Nilsson SRCM apps are currently made up of Nilsson Monitor, a enterprise-class social media listening platform, and I’m now in the works of launching Nilsson Engage, a cloud platform for total management of your owned social media channels.

What can you do with Nilsson Engage?

Would you like to take Nilsson Engage for a “free spin” (no pun intended) before it’s live? Please do me the favour of re-tweeting the below tweet and I shall get in touch with you for setting up an account.

First sneak preview of Nilsson Engage #scrm twitter.com/JoakimNilsson/…

— Joakim Nilsson (@JoakimNilsson) May 8, 2013

I know it’s hard, but you must force yourself to start with clearly defining what you want to achieve? If “just exploring what these tools can do for me” is your objective, that may pass, but you must then be honest to yourself and measure the result towards that goal.

Clearly define your goals

Most likely you’re looking to increase revenues, reduce costs, enhance your brand or increase your customer satisfaction. What are you going to do to impact these metrics and what values should you assign to them?

Clearly define how success is looking like.

Pick the right strategies

I’ve cherry picked five keywords for you to easily create your strategies. Will you be listening to what people say about your brand in order to do customer outreach in social media channels, and hence improve customer satisfaction? Or will you talk on social channels describing your products hence increasing sales?

Identify the right people

No social media program will work unless you have skilful and motivated people. By now you know what you want to achieve and how you’re going to do it. Now is the time to find the right people with the right skill set.

Select the channels, tools & technologies

You’ve now decided how success will look like, f.ex. how much you will need to reduce costs, how you’re going to do it and who will be doing it. Only now should you think about what social media monitoring tool you need, wether Pinterest is the right platform for you or not, and if you should be on Facebook or Google+.

Planning and executing social media programs can be difficult enough, alas there’s no need to over complicate the methodology used to get there.

I do workshops on the above topic both online and onsite, let me know how I can help you!

Today’s business reality holds 4 truths:

1. Consumers are becoming increasingly more informed, smarter and always connected.
2. Companies today have more potential customer touch points than ever before considering all the social network profiles as well as employee profiles.
3. Information travels further and fast than ever before.
4. Hiding a dirty secret is becoming increasingly difficult.

I don’t want it to sound overly pretentious, but if we’re aware of this somewhat new business reality, shouldn’t we adapt to it?

Four levels of social media maturity within organisations

I’ve had the opportunity to work on both the client and vendor side of social media. I started out working with social media in late 2007 when at expekt.com as Project manager for Online marketing.

Later we moved into a more formalised marketing program for social media with the help from Alex Grech at Strategyworks. Then, after a merger & acquisition I’d the opportunity to lead a cross functional social media program for the Betclic Everest group of brands.

And lately I’ve been helping both companies crafting their social media strategies as well as spending time with start-ups providing the new tools and technologies needed.

During these years I’ve gained a pretty good understanding of how social media is impacting businesses and how businesses should react to it. I’d like to illustrate my, not yet completed, journey towards a fully integrated social media program with a model based on open research from the Altimeter Group, the four levels of social media maturity within organisations.

Level 1: The social media playground

When at expekt.com in 2007, like everyone else starting out with exploring a new field, I found myself in the playground area of social media. I setup the usual Twitter and Facebook profiles, posted the classical “yes, we’re 1,000 fans!” and followed 2,001 people on Twitter the first day Yes, I’ve done all the mistakes in the book, and I’ve learnt from them.

As I was working in the online marketing department my objectives we’re obviously the ones of our department head i.e. increase sales. And if you couldn’t track it, it wasn’t being valued. Back then, this resulted in a failed strategy of trying to acquire as many fans and followers to as low price as possible and totally bombard them with sales messages followed by a tracked link. Oh yes, every now and then we’d be uploading a photo from our staff party.

I didn’t work particularly well, but we learnt a lot.

This maturity model is a simplified version based on the open research material provided by the Altimeter group. 

Level 2: Social media emerging as a formal business function

Social media was still all the rage and we justified our investments on the fact that everyone else is doing it and a belief in that this thing is not going away anytime soon. Social media formalised as a small department under a central marketing unit within the company. Within the team was myself and two fulltime interns (@RobertWigren) with great writing skills and understanding of the business from a customer perspective.

With the external help of @Alex Grech we drew up a 1-year plan of things we thought would work. We learnt two things here (Thanks Alex!):

1. Nothing is “going to work” unless we tie it to real business objectives
2. Nothing is “going to work” as long as social media activities rests isolated within the sales department

What happened shortly after was a breakthrough for our social media program. We already had established a social media presence on Twitter and Facebook, but we weren’t smart about how we used it. But now other departments started showing an interest in what we did. We’d spent countless hours talking to PR, Product, IT, HR about social media and how it could help them to a better job. Employees from all around the organisation started coming to us wanting to participate in our program.

For the 2010 World Cup in South Africa we had our PR Manager (@DanVikman), Sportsbook product team and bookmaking team producing a tipster video series just before each event. The results? Half a million video views without having spent one dollar in advertising.

But to us, that wasn’t the most impressive result. We still didn’t really know what those views were worth to us, or how it translated into more business. The biggest success here was that we had learnt how to produce media for these new channels. Moving from producing Press releases in traditional channels, to setting up our own video studio shooting our own material. We had slowly become our own media outlet.

Level 3: Stepping it up to an advanced social media program

Continuing my personal journey with social media, expekt.com got acquired and merged into the Betclic Everest Group operating the Betclic, Everest Gaming and bet-at-home.com brands. I got the opportunity to head of social media from the group’s head office under the CMO and his communications division.

All of the sudden the game changed quite a bit. There was now four brands, four different organisations, with four different maturity levels of social media. After a group wide audit of what each of the brands were doing we could start to plan for the future.

I learnt two things here:

1. Things always moves faster and are easier then you’re directly in charge and control of what you do. That means being on the ground and controlling the budget. 
2. People will never doing anything unless they see the incentive. That can either be an emotional or financial incentive. Not yet sure what works best.

You can probably read between the lines that I felt this was more of a challenge and with new variables I’d not been experiencing before.

We had done great things at expekt.com and I wanted to extend as much of that success as possible into the other brands. I looked for individuals within the brands that I thought could, and wanted to, champion social media. It wasn’t very hard to find excitement, but it was harder to get things done.

We setup what we could a social media council at the group (there’s some excellent reading about similar “Center of Excellence” initiatives here.) meeting on a regular basis. These where people from across the brands and departments either volounteerly our as a part of their job description joining in.

The social media council was the driving force of social media adoption by the brands. It’s sole purpose was to move each brand as close as possible to the last level of social media maturity. Of course this would only happen if the things we did also brought positive business results.

The social media council was the governing body of social media, it drew the high level strategy for social media, it provided training and support, it choose and negotiated with technology vendors and it helped out with shaping the operational organisation of social media in each brand.

The model looked pretty much like a hub-and-spoke, where the spokes executed tactics based on strategies drawn up by the hub:

This was a great model that allowed us to collaborate and share information and insights, as well as implementing social media where it was needed.

The best example of what we did was setting up Social media command center within one of the brands serving as a pilot project. The team was made up by people from customer service, PR, content editors and occasional assistance from other people. This was in turn supported by technology that allowed the team to listen to brand mentions across the web as well as publishing content to social media profiles at scale.

The benefit from this social media command center was clear. We showed that the future of marketing is not department silos, that doesn’t work when any channel can become a customer service channel, or a source for business intelligence, or sales opportunities or… I could go on.

Level 4: An organisation with a fully integrated social media program

As of today, I’ve not experienced this. Some companies I’ve seen are pretty close, but most of them are some somewhere between the Playground (1) and Emerging (2) level. It’s not a strange thing, we’re still exploring the impact social will have on businesses. We’re still trying to understand the best way to shape  and adapt our organisations.

An organisation with a fully integrated social media program, Social media is now an integrated part of every business unit. Each department understands how social media can help them achieve results hence any activities are tied to business objectives.

The organisation is able to hear and respond to everything that’s being said about it, although it’s a scaling issue, it will use the insights to better predict future outcomes.  The organisation also understand the cause effect of actions and uses it to it’s strategic advantage, you can’t hide those dirty secrets.

It uses it’s customer base as primary marketing channel and understand that marketing is the combined perception of any contact from anything relating to the brand. It focuses on delivering an experience rather than just a product.

If you want to move the needle and take your organisation further to the right, then I want to be the one helping you!

I help companies like yours to move from left to right in the social media maturity model. The way I provide help is different from client to client, wether you need someone to come in to your company today and make a change, or subscribe to Nilsson Monitor social media monitoring or just have a few advisory calls from time to time, I’d de delighted to talk to you!

Read more about how my Social CRM services can help your company here.

Thanks for reading…!

When a larger part of your customers and employees all have social media channels, there are then a lot of potential new customer touch points. You could either ignore it or embrace it. Moving CRM out from assigned departments, how would it look like?

Let me know your thoughts on 1-4 in the comments field, the answers having the best justification will receive a free social media brand report from me.

I’m invited to a panel discussion around how to build consumer trust using social media at the ICE Totally Gaming conference at Excel London in two weeks time.

My summarised take on the subject is that social media can only work as a catalyst, or as an enabling medium. No social media initiative can replace good business practices that creates consumer trust.

To better understand this I’ve looked at the 2013 Edelman Trustbarometer which reveals who and what consumers put their faith in. The data comes as no surprise to me, but should be a wake up call for many of today’s business leaders.

The informed public; smarter and more informed consumers

There’s undoubtedly a global leadership problem in the world today, both within businesses and governments. Why is it that less than one fifth of the general public believes business leaders and government officials will tell the truth when confronted with a difficult issue?

The driving force behind the increased distrust from consumers is the increase of relevant information they have access to. Always connected, networked and more informed consumers making up the new informed public are no longer believing in lies from business leaders.

Trust in CEOs has plummet during the last 10 years

A look back on earlier Edelman Trustbarometer reports shows how our trust in CEO’s starting falling already 10 years ago and a person like me has been on the rise since 2006.

This change in trust is definitely a result of a new informed public that have access to more information sources than just corporate communication. Online communities, social networks, forums and Internet connected mobiles devices has played an integral role in facilitating for the rise of the informed public.

Clearly, this is the result of the inescapable digital transformation.

The informed public put their trust in company experts and a person like themself

Although CEOs somewhat regained the informed publics trust in 2010 this has again dropped during 2012. An academic or expert on company issues has had a steady level of trust during the last 5 years, but it is a person like yourself that has increased their level of trust the most, and remains the second most trusted persona by the informed public.

What builds consumer trust today?

Edelman have identified 16 rock solid attributes which builds consumers’ trust. A business strategy built on these 16 attributes will greatly benefit from social operational tactics.

Here’s a few examples:

• Listen to your consumers needs and feedback can be enhanced with social media monitoring tools installed within an organisations customer service, CRM, sales and product department.
• Employees trained in social media communications together with a strong social media content strategy can help organisations better communicate frequently and honestly on the state its business
• Employees can better address consumers issues by knowing their online personas
• Brands can build better and smarter products by leveraging on the collective knowledge on its online community using crowd sourced feedback sites as well as monitor online conversations of, its and competitors, brands.
• Better involve its customers and prospects in environment and society purposes using its online social media personas
• Using social and collaborative technologies to enhance its operations and productivity (See what we’re building at Unified Inbox).

Who’s respected and trusted by the public to do what?

To me this is gold dust, the is by far the most interesting part of the 2013 Edelman Trustbarometer report. The influence mapping reveals who is best suited to do what in order to increase trust.

• Passionate consumers together with the company’s employees are best suited to communicate around Engagement attributes.
• Company’s employees are also best suited to communicate and tell the honest story on a company’s situation… Think  Glassdoor.com.
• The CEO together with its employees are the most trusted people to communicate around product development.
• Passionate customers provide the most trusted judgement on a company’s social and environmental initiatives.
• The CEO remains the trusted figure had to talk about the companies operations and financials.

How I can help you

The above key take aways should be the foundation of how your company chose to communicate in social media channels. I provide Social CRM services that both look at the strategic side of your business as well as the tactical solutions. Read more about how we could work together here.

Today’s topic; The inescapable digital transformation. And with a respected keynote speaker; Brian Solis.

The inescapable digital transformation

Some 12 years after the dot-com boom, this is a topic that is more relevant than ever. Why? It is now that the digital media affects everyone, regardless if you’re participating or not. This digital transformation is obviously more prevailing in certain industries than others, but few if none, will go untouched.

On the very tactical level we can talk about how brands should be better at social media marketing. But the digital transformation is a force that requires large strategic initiatives, considering everything from how we treat customers and employees to our business model.

Brands, employees, shareholders and consumers, they all play a part in the digital transformation. Consumers are equipped with always connected, easy to use, mobile devices. Most of them are on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, ready to share their experiences with brands.

But consumers are also employees, and the lines between them two are starting to blur out.

Brands are confused with how to approach the digital transformation. Who should they please, consumers or shareholders?

What’s the future for business leaders in 2013?

What’s the future of business? Brian Solis takes stage and shares his advice for the people inside the companies leading this digital transformation.

It’s a misperception that brands are leading the digital transformation. It’s merely a slow response to adaptation to the digital, always connected, more informed and smarter consumer of today.

As long as people love to express themselves, as long as they have the enabling technology, the society and business landscape will be impacted and changed. This is the force leading today’s digital transformation.

Who will lead the digital transformation internally? Businesses need fewer managers and more leaders. Businesses needs leaders that recognise change, finds solutions and manage to lead people around herself to implement change.

Sure, leaders could be managers, but that’s not always the case.

70% of Fortune 1000 companies will be replaced in a few years

Not because they didn’t get enough Facebook fans or Twitter followers, but because they didn’t adopt to the new networked society. Business need to recognise their consumers’ change in behaviour. Look at companies such as amazon and netflix versus their traditional counterparts.

Amazon and Netflix got into a very crowded industry but recognised that consumers have changed their way of consuming media. Their ability to recognise this change and provide a solution have helped them to almost lead this change.

The rise of Generation C

The youngest generation growing up in our society today are the connected generation, or generation “C” as Brian Solis call them. Mobile devices allows them to be always connected, social media profiles allows them to engage with their network at anytime, they are smarter and more informed thanks to the intelligence on the Internet.

But most importantly, they know nothing else:

The people formerly known as “The audience” have today changed to “The audience with their own audiences”. Think when a customer service rep sends an email reply and that reply ends up in a forum or twitter, that’s your audience’s audience.

Customers are becoming increasingly informed, empowered and demanding. What strategies do you install to meet the demand of the smarter customer?

Customer with a higher digital social status, a bigger audience, will be treated differently and consumers trust are drastically changing to “people like ourselves”.

Today’s connected consumers turns to their public streams and ask “has anyone tried… is this good… etc”. What comes back is information based on peoples experience. Businesses cannot impact this experience like they are used to with channels they could control.

Getting Earned media working in your favour

These tweets and photos are examples of negative earned media as a result of poor services and failing routines.

It is not a social media ninja running your Pintrest page that will ensure you stay in business. They only way to have the earned media work in your favour is to positively influence your customers’ experience when using your products and services.

Social media will then only act as the enabling medium.

Businesses can control the message in paid media channels and, to a larger extent, in owned social media channels. The earned media, or the voice of the customer, is impossible to control. This is the new job for the marketing department, ensure that products and services produced by the business positively influence earned media mentions.

Read more how I can help your business with Nilsson Consulting here.

We are now in the 8th year of Facebook’s existence and in the 6th of Twitter’s, blogs and forums have been around much longer than that. In fact, practically every part of the web today includes some social elements catering for users to create and share their own content.

By now, most of us have heard about the classical Dirty Domino’s Pizza (2009) and Dell Hell (2005). We’ve seen Greenpeace forcing fashion companies to detox. Nike, H&M, and Zara have already been forced to commit to the demands of Greenpeace.

I could go on and list companies that have been victims of people using Social Media to force companies into changing. Dell started talking to bloggers, Domino’s Pizza changed their Pizza recipe and fashion companies need to change the way the manufacture their goods.

Even if your company has not been, or ever will be, exposed to such extrem examples as above, you probably haven’t identified the opportunities Social Media tools & technologies can bring to your organisation in ordet to give you a competitive advantage.

Why a Social Media department won’t function in the long run

In most companies I’ve come across the Social Media function is sitting under Marketing, sometimes even deeper into the Marketing organisation such as directly reporting in to PR or Advertising.

The problem is not that Social Media sits under Marketing, the problem is that Social Media ONLY sits under Marketing and nowhere else (Fig.1).

Obviously the activities such Social Media department will undertake are such that corresponds to what the Marketing department is being evaluated on. The result is often pretty dull, what happens is that you have a Facebook page and Twitter feed nicely branded in your corporate colours and a lot of status updates talking about how great and good you are and what new offers you have. Advertising in other words.

Fig. 1

The result of the above is rarely very good and pretty soon your Social Media function will start to realize that sitting under the Marketing department isn’t all that great. Typical examples of what could happen:

• There are customer complaints on your Facebook wall
• People are talking about your products on forums
• No one are re-tweeting your tweets
• HR have setup their own Facebook page with out your knowledge
• Employees are posting stuff on Facebook that they shouldn’t, that could even be considered as trade secrets
• IT shuts down the use of Social networks on the company network and won’t approve the use of your cloud apps such as Hootsuite
• Customers are tweeting you about campaigns you have never heard about

I could make the list even longer and you could also turn the question around and ask the other departments on how they are affected by Social Media.

The smart Social Media Manager will try to replicate some of the tasks done in other departments (Fig 2.). Most often this will include some Customer service, content production, sourcing product feedback in the organisation etc. You could of course say that this is normal duties of a Social Media Manager (or Community Manager), but do you really want to end up with a silo in the organisation trying to replicate what the organisation already have support for?

In the long run, isolating Social Media to one department isn’t a solution that will give you a competitive edge on the social web.

Fig 2.

Understand how Social Media can help your business at large, then install these functions throughout your organisation

I’ve witten about the 5 key areas to Social Media in this blog post which are developed by Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff at Forrester research. To date, this is the best framework I’ve seen for describing what Social Media really means for companies.

These 5 key areas (Listen, talk, support, energize and embrace) are not just marketing related, they are applicable to any business unit in your company (Fig 3.).

Here are a few examples:

• PR department talks to your customers via Youtube (See how we did it at Expekt.com here)
• Customer Service listen and support customers and prospects in social channels as well as sourcing product feedback to relevant department (Read about how we did it at Betclic.fr here)
• HR uses tools such as Jobvite and source candidates via LinkedIn
• CRM develops website features together with IT to enable website visitors sharing their positive experiences
• Product Management together with Customer Service can use tools such as Uservoice or Getsatisfaction to embrace and crowd source feedback
• HR and Legal distributes internal employee Social Media guidelines
• …and here are even more examples.

Fig 3.

Create a Social Media task force in order to implement Social Media throughout the organisation

So how do you get all this stuff implemented in the organisation? Change doesn’t happen over night but takes time, hard work and patience.

To embark on a company wide Social Media program it’s essential to get the support of the CEO as you will need people to change the way they work and maybe allocate budgets differently.

You Social Media department should grow into a Social Media task force.

But before you can start implementing things you need to identify what to implement. Start small by inviting a key stake holder from departments throughout the organisation. Meet and discuss how the 5 key areas can help each department in their job, find ways of collaborating with other departments on certain tasks. Slowly grow the Social Media task force to involve all the key stake holders you need inorder to fully implement your program (Fig 4.).

Fig 4.

In the driver seat of the Social Media task force sits a Program Manager, maybe that is your former Social Media Manager or maybe it is someone better dedicated at driving a change management program internally.

The job of the task force is to identify what should be done, it’s then the job of the departments to execute and report back to the task force on the progress.

The task force should help department enable the activities, it needs to be an expert in Social Media vendors, measurement, budget allocation, researching and teaching. Its sole aim is to enable the organisation to be competitive on the social web. (Fig 5.)

Fig 5.

How is Social Media being organised in your company? Are you implementing Social Media throughout the organisation or are you just treating it as a Marketing function? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Whilst all of these tools are great in their own aspect, non of them have thought about how to bridge the gap between internal team-collaboration and external collaboration with customers and prospects.

I’d the pleasure to meet up with Ian Heggs, Director of Business Operations at Clearvale, whilst he passed by Paris on a business trip. In his their own language, Clearvale is a cloud-based enterprise social networking solution that helps business engage with employees, customer and partners. (Or think about Clearvale as a mix between Ning and Podio on steroids.)

Targeting the internal employee social network, external partner networks and customer communities

In an increasingly  crowded Social CRM landscape even Gartner have problems positioning Clearvale in the magic quadrant. Ian is not worried though; “we’re being recognised for our unique solution and we see ourselves targeting the internal employee social network, external partner networks and customer communities”.

As you can see from the above illustration Clearvale takes a firm grip around everything that is internall communication & collaboration. Ian says that he reduced his e-mails with 80% thanks to shifting collaboration over from e-mails to the Clearvale platform.

From an external point of view this means that Clearvale customers can open up parts of the platform for external collaboration with customers, partners and/or prospects.

Clearvale features

What makes Clearvale an Enterprise internal & external collaboration place is a strong set of core features. Each employee within the system has their own profile page, pretty much like on any social network. On top of this there’s a strong set of features such as blogs, wikis, discussion forums and tasks lists where work gets done.

Activity streams and internal messaging systems keeps information overload in check.

Social Enterprise Transformation

A tool is just another tool and benefits no one in the organisation unless it’s being adopted and used for the purpose it was designed. As more and more enlightened businesses change into a Social Business, Clearvale have developed their own methodolgy called Social Enterprise Transformation. A 6-step strategic guide helping businesses moving from current status into a Social Business.

The vendor landscape of Social media management systems is getting crowded, and more and more of them are developing towards full featured Social CRM solutions.

Toby Ruckert is the CEO & Co-founder of Unified Inbox, a tool that aims to do exactly what the name suggest; collect all your messages in one place wether it’s an e-mail, facebook message or a tweet.

This is exactly the problem most company executives wants to solve today, less tools to login to and one unified conversation history with the customer – cross all channels.

I think Toby is on a great mission, so listen to what he has to say about Unified Inbox in our short interview below: