What a pivotal year in our industry! Mobile, Cloud and Social making new leaders

What a pivotal year in our industry! Let's face it, IT has been attesting more evidences that its tectonic forces at work did let emerge new leaders and previous ones fade.

• Mobile: now at the core of IT, Apple and Samsung getting much of the coverage and dominating the smartphone market - surpassing now regular phones - pushing Nokia to be acquired by Microsoft and RIM Blackberry to look for a shelter. For software vendors and CIOs, applications have to be designed for smartphone devices first, tablet second and desktop third. As evidences, PC sales are declining, Dell to become private again, Steve Ballmer retiring, Intel also changed CEO to deal with innovator's dilemma. Wintel once dominating this industry is fading.
• Cloud: depicted as a consumer or anecdotal phenomenon once, Cloud Computing is now center stage for the Enterprise and a key topic for CIOs strategic plans. CRM is paving the way with Salesforce.com becoming #1 CRM vendor all flavors combined (on premise, cloud), customer service and Marketing quickly following. Microsoft bending its Office model with Office 365 is trying to resist Google surge in cloud based productivity suites is another evidence of cloud computing importance.
• Social: with Twitter preparing its IPO, Facebook stock ticker finally getting traction thanks to its successful mobile strategy, Google acquiring Waze for $1B+, Yahoo acquiring Tumblr for $1.1B, Rondee for video conferencing and Xobni for Social Contact Management, Salesforce.com acquiring Buddy Media on top of previous Radian6, Social is another tectonic force at stake making or breaking new leaders.

Combining this to Big Data and associated analytics to get a modern business insight, let's attest we're already in a new world. Get ready if you're not already! CIO, CMO, CDO or CEOs, don't let your competition harness these revolutions before you get a chance to compete or lead: initiate change now.

Week in review: Big Data's impact on the world - Enterprise Apps gold rush to the cloud

Big Data is pursuing to bubble up as the topic of choice for the beginning of 2012, even during Davos. Not surprising when one can attest that the cloud computing model is making significant progress all over the planet and even in my home country, France, where skepticism used to be the attitude regarding it. In turn, leveraging the cloud leads to Big Data, in a business context as well, to try to extract from all sorts of data streams meaningful business insights.

Big Data’s Impact in the World
Steve Lohr, in the New York Times, develops some examples in various areas and highlights some interesting numbers.

• Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development - World Economic Report 
• Cloud Computing to reach $270B in 2020 CAGR 30%: Kleiner Perkins said to eye “cloud” fund
• Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity - McKinsey Global Institute Report

I won't come back on Facebook IPO as the entire planet just twitted and blogged about it. But let's step back 5 years ago and remember how people where viewing Facebook back then. It changed big time, Facebook is no longer a youngster phenomena but a business eye opener. Amazing 180° view of the world for a company supposedly going to be valued more than $100B now. Don't you think? We're already in a new world. Social Media is now a reality to most businesses, Marketing cannot ignore it anymore and mobile devices are becoming rapidly the #1 entry point to it. By the way, what is the revenue Facebook is making on mobiles ;-)? (None for now, but stay tuned).

• The Web vs. Mobile Apps: How iOS and Android Are Disrupting The Open Internet 
• Google testing 'next-gen personal communication device'
• Interesting stats: Content Marketing Tactics Now Critical to All Businesses [INFOGRAPHIC] 
• $267B enter­prise tech­nol­o­gy mar­ket: The 3 secrets behind the enterprise tech gold rush 

By the way, recently SAP acquired Successfactors for $3.4B, Salesforce.com did the same with Rypple and Oracle with Taleo for $1.9B and RightNow, check this out. The enterprise apps gold rush seems to be on the cloud.

As Larry Ellison said about cloud computing in 2008: "What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?" Not there yet apparently ;-)

So are you ready for Big Data, cloud computing, social networks and mobile internet?

Best Internet Trends Presentation - Web 2.0 Summit

KPCB Internet Trends 2011

View more presentations from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

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!

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

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

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

In 2010 people get the news online on par with newspapers: first time ever

According to eMarketer research, 2010 sees US consumers get the news, all demographics combined, online as much as on the radio or even more than through newspapers. This is a confirmed trend that I highlighted already some time ago, but it was at that time only for one demographic.

"As a news delivery vehicle, the internet is second only to television, according to the Pew Research Center. More than 90% of Americans use one or more sources to get their daily news, and the number of digital channels is growing. Pew found that, on a typical day, 44% of US adults got news through a digital channel, either online or via mobile internet, email, social networks or podcasts." -- eMarketer

Should you rethink your PR activity? Yes you can!

Here is now some more details about the behavior of the US population sliced by demographics:

 To publishers, digital publications taking advantage of our proliferating mobile devices are to be taken into account to survive or thrive.

“While the number of digital newspaper readers will continue to grow as digital devices proliferate, the number of print newspaper readers will remain flat or continue to drop.” eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “The Digital News Audience: 24/7 Participation.”

And finally, let me share with you what role Twitter plays in this:

Social Media Increases Small-Business Exposure

Interesting research by American Express OPEN highlighted by emarketer this week showing that SMB in the US actually consider Social Media activity increases their business exposure. The Social Media usage is making progress as well:

"While just one in 10 business owners reported using social networking for marketing last year, 39% indicated they did in September 2010" -- eMarketer

Facebook seems to lead their with 27% using it, LinkedIn 9%, Twitter 8% and Blogging 5% are far behind. But resistance is still very present for SMBs, more than three in five reported not using social media at all, and the biggest reason they gave was that it did not apply to their industry.

We'll get there.

Social Media Revolution Video

This is a refresh of this very good video that provides factual data to make all of us aware of how fast Social Media and Web 2.0 waves are progressing in our daily life. I use very often this eye opener video in my presentations.

The Thin Line Between Liking a Brand and Liking Its Social Marketing

Good article on Emarketer


While Facebook fans and Twitter followers are often out for deals, they also care about showing support for brands they love—but that might not be an invitation to be marketed to. What does a brand fan's self-expression mean for the kinds of messages marketers should push out? Full Article




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Web evolution? Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 predictions

I found this perspective on web evolution quite interesting. We know predictions are a dangerous sport, but thinking about this might inspire you.

Web Evolution Nova Spivack Twine

View more presentations from Nova Spivack.

Combining Email, Search, Social and PR for a Content Marketing Campaign: 6 Tactics to Generate Surge in Visitor Traffic

You know I'm a big believer in integrated marketing. Now that Social Media is making a surge in our marketing plans, I found this article on Marketing Sherpa interesting as it summarizes what we should do better:

"

Marketing teams often focus tactics and goals in a particular channel, overlooking how these channels can complement one another. With a bit of planning, a campaign can harness the strategic value of email, search, social media and other outlets for a single purpose. See how an online luggage retailer created a premium report based on a survey of e-newsletter subscribers and captured 5x more blog traffic.

"

Their blog traffic increased 518% Y/Y and additionnally the report’s landing page had a 16% lower bounce rate than the site’s average, 29% of report downloads came from referring websites, 22% of downloads were referred by search engines.

The tactics used:

• Tactic #1. Use search metrics to research potential report topics
• Tactic #2. Build an online survey
  
• Tactic #3. Send survey request to email database
• Tactic #4. Host report download on a dedicated landing page
  
• Tactic #5. Pitch report to media outlets
• Tactic #6. Use social channels, even if you don’t have them
  

Feel free to post back your own experiences here, I'd be happy to hear about it.

P.S. link related to this bcase Creative Samples from Suitcase.com’s premium report marketing campaign

Facebook Is Not the Whole Game -- Other Social Networks for Business

I've found this interesting take on different social media tools that are beyond Facebook interesting attempt to help entrepreneurs.

"It may seem that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter get all the media love when it comes to social networking, but there is a wealth of sites out there to link business people with other like-minded folks. Most appeal to a niche of users, so you’re sure to find one for your particular need. As with all social-networking sites, the value comes from who else participates on the site and how actively. Most of the sites are free, but many charge for premium services (and many make it annoyingly difficult to find out the cost until you sign up!)."

Full article here
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/slideshows/show.aspx?c=79216&utm_source=itbe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ABG&nr=ABG

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