The evolution of Social Business Strategy: How the customer took control of the conversation

// February 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Blog

Marketing underwent a massive shift in the last half century, with traditional methods of mass marketing moving to more niche strategies, targeting small groups or even individuals. The change came about as companies were able to learn more about their customers; improvements in technology meant they were able to gather huge amounts of transactional data and use this information to target relevant marketing material to their customers. (more…)

Technology is NOT the devil

// September 29th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Blog

This post was written after reading this post on John Moore’s blog.

Recently there has been a lot of talk about creating social CRM strategies, and where technology fits in. A lot of people have argued their case that technology should be considered last. This I think is wrong, technology should be considered at the same time as strategy, not afterwards. After all how can you develop a strategy not knowing the tools needed to implement it?

Technology is essential for large scale social CRM initiatives, and a good understanding of this technology is essential when creating the strategy. Where CRM marketers are having difficulties, and understandably so, is that there does not yet exist a software package that we would recognise as being social CRM.

Developers have justifiably focussed on solving the easier solutions first. They have focussed on community management, with social support community software. They have allowed CRM managers to pull in social streams, but given them little options to analyse them. Rather than incremental improvements to existing CRM systems we need a whole new system. Just as social CRM is a whole new approach to CRM, we need a whole new approach to the technology, a new system built from the ground up, with a focus on social customers and engagements rather than historic records being kept in databases.

19% of tweets are brand mentions

// September 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Blog

Case studies abound about how twitter can be used for sales, and there are various studies about the demographics that use Twitter. However, there is little in the way of research about what users tweet about, and if brands have a place on the social network. That is until now. A study, which looked at roughly 150,000 tweets, examined how users were talking about brands using micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter. The paper, published by Prof Jansen at Penn State University, reveals that 19% of tweets are brands mentions. (more…)