Psychographics: Not just another buzzword

Way back when I was in college, I actually majored in electronic media production. Don’t confuse this with journalism. I enjoy writing but I wasn’t made for being in front of the camera. I’m far too shy and, frankly, too nerdy for that. I loved being behind the camera and working hands on behind the scenes. There are many skills that must be learned on the road to becoming adept at media production. We covered the physical aspects of production such as running a programmable audio board, working a camera switcher, and spending long hours doing non-linear editing in dark editing labs surrounded by half empty bags of chips and stacks of DV tapes. However, as we all know, media is so much more than the physical aspects of making it happen. We also spent a lot of time talking about the social side of being involved in media production. How does mass media affect society? How do the way scripts for news programs influence opinions? How do the colors we use in graphics lure or repel viewers and users? All of these minute details are vitally important and go way beyond simple statistics about audiences. We’ve all heard of demographics: race, gender, age, etc. But the statistics that really matter are actually not demographics but psychographics.

Now, the term psychographics might seem like some mumbo jumbo word that a marketing executive made up to sound smart. In reality, it’s far from some buzzword someone came up with on their way to a client meeting. Demographics represent what people are. They are finite and don’t change. You are the age you are even if your fake ID says otherwise. Nothing will change that. Psychographics, however, represent what people think and how they act. What kind of car do they drive? Do they drink soda? Do they like horror films or dramatic films? Are they calm and calculating or do they fly by the seat of their pants? All of these things are keys to understanding how media in all its forms affects people. That’s why psychographics are so much more powerful than demographics. A demographic doesn’t tell you much. Say you have two 30 year olds, Jim and Joe, from similar income households and who both hold advanced degrees. All of those are demographics. What do we know about these two people? Not much when you think about it. We know we can make generalizations about them because they are in the same groups. However, do we really know what makes them tick? Do we know what they like? Do we know what kind of communication they’re most likely to respond to? We can take a guess, but in the end, we really don’t know.

Now, let’s look at these two people using psychographics. Jim likes coffee in the morning, does the majority of his shopping online, is addicted to his smartphone, and currently drives a hybrid car. Joe has oatmeal for breakfast every morning while he reads his local newspaper. He also does the majority of shopping online but doesn’t use a smartphone and doesn’t like social media sites. He drives to work in a car with average gas mileage. Now what do we know about these two gentlemen? We now know a lot about them. Not to mention, the information we know about them is much more valuable. Demographically, they are equals. Psychographically, they are quite different.

This is why understanding your audience in BOTH areas is so important. Demographics will give you a more narrow audience. With demographics you are at least hitting the group of people the might be interested in you in the ways they may communicate the most. Using demographics, you get a good idea of where you can dig deeper with your information gathering. With psychographics, you have a target audience. You know how they communicate. You know they prefer Twitter over Facebook. You know they are on their smartphones and would potentially respond to an app or a Facebook interaction more than an email. You know that they are eco/health conscious based on the fact that they tend to buy more organic and fair trade products. These are the ever changing things that can make or break your social media campaign.

When planning any kind of interaction, whether it’s B2B, B2C, or even in a community environment, you can’t forget the “social” part of social media planning. It goes without saying that by truly understanding your customers and users, you can better understand your business. You can understand where your business is going and what kinds of changes or interactions your customers will approve of and respond to. It’s not just about connecting with the right age group or the right gender. It’s about connecting with the people who truly have the potential to make a difference to your bottom line. That’s why psychographics will always be much more than another mumbo jumbo buzzword.

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Executive Use of Social Media – A Collection of Research (Part 2)

In part one of the presentation, we focused on looking at the research that has come out during 2011 about social media for B2B companies and how you can use that research to understand how to use social media in your organization to solve your pain points. In part two, we’re going to look at several companies who are doing just that. Through published case studies and an example from Impact Interactions itself, we’ll see how you can utilize social media in a manner which generates real economic value to your firm. So let’s get started.

As always, should you have any questions or would like to comment, please do so below in the comments section.

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Pro-Active Social Media: Taking Audience Engagement to the Next Level

While doing some research on how companies are incorporating social media into their communications, I came across two intriguing articles that really got me thinking about how far the social media industry could go and whether it should go there. The first article, When Customer Service is a Twitter Response, was actually written in response to the Hotels Magazine article, A Day in the Life of the Digitized Hotel(registration required to read). The Hotels Magazine article was a proposed day of interaction between a hotel and their guest completely driven by social media. First, the guest gets off the plane and complains on Twitter that the taxi line is long to which to hotel quickly responds asking if they would like the hotel to contact a car service for them. In a second exchange, the guest is sent a message on their hotel provided iPad recommending a massage because the guest had mentioned in a tweet that they were considering having one after a long day. Finally, when the guest returns home and mentions the hotel in their tweet the hotel again responds this time thanking the guest and giving them a code for a complimentary upgrade on their next stay.

The idea of taking social media to this level was fascinating even though the “big brother” aspect was admittedly a little creepy. The comments I read in the Economist article were mostly against this kind of heavy social media driven interaction. Many of the comments lamented the loss of human interaction in our society while others were somewhat unsettled by the thought of companies knowing that much about where they were and what they were doing. One commenter actually recounted how he stayed at a hotel only to find out that the hotel (and many others) had actually removed the in-room phones because they assumed that all their guests had cell phones and it was just costing them money to keep them in the rooms.

Taking it to the extreme that the fictional hotel did does smack of something from Minority Report but I’m still left asking myself why shouldn’t companies engage their audience (or event heir business partners) in this way just on a smaller scale? I don’t know that I lament the use of social media by companies to pro-actively engage their customers. If my options for communication are calling a company and being put on hold for an undetermined amount of time or making a request online which can instantly be dealt with, I know which one I’m picking.

I recently helped put together a presentation on examples of companies successfully implementing social media into their business plan. One of the stand outs was TATA Docomo, a telecom provider in India. Rather than operating like most corporations who expect the masses to come to them, TATA Docomo realized that the only way they were going to make inroads in the tough Indian telecom market was to go to the people. They now skillfully leverage both Twitter and Facebook as their main means of communicating with their customers for both customer service issues as well as informing them of new offerings. This has lead to huge customer loyalty despite the lack of a “physical” connection.

The generations that are coming of age now are doing it in a time of amazing digital advancements. I’m old enough to remember the days before the internet was a daily part of life but young enough to be in the generation of adults who are keen to absorb any new digital gadget that comes onto the market. Businesses need to realize this fact and capitalize on it. Don’t be afraid of using social media for these kinds of communications. Companies that start a Facebook page only to tell all the people who ask for help that they need to contact the customer service number are going to be sorely disappointed by their “community” building efforts. That’s because they aren’t engaging people in the places where they actually want to be engaged. The example of TATA Docomo is one that companies should look to as the way forward. TATA has engaged their communities consistently on the formats they know are the most popular. What did it get them? It took them from the bottom of the Indian telecom barrel to the top of the mountain. They were the 9th telecom company to enter the Indian market and faced competitors who had been there for years but in a very short time they were the top. Why? It worked because they embraced what social media could do for them.

Ignoring the changing communication landscape is the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. The world is changing around us, why not change with it? Our two part blog series on this very topic titled Executive Use of Social Media discusses the importance of this changing landscape and highlights the success several major companies have had in implementing social media into their business operations. Part One is already posted so be sure to check back and watch Part Two.

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Executive Use of Social Media – A Collection of Research (Part 1)

 

There’s been a shift in social media. Have you seen it? Business to business companies in industries beyond the traditional early adopters are utilizing social media more effectively today to build awareness, generate business, and nurture customers than as little as six months ago. Research that has been published over the past year shows that B2B social media is not only becoming more prevalent, but is also expected by customers, prospects, investors, and recruits.

In the video below, we’re going to interprete the relevant research from multiple sources in order to present a pretty compelling analysis for using social media in the business to business setting. In Part 2 of this topic, we’ll show you how several companies such as Cisco, Intuit, ShipServe, and Impact Interactions have used social media in the B2B setting to achieve real business results. We’ll also provide you with a measurement methodology which will help your team to quickly identify areas where action is necessary as well as where you are successful.

So in the words of the immortal Warner Wolf, let’s go to the video tape!

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Welcome to Social Media Week Chicago!

What are you doing this week?

If you are like many folks, you’ve got an interest in social media and perhaps are working for an organization helping with their social media. This week is all about you! Social Media weeks are one of the best opportunities for people who are passionate, curious, slightly interested, skeptical, and totally immersed in social media to network and learn more about how social media is being used successfully. There are many different events around Chicago this week. Even better, you can follow the Social Media Week activities around the globe thanks to Nokia.

To get started, all you have to do is start at the SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK web site and register.

We’re excited to meet with our friends in social media here in Chicago as well as to learn more from companies that are successful with their applications of social media.

We’ll be attending a couple of events after hours here in Chicago:

Chicago Icons – Wednesday, September 21 from 5:30 to 8:00 (Hosted by the Chicago Social Media Club)

Taste of Social Media Served up SMCChicago Style - Wednesday, September 21 from 3:00 to 4:30

If you are attending either of these events, we’d like to connect. Our president, Mike Rowland and Senior Director of Client Services, Lauren Bittner will be attending these functions. We look forward to meeting you!

 

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EMC Documentum Developer Community Takes Support to the Next Level

Today Impact Interactions follows Jerry Silver and the EMC Documentum Developer Community on a long, successful journey the site started in 2001 as a place for tools and code to its current state, the full-fledged flourishing community bursting at the seams with member-generated content that it is today. Impact Interactions’ interview with Jerry offers important insights into the best practices that have not only allowed the community to align with Documentum’s business goals but have also nurtured its progression beyond a basic online support space for its members into a valuable destination for them to enhance their reputations and expertise.  Learn from Jerry as he covers everything from how to maintain a steady, well-organized flow of content via the involvement of subject matter experts to tips on recognizing employees and non-employees in a way that results in their ongoing participation.

1) What is your role at EMC and with the community? How long have you been with EMC?

I work in product marketing, covering Documentum xCP, a family of products for Application Composition, Business Process Management and Case Management.  I’ve been here for about 3 ½ years.  Within our marketing group we’re organized by product and also by channel.  In my case, the product is Documentum xCP, and the channel is social media and community for xCP and related products.  Developers are a key constituency for my products, which has led me to the role of manager of the Documentum Developer Community.

2) What is the community’s purpose and when was its inception?

As the name suggests, the Documentum Developer Community is a destination for developers that build on the Documentum platform. We also provide lots of great content covering all technical aspects of the platform, such as administration, integration, and performance tuning.  The community is completely public and complements our support forums, which are currently only accessible to customers with a support contract. That said, we’re putting plans in place to make the support forums public and to integrate them into the community.  So the community’s primary purpose is to meet the needs of our members. It supports them in the use of our products, helps them build their knowledge, recognizes them for their expertise, and allows them to network and share information with other developers.

For the company, the community is a channel for increasing product satisfaction and engaging directly with our customers.  We learn a lot about how they’re using our products and the direction they  need us to take  to meet their business and technical needs.

The community grew organically from a home grown site that was launched in 2001 and primarily provided downloads of developer tools and sample code, to the site that you see today.  It’s part of the larger EMC Community Network (ECN) and runs on a commercial platform (Jive SBS).  Downloads are still important, but we now offer considerable interactive, member-generated content – wikis, blogs, discussions, videos, polls, etc.

3) Tell us about your membership. How has it changed over time? Who are they? Customers? Partners? Employees?

ECN has around 200,000 members, but that’s across all of EMC.  We don’t break the numbers out by community since all communities share a common user base.  I can tell you that our community alone gets more than 20,000 unique visitors every month, and many of those visitors make repeat visits during the month and beyond.  Because the community has evolved over 10 years it’s difficult to say how much it’s grown over that time.  Participation is roughly 20% by employees and 80% non-employees.  A large number of partners participate but we don’t break them out as a separate group.  We are looking at programs to more directly engage partners.

4) Give us some examples that demonstrate how the community has achieved its business  goals.

In terms of meeting member needs, the numbers speak for themselves.  The number of unique visitors is growing, as is the number of first time visitors.  We’re able to maintain that momentum through a steady stream of new content, in addition to  programs like developer contests that offer substantial prizes and generate a lot of interest and useful content in terms of contributed code and expertise. Our last major contest had a $50,000 prize pool.

A key business goal for our division is to encourage an approach to development based on modeling and composition, rather than writing raw code.  This approach is supported by our newest toolset, Documentum xCP, and is a transition for many of our members who are familiar with our legacy APIs and more traditional, code-intensive methods. This has therefore become a focus for the community, and we’ve seen interest shift towards the xCP and composition related information, which is now the most popular content on the site.  It includes a substantial and growing library of “xCelerators” – sample applications, pluggable components, design patterns, and best practice guides that extend our product set in highly useful ways.  So the community has also become an effective distribution channel for product extensions that is much more dynamic and agile than the traditional release cycle.

We’re also starting to track how the community contributes directly to revenue generation.  This is a challenging problem, but we’re figuring out how we can correlate community participation with sales wins and repeat business.

5) What are your greatest challenges and how have you addressed them?

Our community is very content rich, which is great but poses challenges in navigation  – just finding the right content.  One approach that works is to enlist subject matter experts to “curate” content. For example, we have created index pages that guide members to relevant information.  We’re also in the midst of a usability review and expect to revamp the user experience in the near future.  Unlike most marketing Web sites, which are highly architected from the outset, community content grows organically, as new industry topics become relevant and emerge .  While  “too much” content is a nice problem to have, it does mean that a periodic refresh of the community design and navigation is required to keep up with the constant flow of information and interaction communities contain.

Member engagement is another challenge that requires some investment.  For the past couple of years we’ve focused on internally produced content. Getting employees to  participate amidst other competing priorities can be difficult.  It requires persistence and constant evangelism.   What works well is to find employees that are inherently motivated to contribute, and to recognize and reward their participation to create incentives for others to follow.  The reward doesn’t have to be monetary. It seems that just seeing your product or latest blog post featured in the community can be reward enough. We’ve even seen team members compete for who gets the most page views in a month.  We’ve recently had some success with a leader board that tracks the most popular content and the most prolific contributors for a particular segment of the community.  That seems to be working. I’m starting to be approached by more groups that want a presence in the community.

Now that we have an active core of internal contributors we need to encourage more non-employee-generated content, beyond discussions.  For that, we’re looking at introducing reward and recognition programs that will identify community MVPs and provide incentives for increased participation.  I believe that recognizing a member’s expertise and contributions to the community is the best incentive, but sometimes you also have to help things along with the occasional iPad giveaway.

6) What are three best practices that you’ve taken away from this community?

We’ve recently become more consistent about tracking metrics, and I regret that we didn’t do this sooner.  But don’t just track metrics for their own sake.  Make sure you’re measuring meaningful activity, and that the metrics lead to actionable results.  For example, we started tracking the top searches.  These indicate members’ interests, which helps with content planning, but also tells us what they’re having trouble finding in the community.  That prompts us to use curation techniques like index pages to help them discover and browse to content instead of searching for it.  Metrics have also helped us sell the value of the community to senior management, who are more willing to invest in community programs if they can see a measurable impact on revenue or customer satisfaction.

A continuous flow of new content is important, but equally important is the organization of that content.  Many community managers understand the role of moderation, but don’t realize that curation is just as important.  Moderation is mostly about ensuring that community content is appropriate and that responses to questions are given when needed, but curation is about making content easy to find and keeping it up to date. Note too, that these are different roles that require different skill sets.  A non-technical community manager can handle moderation tasks, but subject matter experts who understand the content and the members’ needs are needed to curate.

Finally, recognize that B2B communities differ from B2C social networks, and have a distinct set of challenges and approaches.  In a B2B community, the company is much more welcome as an active participant, and in fact is expected to play an active role.  B2B customers want to engage with their vendors and get to know the personalities behind the products, and that personal connection can be a powerful tool for winning and sustaining customer loyalty.

7) Is there anything we may have missed that would give the world a great example of how your community is benefiting EMC?

Many vendors host a community to answer post-sales support questions and think they’re done.  That’s a necessary starting point, but it isn’t really a community until it becomes an integral part of the members’ professional lives.  I think our community has evolved well past its support roots to become a valuable destination for our members to enhance their reputations and expertise.  And it’s proving to be an effective channel that engages customers at all stages of the “buy cycle” – pre- and post- sales – which brings real value to our business.

Jerry Silver has over 25 years of IT development and marketing experience, specializing in content management, collaboration, application development, Web technologies, BPM, and social media. Jerry spent 15 years at Oracle in a variety of technical roles, most recently as Principal Product Manager of Oracle Application Server Portal. He also served as Director of Product Strategy with content management vendor NCompass Labs, now part of Microsoft, and was Director of Product Management for XMetaL, a leading XML authoring tool. Jerry is currently Senior Product Marketing Manager for the EMC Documentum xCP Platform, and is also responsible for the Documentum and xCP Developer Communities.

Blog: https://community.emc.com/blogs/ecmteam
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JerrySilver
LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/jerrysilver

- Lauren Bittner is Senior Director of Client Services at Impact Interactions and has 10 years of experience with helping companies align their social media efforts with their business goals.

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Management Efficiency – Using Dashboards for Executive Reporting



HI to all the readers of the Impact Interactions blog! My name is Robert Hu and I work at Impact Interactions as a manager of client services and I will be blogging about my experiences with how we manage social media and reporting.

We have been using tool called Xcelsius for almost 2 years now and it has worked wonders for all of our clients. No more 50 slide decks which no one ever read. With Xcelsius, we can now put all those charts, graphs, and other visuals that we had to repeat in the PowerPoint deck for each category into one simple visual which the user can filter to see what they are looking for. This not only saves so much time but also gives a more coherent story about what is going on with the social media strategy. Instead of putting 15 slides of the same line graph for each region, we can have just one graph the changes depending on which region the user selects.

Another benefit of a dashboard is that it can display data from multiple sources. As shown above from our dashboard, the data from traffic, behavior, value, and listening are all congregated into one simple view. This means that if you wanted to view the number of Twitter followers for this quarter you would click on the traffic tab. You can then go to the behavior tab and analyze how many of these followers are retweeting your content and finish by calculating the worth for all these tweets, followers, and retweets in the value tab. This process does not just apply to one social media tool, all of your social media offerings can be displayed in the dashboard which allows you a easy way to compare the results of each tool.

So you might be asking with all of these tools being displayed at once how do I compare the ones i want? The great thing about a dashboard is that you can filter out data that is important to you, therefore one dashboard can be distributed to multiple levels of management. The first screenshot shows a typical graph in a PowerPoint presentation, there are so many lines that it becomes confusing which competitor is doing better. But with the filters in a dashboard you can easily display only the competitors that you want to compare your company with which makes visualization of the data much easier.

Simplistic, versatile, and aesthetically pleasing, dashboards are the future of reporting and offer an enhanced way to view your data and make decisions from all your metrics.

Click here (flash required) and see for yourself on how a social media dashboard can look like and please let me know your thoughts on your own reporting experiences.

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Why Blogs Work in B2B – Featured B2B Magazine Article

I was recently interviewed by Jon Vanzile for an article he wrote for B2B Magazine (6/6/11) titled “Is Blogging Over?” along with our client, Jeanette Gibson of Cisco. The article is in response to a New York Times article in February claiming that blogs are losing their marketing power, especially with younger audiences due to the growth in Twitter and Facebook. When we spoke about this, I told Jon that this isn’t the case from our experience in the B2B world. In fact, blogs are a cornerstone for B2B marketers (or should be) who are looking to develop stronger relationships with their customers, prospects, and stakeholders. Here is my quote from the article about why blogs work for B2B marketers:

“When you look at the B2B market, what’s necessary is thought leadership, and you cannot get thought leadership in 140 characters or a Facebook post.”

Think about this for a moment.

We counsel our clients that the main difference between B2B social media and B2C social media is the needs of the audience and the buying cycle timing. For B2C, social media is about building awareness and then trial. B2B is much more complex, it is about building awareness then relationships with the audience. Why? Because in general, the sales cycle for B2B is longer than B2C so more effort and information is necessary to help your prospect move to become a customer.

Blogs can play a big role in this relationship building process by highlighting your company’s thought leadership in the industry. Companies want to buy from companies that will be leading the industry and can demonstrate staying power. By providing executive views of the world to your audience, you help them to understand that your company is a leader and will be there in the long term to help your customers.

Can Twitter or Facebook do the same? No, they cannot. Here is a better way to use these tools in your B2B marketing.

We work with our clients to use B2B social media tools like Twitter, Facebook (yes, it does work in B2B), LinkedIn Groups, and YouTube in their online marketing mix. But we recommend a stronger process of using these tools as a complimentary set of tactical processes that support business objectives. We do that through our “Beacon Strategy.”

Just as a lighthouse helps ships to find safe harbors, the correct use of social media tools can help your audience find the best information you can provide quickly and efficiently on their time. Social media in a B2B setting works best when it works together with blogs and compelling content to educate and help audiences to learn more about your products, services, view of the industry, and support issues. By pointing your social media content on third party sites such as Twitter or LinkedIn Groups back to your controlled website, you have the advantage of measurement while your audience has the advantage of learning more. B2B social media requires measurement. Friends, followers, group members, etc. don’t mean anything until they are engaged in a conversation or contact process with your firm. Why? Because you cannot measure anything of real economic value until the person completes an action. Those actions should take place in your harbor, not somewhere in the vast ocean that is the internet.

Getting back to the article, B2B blogs when clearly written with compelling content are one of the best destinations in your safe harbor for people to learn about your company. In a project we did with SAP back in 2004 and 2005, we saw that one of the best indicators of whether a company was moving towards purchase was their reading of the SAP Executive Blog Series. This was a series of blogs by SAP Board Members and top executives at the time (people like Hasso Plattner, Shai Aggasi, Leo Apotheker, etc.). Why? Simple. Before a company spends thousands of dollars on your products, their executive team wants to know if you are aligned with their interests and if your company is truly customer focused. Blogs help to show this to your audience.

So, are blogs dead? For B2B marketers looking to use relationship marketing, the answer is a resounding NO!

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How SAP Partners Are Using Video to Accelerate Their Demand Generation

As part of SAP’s Best Performance Challenge 2011, competing partner teams in EMEA are tasked with developing videos to help them begin to use social media in their marketing efforts for demand generation and lead nurturing. In the our Business Catalyst Series blog posts, I wrote about how video is quickly establishing itself as a must have for business to business marketers globally. In this post, I’m going to drill down a bit into how the teams currently ranked at the top of the Challenge are using their videos.

The Elevator Pitch – Your Introduction to the Market

Traditionally, many people view the Elevator Pitch in terms from the late 1990s when management consultants told their clients to be ready to explain their company and its strengths in less than two minutes. While this was adopted at the time primarily by new stage companies looking for investments from venture capital companies, the use of elevator pitches has evolved tremendously over the past several years.

As more and more potential customer staff members search the internet for information (one of the top reasons B2B staff use the internet), your firm must not only be found but able to tell its story quickly. That’s what the elevator pitch does so well.  The key concept behind the elevator pitch for established companies using video for contact generation is that the videos reach people who you don’t know who may be looking for your solution or researching it for a decision maker in their company.

So let’s look at an example of a good elevator pitches from a member of the Best Performance Circle, SPIN Consulting of Italy.

You’ll notice immediately that this video elevator pitches is much less formal than you might expect. This video works well because it acts as an introduction, not a sales pitch. The style is conversational and inviting. But what of the results? Well so far, SPIN’s video has received close to 800 views. The majority of SPIN’s views have come from  viewers who visited the SPIN website, which is why you need to embed these videos into your site. Each of these views are an opportunity to introduce your firm to a potential customer.

Customer Success Stories

In business, recommendations and references are often used to help close a deal. What if you could change the timing to demonstrate your expertise and move ahead of your competition, would you make that change in your process? That’s exactly what good, strongly focused customer success story videos do for companies. It’s a tactic that has worked remarkably well for big global companies and for small businesses focused on a single market. Companies like SAP, Cisco, HP, IBM, Cap Gemini, Accenture, Atos Origin, and others have been using customer success whitepapers and videos to help build a faster relationship with their contacts and prospects for years.

In the Best Performance Challenge 2011, we’ve seen several examples of customer success videos. One of the better examples is from DSCallards Ltd, a partner selling Business Objects solutions in the UK. The video on SAP Crystal Reports Server is short, clear, and provides the opportunity for the customer to tell the story. That is the essence of the customer support video.

To date, this video has over 2,300 views since it was created in November of 2010. More importantly, the video has influenced visitors’ views of how the software can positively impact the business. This can be seen by reading the comments on the video on YouTube:

• Great video, good to see user experiences

Dawnlco 3 months ago

• Good video – shows how accurate reporting can impact different areas of the business. Nice to hear positive user experience from the users themselves.

DilbertDaveCarson 3 months ago

• Good to see real, like sized, customer stories, definitely helping us make our mind up

R00ddle 3 months ago

• I’ve been working on a large corporate Business Objects project and had lost sight of how MI reporting can be critical to the day-to-day running of a real life SME. It was great to see dashboard reports actually being used in an operational environment rather than being presented to management as a snapshot tool at a board meeting. Well done to the team for an excellent presentation of how the real world can see the benefits of information that they already had but didn’t know how to use.

wm419142a 3 months ago

• Very illustrative and informative video. Clear to see the business benefits to be derived from such a solution.

lizm2508 3 months ago

• Excellent video!. Really helpfull. We’re considering a similar solution in our organisation, and would like to discuss how we might use Crystal instead.

Please contact me!

businessmanup 3 months ago

• Really useful video. This will help us to move forward with our own reporting project. thanks!

zenagee 3 months ago

• Great to see real customers benefiting from meaningful dashboard reporting & positively impacting their strategy

greenrhino77 3 months ago

Look at the comments closely. See the comment asking for someone to contact the viewer? This is why allowing visitors to view video on their time is so important. As business people continue to start their search for products and solutions online using search tools like Google, Yandex, Baidu, and others, they will find your videos and web site. By combining the power of video into your web site, you present an opportunity to engage and learn more by starting the relationship early and demonstrating the power of your solution long before your competition.

One Last Point About Online Video for Business

In the Best Performance Challenge 2011, some of the feedback and questions from our competitor teams revolved around video styles and languages. Let’s look at one last research chart to answer the question of style:

In the viewers’ minds, it doesn’t really make a difference if the video is a studio produced gem or a company created offering. What does matter is that you offer video.

On languages, there is no set rule other than to meet the needs of your audience. If you are working in several markets which have different languages, you might want to consider providing videos in each distinct language. If you are focused on a single market, it is probably a better idea to utilize the local language. Remember, audience focus is the key, meet their needs and you’ll be successful.

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The Social Media Dilemma

Last week several members of the our team attended the iStrategy Conference in San Francisco. Along with our clients Cisco, SAP, and NetApp, I hosted a panel discussion on B2B Social Media: Moving Beyond the Hype. (You can get the download of the presentation slides here.)

As is often the case with conferences, the best part is usually the networking that we do at lunch, cocktail hours, and late night at the hotel bar. What I found fascinating about this particular conference and its attendees was the dilemma that many are in relating to social media. Whether business to consumer or business to business, the same issues continued to come up in conversation. That is “how can we manage so many sites and messages and still deliver results?”

Of course, we’re an outsourced provider of social media and online community services so it would have been easy to say “Hire us!” But I really wanted to uncover the underlying reasons for the issue and why it was causing so much angst amongst the attendees. In short, there were four main reasons:

1. Budgets for social media remain very limited at larger organizations who are just getting started. That translates to minimal staff to get the program up and running.
2. Staffing models are not clear. Too often there is a single person or a team of 3 to 6 members running the entire social media program with responsibilities split between full time and part time activities.
3. There remains far too much focus on which tool to use versus the appropriate content for the audience. Choosing a tool is easier than gaining commitment for content generation and teams are falling into the “if you build it, they will come” type of thinking because there isn’t a clear social content strategy for their firm.
4. When it comes to measurement, social media practioners remain focused on traffic at the expense of value. I heard a lot of questions about “growing” followers and fans but hardly any about gaining business value from using social media tools. (In fact, when our client NetApp discussed how they found value (hundreds of millions of dollars of sales), not a single person tweeted about it. When our client Cisco discussed how they believe 90% of internet traffic will be video in the coming years, everyone tweeted about it. Think about it, which is actually more important to resolving your social media dilemma?)

So where does this all lead? Well, it reminds me of the early online community period back in 2000 or so. Companies wanted to interact with their customers and inherently understood that this was a good thing to do. But they didn’t know for sure how to go about it. In many cases, companies made community management 10% of ten people’s responsibilities to get to the 100% effort and focus. Back then that didn’t work, and from the comments of the folks I spoke with last week it’s not working now either.

What we’ve learned is that social media takes a team with multiple roles to achieve success. From an executive champion who can get budget and support for the project to facilitators who know how to properly interact with the social audience, there needs to be a team to achieve success. To only have a social media manager who is responsible for using all the tools, training/monitoring internal users, scambling for useful content, measuring success, and recording best practices is never going to work in most cases. Not everyone is a strategic thinker, nor is everyone able to tie back their activities to business objectives (or even define them), nor is everyone able to interact with online audiences appropriately.

Yet too often, that is what we are asking our social media managers to take on 24/7. It is a dilemma.  In our experience, the best way for social media teams or managers to solve this dilemma is by achieving and sharing relevant customer social wins with their stakeholders. These social wins can be qualtitative (commentary that shows intent or influence) or the full quantitative (number of new registrations added to the marketing database for example). Wins gain momentum internally, uncertain results help projects remain as second class cool things which don’t really add to the business. Which can you deliver to help you solve the dilemma and get what you need to be successful?

I’d love to hear how you are solving the dilemma at your firm. If you have questions, post them and we’ll help…

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