Archive for September, 2009

Will the acquisition of Omniture by Adobe help individual customer engagement?

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

In the light of the announcement of Adobe acquiring Omniture, I thought it a good time to comment on the changes we are witnessing in the wider marketing landscape.

Alterian sees this announcement as a very positive acknowledgement of the fundamental shift from mass marketing to customer engagement – and one that will only heighten the coverage of this important transformation. It is also a strong indicator of the vision Alterian has been driving towards for some time (highlighted most recently by our acquisition of Techrigy).

The marketing landscape is converging, with the focus shifting to engagement through coordinating two-way communication and outbound marketing. The future of engaging experiences lies across all channels, content, platforms, and devices and marketers will require multi-channel analytics and execution in their technology platform.

As a result of these market developments, Alterian is also observing the emergence of the Customer Engagement Agency (also covered by Forrester) which combines strategy (and analytics), creative, and multi-channel execution into a holistic offering to their clients. Customer Engagement Agencies help marketers to leverage data to drive analytics, informing creative content, strategy and channel delivery. They also leverage technology to build efficient processes that allow their clients to collect data on their customers, analyse this data and then deliver a tailored campaign across a number of inbound and outbound channels.

Today’s acquisition shows a strong desire to enter the analytics side of marketing by Adobe, who want to make online content more engaging by integrating analytics into the content creation process. This is an important step.  However, it is Alterians view that what is critical is how to maximise the value of an individual’s relationship with an organisation regardless of channel or stage in the customer lifecycle. Alterian firmly believes that the core of any marketing activity has to be the individual. It will be interesting to see if the acquisition of Omniture by Adobe helps clients with this core requirement.

Posted in Agencies, General Marketing, Web Behavior Analytics, Web Content Management | No Comments »

A Big Thanks to the Alterian Community!

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Retrospectively, as we think about our recent Engaging Times Summit, we’re very pleased with the outcome and elated with the amount of positive feedback we’ve received.  As we planned the event we considered both the desired outcomes, and also the benefits to the Alterian community.  This year in particular we took contrarian points of view on a number of topics in the hopes that we’d instigate some new and different thinking. 

We believe we achieved our goal in part, as clearly the whole notion of the customer engagement agency caused a bit of stir – those that agreed with the categorization of a customer focused agency that integrates such skills as analytics, strategy, creative, technology and execution across each account made passionate pleas around the category’s validity, while in the marketing services community we heard vociferously that such services may not be integrated and that buyers will continue to buy in disparate fashions.  Truth be told, no one has the answer, but the debate was interesting, and generated some of the following feedback from Alterian community members. 

 “The meeting was very good and effective. Glad we came. Is there any chance that I could get a copy of the video tapes of the panels?” Targetbase    

 “I think this was the most interesting conference of its kind that I’ve attended. The thought-provoking discussions and differing opinions provided for an interesting and entertaining couple of days.  I’ve said it was ‘typical Alterian’, in that you guys continue to come at things in different ways…we’re looking forward to expanding our partnership.”  Epsilon

 “First rate event all the way!!!!”  Acxiom

“Thank you for the opportunity to come and take part in the Engaging Times Summit. Always enjoy the time and this was time well spent.”  GE

“It was a pleasure attending your Alterian Summit last week in Chicago, and I thank you for including me in the fun at the Cubs Game as well. The content and discussions were thought provoking, and you assembled a real first rate group of thought leaders.”  DM Solutions

“I wanted to thank you again for the conference this week.  I was very impressed at many levels.” UNISYS

“The Summit was both eye opening and invigorating.  It is great to see individuals and agencies willing to turn things upside down to drive where our industry needs to go.  Alterian clearly is on the forefront of this movement and RAZOR is glad to have such a great partner.” Razor Driven

“Consumer engagement is not a trend or the next big thing, it’s what our goal always should have been, Alterian has recognized this and has placed customer data and insights at the center of it, where it belongs…The panel discussions at the Alterian Engaging Times summit sparked some much needed dialogue on how to succeed in using consumer engagement as the core component of marketing strategy.” Engauge

Overall, we’re extremely pleased with the event, the subject matter experts, the attendees and the positive feedback.  We are very thankful for all of those that attended, participated and presented – the participation of the Alterian community really drove some thought provoking ideas and commentary.  In addition, we’d like to thank our sponsors, Unisys, Epsilon, infoGROUP, and Merkle.  While the event was a success, there’s no rest for the weary as we’re already thinking about what we can do better, differently and what approach we need to take for our next summit and, as always, we welcome and encourage ideas and feedback.

The next year will be interesting for our industry and our community.  Alterian will certainly be focused on the evolution of the customer engagement agency – we heard loud and clear from the marketing service providers and agency partners that the Customer Engagement Agency is arrived, and it appears as though it is here to stay.

Tags:
Posted in Agencies, General Marketing | No Comments »

Are You Prepared for Consumers Owning Your Brand

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

What will they do with your brand online? Will they uplift it or trash it?!

Have you considered the implications? Has your brand manager adapted to consumers owning your brand? Do they have the tools and skills needed to be successful? And even more importantly are they prepared for a brand crisis in a social media channel?

These brands weren’t ready for the online firestorms that they experienced:

Could your brand be next?

Here are 3 steps that you can take now to start preparing yourself.

  • Monitor online conversations
  • Create a social media position
  • Have a crisis plan
  • Monitor online conversations. The use of a tool like our Techrigy SM2 allows you to:
    • monitor across all social media channels and aggregates them into one place
    • quickly see sentiment and tone
    • identify trending topics so that you can react quickly
    • receive real time alerts that allow you respond immediately
  • Create a position responsible for planning and executing a social media strategy
    • give the company a human voice
    • establish an online presence
    • build a network so that they will help support you as needed
  • Have a crisis plan
    • online firestorms aren’t limited to business hours
    • establish who will be responsible for responding and what channels need to approve the message

It’s your brand and you may not have control anymore, but there is nothing stopping you from proactively interacting with consumers. And it will greatly lessen the negative PR that your brand could potentially experience an online crisis. In fact you’ll have a community of supporters that will uplift and support your brand which will carry you through.

Can you afford not to? Aren’t the three items listed an inexpensive insurance policy to protect your brand?

What suggestions do you have for avoiding a brand crisis in social media channels?

Posted in Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

Alterian wins 2009 CRM Market Award

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

CRM Market Leader 2009 AwardIt seems like the good news keeps rolling in here at Alterian. On the heels of our extremely well recieved Engaging Times Summit and recent news with Unisys, we were honored with an award from CRM magazine.  

In their 2009 CRM Market Awards, Alterian was named as a Leader in their Marketing Solutions category. CRM magazine’s recognition of the Alterian platform of products continues the great traction we’re seeing with customers around the world. David Myron, CRM magazine’s editorial director said of all the winners, “To stay competitive in a challenging economy, companies must come up with innovative ways to improve their customer relationship efforts. This is exactly what the recipients of the 2009 CRM Market Awards have done.” The magazine notes that the awards, “honors the vendors, consultants, and end-user companies that focus on customer relationships and the customer experience through the sophisticated integration of people, processes, and technologies.”

It’s great when you win an award like this, and it reminds all our staff and our partners  that we are positively affecting the way your customers do business as we move the needle towards customer engagement.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Campaign Management and Analytics | No Comments »

Four Key Stats on Social Media Engagement

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Social media channels are a formidable influence on brands as the Internet becomes the main source of information and consumers trend towards trusting their peers over companies. While this may seem common knowledge, it’s essential we watch the benchmarks that demonstrate increasing engagement on social media. Whereas the old hat was that consumers talk about brands online, we now are able to pinpoint the where and how users are soliciting and sharing information, as well as how it directly leads to buying decisions.
Here are four statistics we regularly look to at Alterian:

Three out of four Americans use social media (Forrester)

This statistic may suggest that social media is an all-encompassing phenomenon, touching many audiences equally. But the truth is just the opposite. As ReadWriteWeb just highlighted, personalization of online media is growing in parallel, or through, social media – bringing us back to the core need to not just reach consumers, but engag with them.

Two out of three of the global Internet population visit social networks (Neilsen)

Traditional engagement is based in cultural idioms – ranging from the proper form of addressing a close friend in the U.K. to the appropriate way to exchange business cards in Japan. Now, social networks are becoming a melting pot of interpersonal connections, and deeper levels of engagement call for more advanced analysis and technology.

Visiting social sites in now the fourth most popular online activity – ahead of personal email (Neilsen)

While email has dominated communications for some time, social sites are allowing multiple layers of interaction with multiple people, all in real time. This doesn’t say at all that email is dead – more that we have the capacity for more complex levels of engagement. Even more, email is experiencing greater segmenting across demographics. For example, the Blackberry user base might live and die by email, whereas the iPhone / Twitter user base may prefer a variety of social apps over their baseline emails.

Time spent on social networks is growing at 3X the overall Internet rate, accounting for 10% of all Internet time (Neilsen)

Despite this increase, it’s important to note there’s still only 24 hours in a day. It’s not only that we’re making more time for our interactions on social networks, it’s that these services are becoming more ingrained in our daily activities.

So, how do we derive value from these statistics? Value is found by leveraging what data you find and applying it to day to day operations such as overall messaging, targeting and segmentation, Web site creation, direct mail and email, call center and lead generation. Social media is offering deeper levels of engagement across these forms of communication – calling for the advanced technology like Techrigy SM2 that can help firms to achieve broader and more personal interaction with consumers. Beyond that, we can monitor responses to campaigns in real time to provide more transparent ROI and the ability for marketers to manage campaigns on the fly and adapt to the needs of their audience.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Social Media Marketing | 2 Comments »

Game over for the Mad Men?

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

Last Tuesday marked the start of our two day Engaging Times summit – a great day of conversations and presentations on how engagement is transforming the marketing discipline.

Discussions covered topics ranging from the impact of social media on engagement to building online engagement roadmaps but all agreed on one thing – engagement is the future of marketing.

Marketing icon Stan Rapp, set the tone in this morning’s keynote chastising businesses for the trillions of dollars spent in the last century on advertising (much of it on 30 second SuperBowl commercials) – something he described as “the most wasteful practice in business”.

To frame the importance of the event, Rapp went on to observe that “if your competitors are here you need to pay attention. If they’re not you need to pay attention because this is a huge opportunity for you.”

For many attendees, the big question was how to better understand and analyze online data on customers and integrate with offline information without being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data.

How do you make this intelligence a marketing weapon?

The summit was designed to stimulate discussion and challenge marketing conventions and the panel debate on ‘Roadmaps For Online Engagement’ brought some fascinating conversations to the fore.

The agencies that formed the panel are some of the most forward thinking in the market and were acutely aware that for many consumers the web is increasingly the only way that they interact with brands.

A whole generation of customers will never want to engage any other way.

This can be terrifying, but also presents a huge opportunity for growth and innovation. People will make mistakes, but with real-time data and analytics available those mistakes can be quickly identified and acted upon.

When campaigns were only measured and monitored monthly or quarterly, mistakes could be disastrous.

We are truly moving to a place where a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is no longer acceptable. Businesses cannot continually broadcast their brand messages to consumers and ignore their preference. If you don’t start listening, engaging and responding one of your competitors will.

While everyone recognizes the importance of engagement, one thing the Summit has made clear is that the fundamentals of good marketing remain – a clear understanding of both the marketing objectives will help the business deliver against them.

Data analytics give marketers more power than ever, not only in terms of delivering clear ROI, but also in enabling organizations to better analyze and adapt their campaigns to target the right audience.

It’s no longer satisfactory to be able to say ‘I know my campaign was successful’. You need to know exactly where it was successful and prove that the right customers took the right kind of action as a result of your communications. But it’s about more than just analytics. Many of the tools we discussed today demonstrated that it’s possible to test hundreds of different customer messages in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost that it would have two years ago.

This is the ammunition businesses need to make campaigns better targeted and ultimately more likely to drive sales. The potential is huge. There is no brand or product that cannot be positively impacted by an effective online marketing campaign.

Marketers need to heed the call to action and arm their businesses with the tools to reach customers in the most effective way possible. And that probably isn’t through a million dollar SuperBowl commercials…

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Agencies, General Marketing | No Comments »

Engaging Times Summit Recap

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

Alterian’s Engaging Times Summit held last week in Chicago presented a number of very interesting dilemmas as it is clear that marketing and those that provide services to marketers are in a state of transition.  The differing points of view centered around marketing services optimizing spend but in a traditional direct marketing/direct mail approach which was in contrast with other emerging service providers that focused on the integration of analytics, strategy, creative, execution, and technology skills to deliver the greatest value to the marketers.  The integration challenge was magnified in a number of panel discussions.  At one point, Mark Wright from Targetbase actually suggested one of the biggest problems facing service providers today is finding creative talent that understands and leverages analytic outcomes to drive and inform creative strategy. 

Alterian views this integration challenge as a key component in the development, emergence, and erosion of the current marketing service provider landscape while catapulting to the forefront the Customer Engagement Agency (CEA).   Currently, services are purchased and delivered in silos.  Organizations that deliver best-of-breed solutions around analytics, strategy, creative, and data/technology/execution force the customer to purchase in un-integrated, inefficient ways.  This lack of integration is costly in terms of customer insight, strategy, data integration execution, and of course impacts outcomes or results.  As buyers evaluate service providers and their delivery models there are a few points one may consider before decisions are made. 

  • How do you absorb the cost of so many service providers:
  • Who is paying for the coordination of these services
  • How many project managers does it take to manage multiple relationships
  • How many account managers does the customer pay for when multiple providers are in the mix
  • What is the cost of coordinating strategy/analysis/creative across multiple channels
  • What results are impacted by separating analytics from execution?
    • For instance, is your click stream data in your customer database? 

Customer engagement agencies look to integrated dis-integrated services, and look to deliver superior outcomes, with more impactful results.  For the customer engagement agency, it is about optimization of results across the disciplines of creative, strategy, analytics, execution, and technology.  The Customer Engagement Agency looks to embrace the consumer in a dialog where channels, media, and data are given an empirically led opportunity to inform how to engage the customer in a dialog vs talk at the customer in a campaign. 

Alterian’s Engaging Times Summit begged a number of interesting topics.  Clearly understanding the customer is key.  Integration of what has traditionally been disparate was all too often the discussion of the summit.  Entering into a dialog with the consumer vs episodic campaign lectures is the evolution being driven by the Customer Engagement Agencies.  Time will tell where the transition leads the marketer, and how the evolution impacts the consumer.

Download Points of View articles from The Engaging Times Summit

Posted in Agencies, General Marketing | 1 Comment »