Tag Archives: working three

Progressing with social media: owning the data

by ON
Reply

Are you using social media to push your company’s message, gain a thought leadership position or generate new product ideas? If the answer is yes then thats great – consider yourself ahead of the curve. But if you are now wondering how to measure the effectiveness of your activity or if you have spotted that a lot of information is slipping through the cracks then it may be time to be rethinking your strategy.

Know what you want

The first priority is to define a goal. That goal may be as simple as generate new leads – or you may want to manage your brand reputation, segment your marketplace to communicate with them more effectively, or generate long term customer loyalty by forming an effective customer service channel. Think carefully about what stage your business is at and what goal is most important. Remember effectively utilising social media takes time so it is not possible to do everything. Focus on one goal and then set a realistic timeframe.

Know your tools

Once you have defined your goal you need to measure what is happening. Before meaningful KPIs can be set it helps to know how to define the metrics. The way to do this is understand the tools that do the measuring. They can be categorised into three groups.

  • Web analytics – One of the most important tools you, or your supplier, will need to utilise is web analytics. Google analytics is an extremely good free option but there are many others depending on what it is you are actually trying to do. Make sure you do your research and know what option is right for you.

  • Social media monitoring – There are a number of ways to monitor what is happening in the social media space. There are some free tools available but some of these lack precision as the technology is not consistently invested in or not enough effort is put into collecting the data. A well developed tool is worth the investment. Good monitoring tools can give you extremely detailed information: what people are saying about your brand, who is saying it, details of the demographics of your social media following and even what people are saying about your competition. The right data allows you to snare the low hanging fruit.

  • Data mining tools – To dig deeper into data it may be necessary to employ more advanced tools. You may need text mining to get an overview of what words or themes seem to be surrounding your brand or geo-locating comments to identify potential new markets may be essential.

Good choices require your knowing what type of data is available and how to best get your hands on it.

Choose your platforms

There are thousands of social media platforms operating in the market place. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are three of the best known ones but there are many many others. These social media platforms are brands designed, like any other, to meet a specific need. What matters then is finding out what your customer needs are, then choosing the platforms that fit them best.

It is also well worth remembering that social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn make their money through targeted advertising. This means that their most valuable asset is the users data – what they like, who they talk to, what stage they are at in life and so on. While this may make your advertising on these platforms cost effective it may also mean that you have limited access to the raw data. 

If your market is big enough you may need to set up your own social network so you can own the data and use it to define new products, segment your market and really understand what people are talking about. There are many ways to approach this, from blogs and forums to fully fledged social platforms with user profiles and interest groups. Dont get caught up in the technology, its your customers needs that are important.

Get going

Of course you will need to define how KPIs are going to be set, who is going to be managing the communities and how your reports are presented. But knowing what data is available and how to read it is vitally important. In some cases just collecting the data and really understanding your customers may be a goal the is adequate enough. 

Your customers are openly discussing their likes and dislikes, what they saw on TV and what they think of the news. There is also a good chance they are talking about you. If you want to get on the front foot and respond to that then get moving – start to collect data and make decisions based on what it is telling you. 

If knowledge is power then data is its generator.

Why social media has gone mainstream

by ON
Reply

The hype around social media just keeps getting louder. Every week a new campaign and a new platform is released. So why has social media gone mainstream?

Online networks, including social ones, evolve and take on a life of their own. In the real world, for multi-celled organisms to exist a number of cells must work together to make something bigger. When individual cellular components work together multi-celled organisms evolve and these can evolve into complex life forms over time. A branch of these complex life-forms have evolved and eventually became humans. Human civilisation has in turn evolved to where we are now because we have mastered the art of continually grouping together into teams, tribes, cities and nation-states to create something that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Networking and collaboration is fundamental to what it means to be human. In our bodies are atoms working together to create cells and cells working together to create our organs. In our brains neurones work together to create our thoughts, feelings and language. In your company people are working together – to create something bigger and more exciting than the sum of its parts.

We can take this thinking and look at the development of the personal computer and see a very similar pattern emerging…

Before anyone had a computer or a smartphone, everything was a social event. Meetings were face-to-face, or over the phone at least, and communication in general was human-to-human based.

In the last 30 years things changed. Initially the personal computer made everything a private and secluded affair. Games, for example, could be played without the help of another human and work could happen sitting in front of a screen. The advent of the early internet showed how powerful many computers networked together could be, but from a personal perspective computing was an insular activity. 

The first social networks, forums and blogs worked with a huge number of anonymous users. While this was a step forward in person-to-person networking, the anonymity allowed people to behave in ways that they would never dream of in real life. This left many of these networks to be the domain of the very early adopters and special interest groups. The rules that govern effective social networks were yet to be developed.

What has happened recently, particularly with Facebook, is that is has become far easier to transport your real identity around the web. This means that increasingly people are joining new social networks with their real identity: their real name; their place of work; and other details that define them as a person in a movement – sometimes referred to as the Open Web. Naturally this makes people think more carefully about what they say and how they behave on social networks – because they own their comments the common rules of society come into play. When a persons reputation is attached to what they say it makes them think carefully about what that comment might mean to others. 

Of course people can still misbehave in social networks, like they can in real world networks, but the networks are now being governed by majority rule so this behaviour is quickly dealt with. This makes cooperation and collaboration much easier and because of this the barriers to entry are dropping at an astronomical rate. Companies can now start to feel more secure in setting up their own networks knowing that majority of users will join to get value out of the information that is provided and quickly deal with other users who lessen the overall value of that network.

So when thinking about why social media has become so widely adopted and pondering about where it is going avoid getting distracted by in the leaps in technology. These are important, of course, but it is the behaviour of the network and the developments of new social norms that are really driving the progress. Every individual in this massive network is doing what he or she is pre-programmed to do – communicate, collaborate and continue the march of our civilisations evolution.

The future of the social web will see openness and ownership of communication adopted on a much greater scale as the tools to do so become more wide spread and easier to adopt. The potential economic benefits of social media will force this to happen. Companies can and will want to access to increasingly granular data about their stakeholders – employees, supporters and consumers. Knowing which individuals are saying what, how they are behaving and who is influencing them is critical and valuable information. 

When Facebook releases its new developer tools in April this year there will be an even bigger push towards the open web – something that many market analysts are predicting will make the eventual float of Facebook bigger than that of Googles initial public offering.

The rules governing online social networks are beginning to mature. Unsurprisingly they closely reflect those that exist in offline world.

The New SME

by ON
Reply

There is a new breed of small business on the boil and it is about to shine.

One of the developments to emerge from the recent financial crisis is the birth of a new breed of SME. They are niche companies born out of a need to fill a void in an increasingly small global market. They work in a market of ever finer market segments that mass marketing and generic products cant cater to.

Affordable ecommerce solutions, coupled with cheap outsourced manufacturing or product sourcing, are connecting with market segments identified through social media – and providing them the products and services that suit them. Social media is allowing consumers to congregate and be heard in a way that is revolutionary.

Australia is in a unique position to be launching pad for many of these new SMEs. It has come through the GFC better than any other developed country. That means as markets are still growing and funding is readily available and the Federal Government spending on the new broadband infrastructure will only make it easier for these new business to get off the ground. The cost of setting up and operating a business drops dramatically with online software services that provide accounting, project management, and a myriad of other management and business tools.

This is not something to be feared. These new businesses are not stealing market share. They are creating new market opportunities. And they need help – maybe from you.

There is a fundamental change coming to our economy and its going to be driven by the little guy – and everyone will want a piece of the action.

Developing your growth strategy

by ON
Reply

As the southern hemisphere heads into summer and people flock to the beach it is tempting to think that the GFC was a just bump in the road. In some ways it was – at least for Australia. We seemed to have ducked the worst of the GFC. But that perception ignores the major changes that the GFC has produced. One of these changes concerns the way brands discover and talk to their markets. The GFC accelerated the rise of social networking and decline in popularity of mass media to produce a tectonic shift. This shift will have far reaching implications.

This new environment has enabled a quite different approach to growing markets and winning market share. Technology has both facilitated the fracture of markets into special interest groups and provided the wherewithal to identify and communicate with these groups – in real time. Its time to get granular!

Stop guessing and start knowing

Not many companies have been able to turn the massive amounts of data that social networks create into profit. This is because they lack the ability or simply do not have the courage to make the steps necessary. In fact, the vast majority of companies have not managed to develop a management structure and marketing strategy that is in line with the fracturing of the market place they play in. Many are still guessing their way through mass media insights and market research based on small sample sizes extrapolated out to the entire population.

This will change very quickly in the coming months. As Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, recently stated in the McKinsey Quarterly, I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s?.

Companies develop far better growth strategies if they choose to focus on granular information – in both identifying and attacking new market segments and in cutting costs.

The concept in practice

The Harvard Business Review recently explored the ramifications of exploring granular data. In that article they discussed how Amazon leverages its virtual and low cost supply chain to efficiently indulge the tastes of narrow customer segments, literally down to the individual buyer, at very low marginal cost.

The article went on to discuss how the strongest contribution to performance comes, not necessarily from focusing on acquiring overall market share, but identifying and investing in markets with the most vitality. The example they illustrated was that of a construction and services business face near zero growth. The company used granular data to divide its world into geographic, customer and product segments. They quickly discovered that they had very weak market share in the fastest growing market spaces revealing over $10 billion in potential that could be tapped into.

Steps to take

So here is what you need to do:

  • Accept that a fundamental change in communication is taking place and be prepared to adapt
  • Allocate budget towards methods and technologies that can gather relevant data
  • Use this data to identify new market opportunities, the strongest growth areas will be apparent quickly
  • Invest in these new segments and be prepared to ditch low growth market segments, and
  • Develop a method for managing the multiple market segments you may now be playing in

Lifes a beach

In the good times its easy to be complacent as customers come to you easily – like all of those people flocking to the beach this summer. But in the wintry phase the world economy is currently going through understanding the needs and wants of the micro-markets you can have most influence over is a winning strategy – its is easy to scale up when things begin to warm back up.

Nows the time to get out your microscope and look carefully at the grains of data you have available to you.

How the economic downturn will mature internet marketing

by ON
Reply

The world economy has been in state of disarray. As companies fail we can take some small comfort in the fact that these types of events help markets evolve. So what is going to happen to marketing on the internet over the next few years?

Before we dive into that it is worth looking back to other major technological booms and their influence on the marketplace. Electricity and rail were both boom industries when they first hit. They were new and exciting and everybody wanted to get in on the action. In both of these industries there was an initial burst of investment and some people got very rich very quickly. Then the bubble burst and many of the companies that had set up to take advantage of these new technologies, yet had unsustainable models, failed. Standardisation, centralisation and ubiquity followed.

The dot com crash, starting in the year 2000, had much the same effect on internet based business. This has caused the IT industry to mature over the last few years. The economic models are better and there has been a lot of effort devoted to standardisation.

The real difference between the internet based industry and other technological bubbles is that the internet is decentralised by definition. In the case of the dot com crash, the rest of the world’s economy was incredibly buoyant and was able to absorb the impact of that crash. What we are seeing now is that the stage of internet ubiquity is moving incredibly fast. It is most other industries that are failing now: banking, automotive, retail and traditional media, comprised of print, television and radio, are all suffering. These industries are going to have to evolve to survive. It is widely understood that the way the market was interacting with each of these categories was changing, due in large part to the way the market was using the internet. The current environment is only going to speed that process up. In many ways, banking, media, retail, automotive and many other industries were already in trouble. This recession was simply the straw that broke the camels back.

One thing that we do know is that we can’t tell what the world economy is going to look like at the end of this economic slump but it is going to be very, very different to what it looks like now; and the internet is going to be at the centre of everything. Going back to the topic of this article, how is this going to affect internet based marketing? Simple answer: massively.

Over the next few years far more transactions are going to be moving online. With the internet’s potential for marketing campaigns to go viral, most industries will have to start thinking about sales beyond their own geographic boarders. As a user’s activity can be tracked with far greater accuracy than most conventional media so the definition of what marketing is, and the whole advertising industry in general, will have to change as well.

There are still a lot of unknown factors about the future of internet marketing. What we do know is that all research suggests that the internet seems to following the famous Moore’s Law. By all estimates it will double in size about every five years. At this rate the web will surpass all other media in the very near future.

The future is unmapped, and to many the unknown is terrifying. To others it is the most exciting time to be alive.