From Dell to Starbucks:From Ideastorm to My Starbucks Idea

A lot of discussion on organisations using social media as a tool to manage customer relationships has moved around companies using the same for brand visibilty and giving the customers a platform to interact and share, but failing to actually engage customers-as in closing the loop by actually showing the consumer what the company did with those ideas.

Looks like Starbucks was listening-
My Starbucks idea is the response.

As Jeff Jarvis had once rightly said that customers would have conversations about a company, products and services. It hence made more sense for the company to become part of these conversations. A series of branded online communities and corporate blogs followed suite.Starbucks apparently has gone a step forward.By providing a space for consumers to share their thoughts, let others vote on those thoughts and create a point system to rate ideas, it has actually made a concious effort to work on the consumer relationship.

Social media non-believers have screamed in the past about the inability of the medium to clearly showcase what the companies were doing with the consumer feedback or how the same was being leveraged.

This is a case in point!!!!!

Marketers start to use social networks for CRM instead of ads

An ADAGE article on Marketers start to use social networks for CRM instead of ads strengthens my understanding on the uses of social media as a tool catering to customer engagement, loyalty and satisfaction. The key objectives of CRM, at the end of the day are Customer Aquisition and Retention, and social media has offered tools to cater to each of these objectives by strengthening relationships, building networks and starting a two way communication process with the customers.

While the ad age article traces how first time product users can connect with experienced ones on these networks, creating a rich customer experience sharing platform, my article on how Corporate Blogs can make organisations customer centric had focussed on how auto giant General Motors had used its blog to maintain and nurture its relationships with its customers. By allowing companies to build product brands, create a customer-centric image, and by giving people a contact point by attaching a face or name they can interact with, corporate blogs serve as for a for consumer redressal and help build intrinsic relationships between the company and it's customers.

Social media and it's contribution to CRM maybe a subject of discussion today...but will definitely provide companies with a competitive edge, in the long term!!!

Building Brand Equity through Social Media

Paul Legutko's discussion at Customerthink
"......, but simply the fact that someone is staring at your company logo and creative for a certain period of time. This has an inherent branding value, and "branding" is something both marketers and management understand......high-volume sites can have significant brand-equity."
and Jim Sterne's response regarding brand impact, awareness and brand character attribution, can further be applied to the way major corporates are using the power of social media to garner brand dividends.

Coke, Hindustan Unilever Limited, Proctor and Gamble, Nike, Nissan, Pepsi are part of a trend where a large number of corporates are creating online communities and social networking sites, taking advantage of the interactivity that the internet as a digital medium provides, to capitalise on the huge number of cybersurfers.

With humongous volumes of visitors on these sites, organisations have successfully mingled customer engagement with increasing brand familiarity and distinction and focussing on solution importance, to try and create customer loyalty.

Hindustan Unilever's( India's biggest consumer goods company) brainchild Sunsilk Gang of Girls, promoting the shampoo brand Sunsilk, has a total of 579899 members in 34122 gangs. This has evolved into a huge medium where people participate, give their views and are really bonding with the brand. By discussing commonplace issues like hair care, shampooing and conditioning, hair tips, hair biology and hosting hair gurus by tying up with hairstylists like Javed, Sunsilk GOG has struck a chord with the readers. By tying up with leading magazines like NewWoman and Cosmopolitan,and Marjorrie Orr at Astrology.com, Sunsilk GOG has been able to delve into areas of interest for women ranging from beauty tips to love quizzes to astrology and with Monster.com to cater to their career aspirations. Typically catering to the youth interests of today, members can even watch funky music videos, download wallpapers and screensavers and participate in exciting contests, Sudoku and word search games.

With a traffic rank of 25,500 the Proctor and Gamble brainchild Beinggirl aims at engaging the female segment for P&G's products targetted for the female community. By giving females an opportunity to discuss issues close to their hearts, without giving up their identities, P&G has been able to provide a medium for interaction and developing relationships with its customers thereby facilitating brand loyalty. About 62% of the clientele of beinggirl is from China and 14% from the U.S.

Most of these sites, especially those catering to niche audiences, use the skills of online community managers to nudge the conversation, seed chat forums with threads, recruit others to take a lead in various topics, and monitor the dialogue

Nike's joga.com for football lovers, Coke's mycoke.com and Pepsi's pepsizone for young adventurers out to network, share photographs,videos,music and have fun, Nissan's community for car lovers discussing car models and their features......the list is endless......

Agreed that there are no ways to quantify brand loyalty as a result of such ventures, but as Paul said, as long as larger number of visitors can identify brands , logos and products, garnering brand dividends as a result of such ventures is a foregone conclusion.

Consumer Generated Media - How peer reviews highly influence consumer buying behaviour

Here is something which corroborates my thoughts on Opinion Leaders and CGM and The era of the empowered consumers-
A report published at ReportonBusiness.com about Online Buyers scouring for deals

The findings of the report include-

1. More and more online buyers are turning to peer-reviews for product related advice, before adopting a product.

"When asked to note their most trusted information source, sixty per cent of online buyers said consumer reviews compared to 31 per cent who said newspapers or magazines."

2.Large no. of online buyers indulge in comparison shopping and use social networking sites to do so.

3.Online buyers are early adopters of social networking such as writing or reading blogs, customer reviews, and community websites. They're more likely to share their opinions and give reviews online than people who shop the old-fashioned way.

4.As social netwroking sites abound with users, they will be areas of most potential for e-commerce.

5.Embracing advertising in the web's community sites appears to be very promising for marketers.

Hope the heads of the organisations (The customer was king....)hesitant to adopt CGM as a promotional tool are listening!!!!

Social networking and the collaborative environment

An interesting post by Eric Kintz, CMO, HP to take a look at Facebook's marketing potential.Early explorations for facebook's potential for marketing

How facebook's integrated collaboration environment could be a one-stop shopping avenue is described best in The Teenybopper Network by Andrew Mc Afee, Associate professor, Harvard Business School. His description of Facebook as collaborationware that spreads like wildfire and what exactly motivates people to get involved with this technology facilitated network building -"The desire to be popular and make friends" sums up the concept behind the ever increasing numbers on these social networks.
Also,
Facebook now open to enterprising developers talks about the innumerable applications being offered to developers to customise facebook to needs of the enterprise.

Another interesting post at the Gilbane Group Blog Facebook and enterprise 2.0 throws up kindof unexpected results. On a query on which collaboration technologies youngsters would use over the next 2 years in their jobs, email emerged at the top of the list. This was fairly acceptable considering that email is the primary source of interaction ad formal data communication in any enterprise today, but the tremendously low expected usage of blogs/wikis and a networking platform like facebook was a departure from the current picture emerging with the increased usage of these networking platforms.After all, appearances are deceptive!!

Case study from Brandingwire

Interesting new blog containing case studies and having a set of bloggers solve them independently. The first case study from
Branding wire is about a fictitious coffee company and the objective is to work out a strategy for growth and expansion. Ideas of contributors range from branding strategies to expansion plans, to extensive market research with the current consumers, to managing customer relationships, developing web strategies for publicity, capitalising local strengths, employee training to kiosks etc. An exhaustive list of ideas..

The one that stuck a chord was the idea on using Coffee outlets for Social Networking by The Branding Blog
In the era of social and Business networking, using these premises for the same, would definitely act as motivation for the social groups and adding an image angle to the offer, can make way for elite/premium social groups to get associated with the coffee chain. This will automatically take care of the word of mouth/buzz marketing as interested groups would like to be part of the clique.The relationship equity can be built upon so that customer's tend to stick to the brand beyond subjective or objective assessments, so much so that sticking to that brand of coffee becomes a habit.
Using social media further, adding access to internet based social networking at such a hangout can further set the revenue registers ringing.

Adding further to Drew Mc Lellan's idea of collecting data to gauge a customer's point of view, maybe some online communities can be established to have people share their coffee experiences...rather than interviewing customers, maybe an online site where they could briefly document their experiences before leaving, and hence be part of the 'Coffee' community....

As suggested by Brand Impact
" go after influential bloggers; find a large number of bloggers inside and outside the coffee blogging arena, and send a complimentary 1/2 pound bag. Ask for their input, either privately or publicly (on their blogs). Bloggers like coffee (by and large), and have an outsized influence"

Having satisfied customers create content about their experiences is bound to set off a positive chain which is much more beneficial than any other marketing or brand building tool....After all, satisfied communities not only indulge in repeat purchases, but also are great customer advocates....

Employee communities in the web 2.0 space

Sandeep Dadlani's post on Linked-in across the extended flat world enterprise reiterates the need of an information structure within an organisation wherein the offerings of Web 2.0 can be leveraged to gain access to an employee database with personal information and probably employee photographs to get a personal feel of the entire setup. He sites geopgraphical locations as the primary cause for organisations to feel the need of sucha set up. This is very relevant with respect to developing an employee community where employees can communicate and collaborate with others with si,ilar skillsets and objectives and at the same time giving them a forum to voice their views. Communities are important not only as they provide employees a sense of belonging, but also an opportunity to showcase their achievements. Networking helps them develop affinity with other members at the workplace while simultaneously increasing the approachability of the members at the higher level.The ease of access provided by this model definitely makes it a viable option for organisations.Several organisations have already developed such communication models-The Sun Microsystem blog system is a case in point and the site statistics are impressive-
Total weblogs: 3200
Total users: 3557
Total entries: 67200
Total comments: 63417
The ideology behind floating the blog is aptly reflected in the fine print on the first page:
"This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything."
Well, employee opinions matter...don't they...and as the 67200 entries show, it looks like...employees do have a lot to say!!!!

Corporate Blogs and their objectives

Corporate Blogs are now becoming authoritative sources of information regarding a company. There value and importance can be gauged when a simple technorati search on the word ' Corporate Blogging ' yeilds more than 19000 results. Considering the amount of buzz generated by the same, their importance with respect to leveraging consumer intelligence and magnifying success stories is now undeniable.

As Linkedin launched its corporate blog , the objective they stated was interesting-
"Linkedin was started with the goal of helping you manage your professional relationships better, and today we’re launching our corporate blog to not only help you leverage LinkedIn more effectively but also to provide you a sounding board for all things LinkedIn. So, if you’re looking for a singular information source on LinkedIn with regular updates on upcoming product features, tips-and-tricks, and events or if you’d just like to hear about all the fun stuff associated with working at LinkedIn, you have reached the right place."

A query on the objective behind the Corporate Blog of Bill Marriott, CEO , Marriott Hotels states the following blog objective-
"The purpose of the blog is to create a forum for people to interact with Bill Marriott. We're proud of our culture, history, service excellence, and especially our 143,000 associates whose Spirit to Serve makes us so successful. Part of what makes us great is our belief in service to the customer and Success is Never Final.This blog allows us to hear from you and build on the community that we've nurtured for 80 years."

The DellBlog-
"Our goal is to build Direct2Dell into a community that’s driven by direct communication. We hope to provide you insights into Dell and the employees that drive the company forward."

Digital Straight Talk is a blog produced by Cox Communications. It's a source of views and news on the many issues affecting broadband providers and consumers.
"High-speed Internet, cable telephony, HDTV and a whole host of related innovations and issues in the digital space have created intense competition among providers. And, where there’s competition, there’s no doubt info overload for consumers and others trying to make sense of it all. With Digital Straight Talk, we want to make sure those in the industry, consumers and others who care have a clear understanding of our vision, direction and opinion."

Corporate Blogs are set up by companies to-
1.Build Product Brands.
2.Create a customer-centric approach for the company.
3.To give people a contact point by attaching a face or name they can interact with, hence catering to the concept of relationship building.
4.Create a buzz about New product/project launches.
5.Act as a source of consumer redressal.
6.Act as a source of viral marketing. Its a place where people chat about the company and the products and if they talk well, well you've got a word of mouth campaign already started.
7.Create communities for communication, collaboration,customer-interaction.
8.Image building purposes by showcasing any good work done by the company.
9.Showcase any achievements by the company and any recent successes...

At the end of the day it all boils down to securing more customers and retaining already existing ones....broadly....add to the value perception of a company's customers!!
Don't you think Customer Relationship Management is the ultimate goal of any corporate blog?

Web2.0, Networking and Image Building

Sat through a very interesting lecture by Bethany Cheney, the Marketing head, U.S.A. of Techtribe-an online community established courtesy Web 2.0. She spoke on
" Building the Brand of a Leader" and brought out how increasing visibility, networking appropriately and developing charisma were the key ingredients to a successful image building exercise, which inturn would be very useful for individual growth and success.

Her interesting observation that 'there are only six degrees of separation' highlighted the power of networking and how connectivity can be established between total strangers to accrue benefits for the others. Web2.0 in turn has opened a plethora of options to leverage this understanding of networking to build relationships.

These online communities have been setup for developing contacts with other people as well as sharing information and knowledge for growth,as also forge vital business associations. A valuable outcome of this new phenomenon is that senior corporate honchos, who could be well established names in their respective domains can service the community by functioning as mentors to the youth.The youth in turn can have the dual advantage of developing rapport with established industry names, as well as gain vital information through participation...

From SEO and SEM to SMO and SMM.

How will the big brands react?

Internet marketing, once upon a time talked about Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing. Now it talks about Social MediaOptimisation and Social Media Marketing.Social Media Optimisation or SMO, a term recently coined by Rohit Bhargava,Vice President for Interactive Marketing with Ogilvy Public RelationsWorldwide, aims to "Leverage all the links and marketing value you canget from social and business networks".

Rohit Bhargava's 5 rules on SMO, which eventually got converted to17 rules, courtesy other readers, showcases how the power of online contentcan be used from a business development perspective.SMM, coined by SeoMoz also aims at reiterating the impact of social networking and itscontribution towards marketing.

In the Indian context, the foray of broadband into the houses of averageconsumers has made internet a pervasive influence in users' lives. As unexpected outcomes emerge from unanticipated dimensions, the time is not far when big brands will end up using Social Media to promote theirproducts and use Web 2.0 as an integral part of their marketing strategy.

Object Centred Sociality

This is a real heavy term which caught my attention as i carried on researching the reach and impact of social and business networks...

The essence of my exploration is...........people connect with other people not only for the sake of connecting...they need to have something in common...be it a some common object or objective or interest....something that creates a kinship...something that generates a desire to associate, share and for that matter, keep associated....

Dont we all relate better with people who agree with us...people who are part of our immediate environments....who are affected by what affects us....cohesion results as people tend to garner support for their ideas and beliefs,as also benefit from those around. Infact we identify best with people who support our ideas or are instrumental in helping us achieve our objectives and goals.

The keypoint here is....when the common objects breakdown, the social network breaks down too.

That is the reason we have to make use of alumni associations...ex-employee groups...forums....to keep in touch...and generate a common platform for interaction......blog posts are also one such object of sociality......most of these networks cease to be functional when the commonness erodes.

www.itvidya.com is a very good example of 'object centred sociality'....a network of individuals brought together by the common 'object'---the desire to learn, share knowledge, ideas and maybe in some way, be useful to each other....A key point here,obviously is Ajay who keeps adding to the 'object' by posting information on useful events,seminars,links,...the works..............hope more and more people keep adding to the "object " and stay connected!!!!

Ryzing and Orkutting

Business and Social Networking along with Corporate or Business Blogging are tools which are catching on like viral fever across marketing communities.
Networking on Business and Social Networks-groups of individuals and organisations has emerged as a key technique in modern marketing. This is a fact we all are aware of...only the size and volume of the entire userbase hit me hard as i read a post on 'Virtual Reality Marketing' posted by Eric Kintz, VP, Global Marketing, HP. He has talked about Korea's Cyworld where 17 out of the 48 million South Koreans are hooked in to this online community....at this rate, being a part of one such network is akin to a qualification/important part one'spersonality.
These online networks help individuals and organisations achieve goals through relationshipping and friendshipping.One can develop relationships, build new contacts and establish friendships.The idea is to develop relationships first and then use them for business.

The focus is hence, on the VCP model(Visibility,Credibility, Profitability) of Marketing-

1.Visibility-The success of all networking is based on the ability of people to remember who you are, what products/services you are associated with and what services you provide.

2.Managing Relationships-Evolving simple aquaintances into credible relationships
3.Collaborating-Joining together for achieving business goals,by making best use of opportunities.

This relationship capital has huge potential if we are able to mimic the dynamics of the real world through online sites and replicate them appropriately to achieve our end objectives. Patience, interactivity and sensitivity are three areas which one needs to work on!! Ryzing on
Ryze and Orkutting onOrkut are the latest buzzwords.