Moving to CRM 2.0

Many organizations these days are overwhelmed with this new phenomenon: The Social Media. The Social Media which I call as Web 2.0, includes fast-growing peer-to-peer (P2P) activities like blogging, RSS, file sharing, open source software, podcasting, search engines, and user-generated content.Out of the total 50 Million Online user base — 82% of users come from the Urban Cities and out of those 81% now read blogs at least monthly, and 73% are members of a social networking site like Orkut, Facebook or LinkedIn. (Reference)

Even more amazingly, almost one-third of all youth publish a blog at least weekly, and 41% of youth visit a social networking site daily. These new technology and social changes are transforming the way all businesses operate, create products, and relate to customers.

Web 2.0 changes the game for your CRM strategy too — big time! CRM strategies are moving beyond their traditional goal of optimizing a two-way relationship between an enterprise and customer to include the simultaneous relationships that customers have among themselves. Including social networks changes the definition of CRM from the stale exchange of data to a live, vibrant network of connected individuals who share their abilities, expertise, and interests.

So, in this new world Web 2.0 your company will be able to:

Collaborate with Customers and Partners in new ways

This will result in genuine business relationships form, and the external perception of an organization changes from sterile and faceless to a collection of individuals who are ready to help

Collaborate within the enterprise to deliver more value

Online networks with even basic profiles of its individual members' experiences, locations, and interests can cut problem-solving time by enabling faster connection between a questioner and a person who has solved similar problems in the past. An internal social networking capability can also help the individuals responsible for creating relationships with customers to pull together the "right" team of individuals who will resonate with the prospect at a personal level.

What I am now describing are the new methods or new CRM landscape which all the marketers should definitely learn to navigate with.

1. Power up market research with "listening" capabilities.

Traditional: Engaging with customers begins with understanding their needs and goals, behaviors, and their value to the enterprise. This activity has traditionally been the domain of market research.

CRM 2.0: But if you redefine the role of market research to include the capabilities for actively "listening" in the Social Computing context, then you should establish customer sounding boards for researching decisions. You can monitor market buzz and measure ongoing trends and customer perceptions using solutions from BuzzMetrics and Cymfony (a division of TNS Media Intelligence).

2. Make marketing more relevant with "talking" capabilities.

Traditional: The traditional role of marketing is to support outbound communication to prospects and customers to raise awareness for products and services and establish favorable attitudes towards your brand.

CRM 2.0: However, marketing in the world of CRM 2.0 must establish a dialogue between sellers and buyers. This means developing capabilities to have conversations with your customers. Use interactive dialogue and help your brand fans spread your message more easily through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Establish the ability to communicate continually with customers and monitor responses using blogs.

3. Boost selling with "energizing" capabilities.

Traditional: Old-school CRM thinking defines the role of sales primarily as carrying out the tasks of identifying decision-makers, making contact, and securing orders.

CRM 2.0: Next-generation CRM thinking consider the use of customer opinions to increase sales through ratings and reviews using discussion forums. Learn how to designate lead customers to energize others through brand ambassador programs. Link with and gain introductions to influential customer network members by using business-oriented social networking and contact management solutions like Linkedin and Plaxo.

4. Strengthen service with "supporting" capabilities.

Traditional: In conventional world we support users by addressing there problems and issues through different mediums like Telecon or Videoconferencing and remote access. Sometimes our support people need to personally visit the customers to resolve there issues.

CRM 2.0: In the new world of the social and connected customer, help customers to support each other. To enable customers to solve each others' problems, consider solutions that support customer forums. To enable customers to build solutions together, think about using Wikis like Confluence, Socialtext, and Wikia.

Customers who are using social technologies to seek better experiences threaten to make traditional approaches to CRM obsolete. For the most part, enterprises understand that there's no choice but to jump in and improve how they architect a differentiated customer experience and use some of the new technologies — blogs, communities, wikis, widgets, social networks, and the concepts of dynamic applications — to their own advantage. The most important question is not what technology to use; most important is determining who you're trying to reach, what you're trying to accomplish, and how you plan to change your relationships with your customers.

Hope you found my blog post useful. If you have any comments or queries do mention the same below and I would try to answer the same as soon as possible.

How to improve your B2B site experience

Tomorrow I need to go to a B2B client to present them a strategy for improving there B2B website. While doing a complete plan which includes Strategy, Web Designing, Content Strategy and Social Media I thought i'll update it in my blog as a summary of my whole analysis.

B2B site owners need a shift in mindset to turn their underperforming sites into business assets. To initiate these changes:

Start with a frank assessment of your current online and offline capabilities. To know which steps of site improvement will require the most work, start by looking at what you already have. Examine your service, communication, and product divisions and ask yourself, "How customer-centric are we? What are our strengths? What are our weaknesses?" Documenting these starting points will help you identify where you will need to seek outside help versus which aspects of Scenario Design, usability, and branding you can manage in-house.

Define clear business goals for the site. Web sites can contribute different kinds of value to your business. But if you don't know which goals are most important, you won't know how to prioritize one set of user goals over another. Set clear goals for the site — whether driving revenue, reducing service costs, or attracting new customers. If different business goals apply to drastically different user groups, ask yourself whether they can be served on the same site or if a separate site or sitelet is warranted.

Test your site against real user goals. To ensure that you have all of the right tools users need to accomplish their goals, break user tasks into their component pieces and underlying motivations. Then, conduct an expert review. Site owners should review their sites on a regular basis to ensure that task paths remain clear of clutter.

Set a strategic development plan. Sites won't go from mediocre to great in one fell swoop — nor will your site stop needing care and feeding over time. To ensure that site development projects continue to advance, be sure your plan includes milestones and measurement metrics. Metrics should cover both user goals like task completion and satisfaction feedback, as well as business goals like conversion rates, revenue increases, and service cost reductions.

Online Display Advertising: Cost Based Models

Whenever I am having a meeting with the clients and present a media plan based on impression / conversion they often wonder what I mean by CPM. Clients also ask me that they have heard a lot on being Online Medium as totally measurable and ROI driven but wonder how do we really make that happen. They sometimes are so ignorant that they even ask me to suggest what will work best with different models that are available. To answer all those queries I thought of mentioning it in my blog and refer them to the same in case they ask me on this sometime again.

Evaluating display ad campaigns on a cost basis allows marketers to track the efficiency of the channel and begin some simple comparisons, such as comparing banner ads and search on their "cost per click" (CPC) or even television and banners on "cost per unique viewer."

CPM (cost per thousand impressions) has been popular since the start of online advertising. CPM remains one of the most popular cost metrics used, though these days it's rarely the only metric employed for a campaign. It allows simple comparisons between campaigns and future opportunities (many publishers use this on their public rate cards).For example, even if marketers pay for a campaign on a cost-per-click basis, they can get reporting on total impressions and simply divide their total spend by impressions and multiply by 1,000, thereby generating a similar metric across differing campaigns. Nonmarketers such as CEOs or CTOs can often more easily relate to this type of measure than to online-specific metrics, such as time spent interacting with an ad, that are less directly related to costs.

CPC is a very popular metric for marketers trying to drive direct action from an advert. More than 65% of database marketers in a recent survey say they use response rates as a key metric. However, it can also lead to advertisers paying for many clicks that are not from the target audience, such as clicks by mistake or invalid clicks from Web crawlers, and even expose them to click fraud. As a marketer, using your own ad serving tool for measuring clicks (and visitors) can help establish a standard measure, rather than trying to compare metrics from a variety of tools for each campaign.

CPV (cost per visitor) gives insight to Web site owners. CPV is where advertisers pay publishers based on how many viewers of display ads then actually visit the advertiser's Web site. These metrics are most useful for advertisers aiming at driving further interaction from consumers, rather than general brand awareness or attitude, and of course take no account of what the visitors do when they get to the Web site; they could, for example, leave immediately once they arrive on the landing page.

Some marketers now impose stricter rules on what counts as a "visit" (which is sometimes still called a "click"), such as "visitors spend at least 3 seconds on the landing page," to get over some of these problems.

CPA (cost per acquisition/conversion) gives a metric comparable across channels. CPA metrics allow marketers to measure success based on customers acquired through a campaign. Of course, "acquired" may have different meanings for different marketers: For a retailer it may simply mean a site visitor or someone who puts goods in the shop's online basket or perhaps only those who actually buy.

For brand marketers, it may be measuring those who click through to a certain area on a Web site, those who sign up for an email newsletter, or those who take some other type of direct response activity via the ad landing page like asking for more information on debt management, for example. Google has heavily promoted this as a metric, with CPA management tools included in its AdWords product and within the affiliate network (previously known as DoubleClick Performics Affiliate). Introducing some type of "quality" measurement within the definition of acquisition — so, for example, only counting those email subscribers who remain subscribers for three months — helps marketers assess success on a more valuable scale than simply volume.

CPE (cost per engagement) is emerging as a metric. CPE is a newer ad model whereby advertising is offered free, with advertisers paying only when viewers actually engage with the ad itself (thus differing from CPA, which looks at consumer activity post exposure). "Engagement" can be defined in a number of ways, such as completing a survey within the ad, entering a competition, or watching a certain amount of video. Online video ad providers pioneered this payment system in 2008.

This method is seen to push back more responsibility for ad performance onto the ad creative than other methods such as CPC, which were thought to place the bulk of the burden of performance onto the publisher. It is also a way of measuring interaction with newer types of creative — such as video ads or ads with product comparison tools within them — that may drive significant interaction but not actually click-throughs. However, as "engagement" means something different for every marketer, such metrics are not comparable across campaigns even for the same marketer, limiting their value.

Keep the Social Momentum Going

Brand building is easier when your brand has fans; connecting with your company excites them. But their enthusiasm will eventually die down if you don't respond to their expectations. Here's how to keep fans' enthusiasm alive long term:

Talk about your customers' problems. Initially, your fans may wait patiently for that next product feature or color announcement. But eventually, talking about your product — no matter what you say — will start to bore consumers. Marketers need to address their fans' problems to create the long-term value customers grow passionate about over time. Just like more boring brands, brands with lots of fans need to find out what's important to their customers and then provide a brand-sponsored solution that caters to their needs.

Turn your branding applications into media assets. Once you've connected with brand enthusiasts, your Facebook pages, communities, blogs, or videos may become attractive to compatible brands from other companies — or other divisions within your own company — that share a common audience. Procter & Gamble, which started Beinggirl.com to promote feminine care products, now helps adolescents learn about other company products like Herbal Essences shampoo on the site.

Be ready for real-time social interaction. Just developing social applications won't maximize brand enthusiasm and engagement. Better to participate actively in anything you create, since your fans will value your company's presence. Twitter is ideal for providing instant thrills to brand fans. For example, Kingfisher lets followers engage in the quiz around IPL to keep the buzz alive around the brand.

Take the brand momentum fans create offline. Marketers need a way to keep brand enthusiasm going — both online and offline. This can be as simple as giving them coupons to share with friends or hosting an event that lets them interact with your new products.

Hire vendors and agencies that have worked with all-star brands. If you're ready to develop a social application, you need to understand how online fans behave. Choose technology vendors and agencies that have experience with brands as popular as yours. Partners like OgilvyOne can develop a long-term social asset your enthusiasts will continually interact with.

Using Social Applications In Ad Campaigns

After working in an advertising agency I have realized that the majority of marketing budgets go to advertising, and there is a significant opportunity to enhance it with social tools. But social media marketing typically generates longer-term relationships, which means that it is out of sync with the quick-hit nature of most advertising.

To enhance an ad campaign with social elements, interactive marketers should know their audience’s behavior, commit to the communities for the long term, plan for transitions or community exits, and develop new campaign metrics.

What I really feel is that Social Applications enhance traditional advertising and that is what I am going to talk in the first part of my topic.

Advertising is by far the largest part of marketing budgets, but it’s typically a time-limited spend with a specific objective, like increasing awareness. Social media, by contrast, gets less than 1/4th from the average marketer but builds brand advocates and word of mouth over the long term.


So should you use social applications in ad campaigns? Yes, but it takes skill to adapt this longer-term strategy to the quicker pace of ad creative and placement. Accounting for these differences, you can use social marketing in five different ways to enhance your ad campaigns:

1. Use communities to launch and extend campaigns.

If you’ve already built a community of brand evangelists, use them to help disseminate the message. For instance, when Vodafone recently launched its new Vodafone Zoo Zoo campaign, the company got more than 3 Lakh (0.3 Million) Facebook fans. These Facebook brand evangelists got all the new services ad as tag it “I like this,” leave a comment, or share with a friend.

2. Use campaigns to begin building your long-term channels.

Lenovo, working with the agency OgilvyOne, allocated a portion of its marketing budget for the High Security Laptops to bring its “Face Recognition Feature” campaign to the social media world. Marketers developed programs within MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter to help support people during the product launch. While these programs were created for short-term use, Lenovo continues to use them as long-term platforms to provide product for their followers.

3. Build communities around existing events — or create new ones.

Use social communities to build excitement around events that are relevant to your brand. For example, PepsiCo used major events such as the inauguration of US President Barack Obama and the Super Bowl to support its “Refresh Everything” campaign.

In December 2008, Pepsi created a YouTube channel asking people to submit April 29, 2009 a video message to President Obama, and these videos received more than 200,000 views. Pepsi also created a Facebook application, a Tumblr site, and a mobile site.

Or you can create your own events, as Tata Tea did with "Jaagore" campaign where it asked people to register and become part of the voting community and get more involved in asking people to come out and exercise there voting rights.

4. Enhance display media with social tools.

There are options to make your display mediasocial. PopularMedia’s “Influencer Ads” entice users to get friends to join them in contests or other marketing programs by incorporating the advertising content into the user’s blog, social network, Web site, or email.

Coca-Cola recently used SocialMedia.com’s WOMI product, which features a “social advertising engine” that identifies the influential friends within a social graph to generate positive word of mouth for brands or products. Result: a 33% increase in purchase intent for Coca-Cola’s cherry Coke brand in one week.

Other tools such as Facebook’s engagement ads, Media6Degrees’ behavioral targeting, Spongecell’s social calendar tools, and SocialVibe’s cause-related applications offer marketers ways to enhance their paid media campaigns.


5. Integrate your brand in external communities.

MySpace is beginning to integrate branded content into its social ecosystem. Sunkist, for example, is the exclusive sponsor of “The List” on MySpace, which is a music franchise that highlights new or popular music and hosts concerts in four different geographies. Sunkist has an online presence within this online community and sponsors exclusive content for the events. While similar to traditional sponsorships, these types of programs allow brands to integrate original content into the social world.

Why should brands in Asia care for Social Media?

There are 4 key reasons:

1. Social Media is big in Asia.

Brands cannot underestimate the size of social media in Asia. Over 450 million consumers are engaging with social media, some of whom are as dependent on it as their Western counterparts, if not more. When social media eventually goes mobile, the numbers reach over a billion, and this scale is something that brands cannot ignore.

2. Consumer opinion counts more than ever.

Consumers in Asia are talking about your brands whether you like it or not, and that opinion has a huge impact on their views of a brand and consideration to purchase. 7 of the top 10 markets that rely most on ‘recommendations from consumers’ hail from the Asia region. The internet is a platform that people listen to and learn about your brand. If you’re not participating in the discussion or feeding into it, you are likely to lose.

3. Consumers are highly connected and harder to reach then before.

The diversity of Asia needs no reminder, and this further accentuates the need to understand commonalities and differences in media repertoire as well as consumer motivations. Marketers are losing the ability to reach consumers in the way they used to as social media starts to displace aspects of traditional brand advertising. Building a corporate website and driving traffic is simply not enough, and calls for brands to re-evaluate the way they reach their audiences. Brands that understand social media by creating a web of activity that can influence and surround the target audience are most likely to be effective.

4. The Y-Generation live their lives in social media and if you’re not talking to them, someone else will.

Social media creates a huge opportunity for brand marketers where they can connect with their target audience like never before. Though the importance of this media may be in its infancy with some of the older demographic segments, there is no disputing that for the Y-Generation and future generations, social media is part and parcel of their daily lives. Brands that fail to appreciate this opportunity will risk losing an entire base of consumers in the future making social media not just a growth strategy but a defensive one too.

"Right now, the largest single group of users on the Internet today is in Asia. Half a billion Asian users. And that’s only 14% penetration. So when they get to 70% penetration which is where we are in the US and some parts of Europe, we’re talking about a couple of billion people. That’s a very, very big customer base. It’s a very diverse customer base but the internet can reach all of them once we get to that penetration level. So this is a really exciting place to be."
Vinton Cerf Vice President & Chief Internet Evangelist,
Google Inc.

"You should try to embrace as many different forms of media as possible because different audiences are in different places. But you will see an increasing amount of, especially the younger generation that’s going to hang out online and be comfortable in communities and social media. And if you don’t market to them, or if you don’t have dialogues with them (not even market to them.) ... then you’re going to lose an entire customer base."
Lee Kin Mun Founder & Blogger,
Mrbrown.com

The Digital Train is leaving - Time to get Onboard

These days marketers must find ways to make the marketing mix produce sales-ready results as the economic slowdown persists through 2009. As they scale back on high-priced tactics like trade shows, direct mail, and print, marketers will have no choice but to embrace digital channels to close the demand generation gap. Luckily, I have heard the interactive whistle blowing, as most now put online channels at the top of their list for this year. Making the digital transformation stick this time means that:

Web sites must cut sales interaction costs. Compared with online interactions, person-to-person sales calls and meetings cost much more to execute. Marketers welcome Web leverage, as I believe that corporate sites will become more important in their marketing mix. With telesales and executive events producing less traction with buyers, Web sites become the main source of online information in the product selection, purchase, and implementation process. To capitalize on this trend, marketers must upgrade online experiences and shift from an inside-out perspective that talks incessantly about features and functions to an outside-in one that focuses on helping prospects and customers accomplish buying and adoption goals.

Digital channels must stretch the B2B marketing mix. In flush economic times, marketers abandon online channels that don't create immediate results and return to what's comfortable — trade shows, PR, and print. Tight budgets require stretching dollars further as marketers use email, Web-based events, online demos, and blogs to replace conventional tactics and create more engaging buyer experiences. Of the all digital tactics that figure more prominently in the 2009 marketing mix, 11 are digital approaches that create more targetable, measurable, and engaging interactions.

Web 2.0 tools must move from experimental to routine. Emerging Web 2.0 tools like microblogs, virtual trade shows, and wikis — as well as long-established tactics like print ads, trade shows, and industry analyst firms — won't figure prominently in the marketing mix this year. Watch virtual trade shows in this space because business buyers — facing cuts in corporate travel — listed these online environments second to support forums as key sources of information they will tap in the coming months to inform purchase decisions.