Altimeter: the average corporate Social Media Team consists of 11 members
Altimeter’s recent survey to 144 global national corporations with over 1000 employees has some interesting insights on how today’s social media teams structured.
They found a trend of four key groups within these teams:
- Leadership team, focused on leadership, vision, the overall program ROI, and driving business results.
- Business Unit Facing team, helping multiple business units get on board.
- Marketing Facing, focused on customer interaction, but shifting towards advocacy or enabling customers to respond to each other.
- Program Management: developers and analysts who conduct reporting and brand monitoring programs.
Further reading:
- Data: Composition of a Corporate Social Media Team @ web-strategist.com
Forrester: the Age of the Consumer
From Forrester's Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer Report [.pdf]:
We’re about to enter a new era that Forrester calls the age of the customer. [...] One by one, every corporate investment has been commoditized. Now every company can tap into global factories and global supply chains. After huge IT investments, companies are realizing that the Internet cloud provides all of the computing resources they need. Brand, manufacturing, distribution, and IT are all table stakes. The only source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology fueled disruption — an obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with, and serving customers. In this age, companies that thrive, like Best Buy, IBM, and Amazon, are those that tilt their budgets toward customer knowledge and relationships.
Here's how technology fuels customer disruption in a number of industries:
The solution?
Marketers will have to learn the difference between customer-possessed and customer obsessed.
The simplest way to become customer-obsessed is to give the customer exactly what she wants — but as Henry Ford noted, that would have meant giving people “a faster horse.” Instead, companies will need to combine their own insights with the latent desires of customers. Look for a growth in the kind of communities that companies like hotelier IHG and Godiva Chocolatier are building, where loyal customers collaborate with corporate innovators to design the next generation of products.
Social media emerging into B2B mainstream
In a recent study conducted by Google, over 600 B2B marketing professionals were surveyed and were asked about their marketing strategy for 2011. From the resulting infographic "The 2011 B2B Marketing Guide":
What is the real cost of social media?
The true cost of a social media campaign depends on the size and reach of the campaign itself.
Some factors to consider, from The Real Cost of Social Media infographic @ focus.com:
- Staff costs, like your marketer's salary
- Advertising, like Facebook Ads
- External fees
- Other, e.g. tracking tools, technical/creative costs
On the bright side, only half of the respondents of an eMarketers survey felt that "low cost" was a benefit of social media:
The importance of customer reviews
In his presentation ‘The Real Life Social Network v2’, design strategist Paul Adams explains why we often look to others when making decisions:
People try to behave rationally, they try to make objective decisions, but other factors mean that they can’t. The problem is that we all have limited access to information, and limited memory. Because of this, we have learned to rely on others to help us make decisions.
We assume that other people know things that we don’t. In fact, we do this so often, that we automatically look to the actions of others, even when the answer is obvious.
In so doing, we increase our reliance on social networks to make decisions:
The web is increasing the volume of information available to us, but our capacity for memory isn’t changing. So it is likely that we will increasingly turn to others to make decisions. There was once a time when we picked what restaurant to eat in by looking in the window.
But now, we often can’t decide without pulling out our phones and searching the web for reviews from people who have eaten there before.
Interesting question: how would negative reviews by people who've eaten in that restaurant before influence your decision to go in and order dinner? According to a Lightspeed Research study, between one and three bad online reviews would be enough to deter the majority (67%) of shoppers from purchasing a product or service.
The study also found that the majority of "window shoppers" used the internet for some kind of product research before making a purchase online or offline. This is in line with McKinsey's Consumer Decision Journey model. Just before the "golden moment", the moment of purchase (online or offline), people enter what McKinsey calls the active evaluation phase. To find the information and opinions they're looking for, shoppers will often go online. For information, they turn to Google Search. For opinions, they turn to friends and family (including their extended circle of friends and family on their social networks). They also look at review sites.
Further reading:
- How many bad reviews does it take to deter shoppers? @ econsultancy.com
4 ways to upload your vitals to the body cloud
Withings and nikerun are two examples of ‘smart devices’. I first heard about them through French entrepreneur and blogger Loic Lemeur, and now he's trying out a third one: Zeo Personal Sleep Coach.
Withings
Withings is the ‘first WiFi scale linked to the internet that automatically registers weight, fat and bmi calculation.’ I remember that cartoon cat Garfield once had scales that talked back to him, but in this case the scales actually publish your weight on your Twitter and/or Facebook account. Loic Lemeur currently weighs 100 kg of which 18.7 kg is body fat. Here's the graph:
NikeRun
Nike+iPod is a device bundle that consists of a small accelerometer that you can to clip on to your running shoe. It communicates with the Nike+ Sportband, a receiver plugged into an iPod nano, or directly with a second or third generation iPod Touch, iPhone 3gs or iPhone 4. If you use the iPod or the iPhone 3gs, iTunes software can be used to view the history of a particular walk or run. This history can be interesting if you want to ‘race’ against other runners – even if these people are doing their run at a different time, in a different time zone or even on the other side of the planet.
Zeo
Zeo is "designed to help you analyze your sleep and improve it, so you can be your best every day. It’s composed of a lightweight wireless headband, a bedside display, a set of online analytical tools, and an email-based personalized coaching program." Here's what it looks like when Loic Lemeur puts it on:
Meal Snap
And finally, there's iPhone app Meal Snap, which "lets you take pictures of the meal you eat, and then magically tells you what food was in your meal. Oh yeah, we tell you how many calories you ate too. Food tracking has never been easier." I think this is the app Cain R is still missing to reach his weight loss goal. He already takes pictures of almost everything he eats but is clearly oblivious of the amount of calories:
Mobile devices can now be used for selftracking, automatically monitoring and logging your weight, calorie intake, heart rate, treatments, sleep patterns, etc., as well as the conditions and symptoms relating to (for example) depression, infections or high cholesterol.
EnterprisemobileToday.com’s Mobile Download Guide to Best Health has a comprehensive list of iPhone apps that can ‘help folks monitor their nutrition; follow daily activity, exercise and weight loss regimes; calculate and track various biological factors; diagnose illness; monitor disease; know what to do in an emergency; etc.’
Loic Lemeur sees all this as "one more step to opening his body API" and hints that "iToilet, iSex and iFood are next into the body cloud".
What about you? How far would you go to get a better grip on your physical health?
What if nobody cares about your brand?
The Cluetrain Manifesto claims
There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
Well, not everyone. Sometimes people have no ‘news’ at all about the products or services they have bought. This is probably the case for the majority of business transactions. According to the Urban Dictionary, ‘meh’ is an interjection that is used to express indifference, to be used ‘when one simply does not care’. Flickr user Ken Murphy (obeyken) designed an alternative icon for Facebook’s ‘thumbs up’, which became so popular that people bought it as a t-shirt.
The market for the indifferent is probably bigger than we thought. Or as programming instructor and game developer Kathy Sierra stated it in her January 25, 2005 post "Creating Passionate Users: Be brave or go home":
Creating passionate users is NOT about finding ways to make everyone like you. It's about finding ways to use your own passion to inspire passion in others, and anything with that much power is bound to piss off plenty of status-quo/who-moved-my-cheese people.
