Devashish reflects on ideas and thoughts about how companies can use emerging Marketing strategies to connect with customers based on his experience leading a global internet marketing organization.
I just finished reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. One more in the emerging and fascinating "behavioral economics" field. Economics aside, what fascinates me are the implications to marketing. This will be the topic at my town hall meeting tomorrow. I will be back to share what ideas popped.
Last week, I spoke to Jennifer Leggio of ZDNet about TI's Social Media Marketing strategy. You can find it here. This is the second such interview I have given now about how we are using social media to connect with our customers and drive engagement. The first one was with a freelance writer and was published on this IDG site.
It's been interesting to talk to people over the last few months about social media strategy. Few observations:
1) I am sometimes surprised when companies are unable to figure out what social media could mean to them and their businesses. Using social media / web 2.0 tools gives companies such a powerful way to engage w/ their customers. To not take advantage of them seems like wasted opportunity to me.
2) Some companies struggle w/ engaging in conversations in such an open environment. In my opinion, any company who is still hiding behind their advertisements will soon realize that conversations about their brand are happening whether they are there or not. Wouldn't you participate so you can listen, learn and potentially shape and influence your potential customer's opinions?
3) Connecting w/ customers in such a direct manner is a refreshing (and often challenging) change for many companies, especially a lot of B2B companies. Although, I do agree that you want to move at the right pace for your organization. The steps you take here fundamentally change how you engage w/ your customers. You want to make sure that you don't take any steps that can potentially backfire. I think the biggest mistake marketers can make is "faking it". Come on!!
In this video, blogger Joseph Jaffe gives his take on the biggest mistakes some companies have made in social media engagement. He identified faking it as the #1 mistake companies can make.
In my opinion, don't put yourself out there unless you are ready and committed to actually drive the conversation w/ your customers in an honest and transparent manner. Having others blog for you, or tweet for you, or email for you - or even worse having generic email responses from marketing or legal departments is a pathetic attempt. You, your company and most importantly your customer will all be better off, if you had just stayed behind the corporate wall.
That being said, I know that getting to consensus in large companies about such radical behavior change is not an easy task. There are many people in different organizations thinking along different tangents. How do you get alignment with such obstacles? How do you ensure that your company does not show up in Jaffe's next video? Good questions - for another post.
4) My approach to social media strategy is the same as my approach to developing strategy in general: always understand your customer needs and behavior and map them back to your business/marketing objectives. Find the overlap, identify specific problems that you want to go solve. And focus on a few specific items as a start. Don't pick too many things at one time. It's better to do one thing well, than to do many things w/ mediocrity.
5) The world has changed. The power in the marketplace is now with customers. They have access to all the information and the tools and technology to connect w/ millions of peers in moments - tapping into their thoughts about brands and products in seconds. Social media tools build upon the foundation of Internet technologies to more effectively connect individuals and harness that power of customers into powerful communities.
With this intense momentum, staying on the sidelines is a futile and foolish attempt. You will get swept in whether you want it or not, wouldn't it be better to do so on your terms?
This deck from Charlene does a nice job of summarizing some top level trends in social networks as w emove forward. I don't even think we will have to go to far in the future to start realizing a lot of these. Many feel like 2009/2010 timeframe. The savvy marketers will understand these trends and incorporate them into their social marketing strategy today.
Interesting talk by Intel's CEO - Paul Otellini on the future of the web. You can see some steps in this direction with some of the newer iPhone apps. What also impresses me is the level of attention paid to the future of the web and how it affects enterprises and people by a CEO of a large company. I think that level of high level engagement helps engage the entire company from the top down in figuring out what this could mean for the company in the future and how best to get ahead now.
I hosted our Global Internet Marketing summit last week here in Dallas. It's basically a session where we get together as an organization and review where we are and talk about where we should be going. In the course of two days I played a few videos which fit in well with some of the themes of the discussion and have been my personal favorites for a while.
Here they are (in the order I think I played them at the Summit):
1) Thank You
2) Information R/evolution
3) Silly job interview
4) Debunking third-world myths w/ the best stats you have never seen
5) Sway
6) Argument clinic
7) Predicting the Next 5000 Days of the Web
8) Do schools kill creativity?
9) How to manage your staff?
10) Ideas that spread, win.
11) Habbits of happiness
12) Building a windmill
Incredible stuff. On another night, I will come back in and give you guys some context to the videos. But they pretty much stand on their own. Watch as often as you'd like - I have always gotten something new and different each time. :)
An ex-colleague of mine who now works in Vegas told me this story a while ago. I loved it and I just read about it in a book called "Super Crunchers" so I know he wasn't pulling my leg. This story reinforces the power of Customer Intelligence for organizations.
So this particular casino (Harrah's) has found that customers exhibit the behavior as displayed in the chart on left. The likelihood of them returning is not affected by a lot, until they lose a certain amount of money (called the pain point) at which point the probability that they will return takes a dramatic fall. So what would you do if you were Harrah's in order to maximize revenue potential from each customer. Well, ideally you'd like to take the customer as close to his/her theoretical pain point and then have them stop so that the likelihood of their return stays high to ensure future revenue. It's a little like the goose that laid the golden eggs, you don't want to get them all at once, otherwise you don't get much in the future. But how do you drive this customer behavior? Why would a customer lose just the amount of money you want and then stop? How does the casino know what each person's pain point is? I can assure you mine is pretty low - unless I've had a few drinks ;)
You know those reward cards at casinos that people get and are swiping all over the place? Yup, you got it. They are providing real time data to the casino's Customer Intelligence systems. This allows the casino to know by the moment how much money each customer is winning or losing. This tells them where the customer is on the x-axis above. To calculate the other dimension, the casino relies on other demographic, psychographic and past visit data points. All these data points are plugged into a regression formula to calculate each customer's personal and individual pain point.
So for example, if a certain customer who likes to play blackjack is a certain age from a certain part of the country with certain past visit behavior, the regression analysis may predict a $1400 pain point. As this customer approaches his pain point in losses, the casino sends in a "rescue team". These guys pull you away, they get you a free steak meal, comp your room, give you tickets to a show and much more. Guess what? Not only did that customer just lose $1300, but the next morning he's feeling really good about his entire experience. Six months later, you can already hear him: "Man, Vegas was fun! We should go back again!"
Gotcha!! :)
What happens in Vegas, is driven by Customer Intelligence.
And there is no reason why this sort of analysis and revenue maximization should only happen in Vegas. What are the missed opportunities at your company? Think of the data you probably already have that could be used in driving the effectiveness of your sales and marketing programs? Give it some thought, I promise you there are lots of opportunities you have not discovered yet.
So I am headed to Mountain View tomorrow for Reaction - a Google B2B Executive Summit. It is a 1-day event on thursday July 31st with a range of speakers in the morning and 6 breakout sessions in the afternoon from which you can chose to attend two. I don't have the invitation handy - but when I do I will outline what the agenda looks like. Following the conference my boss and I will be attending a Google Advisory Board which is a much smaller set of key executives from 4-5 companies interacting w/ key Google management. This one will be particularly interesting to engage in. I am specially interested in hearing what other B2B marketers are thinking about and how they are approaching what are bound to be similar environments and challenges that we face.
Posts
