Social Media: A New Disruptive Revolution

Social media is a new disruptive revolution causing rapid change in the mode of business communication. Businesses must explore and evaluate these media to improve their marketing, sales, customer service, and brand reputation. Smart devices (smartphones, iPads, BlackBerries) are becoming a necessity for sales and field service personnel in many organizations; the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) model is supported by many businesses; and access to internal networks and applications are provided on these devices.

These social media have caused a major impact on sociopolitical campaigns in the recent past. Not so long ago, President Barack Obama used these media for his political campaign that resulted in a resounding victory. We also observed that ordinary people using Facebook and Twitter brought down rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and are threatening absolute rule in Syria. And in India, one man's campaign against corruption went viral, bringing thousands of people together globally in Anna Hazare's support for a greater cause.

We have entered the era of a connected society with powerful media and smart devices in people's hands, and businesses need to be vigilant and alert to listen to these voices. In this new work environment, businesses will have to display transparency to earn trust and faith among employees, partners, and customers. Customers who don't like a product can quickly broadcast their disapproval.

We are all familiar with the story about “United Breaks Guitars.” When United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago damaged Dave Carroll's $3,500 guitar a few years back, he tried to get his claims from the airline the old-fashioned way. But after several months of repeated phone calls and faxes with various customer-service representatives, the airline refused to accept his claim. Mr. Carroll, a professional country music singer from Canada, channeled his frustration into a song and a video, which he posted on YouTube. Since it first appeared, “United Breaks Guitars” has been viewed more than 4.4 million times.

Airlines in the United States have been the quickest to embrace social media as a low-cost public relations and marketing tool, in particular to spread the word about fare sales or to make announcements about new routes or services. Carriers like Southwest Airlines, JetBlue, and Alaska Airlines are among the most active users, each with online followings. Even some airports, like Hartsfield-Jackson International in Atlanta and Logan International in Boston, are using dedicated channels on Facebook and YouTube to provide travelers with information like how to use the airport train system or to give updates on construction projects or changes to rental-car facilities.

The social media's astonishing success in less than eight years has attracted more than a billion active users in almost every country and made it the world's most popular tool for communication and collaboration. Facebook provided users with a personal medium to broadcast to its network. Prominent businesses offer their versions of a hybrid Twitter/Facebook for employees. Oracle with its recently announced Oracle Social Network (OSN), Salesforce.com with its product Chatter, IBM with its Connections software, as well as start-ups Yammer and Jive, offer these collaborative tools for communication. “‘Information is power’ used to mean that hoarding information gave power. Now we're seeing that sharing information is power. The more we share, the more we can help other people and the more it becomes apparent we're an expert and a valuable employee,” says David Sacks, CEO of Yammer.

Many books have been written on social media and social business in the recent past and drawn great attention from key decision makers across all sectors. Sandy Carter in her book Get Bold (IBM Press, 2011) outlines AGENDA (align goals, gain trust, engage, network, design, and analyze) for the success of social business and its characteristics with expected business outcomes. She is a great evangelist of the social business transformation and argues passionately in her book about the need of an AGENDA to survive and thrive in the current tornadoes of disruptive forces. It is extremely important to align goals and culture of an organization with changing business needs and with the new mode of a socially connected ecosystem. Businesses need to gain the trust of customers, partners, employees, all stakeholders and their friends, and followers alike. They need to engage with clients and ecosystem partners offering a more delightful experience. She goes on highlighting the need of the process for social network and design for building trust of all stakeholders. More importantly, she concludes, it is vital to analyze the patterns of sentiments building around products and services. Technologies around social media are mere enablers to capture and listen to the voices around your business that provide inputs for the right decisions. It also helps in cognitive intelligence to run and manage the current agile business.

In our view, social business is extremely important in this new business environment, and this new paradigm shift has defined new levels of customer engagement.

The Six Layers of Customer Engagement

1. The web. When companies moved to the web, they asked customers to be self-sufficient with regard to product information, customer service, and ordering.
2. Social media. The social web opened up possibilities of public, two-way conversation.
3. Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter. These are the Internet for many people, and they handle all of their communication with friends and companies through the world's largest social network.
4. Mobile. With a phone in every pocket, customers are now looking for information that they can consume on their mobile devices.
5. Augmented reality. Digital information can now be placed on top of the real world.
6. The game layer. This builds on the mobile layer and lets businesses turn the world and their businesses into a game.

Consumerization of information technology (IT) is associated with ease of use, attractive interfaces, intuitive functionality, and low prices. In the corporate IT world, this move to consumerized IT has been described as the penetration of employee-purchased mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Android phones and tablets. This phenomenon is already growing and entering large organizations rapidly. The immense success and proliferation of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and mobile/smart devices such as iPhones, BlackBerries, and tablet PCs among consumers has created the consumerization of IT and a new paradigm shift seeking a pleasant web experience. Now, consumers have become more powerful than ever before with access to information and social media to communicate to the world at their fingertips.

Social computing and the use of social media are changing the way people interact with each other and with companies online. The majority of shoppers begin their process online, and the most frequent starting point is the retail site itself. These consumers are engaging, connecting, and collaborating. They want to understand what their friends liked, what other options are available, and what people like them ultimately bought.

Most of these consumers consider Facebook recommendations when making decisions about purchasing. Consistent experiences across multiple channels and devices have offered customers more choices for accessing the web in new, engaging, and collaborative ways than before, and they want that ease and diversity to be reflected in their dealings with businesses as well. Consumers change channels and switch devices whenever they need to. They can keep tabs on friends and family on Facebook and follow Twitter regularly. They can find a nearby restaurant with Foursquare geolocation on their phone and then look up reviews of that restaurant on Yelp.

Mobility: Enable Agile Relationships

We have witnessed a smart revolution of the mobile space (discussed in Chapter 6). This unprecedented growth of connectivity is creating an overwhelming range of new possibilities, and tapping, swiping, locating, pinging, and socializing are quickly becoming part of normal human behavior. Technology is starting to change people, and these people, whether consumers or employees, will change businesses. In this rapid shift, mobility has to be an integral part of the solutions and the framework.

Mobile usage will surpass that of PCs and other wired devices by 2015. Smartphones will outsell traditional cell phones. Tablet sales are booming. Mobile data traffic is expected to increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015. Businesses must optimize their websites for mobile use and prepare to target customers based on context and location. Mobile access must be fully integrated into the web presence, optimized and synchronized in real time, offering rich media content scaled and targeted to the device in question.

In today's ever-changing and most competitive business environment, consumers are seeking more personalized care and services for any engagement before they enter into a transaction. It is natural that the relationship begins with greetings, smiles, and conversation, and then an understanding of the needs and behavior emerges in the process.

User engagement involves a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Quantitative analysis offers useful patterns and is generally more scalable and easier to conduct. User engagement also involves contextual study and ethnography. These provide information, including what the users' routines are in daily life, and what their needs are for which they have visited the electronic website, physical store, or workplace.

Social computing is changing the way people interact with each other and with companies online. More than 40 percent of consumers factor in Facebook recommendations when making decisions about purchasing. Customers on the website may want to “Like” a product on Facebook or tweet about something they find. Or the reverse: While on Facebook, Liking the company could make the customer eligible for special offers that appear on the corporate website.

Customers are used to accessing the web in new and engaging ways through multiple channels and devices, and they want that ease and diversity to be reflected in their dealings with businesses. Yet companies need to maintain branding in a consistent way across multiple platforms and keep track of customers' movements from device to device throughout the day. The current multichannel environment makes marketing so complex that creating targeted, personalized, relevant experiences is harder than ever. And when you get it right, the bar is constantly rising. Companies are struggling to find a way to reconcile sentiment analysis, location, channel, demographics, and the many other factors that surround an interaction.

Marketers and line-of-business leaders need to find a way to control the online experience easily and intuitively. Ideally, marketers should be able to identify visitors quickly, follow their history across multiple channels, and, by evaluating real-time activities against historical data, make time-critical point decisions. Marketers should be able to analyze interactions and be empowered to change the experience fast.

The entire spectrum of components and data needed to create a consistent and compelling web experience today is comprised of diverse assets such as websites in multiple languages, user-generated content, micro sites, mobile and multichannel sites, social channels, and more. Meanwhile, companies have made enormous investments in CRM, campaign management, and other enterprise systems that house critical customer data. Often, these are disconnected from online customer engagements, but companies must integrate and manage all of these facilities to create a truly engaging experience for customers across online channels and between online and offline channels.

CITO Research explains the challenges of contemporary web management for enterprises and the business importance of web experience management as the basis of an integrated online strategy. This concept is vital for executives who are concerned about the strategic direction of their companies and who seek to provide an experience that will drive competitive success.

Web interaction has changed a great deal and entered a different wave now. The first wave, referred to as Web 1.0, provided the platform to publish information about products and services to external and internal consumers. The second revolution, referred to as Web 2.0, deals with technologies such as wikis, blogs, tagging, linking, discussions, and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to provide dramatic efficiencies to people working together with global virtual teams, partners, and customers. Currently, technology is advancing through the evolution of Web 3.0, which focuses on the semantic web and personalization. Web 3.0 is where the computer is generating new information, rather than humans doing so.

In order to deliver a pleasing web experience, one must incorporate social media, tailored through targeting, and deliver it through multiple channels, each with its own form factor and design characteristics. Web experience includes five major dimensions:

1. Social media
2. Multiple channels and devices
3. Targeted and personalized experiences
4. Multiple corporate stakeholders
5. A spectrum of components and data

Social media has evolved as a powerful platform to create a web presence globally and instantly without much investment. In order to take the best advantage of these media, businesses need to offer pleasant and engaging experiences to build community. This includes collaborative tools such as comments, blogs, ratings, and reviews. The various social media offer much more than communication and collaboration. We need to evaluate and address the following questions:

• How can our social media presence be integrated with the rest of the web experience?
• If a customer shows a particular interest on Facebook, how can the company make sure that this interest is acknowledged when the person comes to the corporate website?
• If a customer interacts with the company on Facebook or Twitter, shouldn't their interactions be acknowledged when the same person comes to the main website?
• Shouldn't positive interactions be promoted for others to see or share?
• Shouldn't marketers have the ability to address negative, unwarranted, or critical comments?

It's essential that marketers have the right tools for social channel enablement so that they can moderate and optimize the experience of social media on their site and across the social networking sites important to their customers. In this evolving communication pattern, the company website should be customized for each channel or device, the web browser, Facebook, Android devices, and iPhones. Ideally, a company website should be optimized for commonly used devices, with rich media and interactive panels. Part of this challenge is technical, such as integrating with third-party applications like Facebook, publishing content to diverse mobile devices, or integrating geopositioning. But there are also broader challenges of providing a contextual experience around each customer and allowing the business-to-customer interaction to move between platforms without missing a step. These challenges need to be addressed with a comprehensive strategy and with an integrated user engagement platform.

Customer Engagement: Key Business Challenge

Customer engagement is a key challenge for many businesses and a matter of ongoing optimization. Companies must acknowledge a customer's history of interactions and changes to personal profile details. Marketers need the ability to engage with customers through both explicit criteria (profile of a registered user, purchase history, CRM data, IP address, location, device type) and implicit criteria (behavior on the site, keyword searches, navigation). With this information, companies can begin to develop a customer profile, assign that profile to a customer segment, and target customers with appropriate content. As loyal and repeat customers interact with the website, their experiences can be continuously tailored with panels, messages, and offers. If the customer is volunteering information, reading content, or purchasing, marketers require analytical tools for tracking the effectiveness of online content and adjusting it to optimize its success.

In the current business scenario, most enterprises possess data but lack comprehensive analytics capabilities to make meaningful use of that rich data. Processes for targeting customers effectively need to combine the best of marketer-controlled analysis and automated optimization. Organizations require tools for marketer-controlled customer segmentation and the assignment of content or promotions that will be most effective for those segments. Businesses need data to make decisions, but not just a data dump. They need real-time intelligence on their customers and their behavior across channels focused on the right indicators to directly inform their decisions. And they need these capabilities paired with predictive analytics and automated decision making.

With the evolution of social media, expectations of users and line-of-business managers have changed as well. These users need to be empowered to build websites, design the layouts, make content changes, set up targeting rules, control user-generated content, and enable the mobile web, all from an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. IT remains an important stakeholder because the web is and always will be a critical enterprise software system, but IT people don't want to spend their days supporting the marketing department's content changes; instead they want to focus on more strategic initiatives.

To create a compelling web experience for customers, companies need the ability to organize and access their enterprise data and leverage it in web interactions. For example, a company may use customer relationship management (CRM) to create customer segments for direct mailings. But if CRM cannot talk to the web content management system, the company cannot reuse this intelligence online. If an organization creates a campaign to encourage repeat business, the campaign needs to be effective regardless of whether the customer is in front of a work computer, on the road on an iPhone, visiting a physical store, or calling customer service. And the organization needs to know what happened across the other channels of interaction so that it can make sure the campaign is applied appropriately. How can organizations bring customer data to bear in the web channel? How can organizations ensure that customers have an optimal and consistent experience with the organization, across both online and offline channels?

Today's requirements for web experience management entail a paradigm shift from the way the web was managed five or 10 years ago. Where web content management (WCM) systems several years ago helped IT administrators manage content for static one-size-fits-all websites, today the need has shifted dramatically. As the web has become a critical business and marketing tool, organizations must empower their marketers to manage the online customer experience as a whole. This web experience must provide a targeted and personalized, dynamic, social, interactive, and optimized experience across multiple channels. Organizations today need a web experience management system that is focused on these capabilities and that is capable of deploying a customer experience of this sort across the largest enterprise environments. Web content management capabilities remain the critical foundation of the tool set—but it is no longer enough to simply manage content online.

In order to provide an integrated customer experience, businesses evaluate integrated web content management and front- and back-office systems. This allows the enterprise to be more effective at targeting and customer service. The web experience can no longer remain separate from critical customer-focused systems like CRM and e-commerce.

Given the challenges of personalization, multiple channels, and the need for marketers to monitor, control, and optimize the web experience for customers, a total web experience management solution is needed.

With recent technology and tools, we can easily build and deploy a virtual web store where consumers may get a near real-term user experience with personalization and personalized care. On an intranet or a business-to-enterprise (B2E) web portal, personalization is often based on user attributes such as department, functional area, or role. (See Figure 7.1.)

Personalization: A Key Tenet of User Engagement in Business

Sometime back, I walked into a bank to carry out a normal banking chore—depositing a check. I was overwhelmed by the warm greetings of the branch manager, and he even offered to fill out the deposit slip while I was waiting in line for the teller. Thinking it might take a while, he then offered assistance to have my check accepted for deposit by a personal banker. He continued to offer the best care he could while I was in the bank.

When I walked into his bank again for another banking transaction, I was pleasantly surprised to receive his personal greetings by name with a smile and again his offer to assist with my transaction. This time, I had an appointment with a loan officer for a refinancing. When he saw that the staff was still busy with another customer, he offered to carry out all necessary photocopying of my documents that might be needed. While he was doing this extended personalized service, he was winning my trust and my heart in the process. By then, the loan officer was free and ready to meet with me with all my documents ready for our meeting. I would categorize the manager's assistance as a clear display of personalization that would go a long way in building trust and gaining, growing, and retaining business for his branch and for the bank in general. In contrast, I receive numerous aggressive and bothersome call center calls from its competitive bank for its services, and I refuse to take those calls. I am sure many of us have faced similar episodes in our lives, and we appreciate the significance of personalization and personalized care in business settings.

Customer services have been widely used and misused, and now businesses need to reevaluate the paradigm shift of customers' needs and expectations. Personalization implies that the changes are based on implicit data, such as items purchased or pages viewed.

There are three categories of personalization:

1. Profile/group based
2. Behavior based
3. Collaboration based

Web personalization models include rules-based filtering, based on “if this, then that” rules processing, and collaborative filtering, which serves relevant material to customers by combining their own personal preferences with the preferences of like-minded others. Collaborative filtering works well for books, music, video, and so on.

There are three broad methods of personalization:

1. Implicit
2. Explicit
3. Hybrid

With implicit personalization, the personalization is performed by the web page based on the different categories mentioned before. With explicit personalization, the web page is changed by the user using the features provided by the system (such as Oracle WebCenter sites). Hybrid personalization combines both approaches to leverage the best of both worlds.

Personalization is also being considered for use in less overtly commercial applications to improve the user experience online. Facebook introduced Instant Personalization recently. This new technology is different from social plug-ins, which many B2B and B2C sites are already using. Social plug-ins include things like Facebook live streams and Like buttons, and are intended to drive user engagement and make a website more social. With Instant Personalization, Facebook shares data with a handful of non-Facebook websites.

Social business is built upon three pillars—people (culture/leadership), process, and technology. Employees, partners, and customers are major constituents of any business. The most effective approach to enabling a social business centers around helping people discover expertise, develop social networks, and capitalize on relationships. It helps groups of people bind together into communities of shared interests and coordinate efforts to deliver better business results faster. An effective social business embodies a culture characterized by sharing, transparency, innovation, and improved decision making. Such a culture enables deeper relationships within the organization and with customers and business partners.

Culture change may be the most challenging component of successfully transforming into a social business. Social tools provide a gateway for information exchanges across geographies and organizational silos. Building trust and encouraging social interactions are essential to driving social change in the workforce. To become a social business, we have to recognize that employees need to be agile, informed, and able to work beyond their specific job descriptions.

Technology is certainly a key factor in the evolution. An organization must adopt tools that work efficiently in order to successfully make this transformation. While social software adoption is on the rise, a growing challenge for global organizations is the ability to manage risk while harnessing insights from a wide variety of social communities and remaining compliant with their own governance policies, including practices dictated by their regulatory requirements. With these new advancements around compliance enablement, a social business can confidently activate networks of people to use a variety of collaborative tools, to improve and accelerate innovation.

Business process optimization is extremely significant for any changes, and an organization must go through the process of identifying market factors that are generating the need for a transformation. It must recognize the social objectives it needs to accomplish, and then establish social outputs that will support the objectives. Finally, executives need to determine which platforms, applications, and features they'll need to meet desired outcomes. These basic principles or processes are vital to the success of a social business.

Sentiment Analytics: A Better Way to Drive Business Focus and Agility

Collaboration between social media and business has given rise to new dimension of sentiment analytics to capture, process, and analyze sentiments and behavior patterns of business stakeholders (customers, partners, and employees). Sentiment is nothing but feelings (attitudes, emotions, and opinions) expressed in informal media. Now, with the abrupt and rampant proliferation of social media in the form of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, businesses have a great opportunity to capture and analyze feelings in their business context. Sentiment analysis helps in understanding customers' opinions and experiences from across multiple channels in social media. The explosion of data in all forms from blogs, online forums, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels has given consumers a virtual soapbox of unprecedented reach and influence for publicly sharing their thoughts on events, products, and services. Businesses, academics, and journalists are using sentiment analysis to tap into this social media buzz. By applying analytics and natural language processing (NLP) technologies, they gain a better understanding of consumer preferences, market trends, and brand awareness. Natural language processing, statistics, or machine learning methods are used to extract, identify, or otherwise characterize the sentiment content of a text unit (sometimes referred to as opinion mining), although the emphasis in this case is on extraction. Obviously, these expressions constitute big data by their volume, velocity, and value, and need a big data platform to process them and advanced analytics tools to analyze them for predictive analytics for effective decision making (discussed in detail in Chapter 8).

Change Management and Business Agility for Social Media

The following CMO Insights are from Ryan Bifulco. Ryan is a travel and digital pioneer with over 20 years of experience. An expert on social media and digital marketing, Ryan has been featured on Business Talk Radio, ABC Radio, MediaPost.com, the New York Times, and USA Today. Ryan founded Sensei Project which offers social media and digital PR amplification to travel and lifestyle brands. He also founded and leads Travel Spike which is the largest travel media platform offering digital advertising to hundreds of travel and tourism clients.

These social media insights emphasize the critical role that relationship management plays in propagating cultural change within the business ecosystem. He observes that use of social media can be hard for companies to embrace fully since it goes against what most companies are used to doing. Traditional thinking says you need to control your own brand and marketing messages. You need to market your products and services to your customers. Since social media actually involves user-generated content it requires customer-centric thinking with less corporate control. The most successful social media marketing programs allow the user to participate and engage rather than trying to market to the user. You need to let go to get ahead with social media marketing.

To truly execute amazing social media programs, your company must take the handcuffs off of the social media team. It does not matter if that is an internal department or an external ad agency. Of course you can have some basic checks and balances built into your process, but for the most part your social media efforts must happen in real time. Social media also requires speed, as most things happen in minutes rather than days. Your company will not have time to debate internally about how to answer Twitter replies or blog comments. You will need to respond instantly and already have your processes laid out before the social media conversations even begin. Users will not wait for your corporation to engage on your time line, and they will not tolerate canned responses. Part of your social media output must be actual conversations without a script. Some of the best social media marketing centers around a personality or individuals at an organization rather than at a faceless corporation. People like to connect with like-minded people, and tapping into that concept can lead to big wins within social networks.

Many companies are risk averse, and that limitation can stifle creativity and innovation. If you can't try new things, then you can't discover new opportunities and applications to incorporate social or digital media into more aspects of your business. Social media should not be pushed only toward the marketing department. It needs to be at least considered enterprise-wide. Human resources (HR) might benefit from LinkedIn. Sales might benefit from more social leads. Customer service might improve if staff can leverage Twitter rather than only using call centers or e-mail. Big data is the hot buzzword now, and certainly social and mobile media are a part of that arena. Your research department or analytics team should be utilizing social data to enhance their inputs.

One solution to help your company be more agile and more ready to embrace social media is to form a social media task force. This team can help with change management and keep your organization updated with changes. The team should consist of staff from various levels and departments.

Ryan offers the following case study of social media best practices that describes how Accor Hotels use digital relationship channels to engage their customer community.

Evaluation: Success, Results, or ROI

In less than 14 months after launching their new animation and engagement strategy, they increased the number of followers by 330 percent. They increased the number of retweets per month by 285 percent. Even more indicative of their raised community awareness is that they multiplied the number of mentions per month by three! Their overall impressions per month have likewise almost tripled.

The following examples (Figures 7.2 to 7.8) depict some notable interactions.

Examples

Oilstop: Using Big Data to Drive More Intimate Customer Relationships, and Social Media to Enhance Community

Additional CMO insights are contributed by Ross Halleck, CEO of Halleck, Inc. Branding and Marketing, founder of Halleck Vineyard, and one of BtoB magazine's Top 100 Most Influential Internet Marketers. His insights focus on how CMOs may leverage their understanding of these converging technologies to better communicate with their customers through the media they prefer, engage prospective customers through common interests, and utilize information to build stronger, more personal, and more lasting relationships. A great example is his story about the customer engagement strategy initiated by Oilstop.

There probably isn't a more mundane business than performing oil changes and routine maintenance services on motor vehicles. The environment is replete with quick service, no-brainer options for addressing that red light when it pops on in your car, or when you notice your odometer is higher than you expected.

So it was our challenge to identify and execute marketing tactics to increase car count in this regional oil change chain.

Oilstop has been serving guests in the western United States since 1978, beginning with a modest independent car wash in Medford, Oregon. In 1984, an oil change shop was added and the organization has been expanding ever since, establishing presences in southern Oregon; Sonoma County, Central Valley, the South Bay Area, and southern California; and Tucson/Santa Fe.

Currently, Oilstop has 22 stores, both independent franchises and corporate-owned. All share a technology platform, allowing seamless data collection and exchange. This enables deep knowledge of the buying patterns of their guests, as well as a complete history of all maintenance performed based on license plate number. Further, mileage is tracked during each visit, alerting Oilstop of required and recommended maintenance. By presenting this information at each visit, the customer experience is enhanced to a co-creative relationship: no pressure is applied by Oilstop, so customers can make informed decisions about the maintenance of their vehicles. The big data in Oilstop's case is employed to build trust for a more intimate relationship with its guests.