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Making Sense Out of Social Business

Archive for Month December 2011

The Coming “Scale” Challenges for Social Business

December 21st | Posted by Keith Zoellner in Spredfast Blogs | 1 Comment

As my colleague Dan Doman discussed last week, social business is most certainly moving into a new phase of development. The simplest way to summarize this coming phase is that companies are “scaling up” their social operations.

But what does “scaling up” mean? We work every day with some of the largest companies, best known brands and leading edge agencies – all of which are expanding their investment in social. When we talk about scale with these companies, here are five of the recurring conversation points:

1. There is no single organizational model for social

While most companies have a standard organization structure in place (typically represented by the “org chart”), a single structure is not flexible enough to model the relationships within and across the teams that will manage multiple, independent social initiatives.   A scalable social media management platform must be elastic and support the definition and execution of multiple, independent social organizations that will vary in composition across business objectives, but will need to work in parallel with each other.  

Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group does a great job of describing the myriad of social organization permutations in detail in this article.

2. A rich, configurable user administration and access control is essential

With hundreds (and soon thousands) of users, the scalable social media management platform must have a distributed, hierarchically delegable user administration capability.  Administrators will exist within each business initiative, franchised property, or geographic location (depending on your social organization structure) and must be able to independently add new users or further sub-divide user administration responsibilities.

Once user administration responsibility has been assigned across the social organization structure, each administrator can now add employees and assign them the requisite permissions to access each desired social channel.  The permissions within a social media management system can include activities such as allowing certain users to create and approve content, publish to or moderate a specific social channel and define and execute custom reports that are then exported into other corporate repositories.

3. Today’s manual “conversation moderation” needs a smart overhaul

Today’s incoming social activity needs to be “sorted out” to determine what person or team in the organization might best be able to act upon the incoming Facebook comment, tweet, etc. The composition and granularity of your social channels will determine the level of sophistication needed for the “sorting out” process of incoming social activity. Choose to only have a few channels? You will spend a ton of time sorting the inbound traffic. Choose to have a social channel for every product, geography and function? You are still going to spend a lot of time routing questions and messages that come in on one channel, but are best answered by another channel.  Envision the HR team routing product complaints sent to their @Jobs Twitter account to the right group.  Today’s manual, human “sorting” of content must be replaced, or at the very least augmented, by smarter categorization and routing if conversations are going to be moderated at scale.

4. Publishing on social networks needs to move to a team game

Planned, outbound publishing of messages on social is moving from the domain of the individual to the domain of teams and groups. Social messages are increasingly part of long lasting campaigns, touch multiple platforms and have an end goal in mind. This shift brings a whole host of new capabilities from nice to have to essential – workflow across groups, a centralized content library to preserve brand consistency, a shared calendar that provides visibility to the complete campaign and an ability to evaluate the effectiveness of every message, as well as the aggregate impact of an overall campaign.   

5. Reporting and analytics need context built-in

While there are hundreds of other reports and analytics we might discuss, there are two key points for analytics and reporting necessary to execute at scale. First, the reporting and analytics views must be integrated and controlled within the overall social structure so that an organization can aggregate and view operational effectiveness across the different groups. Second, the social media management system must automatically record the business context (e.g., which campaign you are working on) across all social activity and not require employees across the globe to coordinate and tag all of this activity manually.  As we’ve learned from past product markets (e.g., document management), manual tagging of information within a corporation will not scale.   The integrity of this business context is paramount as this context is the key to rationalizing, understanding and measuring the overall effectiveness of our social activity.  

Each of these five areas is a challenge in itself. Taken together, it is clear that companies with significant social plans will need a powerful software platform to support them. That’s what my team gets up every day to build. We can’t wait for 2012.

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Spredfast and Dachis Group Team Up to Offer Action and Insights

December 20th | Posted by Brittany Edwards in Recent Spredfast News | No Comments

Spredfast, a leading social media management system provider, today announced a technology alliance with Dachis Group, the world’s leader in Social Business, to better address and solve the Social Business challenges many leading enterprises and agencies face today.

Business Time for Social in 2012

December 13th | Posted by Dan Doman in Spredfast Blogs | 1 Comment

It’s pretty clear that large brands and enterprises are approaching social from a much different angle than when Spredfast first started in 2008.  Wave #1, as we’ll call it, was all about the resident social ninja or a siloed team focused on basic, dare I say arbitrary, objectives.  The whole company may have had just a handful of Facebook pages and Twitter handles, perhaps a YouTube channel, and maybe even a Flickr account.  Managing the accounts was painful, but it could be done with a publishing aggregator, maybe a page management tool, a couple of spreadsheets, and an intern or two.

Somewhere along the way brands noticed that this social thing had promise.  The ninjas were answering customer questions, driving traffic to the website, providing product feedback, driving crowds to events, etc.  It didn’t scale particularly well – which started to become a real problem as customers increasingly opted for social as their primary communication channel. Soon enough everyone wanted their own social voice… corporate PR, customer care teams, product management, the CEO, and even sales were looking to join the party.  Forward thinking brands and agencies hired experts with fancy titles, bought basic software tools, and started a page/ handle/ account for anyone with a corporate email address.  And that’s where we are today….  Brands are ramping up investment in social, and they certainly see a future filled with potential.  But they are overwhelmed with the organizational, business objective, channel, and tactical complexities that are inherent in scaling social.

So, as we enter the New Year and large brands decide to ride wave #2 or just try to avoid getting crushed by it, here are a few predictions (and wishes) for 2012.

The major social networks will focus more attention on the developer ecosystem.  Admittedly this is just as much a wish as a prediction, but I firmly believe that the major four or five platforms are starting to realize that big brands don’t connect directly to their platforms anymore.  Almost every organization with a managed social presence is doing their work via third party software.  It’s not really a choice anymore, but rather a necessity as exponentially more employees, accounts, and initiatives make management nervous and make coordination and measurement top priorities.  What does this mean?  I anticipate the time between publicly released features/ functionality and API availability will shrink dramatically.  If the networks are focused on adoption, I hope they start thinking about product releases in terms of consumer features and business applications, simultaneously. The current lag is without a doubt hurting adoption of the latest features by businesses.

Buying decisions for social software products will centralize and budgets will continue to grow.  Our friends at Altimeter have been saying this for a while and it is officially happening.  If Q3 and Q4 serve as any indicator, organizations are beginning to think about social through more of an enterprise software lens.  Point solutions and tools built for small teams are not capable of enterprise level coordination and management, and larger companies have no use for 50 different disconnected instances with no central measurement.   These tools can make you a handful of beautiful Facebook pages, but they just can’t handle a marketing and customer care scenario that entails 1,000 internal contributors, 450 social accounts (across 6 platforms), 214 locations, and 3 languages.  If you are feeling this pain, don’t worry you aren’t alone… call me and we can talk.

Demand for services focusing on implementation and enablement will explode.  If the scenario above becomes more the rule than the exception, then it makes this point an obvious one.  Large organizations have been buying enterprise software for decades now and they know firsthand the risks associated with adoption, training, and implementation.  They fully realize that you don’t just turn these things on.  They also know that people have grown to love their duct-taped solution, so change isn’t always easy.  For their money, large companies expect that software providers have the people power to ensure a successful deployment.

Social engagement will transition from cheap impressions to more meaningful interactions.  Not surprisingly, the social web has followed an eerily similar evolution to web 1.0.  Unfortunately, the same one-off tactics used to drive traffic in web 1.0 also have been quite effective on the social web.  That’s why we see the modern version of dancing babies, sweepstakes, contests, and polls as an inexpensive way to gather “likes” and “followers”… as if that’s the goal.  We are all guilty of it. Admittedly, Spredfast offers tactical engagement applications to customers if they so desire.  That being said, I think this practice has a limited shelf life as a standalone tactic.  Think about it from the consumer’s perspective – are you more likely to be loyal to a brand that serves up a random poll every time you land on their Facebook page, or a brand that uses that space to answer product questions, troubleshoot, and foster a community around their products or services?  Similar to the way Google helped consumers locate relevant content in web 1.0, I believe the major social networks will continue to find ways to favor what they deem to be engaging content on the social web… and eventually these disconnected tactics won’t qualify as such.

In summary, 2012 is just around the corner and the time is NOW!  We expect brands and companies to push the edges of social business much further than any four predictions could encapsulate.  We look forward to working with you and good luck to all in the New Year!

Have your own 2012 social business predictions?  Share them with me on Twitter at @d_doman.

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The Accidental Customer Care Team

December 8th | Posted by Jim Rudden in Spredfast Blogs | 1 Comment

The more active your company is on social the more likely your customers will use social networks to ask your for help, register complaints (to put it nicely) and generally seek advice. Sounds great. That is what you want from social – engaged customers. Right? 

Except when you are not ready for it. That is when your social team (typically staffed by Marketing) becomes what we call “The Accidental Customer Care Team”. And daily fire drills ensue.

A perfect example of this phenomenon was discussed recently at the WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas. Time Warner Cable created a blog to give people better insight into the challenges of running a global network. It is, unabashedly, a corporate blog. And it tells interesting stories about employees, customers, technology and sometimes provides a platform for responding to crises. And it is really successful. So successful that customers started to ask Jeff Simmermon and his small team of collaborators in Digital Communications for help with service interruptions, cable box problems and other classic customer support/care questions. Because of that, Jeff and his team started to spend an increasing amount of their time helping triage and route support requests. Pretty quickly the Communications team in Manhattan reached out to the Care Team in Buffalo managed by Phil Blum to figure out how to route these issues. Over time, this worked into a really productive relationship with the growth of a care group focused on social channels (@twcablehelp). These two teams worked out their processes for routing issues, getting customers answers and tracking effectiveness. A happy story to be sure. And one that took 2 years to work out. 

One major learning to this story, is that if you find yourself on an Accidental Care Team, one way of accelerating your company’s learning curve and getting the proper help is to manage your inbound help requests efficiently while tracking the metrics that will help you make the case for help. Here are 5 basic tips for better management/tracking: 

1. Establish your response SLA. You need to set customer and internal expectations. When will you respond? Weekdays during business hours? 24×7 to service the “always on” customer? And how quickly will you respond? Some of our customers have established a 1-hour response time SLA. We have heard of companies managing to a 5 minute response time. Of course, you are trying to balance what is acceptable to customers with what you can deliver.

2. Map your response plan. What issues do you address on social? Which need to get routed to other care channels because of privacy or other considerations? When do you respond to inflammatory statements and how? You can’t just ignore trolls in the customer care world – you often need to turn them around. When you have 4-5 pages of workflow diagrams for a given product or brand, you probably have a good start. 

3. Get the help of a pro. Specifically, a customer care professional. There are many best practices from the traditional channels of the care world (email, phone, forums) that can be leveraged in social. Even if you cannot get dedicated help from the care team, getting insight from a care pro while you are defining your response SLA and response plan will save you from a lot of trial and error.

4. Recruit part-time expert help. If you find yourself on an Accidental Care Team, reach out to your company’s care group and see if you can get at least some part time assistance. Often, questions about specific products, geographic nuances or other detailed topics are where your Accidental team will spend a LOT of time trying to find answers. As part of your response plan above, it is a good idea to identify specific people at your company that can give you answers on your top brands/products/geographies. 

5. Commit to tracking your success in solving customer issues. There are a few basic metrics your Accidental Team must start tracking. These include Issue Open Rate, Close Rate, Backlog of Open Issues, Open Issues by Team Member, and Issue Categories. Any seasoned care team would track another 15 metrics, but this will be a good start. If there is any hope in getting help for your Accidental Care Team, it lies in showing how many issues are coming in on social week over week and what types of questions are being asked. Note that many social media management tools do not help you track most (any?) of these key metrics. Spredfast does (http://spredfast.com/2011/11/23/spredfast-product-enhancements-keep-customers-ahead-of-the-social-curve/), but we will go into that in detail another time. 

Though using social for care initiatives may seem like one more “to-do” item for your team, it is becoming clear that not only are customers enjoying using it for help, but it is also an incredibly cost effective way for companies to deliver customer care. One of our customers conducted a study showing that it is 6x cheaper to solve customer issues through social and public forums than through call centers. Some companies, like Nokia, already take a very proactive approach to managing customer care on social, and it’s becoming more evident that this is a growing trend that presents new opportunities for Care teams everywhere. 

If you are at a company planning a big investment in social communication, be sure customer care is involved up front. Otherwise, you’re signing up your Communications or Marketing team to become an Accidental (and often inefficient) Customer Care Team. And no one wants that.

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