The merger of insight and contact

Something very noticeable in the last couple of months is the growing recognition that news can be a key cog in contact building and can act as a real catalyst for establishing a dialogue. There's a growing understanding that all the dots can be joined to form a perfect storm of opportunity, and now the real desire is to find the best way of joining those dots.

What are your key clients doing in 2012?

Whilst many resolution setters have probably already picked up that first glass of wine, or left their gym pass in the outer realms of the storage cupboard, many businesses will continue to have dreams and aspirations going into the new year. Business objectives are slightly harder to let go of than the feint promise to run on a treadmill more and you won't find many companies who don't have a plan in place to hit the ground running in 2012.

Quick question for you

Got a very simple question to pose today, after somebody asked me to explain the benefits of a 'trigger event'.

Gartner survey highlights a huge discrepancy

Read a fascinating insight on social media strategy from Gartner yesterday and wanted to share some results from the survey straight away. See if you can spot the discrepancy between these two answers:

Building a social business

There was a fantastic article in Forbes yesterday from IBM's vice president of social business. Follow the link and have a read as it's a really in depth look at what a lot of businesses are now facing. They key points I took from it were how social business really does increase productivity, enhance innovation and reduce cost. It's the continuing evolution of communication which means failing to keep up leaves you with a distinct disadvantage.

Time is often the commodity most overlooked

For a sales professional or account manager who spends time racing up and down motorways, keeping up with paperwork and generally trying to balance 8 plates on one, thin pole hearing sentences like 'take a while to get to know social media' is probably not a very favourable suggestion. In fact, though they'd probably never admit it to their bosses, that line probably wakes up a few internal neighbours with continuous expletives being held back from actually making it past the voice box.

"You can now know more about customers than ever before" Benioff

Cloudforce 2011 hit London today and the message seemed very, very clear: The cloud is the new place to woo customers through social engagement. If you didn't believe the hype around social CRM then you may be surprised to learn it's already here. "We were born cloud, now we’ve been reborn social" was the stand out statement from Marc Benioff's key note speech at the Royal Festival Hall this morning.

Coca Cola looks to add fizz to insight

When you see a global brand like Coca Cola launching a 'listening review' you know the signs are good for social CRM. Last time I checked (and this is a school playground fact I picked up many years ago, so maybe wrong) Scotland is the only country in the developed world to not have Coca Cola as the number one selling soft drink (Irn Bru if you're interested). Even if that fact is no longer correct, let's not pretend like Coca Cola is not a dominant force on the world stage.

Running into social CRM without checking how cold the water is

Read a really interesting article from Gartner analyst Michael Maoz this morning which looked at the idea of jumping into unknown waters too quickly, just because everybody else was donning their swimming caps and readying a dive. He argues that businesses are guilty of taking this approach a bit with social CRM, realising they're joining the game late and wondering how it can all really make things better.

HP's Autonomy deal another big leap forward

Finding the relevant data

Autonomy's mantra on their website best concludes what we've all known for a long, long time: "Human-friendly or unstructured information is not naturally found in the rows and columns of a database, but in documents, web pages, presentations, videos, phone conversations, emails and IMs". The web is changing and that is only good news for the enterprise.

Can you really blame riots on improvement in communication?

I watched with interest last week as many media pundits and social experts alike blamed a better way of communicating for causing the shocking riots that rocked much of the UK. Indeed, many spectators and opinion leaders were calling for the sites to be banned, not just temporarily but altogether, as if a leech on society draining it of common decency (admittedly the latter did spring from the Daily Mail). Forgive me for being naive but surely better ways of spreading a message and sharing conversation can not be classed as 'dangerous' just because of a certain niche audience that choose to abuse it?

Do you really want to see the world?

Because of pressure to do so, and word of mouth that has turned more into Chinese whispers, there seems to be an obsession with tracking everything on social media. The desire is there to watch for every mention, decipher between the good and the bad and hear every last word about a company that exists on the world wide web. Why? If you are planning on doing this ask yourself that very question. What are you going to do with that info.

Why should I have a Twitter account?

For business, Twitter is not all about what you're saying or even what you're hearing. It's about the interactions taking place whilst you're doing both. Make no mistake, I hear pretty much every big news piece break on Twitter before anywhere else, and I also pride my feeds on valuable and engaging content. But that is not what makes Twitter so special.

The blogs they are a changing

After two years of biding our time for the perfect blogging re-launch (patience is a fine virtue) The Artesian blog is having a bit of reshuffle. After studying the form and getting some reader feedback this little page here is to become a how to/what is/for the love of social media I'm stuck ....help guide to all things online. You can pose questions via our twitter feed and have them answered as soon as possible and also take advice from fellow professionals trying to take the leap into online sales intelligence.

Artesian featured in Mad.co.uk

Check out this great article from CEO Andrew Yates in MAD.co.uk

Need to have sales info

One of the common things said about sales intelligence is that it's a nice to have, not a need to have. But I wanted to argue that with the table below using salesperson A and salesperson B (creative names I'm sure you'll agree).

Social CRM: The secret weapon

Just wanted to point you in the direction of this rather swanky little piece in B2B Marketing featuring our CEO Andrew Yates:

Social CRM provides a secret weapon for the sales team

Make that your read for the week and I shall spare you my ramblings...

Super injunction is super interesting

Let us not pretend like social media and the more traditonal print presses have not been set to square up for some time now. The papers have played social media's games simply because they felt it necassary but the underlying tension based around the increasing fuzz between social and factual has been there for all to see.

No time to take the escalator, I'll take the stairs

I saw another piece the other day claiming that companies were failing to adopt online social techniques because they lacked the time to do so. For me that's like saying the aforementioned title. 'I don't have time to take the escalator, I'll just take the stairs.' It's falls under the category of all the excuses relating to time:

Remove the shackles of 'social'

There are still far too many situations where a sales pro is answering the question 'do you use social media?' with the lacklustre response 'no, not really' or 'I know about it, but haven't got round to looking yet.' Amongst the many reasons for this attitude include: