Archive for April, 2010

Customers in Control: Part 3 of the Social Media ROI Series

Friday, April 30th, 2010

Building your brand and product awareness isn’t about marketing, it’s about the quality of customer service you provide.

Your customer service team works with customers by mail, email & phone.
But there is a new channel: the social web that consists of Facebook, Twitter, and the numerous other online places.

Are you listening to your customers online?

Excellent customer service can differentiate your brand from others.

Would you like to learn more? My whitepaper Customers in Control: The ROI of Listening to Your Customers outlines how social media monitoring can greatly improve your customer service efforts.

This is the third in a series. You can find the first two here.

We are also having a webinar on May 4th on the topic.
What you Write Matters: Social media customer service that supports your customer and champions your brand
Register here

Posted in Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

Pharma’s Future of Patient Engagement and Brand Marketing

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

A recent Epsilon survey of 1,350 US consumers revealed that four in ten Americans use social media for health information. More than 80% are “highly engaged patients who take an active role in health management,” said Epsilon. Not surprising, this survey also revealed that respondents engaged social media primarily to fulfill emotional needs for reassurance and support, and that rational needs for knowledge sharing and current news about their ailments are secondary but also very important drivers. The individual patient is forcing the evolution of the pharma industry to operate on a new set of business models and practices in digital client relationship and brand marketing.

This month, WebMD Health Corp launched a new social networking platform called WebMD Health Exchange.  It serves as an online community that seeks to connect patients with each other and with health experts. This new format offers two types of patient engagement– WebMD-moderated or Member-created exchanges. WebMD-moderated exchanges are staff-moderated by WebMD and feature designated experts selected by WebMD. Member-created exchanges are self-moderated and operated by WebMD members. In the past, WebMD chose the community topics discussed online; however, it’s evident that the industry is embracing the patient-control paradigm shift very cautiously.

WebMD Health Exchange also offers pharmaceutical companies the opportunity to sponsor discussions on specific health topics. This opens up the dialogue to include branded knowledge sharing exchanges which can bolster a closer brand-to-patient relationship. As pharmaceutical companies face upcoming industry trends such as the increasing role of branded generics, emerging market price pressures and personalized medicine, the call for highly specialized and transparent marketing for direct buy will be more prevalent than ever before. Those pharmaceutical companies that embrace these growth opportunities first, listen before engagement and measure their customer’s voice will have a competitive edge in a soon-to-be noisy digital market.

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A Framework for Social Marketing Analytics

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Jeremiah Owyang and John Lovett have collaborated with the social media monitoring industry to create a very helpful resource.

In March Jeremiah and Ray Wang of Altimeter published their report on Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management.

Altimeter has partnered with Web Analytics Demystified to provide frameworks for social media analytics. I appreciate their effort to survey the social media monitoring community and then share their work in a creative commons sense.

One thing to note is that the chart below (from the report) doesn’t give attribution to Alterian SM2’s capabilities.

  • Audience Engagement: Alterian SM2 tracks comments, linkbacks, retweets & quantitatively measures them
  • Active Advocates: There’s a report called ‘Key Authors’ in SM2 which lists the authors that are creating the most content. Their influence can also be identified
  • Advocate Influence: SM2 identifies influence for all of the conversations that it gathers
  • Idea Impact: SM2 measures positive & negative sentiment and also tone. It also offers the unique capability to customize the dictionary used for determining them

You can see the whole report here which includes the formulas for calculating the metrics. You can download your own copy from Slideshare.

Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

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Customer Centric Strategies w/Tim Suther

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

Podcast Series


Transforming the Marketing Organization


Hosted by Marcus Tewksbury

Episode 3 – Customer Centric Strategies

featuring Tim Suther, SVP of Multichannel Marketing, Acxiom

At the core, being customer centric is about evaluating, and creating all your marketing activities from the perspective of your customers.  The focus is not generating impressions, but rather optimizing spend to activate and convert your best customers. Given the economic realities of needing to do more with less, and the dwindling effectiveness of traditional approaches, a customer centric strategy represents the best chance of success.

In this episode, Marcus discusses with his guest Tim Suther, SVP of Multichannel Marketing at Acxiom, the harsh realities, approaches and solutions that are a must for any organization’s customer centric strategy.

A little bit about Acxiom:

A global leader in interactive marketing services, Acxiom helps clients connect with their customers through deep consumer insight that enables effective and profitable marketing initiatives and business decisions. Their consultative approach spans multiple industries and incorporates decades of experience in consumer data and analytics, information technology, data integration, and consulting solutions for effective marketing across digital, Internet, email, mobile and direct mail channels. Thery help many of the world’s top companies build customer loyalty by better understanding what customers like, what they want and how to communicate most effectively with them. Visit Acxiom’s website here .

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Posted in General Marketing, Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

How Social Media Drives Ford’s CRM Evolution

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Ford Motor Company is one of the very few global organizations that have garnered significant accomplishments in CRM by listening, engaging and refining products with their social consumers on a large scale. This has afforded them many new market opportunities including brand expansion beyond a mustang / truck company to a car, utility and truck company, penetration into a more diversified customer base and cutting edge products that are customized by the consumer’s social voice.  How did this happen? Check out The Ford Story. This is a website that aggregates Ford’s social web participation along with what others are saying about Ford’s brands.

To learn more about how Ford leveraged social media for CRM success, watch this interview with Scott Monty, Head of Social Media at Ford.

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Posted in Campaign Management and Analytics, Social Media Marketing | 1 Comment »

Email Marketing + Social Intelligence = Increase In Customer Engagement ROI

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

From Social Email Marketing Blog

The recent Econsultancy’s 2010 Email Marketing Census revealed that companies are spending more on email marketing than on PPC, but they are not taking advantage of one of the most important benefits of email marketing – segmentation. Furthermore, what does email segmentation mean for the web 2.0 customers? Ecommerce marketers can power up their email with social intelligence that can not only help drive sales, but also capture the next sale and the sale after that. A social media monitoring tool offers quick and easy ROI enhancements that identify SEO keywords and geo-location segmentation for your email campaigns.

Email marketing has been a superior channel in driving sales specifically in remarketing campaigns.  When you email your existing customers, you already know a little about their buying behavior, and tailoring to a highly personalized message that aligns with their current conversations will generate a significantly higher response than broadcast / spam emails. The web’s new obsession with geo-location has spurred a new content dynamic marketer’s need to factor in to their email campaigns. With the popularity of Foursquare and other geo-tracking web applications, customers are sharing the exact location of their purchasing choices in online conversations. It’s not just about the McCafe, but customer social conversations now include the McCafe at the McDonalds in Chicago on LaSalle and Ontario.

From Alterian’s Social Media Monitoring ROI whitepaper on search marketing, here is a step-by-step process for using a social media monitoring tool to identify words that optimize personalized messaging and geo-targeting content. The following example is based on searches set up for: ‘McCafe’, ‘Starbucks’ and ‘iced coffee.’

Social Media Monitoring Tool Search Set Up:

1. Set up searches for your brand, industry terms and competitors.

2. Create Theme word clouds for each. A word cloud is the result of analyzing all the conversations.

Theme Cloud 

 

Customer’s SEO Content:

Above is the Theme graph for the search results for ‘McCafe.’ This graph is generated by making the words that are used most frequently the largest, such as chocolate. The words associated around the industry terms are the most powerful because they allow you to describe your product using the same language used by your consumers. The competitive words also provide additional suggestions for keywords.

Customer’s Geo-Location Content:

After you have your Theme graph, the Map Overlay option will drill down on where these conversations for your search are occurring. In the below map, most of the conversations in regard to ‘McCafe’ are occurring in Germany. You can also review the geo-locations of your competitor’s conversations.

 Geo Location

Email is available everywhere, on every computing platform, and is an open platform. Social media is not a silo within the marketing program; to be truly effective; it has to be incorporated into a broader marketing execution. A social media monitoring tool offers a multitude of opportunities to maximize your email marketing ROI in a fraction of the time. For more information on Alterian, please visit – www.alterian.com

Ivan Chalif is a director of product marketing at Alterian. He can also be found at Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Posted in Email Marketing, General Marketing, Social Media Marketing | No Comments »