Unlike a website, banner, Facebook application or 30-second (Super Bowl) spot, a platform is an always-on digital environment that allows brands to run specific or multiple programs. The goal is to meaningfully engage consumers on multiple levels. For some brands, that means creating an immersive experience with integrated commerce. For others, it means enabling consumers to connect with each other in valuable, unexpected ways.
But for marketers, the real winners this year will be the brands who have built these platforms to engage consumers well after this year’s Super Bowl becomes a distant memory — there are another 364 days to worry about after all. Here’s a look at some of the more interesting platforms in play today…
At the Clarabridge event this week, I got to spend time with many executives from large companies that were thrilled with the results from their text analytics efforts.
While most companies were still in relatively early stages of their deployments, the ROI of their efforts were already compelling. The business results for using text analytics came from areas like:
• Reducing warranty costs by spotting quality issues much faster
• Identifying underperforming franchisees that need training
• Cutting operational costs of manually categorizing customer comments
• Quickly identifying the impact and severity of service issues
• Understanding “why” metrics like NPS are going up or down
There is a role in modern sales and marketing that is just starting to form. I call it the “Information Concierge”, but I suspect a similar role is called many things in many different organizations. This role bridges the gap between potential buyers and the information we have that is of value to them.
In many ways, this is what many of us are doing in social media, discovering conversations that relate to the topics of interest to us, and helping the people in those conversations through sharing data, perspective, anecdotes, and frameworks.
This, in essence, is the role of a concierge – helping to connect those seeking information with the information itself. But, it’s not purely an altruistic pursuit, we do it in order to ensure that our data, our perspectives, our anecdotes, and our frameworks make their way into the conversation. We do this in a non-salesy way, but we do it in a way that works to guide prospects our way slowly over time.
I believe that there are four reasons that the information concierge role is necessary, and will continue to grow, even as search engines continue to improve…
For those of you currently planning a CRM project, I thought it might be helpful to identify some of the areas where things tend to go ‘off-piste’, but before I do perhaps it’s a good idea to suggest why we might care in the first place.
If the CRM project team come under time pressure, either through underestimating the time-line or through unforeseeable disruption, the, not unnatural response, is to try and speed things up. Unfortunately, often with limited things that can be sped up, this leads to cutting corners in some form or another. Commonly this manifests itself in dumbing down the requirements, reduced testing, and rushed training, which in turn invariably ends with user adoption issues which may ultimately prove insurmountable.
Therefore understanding which bits of the implementation process are prone to delay is a key way of effectively managing time-line expectations. So the following are my top six areas where people tend to get caught out…
I attended this year’s Lotusphere and, to no one,s surprise, one of the big themes of the show is social computing and its role in enterprise collaboration. IBM has been pushing the concept of what Lotus and social media can do through its “Lotus Knows” campaign, which I find to be fairly effective.
The concept of Lotus Knows is fairly simple–Use all of a company’s collaboration and social networking tools to help users connect to the right information or person in as short a period of time as possible. These tools are traditional collaboration tools such as e-mail, chat but also social media tools like wikis and blogs and, under IBM’s definition, extend to things like tagging of content in document sharing programs. In short, having a robust, human centric, collaboration strategy will help organizations “harness the power of the people”.
Now, this all sounds great and pretty simple, but as I listened to all of the customers that came up and spoke, I realized just how far we are from mass adoption. From the presentations and subsequent interviews at Lotusphere, I can summarize the drivers for adoption as follows…
New research from Oxford Brookes University has revealed that over the past few years, companies have lost millions of customers, costing them an estimated $6.28 billion. The survey of 2000 people found that three out of four switched at least one product or service in the last two years, with more than one in five [...]
Here’s a post worth reading by David B. Thomas, from the SAS’s conversations and connections blog, Social Media at Fortune’s Best Company to Work For in America:
As you may have seen on the homepage of sas.com, or in the tweets and status updates of many of my colleagues, SAS has been ranked number 1 [...]
CRM Mastery recently rolled out a Social CRM Technology Directory that includes more then 60 products within 5 categories. One of the technology categories included in the (free with registration) directory is Brand Monitoring. The following comments are from a variety of sources:
Brand monitoring has become an essential task for any individual or corporation. [...]
Here are several excerpts from an excellent post by Ben Yoskovitz, How To Implement a Proactive Customer Support Strategy:
I’ve said before that great customer support has to be proactive. But what exactly does that mean?
The goal of proactive support is to identify and resolve issues before they become problems. In some cases you can [...]
Here are several excerpts from an excellent article by Garrik Schmitt, VP of experience planning at Razorfish, Super Bowl Shuffle: Why Marketers Will Shift to ‘Platforms’:
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