Surely... sometimes it comes as a surprise that brands do listen, mostly because for so long we have been accustomed to the unidirectional manner of brand communication. However, although surprises, these are definitely the nice ones.
Showing newest posts with label Social Media. Show older posts
Showing newest posts with label Social Media. Show older posts
Apr 19, 2010
They do listen!!
Saw this conversation on the Intel Software partner program Facebook page
Surely... sometimes it comes as a surprise that brands do listen, mostly because for so long we have been accustomed to the unidirectional manner of brand communication. However, although surprises, these are definitely the nice ones.
Surely... sometimes it comes as a surprise that brands do listen, mostly because for so long we have been accustomed to the unidirectional manner of brand communication. However, although surprises, these are definitely the nice ones.
Apr 7, 2010
What an Idea!! - How brands are using Ideation Communities
Background: Ideation communities are platforms where customers can post news, stories, ideas, case studies etc and other people can rate, vote for the best ideas, comment and share ideas etc. This is more sort of like a simple Digg.com models where people submit news, community curates ( votes) the best news which is showcased on the homepage.
Ideation communities are a people centric way of carrying the brand message. It is an open platform for people to talk about brand or related businesses. But unlike typical communities or social networks the focus is more on content consumption, curation ( rate/vote/ comment) and creation rather than connecting consumers or building relationships among them.
It will be interesting to see how many popular brands have used such ideation communities:
Starbucks: My Starbucks idea is one of the most popular ideation communities. The agenda is simple. The community members submit ideas on what they would want from Starbucks and others vote and comment upon the ideas they like. By the end of the day, Starbucks has the most popular, democratically decided ideas for its brands. How this benefits Starbucks is that this community automatically positions Starbucks as a brand that is all ears to its costumers which is great for any services company. Secondly it has a platform where people repeatedly come to submit ideas, comment and have conversations, that is better than any marketing campaign. Thirdly through this platform the company knows who are its biggest fans and evangelists and it knows whom to go to for positive advocacy.
Starbucks has put in a lot of effort to showcase how it is taking care of the ideas, which in fact has been the core to the success of this community. My Starbucks idea has a 'Ideas in action' blog where they talk about the ideas that have been brought into action. They also have a leader board to recognize its most active members.
Dell: Surely Dell learnt it the hard way, but then Dell Ideastorm is some of the benchmark examples of brands using social media. Like my Starbucks Idea, Dell Ideastorm is also about the ideas for Dell services and products. The good thing is Dell has sustained this community and nurtured it with time by adding small timely campaigns to it. Presently I see them running 'Storm Sessions'.Many companies like Best Buy and Hindustan Times have tried to model their social business strategies along the same lines.
Dell has also used such Ideation platform to run periodic social media contest campaigns to promote and generate buzz on some issues. Dell Go Green and Dell Social Innovation are example of such periodic Social Media campaigns. ( As a disclaimer, I work for the firm that planned Dell Go Green )
Intuit: Intuit, the financial & accounting software company is an interesting example where an ideation community was developed to woo not end consumers but small businesses. The Intuit small business community is an ideation platform for businesses to share stories of success and business ideas and case studies to the community.How Intuit is doing it differently is that this community also showcases the full Intuit shop, intuit products, services and solutions etc. Also there are periodic campaigns and contests like 'Business Grant Contests'. This also helps the company position itself as a supporter to small businesses in helping them grow and bring ideas into action. Some other B2B ideation communities/ contests have been built by Intel, Nokia, Tata NEN etc
Idea Cellular: In India, the telecom company Idea has and ideation platform which is although not a community ( that is it does not have profile or relationships) but it is a good beginning. What is interesting about this platform is that it is engaging customers around the ideas for brining change in India, which in itself is a good social object ( a lifestyle/ passion/ cause which is the core theme around which a community talks) for any community. A similar campaign was run by change.org around asking the US citizens to submit the ideas for change in America.
Conclusion: Ideation communities are a good way to make your business social. You can use them to get customer ideas for your brand, thoughts around a cause or a passion core to your brand, generate buzz through user generated ideation contests, crowd source around important objectives etc. Surely, you would need to incentivize the social behavior among consumers which mainly depends on what core theme you ask this community to ideate upon, how engaging the community is, inbuilt rewards and reputation systems etc.
Ideation communities are a people centric way of carrying the brand message. It is an open platform for people to talk about brand or related businesses. But unlike typical communities or social networks the focus is more on content consumption, curation ( rate/vote/ comment) and creation rather than connecting consumers or building relationships among them.
It will be interesting to see how many popular brands have used such ideation communities:
Starbucks: My Starbucks idea is one of the most popular ideation communities. The agenda is simple. The community members submit ideas on what they would want from Starbucks and others vote and comment upon the ideas they like. By the end of the day, Starbucks has the most popular, democratically decided ideas for its brands. How this benefits Starbucks is that this community automatically positions Starbucks as a brand that is all ears to its costumers which is great for any services company. Secondly it has a platform where people repeatedly come to submit ideas, comment and have conversations, that is better than any marketing campaign. Thirdly through this platform the company knows who are its biggest fans and evangelists and it knows whom to go to for positive advocacy.
Starbucks has put in a lot of effort to showcase how it is taking care of the ideas, which in fact has been the core to the success of this community. My Starbucks idea has a 'Ideas in action' blog where they talk about the ideas that have been brought into action. They also have a leader board to recognize its most active members.
Dell: Surely Dell learnt it the hard way, but then Dell Ideastorm is some of the benchmark examples of brands using social media. Like my Starbucks Idea, Dell Ideastorm is also about the ideas for Dell services and products. The good thing is Dell has sustained this community and nurtured it with time by adding small timely campaigns to it. Presently I see them running 'Storm Sessions'.Many companies like Best Buy and Hindustan Times have tried to model their social business strategies along the same lines.
Dell has also used such Ideation platform to run periodic social media contest campaigns to promote and generate buzz on some issues. Dell Go Green and Dell Social Innovation are example of such periodic Social Media campaigns. ( As a disclaimer, I work for the firm that planned Dell Go Green )
Intuit: Intuit, the financial & accounting software company is an interesting example where an ideation community was developed to woo not end consumers but small businesses. The Intuit small business community is an ideation platform for businesses to share stories of success and business ideas and case studies to the community.How Intuit is doing it differently is that this community also showcases the full Intuit shop, intuit products, services and solutions etc. Also there are periodic campaigns and contests like 'Business Grant Contests'. This also helps the company position itself as a supporter to small businesses in helping them grow and bring ideas into action. Some other B2B ideation communities/ contests have been built by Intel, Nokia, Tata NEN etc
Idea Cellular: In India, the telecom company Idea has and ideation platform which is although not a community ( that is it does not have profile or relationships) but it is a good beginning. What is interesting about this platform is that it is engaging customers around the ideas for brining change in India, which in itself is a good social object ( a lifestyle/ passion/ cause which is the core theme around which a community talks) for any community. A similar campaign was run by change.org around asking the US citizens to submit the ideas for change in America.
Conclusion: Ideation communities are a good way to make your business social. You can use them to get customer ideas for your brand, thoughts around a cause or a passion core to your brand, generate buzz through user generated ideation contests, crowd source around important objectives etc. Surely, you would need to incentivize the social behavior among consumers which mainly depends on what core theme you ask this community to ideate upon, how engaging the community is, inbuilt rewards and reputation systems etc.
Mar 31, 2010
Why I do what I do (for a living)
This is a question many people ask me or at least might like to ask me. If you look at the typical break-up of jobs from a college like IIT Delhi, you will see major chunks going into core engineering, banking, consulting, analytics, software and a very small fraction getting into marketing. Even a smaller fraction gets into start-ups as a fresh recruit. In fact start-ups are usually also associated with those who are not able to get a job anywhere else!
So what am I doing in a social business strategy firm? And why should anybody looking for a serious career in marketing and brand management look for a job in social media?
To address these questions, let me first explain what a social business strategy firm like mine does. A social business strategy firm builds a brand's presence on social web ( i.e. web 2.0). So apart from the general forms of social media that we see everyday like Facebook/ twitter/ LinkedIn, a social business strategy firms tries to establish a sustainable presence for its clients by building and nurturing community platforms for the client's prospects and customers in a way to meet the client's business needs and objectives. Hence although this is a solutions industry where there are mostly projects and consulting assignments, there are tremendous scope for understanding and learning marketing:
1) Overall presence: Although companies use a social web presence for purposes more than just marketing like support, research, ideation, CRM, attracting talent or even creating the core product ( news and media industry), however I think a presence in any form can be attributed to marketing the brand in some way or the other. Since here it is about establishing the brand's social web presence, any sort of effort will have an effect on how people perceive the brand and hence is a part of company's marketing.
2) Sustainable communities and not one time campaigns: As I must have mentioned earlier that the real value of any investment into social media is in building something that you can sustain and nurture with time. As compared to traditional social media agencies, in social business strategy firms the focus is into building these sustainable long term engagement with brands where you are on the same note as the client's marketing team in understanding their business problems and coming out with solutions.
3) Defining a new type of offering in India: For me the best offering from this job came as the opportunity to learn something that so less people know about at least in India. You get ( and in fact need) to research so much into this field that at a very young age you get the confidence to preach others how they should go ahead with their businesses on social web. Looking at the fact that most of the people working in this field are pretty young, entering this field at the right time can help one build thought leadership at a young age.
4) Get a taste of different industry sectors: Social Business Strategy is more like a solutions industry than a services industry. So one day you are understanding a beverage company's business problem and the next day you are doing the same for banks, NGOs, technology, consumer durables, automobile etc companies. Likewise you get insights into business and marketing practices of different industry sectors.
5) Generate a new perspective for brand building: When I learnt brand management, none of the many books and resources I researched talked constructively about building a brand based on what a customer wants it to be or what the customer wants from it. All talked about creating the right brand identity, right brand personality etc to communicate itself with the ultimate goal to generate awareness; basically the right ways to broadcast themselves to their customers/prospects. However at none of the resources I got to read how should a brand be built in an ecosystem where broadcasting no longer works ! ( due to the availability of social tools )
Interestingly, when I first studied Brand Management, I never bothered about it! But now I see that many brands are increasingly becoming concerned with the shift of power from the organization to the customer, and many of them are thinking of different ways of sustaining or building brands. Many companies like Dell and Starbucks have successfully shown that this is possible.
I hope the above mentioned reasons would help marketing enthusiasts and freshers from colleges like IITs to look into a career in social business strategies or at least explain it to some why I chose it. And by the way... it also pays well :)
So what am I doing in a social business strategy firm? And why should anybody looking for a serious career in marketing and brand management look for a job in social media?
To address these questions, let me first explain what a social business strategy firm like mine does. A social business strategy firm builds a brand's presence on social web ( i.e. web 2.0). So apart from the general forms of social media that we see everyday like Facebook/ twitter/ LinkedIn, a social business strategy firms tries to establish a sustainable presence for its clients by building and nurturing community platforms for the client's prospects and customers in a way to meet the client's business needs and objectives. Hence although this is a solutions industry where there are mostly projects and consulting assignments, there are tremendous scope for understanding and learning marketing:
1) Overall presence: Although companies use a social web presence for purposes more than just marketing like support, research, ideation, CRM, attracting talent or even creating the core product ( news and media industry), however I think a presence in any form can be attributed to marketing the brand in some way or the other. Since here it is about establishing the brand's social web presence, any sort of effort will have an effect on how people perceive the brand and hence is a part of company's marketing.
2) Sustainable communities and not one time campaigns: As I must have mentioned earlier that the real value of any investment into social media is in building something that you can sustain and nurture with time. As compared to traditional social media agencies, in social business strategy firms the focus is into building these sustainable long term engagement with brands where you are on the same note as the client's marketing team in understanding their business problems and coming out with solutions.
3) Defining a new type of offering in India: For me the best offering from this job came as the opportunity to learn something that so less people know about at least in India. You get ( and in fact need) to research so much into this field that at a very young age you get the confidence to preach others how they should go ahead with their businesses on social web. Looking at the fact that most of the people working in this field are pretty young, entering this field at the right time can help one build thought leadership at a young age.
4) Get a taste of different industry sectors: Social Business Strategy is more like a solutions industry than a services industry. So one day you are understanding a beverage company's business problem and the next day you are doing the same for banks, NGOs, technology, consumer durables, automobile etc companies. Likewise you get insights into business and marketing practices of different industry sectors.
5) Generate a new perspective for brand building: When I learnt brand management, none of the many books and resources I researched talked constructively about building a brand based on what a customer wants it to be or what the customer wants from it. All talked about creating the right brand identity, right brand personality etc to communicate itself with the ultimate goal to generate awareness; basically the right ways to broadcast themselves to their customers/prospects. However at none of the resources I got to read how should a brand be built in an ecosystem where broadcasting no longer works ! ( due to the availability of social tools )
Interestingly, when I first studied Brand Management, I never bothered about it! But now I see that many brands are increasingly becoming concerned with the shift of power from the organization to the customer, and many of them are thinking of different ways of sustaining or building brands. Many companies like Dell and Starbucks have successfully shown that this is possible.
I hope the above mentioned reasons would help marketing enthusiasts and freshers from colleges like IITs to look into a career in social business strategies or at least explain it to some why I chose it. And by the way... it also pays well :)
Mar 28, 2010
Learnings from the 2020 Social workshop on personal branding
Its is great to be a part of an organization that encourages its employees to build a personal brand. And its even great to be a part of an organization and working with people who have successfully implemented this mantra in their life.
I began writing in 2007 as a society humor blog since I thought that as I have nothing else to write that people would like to read and moreover as humor sells, it is a good starting point. Then 2 years later when I started working at 2020 Social and as my worked involved a lot of research in Social Media, I realized that probably I should write about social media too as I have a lot to say about it. Hence started the dilemma between writing what I wanted to write ( Society Humor) and what I was good at ( brands, marketing and social media) because of the obvious reasons of working in a social business strategy firm and having authored a Brand Management Textbook.
Typically I should have chosen one of them long ago because writing about society humor and marketing would be confusing to anybody. It is difficult for anybody to digest, " He is a social media guy writing serious stuff and also a funny guy writing random stuff". But I did not want to part away with making fun of people, one reason also being that any typical funny blog posts on this blog generated much more comments than a social media blog which I wrote then on my company blog. So then I thought of Barista, and the way they sell food ( sandwiches, submarines, lasagnas etc) but effectively branding themselves as a beverage ( and that too coffee) company. The learning was, market your USP and keep the additionals inside the shelf. Hence this blog became a place for "Social Media, Marketing & other random stuff" where essentially the social media part was highlighted and the other funny posts were kept in another category tab.
But then yesterday in the 2020 Social Salon Saturday workshop I learnt that a) I am not Barista and b) One needs to choose a very niche thin segment of workspace and try to build a personal expertise brand there.Also that the best time to develop a personal brand was 20 years ago and the next best time is now! So it appears that it is time to make a choice whether I want to write the random funny stuff that I like to write or whether I want to write the stuff which actually adds value to me in the domain related to my work.
Moreover over the time I have realized that I always had so much to say about marketing and social media but never really seriously thought about putting anything more than my research on this blog. So as a note to myself, let me remember this day as the day I chose to write about marketing and social media than writing about society humor. Maybe its high time that I grow up!
I began writing in 2007 as a society humor blog since I thought that as I have nothing else to write that people would like to read and moreover as humor sells, it is a good starting point. Then 2 years later when I started working at 2020 Social and as my worked involved a lot of research in Social Media, I realized that probably I should write about social media too as I have a lot to say about it. Hence started the dilemma between writing what I wanted to write ( Society Humor) and what I was good at ( brands, marketing and social media) because of the obvious reasons of working in a social business strategy firm and having authored a Brand Management Textbook.
Typically I should have chosen one of them long ago because writing about society humor and marketing would be confusing to anybody. It is difficult for anybody to digest, " He is a social media guy writing serious stuff and also a funny guy writing random stuff". But I did not want to part away with making fun of people, one reason also being that any typical funny blog posts on this blog generated much more comments than a social media blog which I wrote then on my company blog. So then I thought of Barista, and the way they sell food ( sandwiches, submarines, lasagnas etc) but effectively branding themselves as a beverage ( and that too coffee) company. The learning was, market your USP and keep the additionals inside the shelf. Hence this blog became a place for "Social Media, Marketing & other random stuff" where essentially the social media part was highlighted and the other funny posts were kept in another category tab.
But then yesterday in the 2020 Social Salon Saturday workshop I learnt that a) I am not Barista and b) One needs to choose a very niche thin segment of workspace and try to build a personal expertise brand there.Also that the best time to develop a personal brand was 20 years ago and the next best time is now! So it appears that it is time to make a choice whether I want to write the random funny stuff that I like to write or whether I want to write the stuff which actually adds value to me in the domain related to my work.
Moreover over the time I have realized that I always had so much to say about marketing and social media but never really seriously thought about putting anything more than my research on this blog. So as a note to myself, let me remember this day as the day I chose to write about marketing and social media than writing about society humor. Maybe its high time that I grow up!
Mar 4, 2010
How to make e-commerce a social activity
Background: Purchase has for long been considered a social activity and often leverages conversations. Recommendations and reviews by a friend or a third party are often very helpful in making purchase decisions. It is interesting to see how some online shopping and e-commerce platforms have leveraged social web into converting a whole shopping experience into a social activity.
Some of the interesting social features that I came upon can be categorized as below:
At the initial levels of these social engagements are websites having ratings & reviews features where users can review the product databases, rate the products which can be compared by the viewers using comparison engines. Then there are websites having comment sections for conversations regarding the products, other member's review etc. People can also add products to their 'wishlists' so that they can remember and let other see what are they planning to buy next.Amazon makes very good use of these review and rating features for its vast product database.
On the next level of social engagement architecture are product aggregation websites where the focus is on aggregating products from various sources and getting the members to recommend or review the product. These websites can cater to niche segments like shopstyle which aggregates fashion products from various sources and lets its members curate the aggregated products. There are also social commerce websites like thisnext where the members themselves submit products from various other e-commerce websites and others curate ( rate, vote, review it) them. Hence such platform give people the opportunity to discuss products belonging to e-commerce websites which do not use such social applications. To add to this list, there are platforms like deals plus where instead of best products, the best deals and offers are featured.
Moving forward there are social commerce platforms with a special focus on community features. So social commerce communities like Kaboodle have people submitting products from various sources but then there are also profile, relationships and interactions among these members resulting in better social engagement. Similarly crowdstorm is architectured to let the community choose product for its members. Wishpot is a social commerce community focused on members and wishlists. So you can see what your friends are buying, help them out with their wishlists, see the most wished products. etc. Ebay has created product neighborhood groups ( like art, video games etc.) and leveraged these evangelist groups to drive purchases.
Then there are communities like product wiki, which is a wiki for product information and ratings. In Zlio members can get their own online store, showcase articles from zlio directory, promote products and earn purchase commission.Many social commerce platform also run periodic UGC campaigns and tactical programs to generate buzz and traffic. Woot for instance keeps doing such contests and campaigns.
Many of these platforms also have good integrations with social networks like facebook, twitter etc to carry the feed activity to their user's friends and social network. Wishpot, productwiki have some good facebook and twitter integration. Ebay has an application for showcasing your favorite items on ebay to your network.
Acknowledgments: Special thanks to mohit for making all the research easy
Some of the interesting social features that I came upon can be categorized as below:
At the initial levels of these social engagements are websites having ratings & reviews features where users can review the product databases, rate the products which can be compared by the viewers using comparison engines. Then there are websites having comment sections for conversations regarding the products, other member's review etc. People can also add products to their 'wishlists' so that they can remember and let other see what are they planning to buy next.Amazon makes very good use of these review and rating features for its vast product database.
On the next level of social engagement architecture are product aggregation websites where the focus is on aggregating products from various sources and getting the members to recommend or review the product. These websites can cater to niche segments like shopstyle which aggregates fashion products from various sources and lets its members curate the aggregated products. There are also social commerce websites like thisnext where the members themselves submit products from various other e-commerce websites and others curate ( rate, vote, review it) them. Hence such platform give people the opportunity to discuss products belonging to e-commerce websites which do not use such social applications. To add to this list, there are platforms like deals plus where instead of best products, the best deals and offers are featured.
Moving forward there are social commerce platforms with a special focus on community features. So social commerce communities like Kaboodle have people submitting products from various sources but then there are also profile, relationships and interactions among these members resulting in better social engagement. Similarly crowdstorm is architectured to let the community choose product for its members. Wishpot is a social commerce community focused on members and wishlists. So you can see what your friends are buying, help them out with their wishlists, see the most wished products. etc. Ebay has created product neighborhood groups ( like art, video games etc.) and leveraged these evangelist groups to drive purchases.
Then there are communities like product wiki, which is a wiki for product information and ratings. In Zlio members can get their own online store, showcase articles from zlio directory, promote products and earn purchase commission.Many social commerce platform also run periodic UGC campaigns and tactical programs to generate buzz and traffic. Woot for instance keeps doing such contests and campaigns.
Many of these platforms also have good integrations with social networks like facebook, twitter etc to carry the feed activity to their user's friends and social network. Wishpot, productwiki have some good facebook and twitter integration. Ebay has an application for showcasing your favorite items on ebay to your network.
Acknowledgments: Special thanks to mohit for making all the research easy
Jan 26, 2010
How are banks, financial services leveraging social media
I was reading the latest blog post on 2020 Social blog by mohit on Social Community efforts by banks and financial institutions and realized that I might have something interesting to add here. In my view the thing worth noticing about the social media efforts by these BFSI institutions is the difference in the way their communities are architectured when they are targeting different segments of customers.
Background: When it comes to investing & saving ones own hard earned money , people prefer researching, asking others, going for tried and tested methods and moreover playing safe. Investments and savings are something that are although done by almost everyone but then not everybody has an expertise and hence people generally prefer taking expert advice, ask peers, research, read news just to keep themselves informed and updated. Many banks, financial institutions, trading and brokerage companies have realized this behaviour and are using a social web presence to solve their problems.
Scope: In this post I have covered three types of social media efforts by the BFSI sector. The first category represents the social media efforts by banks & financial services towards personal banking, the second category of efforts are towards targeting corporates, SMEs & entrepreneurs while the third is towards targeting the investors into stocks to make them smart traders. You will see a fundamental difference in the way these institutions use social web to target these three different categories.
Illustration:
a) Social media efforts towards personal banking: A large no. of BFSI institutions have realized that providing a platform to people to talk and learn about their business needs helps them multifold. Firstly, it helps them position themselves as an institution which cares to enable people to make smart savings and investments. Secondly, it helps them listen relevant conversations and establish conversations and relationships for business development. Thirdly, it helps them understand the current needs and feedback of customers which is like the best market research ever. In this a very inspiring effort has been made by the Young&Free Alberta community powered by the Servus Credit Union to give a voice to the young generation. Y&F launches annual contest where the community chooses its spokesperson. This spokesperson then participates in the community as Y&F ambassador and educates and converses with others through blogs, videos etc. Y&F also oganizes many events for its commuity which include year round online contests and offline events. (For more details see mohit's post at 2020 Social blog).
ING Direct is also making several efforts in wooing savers on social web. They have a Saver's Blog and a community for publishing feel good news about markets and investment called Savings feel good. The news is either submitted from press or by community members. The community also runs timely contests to build interests.
Another interesting effort in this direction is by mint.com which is a maney management and budgeting software company. They have a tweet aggregator platform with tweets from various experts on savings, budgeting, retirement, loans etc.They also have an official blog on similar topics.
As you must have realized that all these communities are architectured around people expressing their financial needs and helping people make smart savings and gain important informations about investments.
b) Social media efforts for corporates, SMEs and entrepreneurs: In such efforts the focus is to help the SMEs and entrepreneurs network and gain valuable information and aid related to their business. For example the Visa Business Network helps you find out businesses in your locality, related vendors, partners, suppliers and customs. It also helps you discuss important information in your work related discussion group, set up business related goals and get help from others to achieve them. A possible goal can be 'to same some xy amount of money by year end. The person can get interesting article links from the community on savings. Or a goal can be 'to find business through referrals'
Effectively you can see that the aim of the community is to help businesses communicate, learn and network. It helps the financial institute powering the community listen about the financial needs and ideas among entrepreneurs. Also it sends across the message that the bank reaches out to help businesses which helps them bringing in more business. Amrican Express, HSBC and Bank of America also has similar business networks the details about which you can get from mohit's last blog post
Another interesting effort here is by Kiva which is a one to one micro lending community where entrepreneurs submit their business idea. For this kiva partners with micro lending institutions. The community helps the entrepreneurs reach financial targets.
c) Social media efforts focussing on stocks and trading: There are a bunch of trading communities which are helping people become smart investors, invest in right direction, communicate with expert and get relevant market information. Also these communities help professional traders gain reputation as influencers. A good example is Covester where members can follow other members investments, read and write information blogs and if they see a trader making very good investments, the can align their investments with him and give him a share in profits for sharing his data.
There are other online invester's communities like Zecco, Moneyrec, Stockhouse and Trade2win. Tipd gives a stock and financial news aggregation platform and news community. People consume, curate and create news articles on a model similar to digg.com. The value for these stock related conversations can be estimated from the face that certain corporates like Berkshire Hathaway have discussion forums for their own stocks.
Visiting these communities are worth it. We would love to have some such India focussed communities by large banks as there are many people here who because of dearth of good investing knowledge and lack of trust on private banks go for safest government investments like FDs and RDs giving very low returns. Also there are many who do not understand the financial jargons of the large investment products given by these banks. Banking communities can definitely help there.
Background: When it comes to investing & saving ones own hard earned money , people prefer researching, asking others, going for tried and tested methods and moreover playing safe. Investments and savings are something that are although done by almost everyone but then not everybody has an expertise and hence people generally prefer taking expert advice, ask peers, research, read news just to keep themselves informed and updated. Many banks, financial institutions, trading and brokerage companies have realized this behaviour and are using a social web presence to solve their problems.
Scope: In this post I have covered three types of social media efforts by the BFSI sector. The first category represents the social media efforts by banks & financial services towards personal banking, the second category of efforts are towards targeting corporates, SMEs & entrepreneurs while the third is towards targeting the investors into stocks to make them smart traders. You will see a fundamental difference in the way these institutions use social web to target these three different categories.
Illustration:
a) Social media efforts towards personal banking: A large no. of BFSI institutions have realized that providing a platform to people to talk and learn about their business needs helps them multifold. Firstly, it helps them position themselves as an institution which cares to enable people to make smart savings and investments. Secondly, it helps them listen relevant conversations and establish conversations and relationships for business development. Thirdly, it helps them understand the current needs and feedback of customers which is like the best market research ever. In this a very inspiring effort has been made by the Young&Free Alberta community powered by the Servus Credit Union to give a voice to the young generation. Y&F launches annual contest where the community chooses its spokesperson. This spokesperson then participates in the community as Y&F ambassador and educates and converses with others through blogs, videos etc. Y&F also oganizes many events for its commuity which include year round online contests and offline events. (For more details see mohit's post at 2020 Social blog).
ING Direct is also making several efforts in wooing savers on social web. They have a Saver's Blog and a community for publishing feel good news about markets and investment called Savings feel good. The news is either submitted from press or by community members. The community also runs timely contests to build interests.
Another interesting effort in this direction is by mint.com which is a maney management and budgeting software company. They have a tweet aggregator platform with tweets from various experts on savings, budgeting, retirement, loans etc.They also have an official blog on similar topics.
As you must have realized that all these communities are architectured around people expressing their financial needs and helping people make smart savings and gain important informations about investments.
b) Social media efforts for corporates, SMEs and entrepreneurs: In such efforts the focus is to help the SMEs and entrepreneurs network and gain valuable information and aid related to their business. For example the Visa Business Network helps you find out businesses in your locality, related vendors, partners, suppliers and customs. It also helps you discuss important information in your work related discussion group, set up business related goals and get help from others to achieve them. A possible goal can be 'to same some xy amount of money by year end. The person can get interesting article links from the community on savings. Or a goal can be 'to find business through referrals'
Effectively you can see that the aim of the community is to help businesses communicate, learn and network. It helps the financial institute powering the community listen about the financial needs and ideas among entrepreneurs. Also it sends across the message that the bank reaches out to help businesses which helps them bringing in more business. Amrican Express, HSBC and Bank of America also has similar business networks the details about which you can get from mohit's last blog post
Another interesting effort here is by Kiva which is a one to one micro lending community where entrepreneurs submit their business idea. For this kiva partners with micro lending institutions. The community helps the entrepreneurs reach financial targets.
c) Social media efforts focussing on stocks and trading: There are a bunch of trading communities which are helping people become smart investors, invest in right direction, communicate with expert and get relevant market information. Also these communities help professional traders gain reputation as influencers. A good example is Covester where members can follow other members investments, read and write information blogs and if they see a trader making very good investments, the can align their investments with him and give him a share in profits for sharing his data.
There are other online invester's communities like Zecco, Moneyrec, Stockhouse and Trade2win. Tipd gives a stock and financial news aggregation platform and news community. People consume, curate and create news articles on a model similar to digg.com. The value for these stock related conversations can be estimated from the face that certain corporates like Berkshire Hathaway have discussion forums for their own stocks.
Visiting these communities are worth it. We would love to have some such India focussed communities by large banks as there are many people here who because of dearth of good investing knowledge and lack of trust on private banks go for safest government investments like FDs and RDs giving very low returns. Also there are many who do not understand the financial jargons of the large investment products given by these banks. Banking communities can definitely help there.
Jan 22, 2010
5 things you need to know before making a direct call to an interested prospect
In my company we get 3 kinds of clients/propects. The first are the large B2C targeting clients which are multinational technology, FMCG, Automobile, Beverages companies etc planning to establish a presence on social web. The second kind of clients are the large B2B targeting companies in similar sectors. The third kind are the small and meduim sized companies, startups and miscellanous sectors (which sometimes include SaaS, movie directors, game developer companies, product marketplaces etc). These three sectors effectively look for presence in social media for purposes like marketing, operations (support, innovation, increasing productivity etc), establishing relationships among a target group of clients, vendors & prospects, HR (enterprise 2.0 and internal collaboration) and similar others.
As I look after the third category where CXOs, promoters of such startups either contact us via mail/ contact form or simply call us; I have learnt that these cases involve a lot of direct calling to understand business needs and objectives before taking things forward to meetings where there is a higher investment of time and resources. If you are looking after client engagement/pitches in social business consulting you get to face the following challenges:
1) Who is the prospect: Whether the client heads the business or is a middle manager. Is he a 55 year old coming from a company culture that might demand to be called 'sir' or whether he is a 25 year old entrpreneur guy who might be thinking that since you do something online you might come pretty cheap. ( As a disclaimer a large part of things we do have online-offline integrations) This can anyways be found out from basic searches, linkedin profiles etc.
2) Where is the prospect: You never know how much the client knows about social media and social technologies. He might be following your company/consultant blogs and completely understand what you do or he might be very naive to social media and end up asking you to explain facebook!! But then most of these interests fall under four categories depending upon how aware they are about the business objectives and benefits of a social web presence:
4) Where do you take it from here: How do you take this forward from this first direct call. What is the next best step?
A a disclaimer I am sure that there cannot be a rulebook to guide through a client/prospect conversation. Also it is best that each client engagement manager uses his/her own way of contacting. However there can always be a mental checklist so as to find out where are you on the conversation.
I generally follow a BNPO model which is sort of inspired by the POST model described in Groundswell by Charlene Li (of course there the reference is slightly different). Here BNPO stands for Business, needs, people and objectives. The model is described below:
a) Business: In most of the cases you will be having a fairly good idea about the client's businesses before the call. This is about asking those details which generally are not clear but are required in our business:
i) What are the client's products/services
ii) What are the target clients/customers
iii) How have they targeted them in the past
iv) How do they position their brand/product (current campaigns they are running/planning to run)
v) What are their major cost & revenue heads in the business
b) Needs: This is mostly the trickiest and the most important part of the call. In many cases if the prospect is aware about social media and the benefits of a social web presence then he knows what are the business needs that can be satisfied. But there are some cases where the prospect also says, 'We hear a lot about social media and plan to explore it for our business. How should we do it?' Generally the needs can be derived from the various business objectives we explore in social business strategies:
i) Reducing costs: Try to understand if the client spending too much on customer support, on market research for understanding the customer opinion, on PR agencies to generating a good word.
ii) Increasing sales/promotion: What fraction of the prospect's target customers are on social web, does the brand exclusively target youth, what is the existing position of their social media efforts, what are the problems they are facing in their present marketing campaigns.
iii) Increasing relationships: Is the client focussing on a niche sector of industry as clients/vendors/partners/customers. Can providing them a community or a business network for engagement help . Do they need leveraging conversations on such communitites.
iv) Increasing innovation & ideation: Is the client looking for more ideas for his brand or product, a repositioning or customer feedback. Does it position itself as a customer focussed company.
v) Increasing internal collaboration: Are there internal communication, workflow, employee moral or productivity problems.
Of course you have to get a feel of these problems from the conversation. You won't be ticking a checklist of these large number of probable situations :)
c) People: When you know the needs you will know the people to target. Understand where are these people on social web. Are they just surfing random sites, do they have their own blog, are they on facebook/twitter/Linkedin/forums etc
d) Objectives: This is different from needs as in if needs are the starting point of your conversation with this prospect, the objective is the final outcome you achieve from the project. So for example the need might be to position your brand as a youth savvy consumer company but the objective might turn out to be a contest module running series of user generated contests targeting youth.
This came out in a discussion with Dave Evans. Generally it is difficult to understand objectives in the first call itself. In some cases when the client is clear about the objectives then you can directly move on to preparing the proposal. Or if not, then set up a meeting or the next call with more relevant people. If the prospect knows that you understand his/her needs, any time invesment is worth it.
Jan 13, 2010
What's happening in Health 2.0
While researching on health and wellness communities I fell upon various platforms worth of interest. It is fascinating to see that people understand that with changing times and health demands people are more interested in discussing out their health problems, helping each other referring the best practitioners and using similar social tools for health related purposes. When research shows that a majority of people seek the initial help of internet for any health research or related problems, it makes sense to make the entire health research and discussions social which is popularly known as Health 2.0.
There are a vast number of health related platforms running on the social web. On a broad scale they can be grouped as Health 2.0 communities, Health Applications and Health online tactical programs. I have discussed each of these platforms in detail below:
1) Health 2.0 communities: There are a bunch of Health 2.0 communities following roughly the same engagement architecture for the members. There are influencers (doctors, health experts, coaches, sportpersons) writing blogs and news articles on various health related topics, support forums on various topics various the influencers are participating and providing expert advice. The community members can interact with the experts on their blogs and discuss and find help for their problems on the support forums. Some such popular communities are Web MD (see pic) and Aarp.org's health page. There are various other communities like Steady Health using news aggregation models similar to digg.com where members submit their health related news and others curate (rate/vote) the news articles to get the most popular news on the homepage. In India similar health 2.0 communities like Bolohealth are gaining interest. Similarly Quaker oats too has health related discussion forum on its Good morning heart community.
Apart from these independent health and wellness communities, there are some hospitals powering such communities too. Mayoclinc for example supports blogs and stories from patients, relatives, friends and staff of Mayo hospital at sharing.mayoclinic.org
2) Health Applications: There are many interesting health applications on the social web. One such application is Patients like me where you can enter various communities, feed your personal health data and find patients like you and get relevant help. Another interesting health application is by Gold's gym (see pic) which is running of facebook. Here the members can set their personal health goals ( like losing weight etc.), find people like them, recruit supporters and post their progress. Other members can provide support and comment on their progress. In India saffola ( an Indian edible oil company) is currently running a health application where people can set up goals for better living, find people like them and get health tips.
There are a vast number of health related platforms running on the social web. On a broad scale they can be grouped as Health 2.0 communities, Health Applications and Health online tactical programs. I have discussed each of these platforms in detail below:
1) Health 2.0 communities: There are a bunch of Health 2.0 communities following roughly the same engagement architecture for the members. There are influencers (doctors, health experts, coaches, sportpersons) writing blogs and news articles on various health related topics, support forums on various topics various the influencers are participating and providing expert advice. The community members can interact with the experts on their blogs and discuss and find help for their problems on the support forums. Some such popular communities are Web MD (see pic) and Aarp.org's health page. There are various other communities like Steady Health using news aggregation models similar to digg.com where members submit their health related news and others curate (rate/vote) the news articles to get the most popular news on the homepage. In India similar health 2.0 communities like Bolohealth are gaining interest. Similarly Quaker oats too has health related discussion forum on its Good morning heart community.
Apart from these independent health and wellness communities, there are some hospitals powering such communities too. Mayoclinc for example supports blogs and stories from patients, relatives, friends and staff of Mayo hospital at sharing.mayoclinic.org
2) Health Applications: There are many interesting health applications on the social web. One such application is Patients like me where you can enter various communities, feed your personal health data and find patients like you and get relevant help. Another interesting health application is by Gold's gym (see pic) which is running of facebook. Here the members can set their personal health goals ( like losing weight etc.), find people like them, recruit supporters and post their progress. Other members can provide support and comment on their progress. In India saffola ( an Indian edible oil company) is currently running a health application where people can set up goals for better living, find people like them and get health tips.
3) Online tactical programs: These include short user generated contests or advocacy programs run on the social web. An example of such a user generated contest to promote health was run by Gimme20 health community where participants were asked to submit their fitness stories in form of pictures, text or videos to win prizes. Mayoclinic Hospital runs an advocacy program where the patients can submit stories about their experiences with mayo clinic. Similarly another hospital chain Porter Adventis Hospital allows members to start free 'carepage' which are personalized web pages by/to patients and their families /friends to provide emotional and moral support.
Dec 4, 2009
How-to run an advocacy program on social web
Background: Advocacy programs provide a win-win situation for any brand or product on social web. On one hand it lets you recognize that set of evangelists who would be ready to promote your brand/product free of cost and on the other hand it leads effective promotion of your offerings to your consumers. We at 20:20 Social have researched some of the most effective advocacy programs to seek out varous ways in which these advocacy programs on social web can be modeled.
Scope: In our research we have focussed ourselves in studying how advocacy programs can take consumers and visitors across different levels of Ladder of Engagement. The Ladder of Engagement involves identifying various levels at which the consumers ( or site visitors/partners/employees ) can be engaged. It begins with content consumption, then moves on to content curation ( rating, voting, commenting ) , content creation, collaboration and then subsequently to trial, purchase and finally to evangelizing and recommendation( hereby mentioned as advocacy) to others.
Our research on some of the most popular Advocacy programs shows that advocacy can be used to transition consumers across the following levels:
1) Advocacy to content consumption and curation
2) Advocacy leading to content consumption, curation and even creation
3) Advocacy leading to product trial and purchase
4) Advocacy leading to content collaboration
Advocacy to content consumption and curation:
One of the most effective strategies of modelling an Advocacy program on social web is to find a bunch of evangelists who appreciate your brand/product and are ready to write good about them. These evangelists can be popular bloggers or influencers having a lot of connections on social web. A good example of such a program is Microsoft MVP ( most valued professional ) program where the company recognizes talented influencers in the field who write about the businesses Microsoft is related to. Another case where influencial bloggers were leveraged for brand advocacy was in the marketing campaign of Chrystler's Dodge Grand Caravan where the company loaned the car to influential mom bloggers for a week for trial run, which triggerred a lot of conversation in the blogospere. Similarly Redwood Creak ( An Ameircan wine making company ) has created a community platform around passion for outdoor adventures and recognizes wine evangelists known as ‘The Trailblazers’ as their official brand ambassadors who talk about wines and adventures on the company blogs and forums. Sometime influencers need not be popular and advocacy can be leveraged from consumers who have a strong social network. Something similar was done by MTV in its 'Elite Influencer Network Contest' where members were asked to promote their obsession for the MTV culture on their blogs, websites, social networks like Facebook, YouTube and through this MTV tried to find out the most influential individuals on social web. These contest winners will now participate in further upcoming events.
Advocacy leading to content consumption, curation and even creation
Advocacy programs can even be modelled to take consumers upto creation level on the ladder of engagement, which can be used to find your next set of evangelists. A good example of such a tactic is HP 31 days of Dragon contest which is a user generated contest lanched by the company for the promotion of its HP HDX dragon notebook. The company found 31 popular blogger evangelists/ websites who created their own User Generated Contests on their personal webpages. Thus the task of planning, designing and promoting the contest was taken up by the participating evangelist websites and involved taking the consumers across various engagement levels. Another example is walmart's eleven moms community which has the popular mom bloggers blogging about money saving ways ( which is core to the brand value itself ) and the consumers interacting with them and sharing their own money saving tips etc.
Advocacy leading to product trial and purchase
Many of the cases we researched showed brands leveraging consumer and evangelist advocacy for product trial and purchase. The Indian gaming website zapak.com uses a facebook application to give the users an option to recommend the game they are playing to their freinds on facebook and also embed it in your personal webpage. Similarly the cleaning products company 'Method' launched a campaign called 'people against dirty' which aimed at finding product appreciators who were ready to share their experience of the brand with others.
Advocacy leading to content collaboration
Now the reason I took up this point last is because I am still not sure about this, but product help communities like that of Intuit can qualify as advocacy programs. This is because if somebody is ready to help you out with a solution on a product help community then that means a) he has already tried the product b) He finds the product interesting enough to make him participate on the community c) if in the future any other problem crops up then there would surely be more people like him to help you out with that product. If such a thing qualifies as advocacy then product help programs can be instrumental in collaborating efforts around a particular problem.
What's happening in social media on climate change
Background
I follow Indian Express and almost everyday when I pick up the morning daily I see something being written on Copenhagen 2009 summit. Then there was the Blog Action day on Oct 15, 2009 when thousands of bloggers wrote about climate change the same day. Hence no prizes for guessing but a lot is happening over environment in social and traditional media. Therefore I thought it would be interesting to see how specifically social media is helping us make our planet a greener place to live.
Scope
Honestly social web is seeing a lot of activities on climate change and a greener planet. There are a bunch of facebook apps, many websites and applications on organizing events and creating petitions, online communities targeting environment and wild life etc but I would specifically like to focus on social applications targeting aggregation of environment related news and influencer platforms. The reason for the preference is that some of the most popular efforts in social media for environment have gone in these two directions.
News Aggregation
Various websites are using different models for aggregating environemnt news. The most popular of them is using the digg.com model for aggregating news. Users bookmark the environement related news they like and others curate/vote for their favorite news. The most popular news gets features on the homepage. Ngopost.org is using this kind of model in India. Then there is care2.com which is also the largest environment promoting online community and uses this kind of aggregation model. Care2 in fact does a lot more than this. It has a online petition site where people can start their own petitions and sign the petitions they support. Members can donate, read expert's views on healthy living etc.
The other popular model is importing stories and news feeds from top news websites and blogs. Greenedia.com for example, aggregates blogs, podcasts, videos by experts on green living, climate change, global warming and other topics who have been vetted by Greenedia. Experts can submit their credential for contributing to the platform or users can suggest popular blogs to be tracked by Greenedia. Alltop.com is another popular website which uses this model for many topics like food, photography, health etc and it has a separate platform for aggregating news on climate change.
The third news aggregation model is something that was adopted by change.org for Blog action day where they asked everybody to register and write on the climate change. Presently their homepage features the link to the most popular web platforms that participated in the event and also gives links to all the participating blogs.
Influencer Platform
Influencer platform are a great way to generate opinions, gain traffic and trigger word of mouth. Presently the platform getting most attention and traffic is change.org which has an influencer platform called 'Changemakers'. Users can nominate influencial people whom they want to see as the changemakers and others vote for the nominees. The selected changemakers will then be invited to write on the platform and their opinions will be pushed through change.org's network of partners, bloggers and activists.
The other types of influencer platforms are ecorazzy which aggragates news about what celebrities are doing for environemnt. With news like 'Brand Pitt to donate various hats to charity' and 'Roger Moore continues his battle with the Foie Grass Industry', this brings another way of getting influencer's say. Similarly Huffington Post has a environemnt news category called 'Green' which showcases celebrities taking about various environment related issues.
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