Best Internet Trends Presentation - Web 2.0 Summit

KPCB Internet Trends 2011

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As usual, Mary Meeker delivered this presentation during Web 2.0 summit and summarizes important trends in our industry with a lot of meaningful data.

Internet Trends 

1. Globality – We Aren’t In Kansas Anymore… 
2. Mobile – Early Innings Growth, Still… 
3. User Interface – Text -> Graphical -> Touch / Sound / Move 
4. Commerce – Fast / Easy / Fun / Savings = More Important Than Ever… 
5. Advertising – Lookin’ Good… 
6. Content Creation – Changed Forever 
7. Technology / Mobile Leadership – Americans Should Be Proud 
8. Mega-Trend of 21st Century = Empowerment of People via Connected Mobile Devices 
9. Authentic Identity – The Good / Bad / Ugly. But Mostly Good? 
10. Economy – Lots of Uncertainty 
11. USA Inc. – Pay Attention!

Productivity Future Vision: do you like this future world?

You should take the time to review this video -- produced by Microsoft -- and immerse you in this future world we are presented here.  In the beginning I was attracted but after a while I felt a bit oppressed and I guess the absence of true emotions is the reason why. You never hear anyone speak truly and the visuals are very clean, so cold.

Some ideas are very interesting but companies putting together such tentatively inspirational videos should pay attention to emotions as this is fully part of the customer experience... more, it is center stage.

Reactions?

You can see more of videos I've noticed about the future ergonomics in my future playlist on youtube.

Managing Customer Experience: the next big thing?

I am a big believer in management guru Peter Drucker saying "What gets measured gets managed". When it gets down to tracking a company's success, too many businesses tend to rely on market share, profitability, EPS growth or repeat purchases only. Don't take me wrong, you still need to track these down, but as one brilliant Berkeley Marketing guru asked: "Do you think your partner is loyal only because he's having diner every night at home? So, does the number of repeat sales indicates that your customer is loyal?" At least for the first one you must admit he's got a point.

Nowadays, customer experience is one if not the main ingredient of customer loyalty which translates into market share -- as loyal customers are the best brand advocates, profitability and EPS growth i.e. the way most businesses would define success. Then what are you doing about it?

If you're still in doubt, take the coffee business as an example. Who has been insanely successful in this business? Starbucks and Nespresso success stories -- follow the links for more -- can attest about it.

As Shaun Smith, author of Managing Customer Experience, details in his post, there are 10 best practices to create real business value:

1. Successful deployment requires the active and continuing involvement of leadership
2. Ensuring cross-functional ownership is vital
3. Focusing on your most strategically important customers
4. Finding out what these customers truly value
5. Being clear about what you stand for
6. Delivering the promise at every touch point
7. Providing branded training to ensure that employees understand the brand story
8. Designing CEM before installing CRM systems
9. Measuring the customer experience
10. Aligning KPIs with the customer experience

This is heavy duty, but social media -- as you can see in the Starbucks video in the link above -- is becoming instrumental in that regard.

I'll leave you with the five barriers to measuring customer experience, from mycustomer.com:

"Customer experience isn’t just about giving customers a good time. It’s about understanding just how good a time (or not) you are giving – and making adjustments"

1. We rely on magic numbers
2. We don’t really listen
3. Measuring word of mouth is hard
4. We have too much functional data – too little insight
5. We don’t look beyond the obvious and the superficial

Tribute to Steve Jobs

With its latest achievements, this is a lesson for all of us that passion and determination are leading to achievement. We all will connect the dots later ....
Farewell Steve and thanks for everything.

Emmanuel Obadia in a podcast (French)

BFM : L'innovation en Europe et le secteur des logiciels

09 juillet 2011

Actualité : baromètre BVA/Syntec pour 01Business&Technologies. 

• GAEL SLIMAN, Directeur Général adjoint de BVA opinion, 
• BRUNO VANRYB, PDG d'Avanquest Software et président du Collège des « éditeurs de logiciels » du Syntec Numérique, 
• EMMANUEL OBADIA, Senior Vice President Enterprise Products chez Sage. 

Coup de pouce à une start up : Jérôme Valette, directeur général de aEnergis, une start up qui optimise la collecte des déchets grâce à un système de capteurs radio.

Ecoutez le podcast du 9 Juillet 

Online leads: do you act timely to respond?

Reading an interesting research summary in HBR that I wanted to share.

Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, the time taken to respond to prospects stimulus online can significantly change the ROI of your web presence. As this research shows, many firms are too slow to follow up on these leads. As HBR states:
- 37% responded within an hour
- 16% within one to 24 hours
- 24% took more than 24 hours
- and 23% never responded at all!

As companies are investing significantly to get prospects out of the web, they should have a much better turnaround, don't you think?

Reasons not to do so include retrieving leads from CRM daily rather than on the fly, sales forces focusing on their own generated leads and rules for leads dispatching not effective enough ("fairness" can be damageable).

Where are you with this? Better know where your marketing ROI is headed sooner than later.

Happy Easter.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Mobile megatrends 2011 (VisionMobile)

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Mobile megatrends 2011 (VisionMobile)

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How to measure your brand's online influence?

Several tools are emerging to help you do this, and Inc. touched on this in an interesting post about it and even providing in their opinion the 11 best web analytics tools. They come back on how Web Analytics 2.0 is defined:

1. The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition
2. To drive a continual improvement of the online experience of your customers and prospects
3. Which translates into your desired outcomes (online and offline)

Inc. concludes like this:

"Measuring online influence can be useful—and has potential to reinforce your social-media strategy (hey, it just feels cool when you get a high score)—particularly for growing brands looking to utilize technology to make their jobs easier and more effective. However, it's not for everyone." -- Dave Smith, Inc.

Another post on GigaOm from Georgina Laidla highlights the 5 Ways Brands Influence Social Media Strategy:

"It’s not just the way organizations engage through social media that matters: the portrayal of a business brand in this space is affected by a range of factors."

And the factors she lists

1. Network & Tools - the tools and network you use say something about your brand
2. Types of engagement
3. Who's making the update?
4. Degree of integration with other offerings
5. People your brand follows, friends and fans

preaching for an evolving approach.

At the end of the day, there is in my opinion no option for all of us to engage into measuring our brand's influence online. We better get starting ASAP and make our plans on how to do it. This is what I am doing already for the brand I work for which faces an interesting challenge to do it with one voice globally. Your feedback and experiences are more than welcome on this blog.

Unhappy Customers Can Be Won Back via Social Media

According to a report (pdf) sponsored by RightNow, Social Media is an effective way to bring back unhappy customers. Marketing Charts reports about it as well here. The research present a number of facts to support this: 

- 68% of consumers who posted a complaint or negative review on a social networking after a negative holiday shopping experience got a response from a retailer.
- 18% of those turned into loyal customers, 33% turned around and posted a positive review and 34% deleted their original negative review

On top of it 50% of consumers say great customer service/experience influences their decision to buy from a specific online retailer and after a positive shopping experience 31% purchased more from this retailer.

Finally, 28% of consumers looking for information or support with online shopping researched what other customers said on social networking and reviews websites.
In many cases, the 32% of US consumers who posted a negative review of a holiday shopping experience in 2010 and were ignored by the retailer simply had a bad impression reinforced. Six in 10 (61%) of these consumers said they would have been shocked had the retailer contacted them.

So YES social media has a growing influence on your customers loyalty and you should be paying attention to it. Actually we all know that a happy customer is the most effective sales influencer when turned into an advocate.

According to the same research, for consumers who had a positive exeprience this holiday season online, 21% recommended the retailer to friends and13% posted a positive online review about the retailer.

2010: Resurgence for Digital Media in the Wake of the Recession

I mentioned previously this interesting research from Comscore, and I wanted to highlight more general trends about digital media coming out of it.

Comscore outlines that the digital media industry responded with significant growth across various media platforms to the wake of the recession. As they say: 

"Industry innovations brought an unprecedented number of options to consumers as digital media continued to weave itself even tighter into the fabric of Americans’ daily lives." -- comScore

Key findings about consumer trends, highlighted in the report, include:

• Following 2 years of depressed consumer discretionary spending, the economy showed signs of improvement, leading to positive growth for the e-commerce market. Total U.S. e-commerce spending reached $227.6 billion in 2010, up 9 percent versus the previous year. Travel e-commerce spending grew 6 percent to $85.2 billion, while retail (non-travel) e-commerce spending jumped 10 percent to $142.5 billion for the year.
• Social networking continued to gain momentum throughout 2010, with 9 out of every 10 U.S. Internet users now visiting a social networking site in a month, and the average Internet user spending more than 4 hours on these sites each month. Nearly 1 out of every 8 minutes online is spent on Facebook.
• The U.S. core search market grew 12 percent overall in 2010, driven by a 4-percent increase in unique searchers and an 8-percent increase in the number of search queries per searcher.
• U.S. Internet users received a total of 4.9 trillion display ads in 2010 with display ad impressions growing 23 percent in December 2010 versus December 2009. Social networking sites, which now account for more than one-third of all display ad impressions, were a significant driver of growth in the display ad market in 2010.
• In December 2010, the average American spent more than 14 hours watching online video, a 12-percent increase from the prior year, and streamed a record 201 videos, an 8-percent increase.
• Major milestones in mobile were crossed during the year as smartphones reached 1 in 4 mobile subscribers and 3G penetration crossed the 50 percent threshold. Approximately 47 percent of mobile subscribers are now connected Internet media users (via browsers, applications or downloaded content), up 8 percentage points from the previous year.

In short, businesses should consider these aspects of Digital Media in their strategies to be successful in the coming years:

1. e-commerce
2. Social Media Presence
3. Search
4. Advertising 
5. Video on line as convergence with traditional TV continues to blur
6. Mobile media for both consumption and as an alternative e-commerce platform

Ecommerce spending jumped 9% to $227.9B in the US

As I track the evolution of e-commerce, I found these results coming from Comscore pretty interesting.

e-commerce revenue reached $227.6B for the entire year, growing 9% compared to 2009, and varies per industry:

• travel e-commerce up 6% to $85.2B
• Retail (non travel) up 10% to $142.5B
• Top growing category: Consumer Electronics +19% (flat panel TV and mobile devices are first)

This signals a recovery since the end of 2008, after a two years depressed situation due to the economic downturn. The 2010 holiday season was at a peak with a 12% growth, reinforced by some promotional activity - most notably free shipping. The Cyber Monday (Nov 29th) did peak at $1.028B surpassing for the first time the $1B mark. Groupon.com attracted 10.7M unique visitors in December, up 712% vs 2009.

Interesting evolution since my post e-commerce revenue over $100B back in January 2007 i.e. it more than doubled since 2006 even with a major downturn in between.

So, how is your e-commerce strategy going? Maybe a good time to revisit if you have one and definitely start one if you haven't.

If you want to know more, you can download the comScore 2010 US digital year in review report.

Social Marketing: identify influencers for free

source Elliott Lemenager 

This is the question I get very often even from marketers already involved and active in Social Marketing: how to identify influencers? Yes, seems like 101 but actually not so easy to figure it out.

The notion of influencers came first to me with Regis McKenna back in the 80's -- wow already! Here is the quote:

« The infrastructure includes all individuals between a vendor and its customers that can influence the buying process. » -- Regis McKenna

Pretty wide isn't it? But for B2B marketers like me this is so true and so daunting. Today's Marketing 2.0 reinforces and stresses our imperative to identify them and reach out to them through social media because we need them to be involved in the conversation, hopefully positively.

To start with today, I wanted to share with you this blog post: Social Marketing: Hybrid Approach to Identifying Targeted Influencers. Dive in as Elliott's post has lots of tips and links to tools and present it in a very simple way. His Hybrid approach actually refers to a combination of manual operations and free services you can use if you're on a budget contraint and cannot hire an agency to help you. Enjoy!

source Elliott Lemenager 

Social media marketing: build a lasting methodology

Here is an interesting post about optimizing your social media marketing from David Kirkpatrick, Marketing Experiment.

Justin Bridegan, Marketing Manager MECLABS Primary Research said, “One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is creating a lasting methodology that works.  Time and resources continue to be two of the most difficult challenges social marketers face.”

Justin’s key takeaways:

1. Start small and test – “You don’t know what you don’t know”
2. Having a solid social marketing methodology in place will allow you to focus on real obtainable goals.
3. Determine the most effective offers for your campaigns including: Contests, incentives and promotions
4. Weigh Quality vs. Quantity with your offers, and remember the need for balance in your engagement
5. Successful campaigns don’t always equate to revenue, but can be one of many contributing components

Related resources on Marketing Sherpa

Free Inbound Marketing Newsletter – Case Studies and How To articles about social media, SEO, and content marketing

New Chart: Social Marketing Maturity and the Social Marketing ROAD Map

Social Media Marketing Research: Rolling up my sleeves and getting social

Maximizing Email List Growth: How the New York Public Library drove a 52.8% lift in newsletter subscriptions

Most-Tweeted Blog Posts of 2010: Facebook case study, social media marketing human factor, antisocial media, and more

How does your marketing compare to best in class?

A recent research from Aberdeen about Marketing Asset Management gives an opportunity to compare to the best in class.
Aberdeen uses 3 key performance criteria to compare:

1. 44% of the sales forecasted pipeline generated by marketing, as compared to 2% contribution for laggards organizations,
2. An average 9% reduction Year-over-year cost of market asset creation, as compared to a 6% increase among laggards,
3. 15% average decrease in year-over-year time-to-market of content of all types and formats, as compared to an increase among laggards.

To achieve best in class performance, you need to

• Allow all geographies and business units to customize marketing content with proper control
• Centralize asset approval and distribution to expedite time to market and improve content

Happy New Year 2011

Paris, Jardin Robert Cavalier de La Salle - 26 December 2010