Companies should have a ‘Customer Strategy’ not a ‘Twitter or Facebook Strategy’. To start, first understand your customers social behaviors, below are the slides and recorded webinar featured yesterday by Charlene Li and myself.
We know that customers are adopting new technologies to communicate with each other –and companies must change their own behaviors to reach them. Yet, to often, we hear of companies ‘fondling the hammer‘ where they have knee-jerk reactions to which ever technology emerges. The problem with this strategy is that new technologies are emerging in rapid iterations due to low-cost of innovation. As a result, focus on their behaviors, which we cover in detail in the Engagement Pyramid.
While using surveys is an effective way of getting a strong baseline set of knowledge, you must be constantly monitoring and updating the changes your ever-changing customers are having, and encourage you to partner with brand monitoring companies like Visible Technologies, Techrigy by Alterian, Radian 6, TNS Cymfony, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Crimson Hexagon, and even simple easy to use tools like Twitter search and Google Alerts.
We focus on disruptive technologies, and know we don’t have all the answers, so we want to work with the community. Like the Opensource movement and creative commons, we’re embracing ‘Open Research‘ which means we want to share what we learn so others can build on top of it. We like Creative Commons, and hope you use this content for educational purposes and to share with others with attribution. Stay tuned, as we plan to share more about the socialgraphics methodology and other frameworks.
Above: Access the slides on slideshare (you can download them in PPT format)
Above: Listen and watch the recoded webinar, there were over 600 attendees in real time, making it interesting to watch the discussion in the chat and in Twitter.
Here’s the link that I mentioned comparing Toyota’s shotgun approach and Ford’s laser-like approach. Next, join the conversation in Twitter and beyond, see the many tweets tagged #socialgraphics. Last but not least, thanks to Christine Tran, for her research expertise and rolling out our new powerpoint design.
The Social Strategy Trilogy
Part 1: Socialgraphics help you to understand your customers
Part 2: Developing a Social Strategy (You’re here now)
Part 3: Getting your company ready
Great post and presentation – but after visiting the sites of those brand monitoring services, I get the sense their target is larger corporations and I wonder if their services are affordable for SMEs. If not, are the majority of US businesses destined 'fly blind'?
What do you mean by SME? I assume Small Medium Enterprise.
Some of these vendors have white labeled version that they share with agencies. Take for example, Radian 6 which primary focuses on agencies as their go-to-market channel.
I'm sure they will chime in the comments.
It is incredibly easy to have the cart come before the horse in social media. Thank you for encouraging the use of a customer first strategy and giving us a shout out!
Lauren Vargas
Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL
Great presentation. I have a feeling that once you do your homework on your customers and turn your findings into actions the positive affects on SEO will be tremendous. Not only that, but think of the untapped customers you could reach? Pretty exciting…
Only you can determine if the investment is right for your business and objectives, but at Radian6, we have a variety of business sizes and industries using our tool. We are definitely not limiting ourselves with large corporations or agencies. Rather, we work with those who are ready to make social media more than a campaign, but a program. Always available to answer any questions. lauren.vargas@radian6.com
Lauren Vargas
Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL
Jeremiah, here is the Russian version of the material – http://bit.ly/5ELNXr
Love the idea of a “customer strategy” but shouldn't it be even broader than that… a “customer and employee collaboration strategy?” When you look at all the customer service articles available, aren't they usually fueled by passionate, collaborative, engaged and rewarded employees? A new article by @pjbfcp explains it well. http://bit.ly/7SDv7z
great posting very informative i have learn a lot from this post please keep it up thanks for the nice sharing.
The first paragraph says it all. Find out how your customers want to communicate with you.
Pat / Jeremiah –
We (Biz360) serve the professional market (smaller businesses and consultants), as well as large enterprise clients. Our do-it-yourself plans are priced very aggressively, and we don't charge by topic. You can delete and change your search parameters on the fly, so you can constantly refine your topics and never get penalized financially for changing directions. If you build your own topics, you can end up paying very little (and the UI is very easy to figure out, so many do-it-yourself clients end up not needing a lot of support). When you get large and complex with a multimillion dollar installation, well, then it gets a little more expensive. Happy to chat further.
P.S. Really good post BTW.
Jeremiah and Charlene, great work. Once again a high value breakdown of significance. Jeremiah having been a proponent of your work since well before your Forrester days, the customer centric theme isn't surprising from either you or Charlene, sound advice…cheers, Walter
Hi Jeremiah and thanks for the good post and slideshow! It made me create my own post about this subject, you can check it here if you like:
I have a question about this presentation. Would you like to enlighten me more about the Curating part? The term isn't that familiar to me so could you open up it a little bit with a couple of examples or with different words? Thanks a lot! Much appreciated.
I'm listening to this and it's wonderful how you have thought this through. But when I think about whether a company is going to follow little ol' Albert Maruggi and track how much I've purchased, my likes and dislikes, how many friends I have online and the influence I have with them, then treat me accordingly it's mind bloggling. Which of course is why companies need advice on sorting out the social web. This is a good thing as it puts food on my consultant's table.
However, during a quiet moment, It seems a lot simpler to say, “hey treat everyone well and everything else falls into place.” But we can't do that, I understand. We can't because our other cultures, eg. financial culture forces companies to drive numbers within 30 days to meet payroll and 90 days to meet publicly traded company expectations.
Those realities turn marketing from relationships to manipulationships. It's not a bad thing, just an observation.
Thanks Albert.
In the long run, this helps companies (that may be offering high end audio equipment I know you crave) reach you in the channels that *you* want to be reached in, and in the way you prefer.
Mistersteel
Good question, this is a new term we're introducing to the lexicon.
In the real world, we may think of these people as event coordinators, the party hosts, the community organizers.
In the online world, they may be the folks that: 1) create and update wikipedia pages 2) Create fan pages in Facebook and manage them 3) run communities or email groups on a particular topic.
Hope that makes sense, this small group of folks has great impact over a larger market.
They are larger influencers.
King,
Absolutely, the lines between customer and employee start to drop in many of these tools. We're primarily focused on customer strategy in this presentation but intent to discuss employee strategy going forward. Expect us to focus more on employee and leadership in the coming period.
Thanks Pavel, I cross-linked in the post itself, I *really* appreciate you doing that, and I read the translation, using Google translate.
Great stuff as usual Jeremiah. It all feels very spot on. Oddly I'm most impressed by the open research idea. I believe the article that Collaboration King was trying to link to is this one: http://bit.ly/66eKoj The link in his comment seemed to point to a great new album I've been listening to. Cheers!
Thanks for clearing it out! Makes sense. And godspeed with your lexicon project. 😉
Charlene was the first analyst to get 'social' years before I started to implement. She's really easy to follow.
thanks for you, http://www.gucciwell.com
Great presentation. I wholehearted agree with these stages. When I talk to clients and give presentations, I talk generally about these levels, but it's good to finally have something that confirms my thoughts.
Hi Jeremiah,
Thank you very much for sharing your Open Research. It's been very helpful. I wanted to make a comment concerning slide 24, Engagement Pyramid Data. You comment on the reason South Korea has higher engagement in both commenting and producing layers of the pyramid due to technology adoption of broadband – I believe there is more going on there.
For example, according to a March 2009 Asia Social Technographics report from Forrester, the portion of internet users who have published blogs, web pages, articles, stories, videos or audio/music content on social technologies was: China, 40%; South Korea, 52%; and Japan, 35% compared with Australia, 26% and the U.S, 21%.
These numbers may indicate that although broadband adoption is places like Korea and Japan are very high, in general I think it's more of a cultural or social behaviour pointing to other motivating factors (i.e. new channel for personal expression) for why Asians enjoy creating social content in general.
Looking forward to the next segment on Feb. 24th!
I can't watch the video. Is there a problem?
Great stuff Jeremiah, I like it much. Great presentation!
Thanks for sharing your Research results!
Best regards from Austria
Ortwin Oberhauser
@oberhauser
This is very interesting. Are you aware of any research that looks at the types of people that are most active with social media? In other words, not demographics, but personality, motivation, etc?
This is very interesting. Are you aware of any research that looks at the types of people that are most active with social media? In other words, not demographics, but personality, motivation, etc?
Does each of the 5 key socialgraphics questions relate to each of the levels of the engagement pyramid? I am writing a paper for an MBA class and wanted to better understand how to relate the information. thank you
sports shoes
Nike Sport Shoes
Women's Nike Sport Shoes
Men's Nike Sport Shoes
I like this article, I think this article is very level. Whether the content, or structural arrangements are very good. I believe some spent a lot of effort on it!embroidery design,embroidery designs,rapid prototyping,plastic molds,product design,plastic molding
Very good article. So that each reader has a kind of fresh feeling.custom caps,fitted hats,baseball caps,beanie hats,embroidered caps,custom hats,caps,
This article is very good, very excellent article, very fluent strokes. I believe also very talented on it.Digitizing,embroidery Digitizing,embroidery designs,vector conversion,digitizing software,stock designs,
I like this article, I think this article is very level. I believe some spent a lot of effort on it Fleece Blankets,Blankets, fleece throws,wholesale blankets,throw blankets,blanket throwWhether the content, or structural arrangements are very good.
If your potential consumers mainly gather around a search engine, I wonder how you approach them.
The page is nice and I like it very much.