Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital

May 29, 2012 at 1:01 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Awareness has released an interesting free report, 3 Keys to Influence: Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital. It began with some useful statistics:

• 90 percent of all purchases are subject to social influence.
• 90 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.
• 67 percent of shoppers spend more money online after seeing recommendations from friends.
• 75 percent of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand, and 53 percent of Twitter users have recommended companies or products.
• Fans of brands are 51 percent more likely to buy.
• Sharing features can increase the spread of awareness by 246 percent with “Likes” and 98 percent with “Send to a friend.”

We are in a social world. When LinkedIn added social features, their use and market value went up. Even the Weather channel is adding social features. It is happening inside and outside the enterprise.  The Awareness report provides three keys to gaining great influence in this new online social world. They define influence as “a brand’s ability to affect or prompt action among its key constituents.”

The first key is growing social capital by leveraging external and internal influence. I like this use of both internal and external. This is why I like the term social business rather than enterprise 2.0. The internal and external social media strategies and practices need to be aligned, and where appropriate, the technology needs to be integrated. I remember the old call center days in 90s when call center reps said they would learn about their company’s latest offers from people calling in. This cannot happen today and should not have happened then.

In the section on leveraging external influence they look at a number of tools, including one of my favorites, Traackr. I have written about them many times on this blog (see the Appopedia). Here is their enterprise social media list of key influencers. They also mentioned, PeekYou, Kred by PeopleBrowsr, mBlast and PeerIndex. The Awareness report provides an eight step approach to maximizing this influence. I also covered Awareness severla tiems and you can also find them through the Appopedia.

In the leveraging internal influence section they offer a four step approach that begins with benchmarking your firm’s social capital and concludes with fostering brand advocacy over time.   This is a very useful report for marketers and others who want to expand their organizations’ influence through social media. Here is the way to download it.

Are We Measuring the Right Stuff for Social Media’s Marketing Impact?

May 22, 2012 at 3:21 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Adobe has released second Adobe® Digital Index report, which provides marketing, e-commerce and retail executives with digital marketing data. The research looked at how marketers measure the impact of website traffic from major social media sites. The most common measure of impact is the last-click attribution. However, this may cause marketers to undervalue social media’s website impact by up to 94 percent. The report argues that first-click attribution models more accurately capture the benefits of social media in engaging customers earlier in the buying process. It concludes that the significant differences in the results of first-click vs. last-click attribution data for various social media sites may cause marketers to change how they allocate the budgets across social and other digital channels.

They go to explain their rationale for using first click attribution. “Last-click attribution assumes that the marketing channel most responsible for a consumer’s behavior is the channel the consumer last touched before a visit or purchase. First-click places responsibility on the channel the consumer first touched. Social media creates an environment in which brands can build awareness and engage with prospective and existing customers early in the purchase process. By ignoring the value of these earlier interactions, last-click attribution gives disproportionate credit to the marketing channels customers use late in the purchase process, potentially undervaluing the role of other channels in building awareness, engagement, and ongoing relationships between customers and brands. In contrast, first-click attribution gives social media more credit for these earlier interactions. The difference between last-click and first-click is significant and has the potential to change the way companies allocate social media budgets.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. The report looked at sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Blogger, YouTube, and Yelp. These are often used as pointers to other sites. For example, I often use Twitter to drive traffic to my blog or to a company Web site. So you need to measure this pointer impact to really determine success. This is one thing we examine at Darwin. It is why tools such as HubSpot, Google Analytics, and Typepad give you referring sites

Adobe Provides a New Set of Digital Marketing Capabilities

May 17, 2012 at 3:05 am · Filed under Web 2.0

At the recent Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, Adobe made a number of announcements about new capabilities for digital marketers. These included the following.

Adobe Social is a new product within the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite. It combines social publishing and engagement with monitoring, social ad buying and analytics that can attribute social activity to business results. It gives social marketers a single platform to manage, measure and optimize social media strategies in the context of all other digital marketing efforts. Adobe Social builds on the social media management technology Adobe acquired earlier this year as part of the Context Optional/Efficient Frontier acquisition, as well as the social media monitoring and analytics of Adobe Social Analytics.

The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite features new predictive marketing capabilities, helping digital marketers improve personalized engagement, multi-channel campaign execution, and media monetization. These advancements will help marketers better understand the opportunities within big data. They can more quickly sort through an increasing amount of data to identify impactful insights and leverage historical data to predict future results. Adobe captures more than 6 trillion transactions per year for its 5,000+ digital marketing customers.  Collectively, these transactions represent more than 27 petabytes of data.

Technology acquired from Efficient Frontier is now available as part of the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite to new and existing Adobe customers.  It unifies social, search and display campaigns and creates true multi-channel optimization from disparate campaigns. This is a departure from multi-channel campaigns that are often operated with separate budgets, distinct data sets and unique workflows

The Adobe Web Experience Management (WEM) solution and CQ 5.5 are integrated with the Digital Marketing Suite, helping organizations build their brands, increase engagement and drive demand by delivering more consistent, contextually relevant experiences on the web, mobile devices and social media. The new Adobe CQ 5.5 includes several new features and capabilities, as well as integration with other products in the Digital Marketing Suite.

Adobe is partnering with hybris, a provider of multichannel commerce and communication software, to provide digital marketers commerce capabilities as part of Adobe’s solution for powering online customer experiences. This partnership lets marketers manage and optimize the online buying process across multiple channels for both the front-end shopping experience and back-office merchandising and marketing publishing processes. The integrated eCommerce capability as part of Adobe WEM is available now in beta and is targeted for general availability in the second calendar quarter of 2012.

State of CRM Customer Data Integration in 2012

May 11, 2012 at 3:57 am · Filed under Web 2.0

In February 2012, Scribe Software surveyed 300 business leaders and channel partners to uncover opportunities and challenges associated with customer data integration. “The State of Customer Data Integration in 2012” report contains input from C-level executives, business analysts and IT engineers, and systems integrators and consultants who design and implement data integration for their enterprise clients.

In summary, Customer data integration can play a critical role in addressing operational challenges in sales, marketing and customer service. It increases CRM systems’ adoption and satisfaction. Yet, many businesses lack a solid framework for planning and implementing CRM and other systems integrations that would be most beneficial to their business and have the greatest operational impact.

Cloud systems are less integrated than on-premise: 33% of businesses operating within cloud-only environments report their systems are not integrated compared to 9% for those who operate fully on-premise. Although 40% of businesses report increased investment in customer-facing systems in 2012, they still have a long way to go to – only 15% report full integration among their systems. Third-party systems integrators are key to CRM integration success – businesses using them see less risk and greater cost savings than those that tackle integration projects without an outside partner.

It was interesting to that CRM is main focus customer-facing enterprise systems (100% adoption), followed by Business Intelligence (BI) (72%) and Sales Force Automation (SFA) applications (56%). Surprisingly, investment in Social CRM (46%) precedes Marketing Automation (30%) and Customer Services application (27%). The reported under-deployment of Marketing Automation and Customer Service systems is likely due to these functions increasingly being included as part of the CRM systems. I would have to agree with this conclusion, as I cannot see only 27% of firms with customer service apps. This possible integration is an interesting fact in itself. I have seen it operating in the marketplace.

The main challenge as reported above is that, “many CRM systems remain an island in the business. Integration should be considered a key part of any CRM or customer facing system initiative to get maximum operational benefit and return on investment.” Integration across the enterprise between old school enterprise apps and new school social ones is the key to creating the connected enterprise. Application like CRM are the systems of record and the new social tools become the systems of engagement driving up usage and benefit, But this benefits will not occur without greater integration. This free useful report points out a major gap that needs to be addressed within enterprise architectures and adds some useful ROI data related to CRM data integration. I recommend taking a look at the results if you want to get full value from your CRM investments.

TIBCO Enhances tibbr with GEO and Other New Capabilities

May 7, 2012 at 3:03 am · Filed under Web 2.0

I have reviewed TIBCO before (see: TIBCO Spotfire Brings Self-Service Data Analysis to the Enterprise with a Social Twist). Recently I spoke with Ram Menon, TIBCO President of Social Computing about their upgraded social business offering. TIBCO has been a leader in making the digital world connect for quite some time.  So when they turned to social business software connectivity was naturally a sweet spot for them. It is also essential for social business to work as I have written several times (see for example, Maybe Enterprise 2.0 Is About the Technology).

So Ram and I were of the same mind from the start. If you need to get work done, then you need to have all the resources together and connected. As Ram said, in the enterprise it is not enough to like and share, you have to act. I could not agree more.

TIBCO launched tibbr, a heavy duty and secure social platform a year ago and is approaching 1M users at companies like Macy’s, KPMG, and shipping giant OOCL. Now they are adding a number of new features. There are five guiding principles in this effort. First, you need to be able to have users get started right away and it needs to be easy to use. The consumer Web has set this expectation and reduced budgets demand it. Gone are the days of six month IT projects and extensive employee training programs. Here is a sample user’s view of tibbr.

Second, tibbr provides the option for cloud technology or on-premise installations. You need to be able to provision the service quickly. They were able to get 19,000 MGM employees up and running in a single afternoon. This doubles down on the first goal.

Third, context has become king more than content. They have introduced subject filters to their activity streams so you take out the fire hose effect. You filter on customers, customers in North America, government customers in North America, etc. so you can adjust the level of granularity to see just what you want.

Fourth, the system adheres to the way people work. They found that 63% of tibbr users operate on a mobile basis so they support all mobile devices and the latest version 3.5 had HTML5.  They are also integrating video conferencing. While they find that many people are migrating their work from email to tibbr, you can still post and receive tibbr content through email for those holdouts. Here is a sample mobile screen for a grocery store.

Fifth, you need to make IT happy. So they have focused on such issues as compliance and risk management. They also offer an on-premise version for the same price as the cloud version.

Next I ask Ram about the tibbr GEO function. Ram said that with tools like Foursquare you have to check in. This is not likely to happen in the enterprise. So they turned the consumer ‘check-in’ model on its head for the enterprise. Tibbr GEO is turns physical places into data hubs that can immediately stream important insights relevant to that specific place. Instead of checking in to a location, the location checks into you – and brings you the relevant information, helping you discover important insights and work faster wherever you are.

tibbr GEO gives companies the ability to tag important places, whether in the enterprise or as part of the extended enterprise. As tibbr users approach these places, they’re automatically presented relevant in-stream information. The airline industry is a good example. An airline gate agents can get notified of all the relevant information as they approach the gate.  You can see personal information, changes in schedules, catering updates right from your mobile phone as you arrive at the destination. Here’s a link to a useful tibbr geo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1p3ugA55T8

I really like what they are doing, especially the five principles, the use of filters for the activity stream and the creative way they have applied location specific information. I look forward to seeing what is next.

Convo Moves to the Web and Enhances Features

May 2, 2012 at 3:43 am · Filed under Web 2.0

I have written about Convo before under its old name (see – Convofy Enables Comprehensive Collaboration Through Enterprise Social Networking) and am also a user at both Darwin Ecosystems and the Merced Group. Convo builds on the activity stream but adds additional features to enable more comprehensive collaboration. I recently spoke with Tad Staley about their latest moves. One of these is to simplify the brand name from Convofy to Convo and that I certainly applaud. It was simply a matter of securing the Convo domain.

Convo has also upgraded it user interface to both simplify it and add more capability. Now there are navigation bars on both sides and this allows them to segment each for specific functions. The left bar now only provides user specific information and links such as groups, filters. It changes as the user moves to different spaces. They added a right bar for system wide functions that stay persistent regardless of location. This makes sense and below is a sample screen shot of the new interface.  There are also filters for search at the top and a home button to get back to your starting point.

They have added a native Web version to go along with the existing desktop Adobe version.  Many other collaboration platforms began as a Web app and then created a desktop app with a subset of the functions. Convo actually did the reverse. It began as a desktop app however they found that not everyone wanted to go through the download process so they created a Web version which allows you to just sign up and go.

For Convo the desktop version is fully featured. In fact it has a few more capabilities than the Web version as it takes advantage of its desktop status to do some things not possible on a Web app. You can use drag and drop for file sharing. There is desktop notification in a small window when new updates are posted. Perhaps most significantly, the desktop app has its own built-in browser so you can bring a native Web page into Convo and comment on it and mark it up for collaborative discussion. With the Web version of Convo, like the other Web-based tools, you are sent to the actual Web page instead, when a link is attached to an update in the activity stream.

Convo is putting LDAP integration in place to make it easier for large enterprises. has also added smart phone capabilities, support Apple iOS and Andriod . The user interface is adapted to the smaller screen. You can see sample screens below.

These moves are all designed to make Convo more useful for large enterprises, as well as the small to mid-size market. I have found the previous version very useful for small organizations through my personal experience as a user. I can see how these new moves are properly designed to expand their attraction to a wider market.