Archive for category Customer Marketing

Much to my mother’s relief after YEARS of complaints about the loss of a single telecommunications provider, I accurately predicted that the dizzying array of long distance provider choices would be relatively short-lived post-divestiture of the Baby Bells/AT&T.  Those of us mature enough (read middle-aged) to have survived the years of long distance provider ballots,  recall the touting of freedom of choice but an experience with multiple service providers and the consequent bills, different customer relations contact numbers, and frustration that has been minimized by the demise of the early alternative providers and the accounting mishaps of MCI, et al.  I offer this example not only as a complex lession in B2C socio-economics, but as a metaphor for similar trends of expansion and contraction that I see in the customer relationship/social media and networking applications and use of today.   (I also offer it as tongue-in-cheek proof that at least once in twenty years, my predictions have been accurate! )

In a much shorter span of time, due largely to the rapidity with which we can today adopt and reject different technologies and communications metaphors, I believe that 2010 will bring us some readjustment to the adoption and application of many of the social media and networking solutions available.   Businesses, their customers and various audiences, and the technology vendors that support our ability to relate have behaved like the proverbial children in a candy store as they deploy ways of internetworking in their customer relationship, sales and marketing channels.   We have been preaching that adopting and deploying social media and networking applications should be informed by an integrated marketing/sales/customer relations strategy; we should also have been coaching ourselves and our consumer-friends to do the same.   Today, faced with multiple devices and applications on each, all similarly poised to serve my communications needs and curiosity, I see 2010 as the year that some consolidation, re-prioritization, and merger/acquisition will take place due to the constraints of bandwidth, the natural fall-out of the success and failure of businesses who have quickly cobbled together competitive applications, and the maturity of our adoption of the same both in our professional and personal capacities.   With no further ado, but some nervous wincing, I offer the following general and some specific predictions for 2010:

General Trends:

1. Organizations who have been dabbling their toes in social media channels for customer outreach will either be the best practice model or retract their offerings completely.  The speed with which our effectiveness in communicating using these channels is judged by our audience dictates that their is very little-time to privately fine-tune our approach.   Missteps are instantly reported and best practices lauded.   We have been cautioning our clients to strategize first; “Tweet” last and those that have adopted this approach are much more successful, even as they adjust it, than those who jumped on the Twitter, Facebook Page, blog, etc. bandwagon only to find they had little to say or had not developed the infrastructure to support their efforts.   I have been personally “testing” and rating the efforts of some companies in the telecommunications, high-tech, and consumer products verticals and will continue to do so.   Even in the past year, the gap between success and failure has been very black and white.   Those that dabbled without a transparent, honest and open approach to soliciting participation and feedback have dramatically reduced their presence or are gone; those that set strategy and have flexibly incorporated the feedback of their participants are still going strong.   Most importantly as is mentioned in this article, “real time is not fast enough”: 4 Social Media Trends for Business in 2010 (pamorama.net)

2.  A leader in social media measurements and metrics WILL emerge (this may be definitely in the wishful thinking category).   We have played with a number of applications in an attempt to measure our own effectiveness in our social media outreach and our clients and colleagues have certainly expressed this as their biggest challenge and need for 2010.   A plethora of applications and practices have evolved over the past year, but no one seems to have demonstrated the ability to provide service to both the SMB and large business marketplace.   VisibleTechnologies, Radian6, and ViralHeat all offer a  suite of solutions that seem to provide the breadth of measurement for which many have clamored, but we think that a vendor that has the benchstrength of SEO and traditional collateral metrics blended with the ability to monitor the pulse of sentiments expressed in our emerging channels will be a front-runner.   Another key success factor will be their ability to offer a tiered-pricing structure that is accessible to the smaller business.

3. Bandwidth issues will force resolution.   It is clear that the FCC is facing some enormous challenges in the spectrum arena, pushed by our adoption of mobile applications and our increasingly untethered approach to communication and conversation.   The “but of course” piece of this prediction is that the FCC will make a decision about alternative and additional sources of spectrum (for those of you inclined to take a look at the history, see this study: http://www.reg-markets.org/admin/authorpdfs/redirect-safely.php?fname=../pdffiles/working_01_021075290780.pdf The more intuitive piece is that our limited bandwidth and the growing frustration of consumers and business mobile application users must drive our own strategic thinking and prioritation regarding use of solutions that blend the best of our CRM, SFA, and social networking tools on our mobile devices.   Those applications that offer the best-of-breed that shares a piece of all of these will certainly emerge as icons on my Blackberry.

4. Congress will consider additional privacy legislation.   Knowledge service provision is the polite term for the complex data-mining that both corporations and individuals practice as conduct predictive analyses of our consumers’ and networks behaviors and attributes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_market).  Consumers concern for the privacy of their on-line personas (which seems paradoxical) will drive politicians at the local, state, and federal levels to contemplate additional protective measures,   http://www.cedmagazine.com/News-Congress-online-privacy-legislation-061909.aspx.   Most importantly, this concern of our constituents and attention of politicians should drive us as businesses to be ever more vigilant in our transparency and honest expression of our internetworking intentions, lest we suffer backlash from our audience and failure of our attempts long before legislation steps in.

To return to my opening anecdotal story, the plethora of choices that face us as businesses and consumers and the speed with which our internetworking communications are judged and evaluated will drive a much faster shift in applications provision, vendor consolidation and acquisition, and availability of broad content creation, publishing and measurements suites than we experienced post-divestiture.    If a single-bill and customer contact 800 number drove a return to a single telecommunications provider over a ten year period, shrink that consumer reaction and vendor response time metphor by 1/10th and you will understand the core of our predictions for 2010.   Perhaps a more concrete synthesis of this post is provided by my “Going Out On A Limb” prediction for 2010:

Twitter will be acquired by ?. The names of the players may change, but my thinking is that in Twitter we have found a truly facile, effective and immediate channel for communicating with a very diverse and huge potential audience.  The service and its users are self-regulating and successful users are quickly noted and its open approach to associated applications has resulted in a myriad of options for uploading content, measuring folowers, RT’s, etc.   We think that an acquistion by a company who has the content creation, editing, and publishing benchstrength, combined with an understanding of social media and networking measurement challenges will purchase Twitter and embed the channel with some native content and measurement utilities.   The odds-makers are predicting that this will be Microsoft, but we are thinking that the acquirer may be someone that is not in the search engine/networking/social media space but a more traditional collateral application company.   The debate at Cubed Consulting continues as to who this might be but we’d love for your to weigh in with your names!

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• 4 Social Media Trends for Business in 2010 (pamorama.net)
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