Social Data

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts exploring Social Business.

Hands up who has bought a house without getting a survey first?
OK, who has bought a washing machine without checking the specification?
Finally, who has made a sales call without knowing anything about the prospect?

My point here is that you need information and understanding before you can make an informed decision about the direction of something. The more you know, the better prepared you can be.

The same applies to marketing.

The “Spray & Pray” approach no longer works. Today, it’s all about relevance. We’ve seen this with direct mail, e-mail marketing and telemarketing. Each of these channels originally started as a percentage game: hit as many people as you can in the hope of getting a small number of responses. Over the years, however, this approach exhausted the audience, and now successful campaigns within these channels are those that are targeted and relevant.

Social media is no different: yes, it’s new, exciting and largely untapped; and yes, 46% of people access their social network every day; but in reality it’s a just different channel – the customers are the same.

So the same logic applies.

So what can you learn from social-data insight? Well, you’d be surprised.

To help explain this, I should first give a Reader’s Digest version of the history of database marketing.

First generation:

Once upon a time, customer databases were insular, collecting information that was either part of the transaction process or in response to a request, e.g. What is your date of birth? They allowed marketers to understand the customers’ relationship with their products and engage with them accordingly.

Second generation:

We then moved on; compiled data from multiple sources such as organisations, government bodies and so on. These can be used for demographic profiling to help you understand more about your customers and prospects through relationships elsewhere.

Typically, traditional demographics are based on location, on the assumption that you and your postcode neighbour are the same type of people.

Third generation:

We now have social networks. These weren’t initially designed to be a marketer’s friend, but due to the massive take-up around the globe (one in nine people alive are on a social network), they are proving to be a rich source of new information on customers and prospects.

The thing is, this information has been given, not requested.

Meaning that it has no particular bias.

The same can’t be said for the information gathered for those competitions that require you to answer questions with a view to winning a shiny new widget. Who is going to be honest and say the product is rubbish if they think it will mess up their chance of winning?

The trick now is to listen to what your customers aren’t telling you.

This data is new, powerful and constantly updating.

For example, want to know how far someone tends to travel to events?

What other interests do they have outside your relationship with them?

Which brands would be good affiliates?

Have they changed jobs, moved house?

Are they sport fanatics? Football? Which team?

Are they party animals?

The answers to the questions above aren’t the sort of things we would necessarily know. However, through the inherently dynamic style of social media, we have this information instantly. Social DNA can be derived, so to speak.

BUT (and it’s a big but) this data is not freely available. It needs to be earned. Through relevance and trust. The user must authorise the sharing of their social data with you.
So you need to consider why a user would authorise this. This is the marketing challenge, and to be blogged about at a later date. Once a strategy has been devised for the incentivisation, the use of Facebook’s Connect functionality (for example) opens up this new world of information.

Each one of the three generations of marketing data is useful in its own right, but blending them can prove extremely powerful, by making the unknowns known, and enhancing the marketer’s knowledge of the customers.

Now, hands up who wants to know more about their customers and their social DNA?

Contact me: daryl.swinden@volume.co.uk

So, now you have powerful insight on your customer, but what about understanding the brand connection? In next week’s blog, we’ll discuss the brand relationship.

This is the second in a series of blog posts exploring social business

In the last blog post I introduced the term “social business” with the following definition:

“A social business is an organisation that has incorporated social engagement processes and technology across all areas of a business (both internally and externally) to maximise business value and profitability.”

You may still be scratching your head over what “incorporating social engagement processes” actually means, and what is meant by internally and externally. So, to start delving a little deeper into the definition, it’s helpful to clarify what is meant by internal and external audiences. By internal audience, I am referring to employees, partners, investors – any group that has a vested interest in selling a product, solution, service or company proposition. An external audience however, is any group that will be on the receiving side of the organisation’s brand messaging: customers, potential prospects, potential partners, potential investors and potential employees.

The social-business goal is to have internal audiences collaborating in order to effectively communicate with external audiences. “Social engagement processes” are about optimising human engagement at the heart of an organisation for it to penetrate across all communications externally.

With these definitions in mind, the next question to answer is: “What do you actually need to do?” As the diagram above highlights, there are four stages of social business enablement:

1) Work out where everyone is.

Before you have a party, you need to know where to send the invitations! The same process applies: before you facilitate the engagement process, you need to map your social landscape – both internally and externally. Where is everyone? How are they connected?

2) Work on your people.

With one-to-one human engagement at the heart of this proposition, it makes sense that you understand how to connect to your audience. For an external audience (anyone who is on the receiving end of your brand messaging), identify both the business and human need for your product, solution or service. Whilst a certain product may make business sense as it reduces operational costs, what’s in it for the actual target purchasers – will it help them secure their jobs by appearing more tech-savvy then other members of staff? Will it get them bonuses for cost-savings? This human need is often ignored and as a result, organisations compete for ears in a crowded space – all with similar messaging.

For internal audiences, the same principle applies. You need to activate your workforce, get exec buy-in – how will social engagement help them and how will it help the organisation? Following from this, you can develop an organisation model that places socially-activated employees into every department across the business.

3) Define the process.

So you know where to send the invitations to your party and you know how to motivate them to come – what’s next? You need to make it happen! Following this analogy (which I promise I won’t use again!), the next step is to put in place the processes to make social engagement happen. Looking at your external audience, use the insight obtained to create and tailor the messaging. For your internal audience, facilitate and connect the different socially activated workforce through listening, engagement and crisis-management workflows. To ensure people engage effectively, provide governance models and policies into best practices along with social training.

4) Identify your technology.

This is the last step before you are ready to engage. More often or not, it’s the step that organisations jump to first, but before you choose technology that can support your social business, you need to have gone through steps one to three to know what technology you actually need and who will be using it. The social-business technology space is becoming more and more crowded, with new vendors introducing tools into the market every month. Simply put, these tools aim to facilitate engagement both internally and externally. Think carefully about which tools best suit your business as a whole and ensure they work with your current processes.

So there you have it – you should be all ready to go down the path of social business enlightenment… or not! There’s a great deal of information to be taken in here, so in following posts, I’ll drill deeper into each of the stages and relate them to real-life examples of organisations that are supporting the social-business proposition. In next week’s post, however, I’ll answer the questions you may be thinking: Why should I care? What’s in it for me?

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Third generation:

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