Influencers can be bought; but may not always deliver

Well, not really.  What I am trying to say is that influencers don’t really care about your brand.  They may have a crush on you or find your product useful; but they are too busy being influencers – tweeting, blogging, and recording webinars to really care. Of course they love getting free trials and new products before they hit the market; and very rarely will they say no when you offer to send them that new shiny object. 

But how many times have you seeded a product to an influencer without any result?

Besides, even if they did love you, they’d probably refrain from talking too much about you in fear of community backlash or the fear of a negative perception of being bought even if it’s not true. I completely understand that conflict. Most influencers get pitched several times a day and all it does is feed their egos; so the time commitment of reaching out to them won’t always reap any positive benefit much less any business value to a brand. I am speaking in general terms here because I do know some really awesome influencers. Point is that influencers are great for generating buzz; not so great for driving purchase decisions.  At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about, right? Go ahead, attack me.  

Don’t forget to pay your rent

The minute you stop sending influencers the latest and greatest; or pass on flying them to CES or any other industry event, they will evict your brand in a heartbeat. Then, the already infrequent tweets will completely stop and they may even talk smack behind your back because you poked at their ego. The reality is that with many influencer programs, brands are just renting the conversation; and unfortunately the conversation isn’t always authentic. If it was, you wouldn’t have to keep sending them products to fuel their conversation.

Don’t get me wrong here.  Influencer outreach programs do have some validity to a brand’s marketing initiatives. They just need to be done smart and strategically and it shouldn’t be the core focus. I would say that a brand’s first priority should be to focus on its advocates because their love is real. 

Advocates love your brand and tell others too

Shot out to Kelly Feller (a previous colleague and friend from Intel) who once said, “if you love your customers, they will love you back and tell others about it.” 

Here is the great thing about advocates. They love you even if you don’t give them the time of day. They are vocal, passionate and are not afraid to give your brand praise (on and off line).  And, while they may not have hundreds of Twitter followers or thousands of RSS subscribers, the conversation with them is always authentic. I would also argue that advocates outnumber influencers by a long shot. Can you imagine for a second what the impact would be if you paid just a little attention to your advocates? It’s not hard to do at all; and the great thing about it is that they don’t label themselves and are very easy to approach.  While influencers consider themselves influencers; advocates don’t really care. And, that makes your job so much easier.

Tapping into the emotional equity

I have never studied the psychology of a consumer’s purchase behavior.  But what I am confident about is that there is definitely an emotional connection between a brand and its advocates.  It’s the reason why I only buy one kind of television.  It’s not out of habit, convenience or price either because the brand I love is quite expensive.  But I have an emotional connection to the brand, Sony. The connection can stem from just about anything – a previous brand experience, the value the product brings to someone’s life, its swagger or the product simply kicks ass.  When a brand actually becomes human and spends time nurturing their advocates; the emotional equity will grow exponentially. And that’s a hard bond to break.

Advocates affect the purchase funnel

I am sure we have all seen the traditional purchase funnel at some point in our careers (some call it a sales funnel). Marketers – and people much smarter than I – spend a lot of time and coin trying to figure out what messages resonate with customers; and which channels have the greatest conversion rates. We are talking about millions of dollars in media spend that aims to drive marketing messages in each of the phases.  And smart marketers are also creating metrics models for each phase of the purchase funnel to measure the effectiveness of these messages.

The purchase funnel is evolving, especially as we think about advocacy.  In this model, customer advocacy is at the center. It’s meant to illustrate the power of social media and how advocates aid and influence their micro communities down the purchase funnel through authentic messages (or everyday conversation). 

It’s circular in nature because as a brand invests and drives customer advocacy; they will, in turn, influence others at various phases of the purchase funnel; thus creating a cycle of influence and advocacy that the brand is facilitating.

How to identify advocates

Identifying advocates is really not that hard to do. If you spend enough time in Facebook, you will begin to see who stands out and interacts the most with the content. There are tools like SocialTALK that are building this capability into their product which will make life much easier.  Also, Zuberance is a great tool that can identify advocates already living in your brand’s ecosystem. What I love about this is that it empowers advocates to share reviews and content about your product with their social circles. Rowfeeder is an exceptional tool that pulls data directly from Twitter and Facebook, and allows you to easily see who is talking about your brand the most and easily identify those advocates.

It’s very easy for me to say what an effective or ideal social organization should look like. It’s much more difficult to make it happen. It requires a firm commitment from senior level management across all business units (marketing, PR, Operations, Engineering, IT, Human Resources, Privacy) and a cultural transformation that empowers employees of all levels to do what is already a significant part of their DNA – to be social.

My point with this post is to blatantly say that buying fans/followers is not a very effective strategy. I have been bought before by a few brands but a quick glance at the list reminds me that I have NEVER gone back to any of these pages, ever!

I do understand the need to spend money in Facebook or wherever to drive people to a particular domain. How else will the masses even know you exist?  The problem arises when brands make this the core focus of their outreach strategy.

Organic growth via real time engagement is what works. Having dedicated employees managing Facebook “like white on rice” is where the true value is.  Statistics show by multiple data sources that consumers want to engage with brands; AND according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, consumers TRUST employees of a company. Truth is, people relate to other people, not logos or corporate entities.  It’s the core of our DNA.

There will always be a place to buy media and develop applications in Facebook; but unless you have a team of people ready to engage “real time” with the community, it’s a complete waste of time. Unless of course, fan numbers is your only metric.

Quick Tip:

• If you really want to grow  your fan base on Facebook, consider integrating the “like box” or any of the other social plugins on all of your pages of the .com site.
• Do I really have to say that having “compelling content” on the page is a must. Consider content that isn’t readily available anywhere else.
• Integrate your Facebook URL with any paid media in market

In case you didn’t get it, I am being completely facetious with this post.  I personally think that anyone who considers themselves to have “real influence” just because they have a certain amount of followers or fans is a complete joke. My opinion only.

There are only 3 things that I care about having influence over; my family (and friends), my co-workers and my clients in that order. Everything else is irrelevant.

And of course, being the great social media practitioner that I am, I checked in on Foursquare the day I arrived.

Just today, I noticed that the hotel started following me on Twitter.  I reciprocated and then got this message a few hours later.

I normally don’t click on links when they solicit a “like” but I did today. I clicked through, liked the page and even left a wall post thanking them for a great stay.  They responded a few hours later.

So, I guess you can say that I am now loyal to the Sheraton Delfina. They didn’t have to give me any discounts, a complimentary dinner or a room upgrade. They simply spent time (manually) finding out who visits their hotel; and then reached to say “thank you”.  That was enough for me.

I have read several excellent definitions of social CRM but I am yet to be satisfied. I often try and put myself in my client’s shoes and evaluate whether a given definition (program or strategy) makes sense for the business. So far, a lot of what I have read is either fluff or so high level that it’s not actionable.  And from my experience working in the enterprise, a strategy that is not actionable is usually just someone’s really good idea that will never get implemented.

Here is what I have learned thus far.

I really like what Martin Walsh wrote about Social CRM – “Social CRM is a process to monitor, engage and manage conversations and relationships with existing and prospective customers and influencers across the Internet, social networks and digital channels” and found my good friend Jacob Morgan’s infographic on the Social CRM process to be extremely insightful.  And of course, Altimeter’s recent report – The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, the New Rules of Relationship Management – gives insight on how organizations are leveraging traditional CRM tools and social technologies for marketing, sales, support and collaboration.

The challenge that I am finding in reading a lot of other material is that the term itself – social CRM – can be substituted with just about every other new buzzword on the social web; and it’s all saying the same thing over and over (i.e. it’s about listening to the customer).  While I agree wholeheartedly, there is so much more that has to happen on the backend for this to even work properly.

From a very high level point of view, it’s important to first highlight what my colleague David Armano wrote about this new evolution in business called social business design. I see this as a natural business progression as market conditions change and technology advances.  Businesses are getting smarter and acquiring new technologies, intelligence, talent and motivation to get more social. Social CRM is just one component of this transformation. I have been fortunate enough to witness firsthand how organizations are evolving from a business that merely engages in social behavior into a social business.   There is a huge difference.

In its most simplistic terms, and as explained by Jeremiah Owyang, a social CRM scenario would look a little something like this in the very near future (summarizing in my own words from a recent SMC panel he participated in):

Imagine that every employee in the company regardless of what department they work in will be equipped with a dashboard as a part of their computer monitor.   This dashboard will include all relevant customer data to include recent purchase history, demographic data, previous interactions, call support history, recent tweets and Facebook status updates.  This data will equip employees to provide more relevant and personal information with every customer interaction via web, over the phone and even in person.

Now it’s really easy to argue back and forth about how accurate this scenario may or may not be in the future (and for the record, I believe this to be very accurate); but from an organizational perspective, it takes a lot of internal collaboration, planning and technology integration for this to actually make this happen.

Jacob and I had a brief conversation about this a few weeks ago over the phone.  I asked him what the biggest challenge organizations face when it comes to social CRM.  His response to me can be summarized something like this:  no two companies are the same; and every company has different needs and challenges when it comes to social CRM (i.e. user experience, creation of advocacy programs, etc.) While I agree with this 100%, the problem with this reasoning is that it can be applied to just about any other business issue i.e. operations, marketing, customer support, supply chain, etc.  But if I am a brand marketer and ask, “how do I launch a successful social media program” and the answer I get it is, “it depends”, well there is definitely a disconnect.

As summarized in his recent post, Jacob basically said that those who are involved in social CRM need to do a better job conveying its definition to those who want to learn. He is absolutely right.  I would also add that there needs to be models defined or at least discussions of how social CRM theory can be put into practice from behind the firewall; not just from what a successful scenario might look in the future but how it can actually be achieved.

Now, I have a tendency of over simplifying everything; but I will go ahead and take a crack at defining what social CRM means to me.

Social CRM is one component that helps organizations evolve into a social business.  It is a strategic business initiative that considers technology, intelligence and process; so when organizations communicate with their customers they know what to say, how to say it and when to say it in order to provide a more relevant customer interaction.

Seems pretty straight forward to me but before a company can fully accomplish this, they will need to ensure that they are capable internally first.  I live by this motto and believe it to be 100 percent accurate and also relevant to social CRM; that is, before a company can successfully manage external conversations, they need to first master internal conversations.

As companies begin to start thinking about deploying social CRM, they will need to consider two factors; organizational readiness and the external social landscape.

ORGANIZATIONAL READINESS

Organizational readiness refers to the internal landscape (and culture) of an organization and addresses such issues as technology, process and people.

Technology is probably the most important issue because in large organizations much of the internal infrastructure is not integrated and many times scattered across multiple divisions, groups and even geographies. Organizations need to ensure that traditional CRM tools like SAP, Oracle and Salesforce are integrated with external social tools like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google Profiles and listening software such as Biz 360 or Scoutlabs in order to gather and consolidate customer data.  Other technologies worth considering are Peoplesoft and Ariba; which could be used to integrate human resources and vendor relationships. There are several other software applications; too many to name here.

Process takes into consideration business rules, work flow processes, data & systems integration, escalation, global expansion and crisis management to ensure maximum efficiency within the organization. It also addresses governance. Even though many of the processes and integrations will be managed by the back end; having them will help maintain consistency for teams/employees that are on the front lines interacting with customers.

People address the cultural dynamics of an organization.  It involves employees (and teams) to serve as change agents and work together to collaborate in order to create policies & procedures, training and governance. They are responsible for shaping the social CRM initiatives ensuring proper alignment with other social programs both internally and externally. They will drive policies that outline the following:

1. Ownership and governance of Social CRM
2. Internal & external policies for gathering and integrating customer data
3. Policies for engaging with customers externally (probably a part of a larger social media policy)
4. Global and regional deployment and training
5. Budget and vendor management

EXTERNAL SOCIAL LANDSCAPE

The external social landscape address intelligence gathered from sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, social listening software, etc.  It also takes into consideration what networks people are using, how they are using them and the information being shared.

As the market changes and evolves, it’s important that social CRM leaders are thinking about forecasting consumer behavior as it relates to these tools; and identifying shifts in attitude and usage of social networks. Partnering with a research firm like Forrester would be ideal for organizations that don’t have market research resources internally.

The dynamics of the social web are changing rapidly.  Consolidations of social networks are on the horizon. New networks and capabilities are launching every day; and acquisitions are already among us.  All of these shifts will impact social CRM so it’s important for organizations to stay ahead of the curve and not fall behind.

So that’s my take on social CRM. I would appreciate any feedback.

Product Spending: Facebook Fans spend, on average, $71.84 more than non-fans over a two-year period

Brand Loyalty: Facebook fans are 28 per cent more likely to continue using a brand than consumers who are not fans on Facebook

Willingness to Recommend: 68 per cent of fans are ‘very likely’ to recommend a product to family and friends (as opposed to 28 per cent of non-fans)

Brand Affinity: 81 per cent of fans feel a connection to the brand (versus only 39 per cent of non-fans)

Earned Media Value: Incorporating all of the above factors, the average value of a Facebook fan is $136.38 to an organization

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Please pass this along to anyone you know who might be interested! Thanks.

Though Foursquare does not yet have the wide market penetration that Facebook and Twitter enjoy, the hope is that through its embrace of location-based services, Earthjustice can connect a younger audience to its work, whether it’s curbing oil and gas exploration in the Arctic or protecting endangered species like the pikas of the Sierra Nevada.

At the same time, Foursquare users on BART will get their shot at becoming the “mayor” of Earthjustice ads and help protect the environment, all while doing their daily commute. Aside from the donation aspect, the check-ins also encourage users to learn more about Earthjustice through other Foursquare features, such as tips or “shout outs.” You can follow them on Twitter here of “like” their Facebook page here. I just did.

To amplify the campaign even further, I would recommend the following:

1. Aggregate all check ins and tweets somewhere on their web site
2. Recognize and showcase each mayor (i.e. on their web site or fan page)
3. Create a mechanism that integrates with the campaign and allow users to make contributions easily
4. Tweetup / fund-raising event

Heck, I may even take Bart a few times when this launches to show my support. Hopefully you will too!

Thank you Amita Paul, CEO of Objective Marketer for providing this fantastic analysis of SxSW and the conversational activity around the event.

The report provided influencer and demographic data and provides insights as to how information is shared during events.  Some of the key findings include:

• Higher followership did not guarantee higher retweets but higher rewteets did require a higher number of followers
• Most active users were with tweets in the range of 1,000 to 100,000.  Activity level of the users with fewer tweets was high. So, It is not necessary that people who are heavy twitter users will be the most active
• Embedding multi-media content may not be as effective a strategy on Twitter as it is on Facebook. The retweets for messages without images (31.6%) was almost double than the retweets received for messages with images (16.8%)
• The number of Retweets is significantly more when the follower /friend ratio > =1.
• Tweets and Retweets can have different activity peaks.  Retweets followed Tweets for about 30 minutes to 1 hour.