How Social Is Your Business, Anyway?

Published in ClickZ on October 29, 2014.

Evolving into a truly social business is a tricky task, and one that can take a while to accomplish. How does your brand stack up?

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#IBMSocialStudy -- new research from the IBM Center for Applied Insights

I think we, especially as marketers, can all acknowledge that whether or not companies admit it, all businesses are already social. After all, customers post comments and reviews and employees are individuals with lives they share with their friends and families - including thoughts about their employers. In fact, there is even a coined phrase "dark social" to describe referrals that aren't trackable by Web analytics (here's a great real world use case of dark social in action). But for those businesses that have knowingly picked up the gauntlet, where are we on the path to real social engagement?

New IBM research has some interesting insight into this social adoption, including how companies themselves are defining what it means to be social. Three-quarters of the respondents in our latest study believe a social business is one that uses social technologies to foster collaboration among customers, employees, and partners - and we agree. So social is about helping people work together more effectively to make better business decisions. But this transformation isn't easy and organizations can't realize all of their social aspirations at once, as evidenced by the fact that only 20 percent of executives we surveyed say their own enterprises have attained the social interaction mentioned above.

"Hypotheses and assumptions abound, so we turned to science to help us determine what's really happening. Through cluster analysis of 19 different social capabilities that executives are currently implementing or planning to implement, we discovered that companies tend to deploy certain groups of capabilities together. These five distinct clusters of capabilities - or 'social ambitions,' as we've called them - reveal the particular goals enterprises are aiming to achieve as they become more authentically social.

- Charting the Social Universe: Social Ambitions Drive Business Impact, IBM Center for Applied Insights, September 2014

It's a journey, and one that companies are tackling from different starting points based on their business needs and specific market conditions. Data showed that common (and logical) starting point for many organizations are to deploy capabilities around internal and external collaboration. Foundational social capabilities - like infusing social into basic business processes - still seems more difficult to attain, and is one of the least-deployed social ambitions.

So what are the five distinct social ambitions?

1. Drive Internal and External Collaboration

Objectives:

• Increase employee productivity
• Increase customer loyalty and advocacy

Capabilities:

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• Collaborative applications
• Enterprise social networks
• Social media marketing

2. Build, Educate, and Protect the Workforce

Objectives:

• Increase employee productivity
• Optimize workforce talent

Capabilities:

• Security intelligence
• Workforce training
• Recruiting
• Policy communication

3. Understand and Engage Customers

Objectives:

• Increase customer loyalty and advocacy
• Increase sales

Capabilities:

• Customer analytics
• Customer support
• Social CRM
• Social analytics

4. Mine Community Expertise

Objectives:

• Optimize workforce talent
• Increase employee productivity

Capabilities:

• Onboarding
• Locating experts
• Crowdsourcing/Idea sourcing

5. Improve Business Processes

Objectives:

• Reduce costs
• Increase sales

Capabilities:

• Workforce analytics
• Sales software
• Supply chain
• Business process management
• Workforce performance

Evolving into a truly social business is new and uncharted territory, so we can all learn from the pioneering companies on the forefront of this journey. To learn more about what surveyed companies tracked as success metrics, lessons we can learn from their experiences, as well as a checklist of the four key considerations of strategy, implementation, involvement, and metrics that you'll want to apply as you chart your own course for social success, I invite you to see the details about the study and access the ungated research report.

IBM Social Business for Small-Medium Size Businesses and Enterprises

Video interview focused on "IBM Social Business for Small-Medium Size Businesses and Enterprises". In the video we discuss various business drivers and include a few of IBM's tools that can help any company looking to sell more products, increase customer retention, employee engagement, collaboration, and innovation.

Visit: ibm.com/social-business

Marketing Essentials for 2015

DMN's 2014 40 Under 40 winners offer up their predictions for the most important aspects or attributes of the marketer in 2015.

Data Tidal Wave: Opportunity and Responsibility

Published in ClickZ on October 1, 2014. Full copy below.

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Image source: ClickZ | Marketing News & Expert Advice

As marketers, we need to think carefully about how we can maintain a balance of using data to improve the customer experience while also allowing for visibility and control for individuals who want to understand how their personal data is being used.

In the last two weeks, I have had the good fortune of participating in The Corporate Social Media Summit, Social Media Today’s “Social Media Shake-Up”, TED@IBM’s “Reimagine our World”, The Churchill Club’s “Churchill Awards”, and upon arriving in New York City from home in San Francisco, (at least the Twitter stream of) the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX conference.  I need to pause for a moment and express how full my brain is, and how keyed up I am with the possibility of the future!? Whether engaging as a speaker or an attendee, it is clear to me the marketing (and global, for that matter) transformation that we have been speaking about for many years is truly upon us – AND it is coming like a tidal wave. 

Over the course of these past two weeks, I’ve had a unique opportunity to look both micro and macro at how the digital transformation is impacting us as brands and as individuals.  From how corporate brands are innovating to engage with their increasingly elusive customers, to how individuals are participating in and creating a collaborative economy.

Bryan Kramer key noted at the Social Media Shake Up, and discussed how there is no more business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), that there is simply human-to-human (#H2H). Bryan took this even deeper in his TED@IBM talk where he discussed how he learned the importance of this concept in his own life.

The Tesla Design Team discussed the importance of Design Thinking, from utility to beauty to brand building and acceptance in the mainstream.

Jeremiah Owang spoke about the rapid disruption and empowerment brought on by the birth of the collaborative economy, key noting at the Social Media Shake Up and interviewing the Head of Data Science, Riley Newman, for AirBnB at The Churchills.  Most inspiring to me about this economic shift is the power individuals reclaimed during the economic downturn to sometimes save their homes or businesses through this supplemental income, and in doing so, creating a new model for trust that is creating truly human experiences in an old-turned new fashion.

Airlight Energy, a Swiss-based supplier of innovative technology, shared their vision for solar production that offers the bi-product of desalinized water.  Gianluca Ambrosetti, Head of Research for Airlight Energy, shared the promise of bringing solar energy to remote parts of the planet using sunflower-shaped panels.

Kare Anderson reinforced the importance of reciprocity, mutuality and truly being present in order to engage with one another as people; really encouraging us all to step out of our comfort-zones and connect with people who are different than us to expand our thinking and reach new levels of innovation.

These are just a few of the truly next generation topics that I have had the wonderful opportunity to explore with some remarkable thought leaders!!  I am overwhelmed (in a good way) with things to ponder for a good long while ;)

What I'd like to delve into with you all, as fellow marketers, is the specific topic data privacy. In all honesty, it has been on my mind quite a bit and growing over the course of the summer and the many events that I've attended recently. Through discussions about platforms, mobile marketing (or as this tweet so eloquently points out: "It's not mobile marketing. It's marketing in a mobile world"), digital engagement, customer-centricity, and the like, paired with the discussions of social analytics, psychographics, and predictive profiling, I had already been thinking about both the amazing and scary future enabled by the data footprints we all leave just by going about our daily lives. Amazing because we can interpret real insight from this data, and scary for just the same reason - data scientists can see where we go, what we do, and when. And it's becoming more and more visible in the press, from retail to sports. Take this recent article about how theSacramento Kings basketball team is leveraging data; it talks about analyzing visual data, like plays via video of the court, as well as statistics. And this one about Facebook's re-launch of Atlas. Suffice it to say: It's here.

Which is what brings me to Marie Wallace's presentation at TED@IBM, "Privacy by Design: Humanizing Analytics." Wallace is an analytics strategist for IBM. I already knew that she has led the research and creation of some incredible projects, including the small Natural Language Processing (NLP) research project that turned into an enterprise technology that underpins dozens of IBM products, including IBM Watson of Jeopardy fame. What I didn't (yet) know was her core belief that as a data scientist there is an inherent obligation to protect the individual. I also didn't realize that she was applying - and advocating for - a serious code of data ethics. She discussed the power and responsibility data scientists have. Wallace's example was one of analyzing internal employee data created through the use of enterprise social networks (IBM's own) and the request to provide insights and reporting. In her example she discussed the insight that can be garnered from aggregate data without invading the privacy of the individual, and she called data scientists to carry the banner of privacy protection for the individual, as she herself does.

As a marketer who is thinking about how we can better optimize cross-channel digital engagement and match up cookies, mobile IDs, social identities, and others, while also realizing the implications to my own personal data security, this was a fresh perspective to know that (at least some of) those designing the data analysis systems are approaching their work with privacy and ethical responsibility in mind. As consumers become more educated through news coverage, it will be interested to understand how the market (may - OK, very well likely) shift. Stories like George Clooney using "burner phones" to prevent hackers or leaks for his wedding plans or wedding photos, to new social networks like Ello, built on the foundation of data privacy, consumers and individuals are starting to demonstrate their desire for control.

We marketers will need to think carefully how we can leverage behavior data to improve the customer experience, while allowing visibility and control for individuals who are going to want to understand how their personally identifiable information could be used.

Michelle Killebrew, IBM Social Business: DMN 2014 40 Under 40 Award winner

Michelle Killebrew
Program Director of Strategy and Solutions, IBM Social Business

Published on DMNews on September 30, 2014.

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Direct Marketing News 2014 40 Under 40 Award

Winning ways: Killebrew is all about optimization. With analytics as her guide, Killebrew led and launched the first integrated digital campaign across the IBM Smarter Commerce portfolio, introducing role-based messaging and providing best practices and Web analytics globally to in-country marketing teams. Additionally, her data-led work has resulted in revenue increases across several areas of the business.

Defining moment: “It's been a number of progressive experiences that have built on themselves. The biggest opportunity is taking advantage of them…. [First], I was the director of marketing for an online retailer. I was able to tinker around with Google Analytics, really look at the user flow and what was made to optimize that user flow, and increase revenue significantly. Then in my next role working for Coremetrics…[I] implemented campaigns with more sophisticated digital analytic capabilities and looked at optimization and trends in a much more sophisticated way. When that company was then acquired by IBM, I was able to pilot specific trends that I had learned from Coremetrics and apply those on a much larger scale with IBM.”

Words to live by: “Concentration is my motto—first honesty, then industry, then concentration."  –Andrew Carnegie

Head swivel: “When I rolled up my sleeves and really delved into the discussions around content marketing, I realized that this is something that we had already figured out, to some degree, and were implementing it in some of our customer engagement strategies.”

Good advice: “The best thing for [young marketers] to learn is the desire and passion to keep learning.”

First job: “My very first job was babysitting. My first official pay-check job was in a shop in a retail environment. Both of those really teach you to be patient and think about other people's needs first. In the first instance, it's the child. In the second instance, it's the customer. It's really putting that end-user hat on when you think about how you approach different problems.”

On your nightstand: “I'm currently reading Brisingr—book three of The Inheritance Cycle series by Christopher Paolini.  It's a fantasy, hero journey about a young farm boy and his dragon [and how] they hope to overthrow an amazingly strong and sadistic king from his control of the Empire. At the end of a long day plugged into the digital world, I enjoy escaping in the storytelling evoked in fiction on paperback. That said, of course there are always life and career lessons that can still be learned and applied: how one gains skills to succeed, the promise of overcoming obstacles to achieve, the importance of people that help you along the way, to name just a few.”

Favorite mobile app: “Right now, I'd have to say TripIt because I'm traveling so much. It really [keeps me] on the ball as to where I'm supposed to be next. If I'm thinking about engagement, it's probably Hootsuite in that it allows me to stay engaged on a variety of different social fronts and understand how I can engage with my audience while I'm sitting in the airport or traveling in a car on the go.”

Click or tap here to read the stories behind the successes of the other Direct Marketing News 2014 40 Under 40 winners.

Surprising Lessons from IBM in Successful B2B Content Marketing

Michelle Killebrew Sheds Light on Why Business Customers Crave Engaging Content

Published in the Content Insight Blog on September 11, 2014.

Selling candy, appliances, or fast food can involve rapid-fire, high volume social media campaigns driven by the latest trends in website, mobile, and social content. By contrast, B2B products and sales cycles appear bland. Yet, B2B customers and prospects are people, too. Shouldn’t the same B2C engagement principles apply to B2B content marketing?

Michelle Killebrew

Michelle Killebrew answers with a resounding “Yes!” However, she points out that leveraging those trends requires a granular understanding of your audiences. Once you understand what content your audience craves, Killebrew says you then know what content they will view, share, and use to eventually buy your product or service.

In this interview, Killebrew offers plenty of insights about IBM’s successful Rethink Business campaign that highlight the importance of audience analysis, effective translation of B2C marketing techniques into the world of B2B content marketing, and measuring success.

Many trends seem to blaze like wildfire through the B2C marketing world but sometimes lag with B2B content marketing. How do you leverage content marketing trends in video or social media to help engage a B2B audience?

B2B marketers need to remember that they sell to people, and they need to engage with those people. It’s easy to look at B2C marketing from a transaction viewpoint as if any of those trends don’t apply to B2B’s longer sales cycles. However, much of the B2B sales cycle leverages an engagement strategy before the prospect passes over to sales. B2B marketers are starting to see that the sales cycle begins with that initial engagement—and what captivates and engages B2C audiences can also apply to a B2B audience. To leverage B2C trends for B2B content marketing, put yourself into the shoes of your target audience, understand their challenges, and build a campaign around those insights.

People crave different content depending on their role. How did you go about segmenting and differentiating content for different roles and audiences for the new IBM Rethink Business website?

We focused on a roles-based messaging approach and really rolled up our sleeves to get in-depth and in touch with each of our target audiences. When creating a digital campaign, we not only look at different content and messaging for various roles but also take look and feel, usability, and interaction into consideration. For example, digital marketers want a slick, engaging, visually-rich, and high impact experience. They’re upheld to that kind of standard in their roles, and they want to learn how to up their game as digital marketers by seeing us practice the digital marketing best practices that we preach. On the other hand, IT professionals feel that slick websites lack credibility. They don’t like marketers marketing to them, and they prefer to hear from other IT professionals. That’s why it’s important to not only consider the content you create but also the experience around that content.

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IBM’s Rethink Business page focuses on a roles-based messaging approach.

What particularly made your social content successful with a B2B audience? What ingredients worked that you feel others can use too?

Peer to peer sharing worked especially well for our social content. People like sharing content to their network with a click. For example, when people come to our website and engage with our content, we include visually appealing, sharable facts and data. Sharing this social content shows them off as thought leaders to their networks. For us, we bring their social traffic back to our site. Also, our overall social plan ties into different pieces of content. We might feature a blog post about a webinar that encourages people to participate, and that post offers links back to our main website where people can engage with more content. Or when we post something like an analyst report, we’ll blog about that content and push it out through our social media channels to bring people back to the site. And don’t forget Facebook! I’m surprised how often B2B audiences use it, and B2B marketers should not ignore that platform.

When you sell technology solutions, there’s always a risk of delivering dry technical content that falls flat. How do you avoid this pitfall and engage audiences?

Know where your audience is in their buyer journey. Our campaign primarily intended to capture and captivate new audiences. As users go through their buyer journey, our intention is not to go too deep on that “first date.” Opportunities will exist later to drive your audience toward deeper content as they journey further into the funnel. They may not be ready for a sales engagement, so we don’t overwhelm them with too much technical content out of the gate. Instead, we speak to their business pains, why our services matter, and how other people solve similar problems through sharing case studies and peer-to-peer examples.

How did you measure the success of your campaign? And what was the indicator or visible turning point when you felt a sigh of relief and knew that it all worked?

Given part of our portfolio—and my pre-acquisition legacy—we leverage IBM Digital Analytics (formerly Coremetrics) to analyze and optimize the digital experience. Obviously, we measure page views, conversions, and how people interact with our content (such as the number of video views). During a campaign several years ago (before Coremetrics was acquired), we included an interactive feature where a user needed to click something in order for a video to pop up. We noticed by looking at our metrics that only a small fraction of the visitors looked at it and took an action. In response, we made our call to action more visible so that more people saw the video. Because the video formed a significant investment as part of the total campaign cost, we used metrics to make sure we fixed any engagement problems and ultimately ensured that the video was a valuable part of the user’s experience. We had to rearchitect and reengineer the technology serving up that user experience, but by taking the time to collect analytics, look at the interaction experience, and then act on our evaluation, we increased the sophistication of our user experience.

From a user flow data collection perspective, we collect user information in a relatively short form. After that, we cookie the user. They fill out the form once, but on the backend the user submits an invisible form for each piece of content they interact with. When I pull up John Smith, I can see that he downloaded whitepaper A and webinar B. I know exactly what he likes. The person isn’t bothered with multiple forms, but I can see a user’s interaction and behavior within the site to see what’s working and not working with our content. Additionally, we can leverage those cookies for retargeting with IBM Digital Data Exchange (DDX). That helps leverage the behavioral insights gained from on-site interactions and syndicates it out to demand-side platforms (DSPs) and networks across multiple online publishers.

As Killebrew points out, your B2B campaign can absolutely leverage B2C marketing techniques IF you keep the following in mind:

• Remember that you’re selling to people. B2B products may seem more complicated and technical than most B2C products, but you still need to captivate and interest people.
• Deeply learn about each of your audiences. You may need to design different content and user experiences for different customer segments
• Evaluate your content, and then act upon your evaluation. Make changes when you realize what’s not working in order to maximize your marketing and content investments.

Read more about IBM’s Rethink Business campaign.

To see the end result of IBM’s campaign, visit IBM’s Rethink Business page.

The Future is Now

Published in ClickZ on September 4, 2014.

Recent partnerships between unlikely brands are an indication that the prediction that consumers will shape how businesses are run has come to fruition.

One of the fascinating things about my role in market strategy is the frequency in which I delve into research of upcoming trends and major transformations. We all know that technology is being adopted and changing at an exponential rate, but it really struck me a few weeks ago when I heard one of the Apple vice presidents speak to a large group of IBMers about the Apple/IBM partnership recently announced.

What struck me specifically was that the prediction that technologically empowered consumers will shape how businesses are run, down to the fundamental business models - and that it would cause some unlikely partnerships and "co-opetition"/frenemy-type relationships - had just come true on a major, global scale. Of course, the legacy contentiousness between these two iconic brands is decades behind us, especially with IBM having moved out of the personal computer business, and the partnership offers huge advantages for both sides - yet it is still a historic moment.

Recently we saw some other interesting partnerships announced, with Uber, the market-disrupting, sharing-economy-model car service, partnering with both traditional and non-traditional partners: United Airlines, Hyatt Hotels, Starbucks, and Yelp. For me the fascinating partnerships are with United and Hyatt. Uber shares a business model close to that of Airbnb, which is competing with major hoteliers, and while I don't know of any pilots offering ride-shares yet, it might not be that far off, so it's interesting to me to see these major brands affiliate through a partnership of this type. However, I think it's the type of out-of-the-box thinking that traditional brands are going to need in order to keep up with the demands of their customers, because in business we are running to keep up with the pace of change that our customers are expecting.

So what's fueling these partnerships? Empowered consumers with the knowledge of the world in their pockets who can force organizations to operate in an ever-more transparent fashion, and expect immediate responsiveness. Customers are expecting seamless experiences. And these expectations of seamless experiences go beyond the boundaries of a business' purview. We see the need for organizations to partner to create engagement ecosystems with companies that may provide a service that somehow relates - and sometimes doesn't - to their own customer value proposition.

I think of integrations like Zillow and other real estate apps integrating with services like Yelp so that prospective home buyers can see the number, type, and ratings of restaurants in the neighborhood around a home that they're looking at. Partnerships and integrations like this are fairly intuitive. But what about less intuitive partnerships? Think about Citi's partnership with LinkedIn. Citi recognized that women were the "CFOs" of their home finances, so they wanted to engage them with meaningful content and a sense of community. What that led to were requests for career support, and the partnership with LinkedIn was created. This was an innovative way to engage with a key audience even in a way that isn't directly tied to the organizations business proposition, and it has boosted their brand affinity.

These partnerships are just another visible trend of the impact of the major global shift being caused by technology advances and adoption that Gartner calls the nexus of forces. The shift of power from an organization to the customer is impacting many changes across the globe, from how we communicate to how we learn and work. It is captivating to me to see some of these trends and predictions that research has been pointing to for years come to fruition on the global stage.

So how can you prepare to keep up with the future? On the surface it's quite simple - think through your customer experience. In practice it's a more challenging. In order to engage with their customers, organizations are thinking through the entire customer experience, well beyond just the interaction with their own organization. They are devising sophisticated engagement strategies to define that customer journey, profile them appropriately, and pass relevant data to their partners and their systems. We'll see more flexible and integrated platforms to support this data sharing between partners - for us, as marketers, we'll see further increases in API-integration between data sources so that we are able to further hone our objective of truly personalized offerings and campaigns.

Over the next few years, with business models truly being impacted by the empowered customer, the access to data, the ubiquity of connectedness, and ever-increasing expectations, we'll continue to see these market disruptions impact business models and how companies operate, partner, and compete.

And this is just a look at one of the many impacts these changes will wrought. The future is now, and I can't wait to see what will happen next!

Connect, Engage, Collaborate: People-Centric Engagement in a Digital World

Published in ClickZ on July 11, 2014.

New innovations in social and mobile are helping to change the way marketers can engage with consumers. How can we deliver a valuable, personalized experience?

In my marketing strategy role, I've been recently focusing on the idea of people-centric engagement because, as we all know, as social and mobile technologies become increasingly pervasive, the opportunity to engage people in new ways is profoundly changing the way we operate. Individuals empowered by technology expect to engage with brands when and how they want; organizations are tasked with encouraging and supporting collaboration for employees, customers, and citizens while keeping an unrelenting focus on user experience. How can they do this, while safeguarding the integrity of both the business and the brand?

It's a complicated challenge to deliver a personalized and valuable experience - one that is challenging brands to metamorphosis to truly engage with their customers and would-be customers through understanding what they want (through analytics), providing them what they want (through valuable content and storytelling), and when and where they want through a consistent omni-channel brand experience (mobile, Web, and physical).

It means putting people at the center, to create open and authentic ways of engaging with individuals instead of segments or categories. This is possible today like at no other time in history because of the convergence of technologies for social, mobile, cloud, and security. This convergence is giving organizations and brands the means to meet people where they are. It is arming them with the data and the expertise required to personalize every human-to-human interaction. And it is giving them the credibility that is the foundation of trust. In fact, 80 percent of individuals are willing to exchange personal information for a personalized offering (IBM 2013 Annual Report, page 21) with brands they trust to keep their information safe.

The wonders of technology are impressive, it's true, but in order to effectively engage with people we must look back to some of our intrinsic and ancient human qualities: storytelling, substance, empathy, and the value of specialized skills and talents. All of which is made most daunting to brands by the rapidity of the change and the fact that multiple shifts are occurring simultaneously...and the changes will keep coming!

As we know by the growing "buzzwordiness," storytelling is becoming an ever-increasingly important art for us all to engage with one another - person-to-person to cut through the barrage of messages we're presented with at every given moment. We now need to heighten our focus on creating an emotional connection. I love how Pilar Alessandra describes successful brand storytelling in an interview with Buddy Scalera:

Years back there was this wonderful commercial that always made me cry. In it, a grandfather affectionately holds his arms out to his granddaughter. She toddles toward him... then passes right through him. It was an anti-smoking ad. And it made its point by telling the story of a smoker who'd missed out on his life.

To me, that's when brands make their point best - by telling us stories. Rather than showcase the brand, tell a story about the need for or effect of a brand, and your audience will pay attention.

As a marketer, I believe the power of storytelling comes to life through the need to relate to your audience - it is true customer centricity. To do so, we must truly understand our audience. I've discussed how important analytics is to this understanding in the past (and will again); right now, however, I'd like to focus on the human-side of understanding (understand (ˌʌndəˈstænd): ( tr ) to be sympathetic to or compatible with: we understand each other): empathy. Because digital technology is increasingly transparent, it requires us all to be more authentic, sincere, and empathetic. It also allows us to be fun, personable, and relatable - both as individuals showing more of our true, full selves or as a brand that can create a more human persona.

Here's a fun content marketing #DearKitten video created by Friskies. It is brilliant content marketing. They completely understand their audience of cat owners and have created socially relevant (not sure if the tone was intentionally similar to Grumpy Cat) and viral video content. They have developed the characters, it's a longer format, and is ripe for episodic storytelling,which will only help further engagement and brand impressions with their audience over time. Friskies has created a community for their loyalists and increased engagement through the invitation to co-create content featuring their beloved pets.

IBM research shows that there are compelling reasons to foster this cooperation. Outperforming enterprises are 54 percent more likely than underperforming enterprises to collaborate extensively with their customers (see Figure 9). In fact, deep collaboration is a universal ambition: nine out of 10 CxOs foresee doing so in the near future (see Figure 10). (Exploring the Inner Circle: Insights from the Global C-Suite Study, IBM Institute of Business Value 2014.)

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Exploring the Inner Circle: Insights from the Global C-Suite Study, IBM Institute of Business Value 2014.

Of course, the crucial bridge between the organization and its customers is the workforce. The ability to engage, develop, recognize, and support employees is essential in the high-stakes battle for customer loyalty. It is these individuals who represent - and effectively are - the organization's brand in the market. They interact with customers on a daily basis. It is they who monitor and analyze changes in customer preferences and who develop and maintain the technologies that help connect the physical and digital worlds. This is why a motivated and properly prepared and engaged workforce will be indispensable for success in the customer-activated world. (New expectations for a new era: CHRO insights from the Global C-suite Study, IBM Institute of Business Value 2014.) And it is why organizations are recognizing the importance of employee engagement as part of the customer experience and are creating a workforce of brand ambassadors in their employees - "involving employees in spurring social sharing of happy customer moments," eloquently summarizes Kare Anderson of Cheryl and Mark Burgess' book The Social Employee.

It all comes full circle: customer experience -> employee engagement -> innovation.

The exciting future of all of this is that we truly have the opportunity to co-create and innovate as both employees and as customers, allowing us to connect, engage, and collaborate as people - together - to create value and invention.

Join my session on the same topic at ClickZ Live in San Francisco on Wednesday August 14 at 11:50 a.m. to learn more and see how some brands are successfully engaging customers.

Insights for Business Transformation in This 3rd Platform Age

Published in ClickZ on June 11, 2014.

There are many challenges that come when attempting to transform a legacy brand into a modern customer-focused organization. Here are some tips for making the process simpler.

I am lucky to live in Silicon Valley and have the opportunity to be a part of the lively gatherings and discussions that occur as people come together to think through this changing world we are all a part of.

Last week I attended a particularly interesting event that I think you'll enjoy sharing in: The Churchill Club's open forum event "Business Transformation Insights and Strategies: D&B CEO Bob Carrigan with Advisory Geoffrey A. Moore" - two extremely well-known thought leaders who combined made for a fascinating discussion about business transformation. Bob Carrigan assumed the chief executive (CEO) role at Dun & Bradstreet eight months ago; prior to that he was CEO of IDG Communications. Geoffrey A. Moore is a renowned author focusing on market dynamics surrounding disruptive innovation; his books includeCrossing the Chasm and Escape Velocity.

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Geoffery A. Moore and Bob Carrigan at The Churchill Club event at the Rosewood Sandhill on June 3, 2014

The conversation was broadly centered on business transformation and some of the key elements Carrigan is focused on in his role as CEO for Dun & Bradstreet as he tackles the challenge of modernizing a legacy brand of a 173-year-old company into a modern customer-focused organization.

Third Platform Age

Moore explains that there are basically two reasons a company undergoes the terrifying process of transformation: 1) to catch the wave of the next big thing and if we don't transform we're going to miss it or 2) to react to an existential threat and a competitor will take our business away from us. He cites 45 iconic tech brands that he has worked with no longer exemplifying the high stakes of business transformation.

As we all know, cloud, mobile, social, and big data are changing everything from the way we shop to the way we interact - analyst firm IDC calls this the "Third Platform Age" (first platform: mainframe, second platform: client/server). For established organizations to survive and thrive as the pace of change quickens exponentially is a huge challenge as everything become more digital and Internet-based - creating the need to foundationally change how their businesses are run, especially as threats like commoditization and pure-play digital upstarts loom.

Organizational Transformation

After spending time with numerous customers, Carrigan started his tenure by investing in innovation - that isdiverting returns - which can be difficult to explain to investors. One of the (I think brilliant) ways that Carrigan worked with his strategy team to look at investment options was to visualize the decision-making process by setting up a table with poker chips and different investment options. The strategy team physically moved the chips as they considered how to spend their investment dollars for the company, all the while keeping customer needs top of mind. Of course as some budgets are diverted to fund new projects; this raises the cultural issues that surround business transformation as it changes standard practices and the stakeholders who grasp onto the "this is how we've always done it" mentality.

In this modern organization transformation, Carrigan took some of the following actions:

• Creating a more transparent and flatter organization: reducing his direct reports from 13 to six
• Hiring of a chief people officer: someone new to the organization who is an experienced change agent focused on people and talent development, who looked at new compensation models, who was intentionally not "human resources" (this role is one of the six that report to Carrigan)
• Allowing for employee advocacy: their social media policy had been more restrictive than open; they now encourage employees to socially engage inside and outside of the organization
• Hiring the first chief marketing officer in D&B's 173-year history: recognizing that today the "medium is the message," that look and feel needs to be modern and crisp and clearly convey what the brand stands for (this role is one of the six that report to Carrigan)
• "Moving from arthritic to agile" infrastructure: look inside (customer-centric) out, instead of outside (company-centric) in to figure out what should no longer be done so that technology supports the strategy
• Thinking globally: breaking the silos of "U.S." vs. "rest-of-the-world" to address the growing global economy and his client's global growth needs, and the data consistency to support them

The Way Forward

Like many organizations in this Third Platform Age, D&B sees its future in the power of data. It is moving forward by holding on to its foundational value for its clients in the "DUNS Number" (the unique identifier in its global commercial database) and coopting data from other sources - like social data and interaction data - combining structured and unstructured data into system that can be leveraged by predictive analytics capabilities. Carrigan sees the company's evolution forward as a goal of "liberating content" (data) - making it more accessible to their customers: in the cloud, through easy API integration, and data feed services. They are hosting hackathons for API development and strategically acquiring companies (and with them "aqui-hired" talent) to support that goal.

As a professional immersed in these strategic changes around cloud, big data and analytics, mobile, and social daily as I approach my work, I found it fascinating to hear how a company with such a long history is transforming itself to compete in this hyper-competitive, digital landscape. I'd like to thank Bob Carrigan and Geoffrey A. Moore for an insightful conversation and The Churchill Club for organizing it. You can watch the full exchange here on YouTube.

World-Class Customer Service in the Digital Age

Published in ClickZ on May 14, 2014.

The combination of the best possible tools for social marketing and the best possible customer service representatives will result in a unique, engaging experience for your customer.

We all know the power of a great customer experience or a terrible customer experience - 95 percent of people share bad experiences vs. only 83 percent that share good, and 58 percent are more likely to tell people of their customer services experiences than five years ago. (Zendesk)

But there is much behind an excellent customer experience. Leading organizations realize that social business is more than just "doing social media"; they need to provide an excellent employee experience and are harnessing the power of social networking to innovate, deliver valuable experiences, and engage with customers in new ways - sometimes even going above and beyond to deliver a juicy steak right to a customer's plane terminal.

So, they're integrating social communication into the very fabric of their organization, beyond just the realm of customer service and support.

Companies need to rethink operations, policies, and infrastructure to better serve customers, because social business is about much more than any single social network; it's about putting the customer at the beginning, middle, and end of your organization's focus.

I'm sure most of us have seen these statistics before, and we know that digital technologies are playing a large part in how a brand interacts with its customers - and how that brand is perceived by its customers.

That's because customer service has become a key differentiator. In an age where a company and its competitors are all reaching out and interacting with the same customer through multiple channels and touch points, everything hinges on customer experience.

• How does the customer interact with your brand? 
• How does your workforce interact with your customers? 
• What tools do you have at your disposal to better understand, interact, and serve your customer?

These are important questions, because the answers determine the kind of experience your customer has when engaging your company - and they also determine if the customer will continue to engage, or jump ship to a competitor.

Industries and CXOs agree: Many of today's customer experience challenges can be overcome by digital fluency.

And, within the next few years, we will see nearly 70 percent more CXOs using digital channels to more fully engage with customers for a stronger customer service experience across every point of interaction.

And social business goes much deeper than just an improved customer experience. It allows you to engage people as individuals, not segments - offering personalized value at every touch point.

By delivering a high-value, personalized digital experience to prospects and customers, you can drive higher revenue. Up to one-third of all consumer spending is influenced by social interactions, accounting for $940 billion annually (McKinsey).

Digital customer service experiences must be:

• Engaging: putting the customer in charge, letting them drive the experience
• Compelling: matching and exceeding expectations
• Consistent: regardless of device or channel, and
• Relevant: the digital experience must know who the customer is, where they are, and what they're trying to achieve. 

Customers satisfied with their digital experience have made 30 percent more referrals. And happy customers call customer service about 62 percent LESS, making very happy employees.

Ultimately, savvy companies understand one truth: that customer service is at the core of customer experience.

By delivering exceptional experiences for your customers, your organization can turn those customers into brand advocates, working for your brand and spreading your messaging across every channel - sharing stories, writing reviews, and recommending products or services to friends.

Did you know that:

• A company with 100,000 brand advocates can reach 60 million people. (Zuberance)
• A 12 percent increase in brand advocacy generates a two-fold increase in revenue on average. (Fred Reichheld, HBS Press)
• Seventy-two percent of adults who had a memorable product or service experience said they took positive action, with 57 percent communicating their positive experience to others, and 41 percent recommending that someone make a purchase. (Harris Interactive)

Social is a natural platform for this - we call it Social Business.

A successful social business will:

• Understand the individual customer by getting the data necessary to anticipate user needs, spot trends sooner, and optimize a digital commerce strategy.
• Foster meaningful interactions through consistent and seamless multichannel experiences, allowing them to reach wider audiences and gain individuals' trust.
• Embrace transparency with open, authentic social interactions and community-based customer service.
• Unleash creativity by using rich media management tools to rapidly respond to changes and new opportunities in the marketplace.

But where do you start? You start with people - both your customer and your employee. Engage your customer through an enabled, empowered workforce. Listen to what your customers are saying across every channel through open communication, use analytics, and put the insight gained to good use so you can create a better, personalized customer experience.

Give your workforce - from the call center to the boardroom - powerful analytics so they can provide better service and solutions to your customers.

Give them the social and analytics tools they need to better interact with the customer, on the customer's terms.

And furthermore, a social business leader uses social tools to determine the best behaviors and traits needed for positions involving any kind of customer interaction, optimizing your customer service by using the most qualified and best-suited employees.

So it's the best tools in the hands of the best possible workforce - coming together to craft a unique, engaging experience for your customer.