Chapter 5

Establishing the New Social Business Model

Creating an infrastructure to embrace the social business requires a general to lead the charge for cultural change within any organization — no matter the business size. Whether you appoint a C-level social officer or a social media specialist, you need someone to drive and motivate the social business model. You have to look at processes and roles that touch the customer experience and prepare for a major shift in the way you do business. To really get into the social game, your organization must establish an operational model to cater to the social experience, internally and externally.

The social business model goes way beyond social media monitoring and responding to customers via social channels, though those are key elements to social CRM. Monitoring will be rendered worthless unless you establish strategic processes to turn your findings into valuable insights worth turning into an actionable approach. Customer-created content continues to proliferate, and you need to get ahead of the messages, not just respond to what's being crafted.

This chapter explores what really drives the social customer's experience and what internal and external factors play into what you can and can't control. Well within any organization's means is the ability to identify and empower a role to drive and manage your social business model and its key elements, including social media strategy, processes, training, guidelines, and so on. You need a framework. A new social business plan affects the entire company, and you'll need a leader to guide a scalable integration to your current systems.

Finding the Right Person to Lead the Way

For true social CRM success, identify a social leader to drive the cultural change from sales to experience, as shown in Figure 5-1. This organizational leader will coach, mentor, empower, and support the overall social business model being deployed within your organization. With a leader in place, you'll have a better chance of creating a consistent experience for your audiences and customers. The idea is to transform your business model and culture. Then leverage technologies to support that transformation. Ultimately, you're embracing a model that will foster more direct relationships with your customers.

Figure 5-1: The Social Business Model encompasses all audiences and all departments with a social organization leader.

Of course, the exact job description for this role varies by company and industry, but we can identify quite a few characteristics and skills required to be an effective social media leader:

During the hiring process, don't be afraid to look at candidates’ social media profiles and ask them about the brands they follow. Look for communications, advertising, marketing, public relations, or English majors, but don't discount other backgrounds. Prior experience is a plus, but make sure the candidate is ready to discard old habits and start fresh.

Defining Processes That Yield Insights

A social business model is driven by customers having and driving the experience with your brand. As a brand representative, you aid in moving the conversation forward, and these customer interactions altogether create an all-encompassing experience. With customer experience directing the model, you're adopting an outside-in customer approach. Your customers infiltrate your overall operating model.

But what does that operating model look like? Although each industry has variations, the following basic steps outline how to involve your customers in conversations that you can learn from:

1. Identify the social networks on which your customers interact.

   This will likely include the usual suspects — Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare — but don't discount newer sites like Google+ and Pinterest, or Yelp and other review sites or forums. There are niche sites for quite a few industries as well. For instance, those in the travel industry should look at TripAdvisor and FlyerTalk. Identify a few of these more narrowly focused sites and see if your audience is active there.

2. Listen to what customers are saying about you.

   Before you start addressing your customers (and potential customers), listen up. What are their complaints with your business? Do they have any suggestions for improvement? And what do they love about you? Identify their pain points and favorite features to see how you can begin to give them what they want, and continue to deliver what they already enjoy.

   A great way to get a feel for customer sentiment is to search Twitter for your brand name (not just your username). You can identify general themes pretty quickly. Write them down, and then do a search for broader keywords and competitors. For example, representatives for a pizza place would first search for their restaurant's name, then search for pizza and their city or state, and, finally, search Twitter for local competitor pizza chains.

3. Join the conversation.

   Your Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter audience are mostly previous or current customers who like your brand. You need to evolve your typical marketing approaches into conversations to really interact with this audience. Begin by answering questions and providing suggestions to customers who are already talking about your brand. Using the search method outlined in Step 2, you can find people who are addressing you directly, as well as those who are mentioning you in passing. When replying to questions feels natural, you can begin guiding the conversation by asking questions yourself, and posting content designed to grow the conversation around your brand.

   To brainstorm content around your brand, organize a meeting with many different departments within your organization. Ask attendees to write down the questions they're asked most often about your brand, or the feedback they hear from customers. The more input you can get, from a variety of sources, the better.

4. Implement customer suggestions.

   Now that you know where your audience is and what they're saying, it's time to take action. Take their pain points and find ways to address them, whether it's through content or actual organizational changes. If customers are confused by what time your business closes, or angry that it isn't later, try posting your hours more clearly in social media, or experiment with staying open later on certain days. And don't focus only on the negative. Look at what customers already love and build more conversations around that. If, for instance, customers say you make the coziest slippers, use those testimonials as retweets, challenge commenters to define just how cozy with a Facebook fill-in-the-blank update, or post photos showing your socks snuggled up by a fire.

Incorporating Social Into Your Company Branding

There are two social factors key to branding your business within the new business model: humanization and personalization. Too often, a brand representative thinks she must be a faceless entity without a personality — Brand X, not Mary at Brand X.

But it's hard to have a conversation with a brand; only people can truly communicate with each other. Humanize your brand and shape how it will grow and evolve by giving it a personality. Technology allows us to connect to friends, family, followers, fans, and subscribers in all corners of the world at any hour of the day. With all these conversations fighting for our attention, we must feel a connection to something before we're inspired to engage, and the best way to do this is to show a human side of your brand and demonstrate what's really going on behind the scenes.

We talk about courting the social customer in Chapter 4. Once you've established a connection, how are you going to maintain a mutually beneficial relationship with your customers? In order to successfully position your brand in social media, you have to be willing to look at your customer relationships in human terms, with consideration for issues like trust, emotional connection, respect, and so on. If your brand doesn't show willingness to evolve and change, it may get brushed to the side by consumers looking to have a personal connection with companies today. You have to stay relevant, and you can do that by humanizing your brand.

Showing your company's human side

Humanizing your brand is more than a new marketing ploy or effort. It falls in line with the major cultural changes we talk about throughout this book. Humanization is a deep, evolving characteristic necessary to stay in the social media game.

Information on the web is overflowing. In order to make your brand stand out, you must drive your brand the way you do personal relationships in your own life. This means talking the way your customers do, admitting mistakes, and having fun with the content you post. For instance, IKEA, a large furniture and home store, made its brand more human by taking its signature blue shopping bags and creating a fashion show around them, where the clothes were made entirely out of these bags. They then posted the photos on their Facebook page and asked fans to upload their own and vote for their favorite.

A newer trend that might make traditional marketing professionals cringe — and for which consumers seem to have a growing affinity — is to share your brand's flaws. In order to be trustworthy, you have to be humble enough to let people know that you make mistakes (you're fallible). When appropriate, use humor when allowing your customers to see your weaker side. If the error is of a more serious nature, let your more empathetic side show and become helpful and resourceful.

A great example of this comes from The American Red Cross. An administrator of its Twitter account accidentally tweeted this from @RedCross instead of her personal account: “Ryan found two more 4 bottle packs of Dogfish Head's Midas Touch beer … when we drink we do it right #gettingslizzerd.” The Red Cross quickly deleted the tweet and owned up to the mistake, tweeting this response: “We've deleted the rogue tweet but rest assured the Red Cross is sober and we've confiscated the keys.” They went on to partner with Dogfish Head to drive donations.

People use social media platforms to call out their own flaws every day. A mom who found her toddler painting the walls with nail polish and a new college student who showed up the wrong class may quickly craft a post or tweet to poke fun at themselves. They broadcast their flaws and in turn are expecting your brand to the same. After all, “To err is human.”

Just be careful you don't overdo it. Companies have been known to post pictures of their entire staff attending, for instance, a group picnic, only to receive angry posts from customers saying they can't get anyone on the phone because the whole company is out partying. So make clear to your social media representatives that after hours fun shouldn't get in the way of providing customer service.

Discovering personalization

One of the most powerful ways a brand can connect with its customers is by allowing customers to play with the brand and make it their own. Here are some good examples:

Moving from digital to the real world, Starbucks may be the most successful case study of all case studies for just about any topic in marketing and business. Personalization is no exception. On the customer side, you approach a knowledgeable, friendly barista at Starbucks and get to hyper-customize your beverage. When your beverage is ready, a barista calls you by name and hands you the drink, reiterating your customized choices. That's personalization!

Measuring the Impact of the New Model

Anyone who takes on a new business venture or investment wants to know how to measure success. We talk a lot about how social CRM requires patience, with a focus on long-term goals and benefits. We hope that you can see the many benefits to be realized within the social business model — more deeply engaged customers, brand ambassadors, a wider understanding of customers and their motivators, and so on.

For actual measurement, you turn to the abundance of information and data that accompanies the swiftly growing and ever-changing technologies integrated into our daily lives. Knowledge-sharing through a multitude of social networking platforms increases our customers' impact on our business practices. Measuring the success of all this data and knowledge collection can prove challenging for any business, especially if the organization still holds onto the idea of old metrics for success. Social CRM success metrics need to be examined under a different lens, not the lens of CRM 1.0. Conversely, limiting social measurements only to information sharing or anecdotal engagement may miss the mark as well.

CRM 2.0 is just another way of saying social CRM. It's what CRM has evolved into with the proliferation of customer-driven social channels. The technology piece of social CRM focuses on centralizing all the extensive data generated in social media and turning it into efficient solutions to be used across your entire organization.

Take some time to determine what you want out of social CRM, generally, and how you can translate those desires into measurable goals, as we outline in these examples:

Track and measure your success and work toward your goals. Social CRM monitoring platforms can tell you how long your current response time is, as well as track the growth of your accounts and your reach. To track sales or leads, create dedicated e-mail addresses or landing pages for social media, as well as tracking clicks.

Engaging in Co-creation

Brand value isn't defined only by marketing people. Its value is co-created by many individuals, including consumers, employees, partners, and so on. The communities surrounding these individuals and varying stakeholders play a key part in co-creation of experience and ultimately value. Truly social businesses encourage social collaboration in every fabric of the business, especially amongst their employees.

Co-creative initiatives can start anywhere within your organization, including customer service, IT, HR, web development, and marketing. Each of these areas (and more) present experiences internally and externally. Tapping into different stakeholders through collaborative interactions can innovate new products, operational processes, and business strategies.

Starting with internal co-creation

Build a co-creation team, taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of your company's different departments, as illustrated in Table 5-1. Let the co-creation start with internal collaboration.

Table 5-1 Building a Co-Creation Team

If you have an internal customer service team, start the internal co-creation discussions with them. They'll have a wealth of knowledge on what customers do, like, and ask about. Then move to the marketing team, who will be full of creative ideas and suggestions they've wanted to try. But don't ignore other departments — you never know where a great idea will strike.

Aggregating information

Market research turns into an ever-evolving creative process with co-creation, which generates open dialog with customers that goes beyond simple demographic data. But it must also set clear expectations and limitations to access. Your organization has to offer transparency in these interactions with your customers. True co-creation requires trust, from both the organization and the customer.

Co-creation is a great way to keep relevant information feeding into your system. With its emphasis on consumer content and opinion, co-creation is a natural funnel for information.

Dell's IdeaStorm (www.ideastorm.com) raises the bar on aggregation of information for co-creation. Dell launched this community-focused site in 2007 to foster interactions and ideas from its customers. IdeaStorm invites users to post ideas on how to improve Dell's product offerings and services. Other users in the community vote on the ideas. Five years later, Dell had implemented over 500 community-created ideas into product enhancements. With an abundance of ideas flowing into the community site, Dell assigned 16 employees with the title “idea partners” to foster, track, manage, and engage the community's storm of ideas.

Customizing the overall experience

Co-creation and collaboration with your customers can be a true test of your company's ability to evolve with the times. It requires you to loosen the reigns of your brand a bit, but not entirely. You still get to

The following steps walk you through the big-picture process of creating a custom experience for your customers that enables them to co-create with your business:

1. Determine your business's goals for co-creation

   For co-creation to be successful, you need to know what you want to achieve with it. Some look to co-creation simply for content, but the best campaigns actually utilize the information captured to their advantage.

   My Starbucks Idea is one example of this, where they asked customers to tell them anything and everything about how to make the Starbucks experience better. Then, instead of putting that information in a drawer, they used it to improve the drinks, service and layout of their stores—all while telling their customers exactly how and why they made these changes.

2. Choose technology to support co-creation

   After you know the goal of co-creation for your company, determine where it will take place. Facebook and Twitter are easy to use, existing systems, but they are owned by someone else.

   Explore the idea of building your own application or web platform to collect the information you receive through co-creation, as both Starbucks and Dell did.

3. Respond to feedback from the co-creation forum.

   Think about what you are going to do with this information. Answering the following questions can help you develop a well-rounded response:

   • Will you be allowing users to post in real-time, or will you be moderating their contributions?
   • Will you reply to them immediately, or wait until you have reached the end of your campaign?
   • After you have the information you need, how will you implement it and communicate these changes both to your co-creators and customers (who may be unaware that other customers assisted you)?

If you discover a divergence of audiences within your community, you can develop new outlets that cater to different segments. You can give your customers more choices on how they engage, further customizing their own experience and probably enhancing the environment of each community.

Birds of a feather flock together, and we all like to engage with people who “get us.” Focus not only on the experience of one customer but his or her entire community.

United Kingdom–based mobile network giffgaff (http://giffgaff.com) employs no customer service agents or representatives, only community managers. The online community empowers customers to provide answers to fellow customer questions or concerns, as shown in Figure 5-2. Community managers stay engaged to keep the brand on track and step in where the community can't provide answers, for example on billing issues.

Figure 5-2: giffgaff's online community fields a variety of customer ideas and concerns.

Blurring between the producer and consumer

The customer experience is everything today. With the negative economic factors of the last several years, a highly competitive landscape has emerged. Giving your customers more than they ever expected when experiencing your brand is the way to the top. You have to find ways for your product or service to pull away from the very congested pack.

Value lies in the experience you're able to provide customers. Sure, you have a brilliant product or service that should really sell itself, but how are you going to generate referrals and word-of-mouth business?

Within the ecosystem of co-creation, it becomes more difficult to discern user-generated content from brand-driven content. Customer-created content, like blogs, videos, and photos hosted on a customer's own site or shared with the brand, (some people call this DIY content) weave into enterprise-generated content. Many TV shows have found success with this type of co-creation by taking user-generated content (with permission) and reposting on their own sites. Travel companies often hire outside bloggers to report back on their trips. This engages customers on a deeper level because it creates a deeper relationship with the brand.