2011 March |Alterian Blog | Social Media, Email, Web Content & Campaign Management

Archive for March, 2011

What the Salesforce acquisition of Radian6 means for social media marketing

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

By now, you’ve likely heard news that Salesforce.com has acquired Radian6. In fact, given the nature of the news and our collective industry, I would be shocked if you hadn’t. Twitter has been buzzing all day with reactions to the announcement, and the tech blogs have all weighed in with their opinions and theories of what it means for both parties and the industry as a whole. So it seemed appropriate to contribute my POV here.

This acquisition validates the importance of social media monitoring as something all organizations must embrace. The market is one we’ve fully invested in since our own acquisition of SM2/Techrigy in July of 2009, bringing the capability to mainstream marketers. It almost seems cliché anymore to say the customer is now in control, yet marketers who do not acknowledge this shift and engage with their customer only set their brands up for failure.

This union not only validates the market, but it brings social media marketing to the masses and sets the stage for a deeper dive into social media insights. Simply having access to social media monitoring tools is not enough; marketers must understand how to analyse and act on the data they collect, incorporating it into the broader marketing mix. Alterian’s acquisition of Intrepid last September addressed an increased awareness that consumer expectations have changed dramatically, based on the emergence of new digital channels and social media, and many brands struggle to harness this new communication. With Intrepid’s social media monitoring insight services, using social media data for market research as well as consulting, Alterian has been well-placed to help our partners and clients generate value across the organization.

With Salesforce.com’s core business being customer service and lead generation, it makes sense that the newly forged companies will focus on helping companies build social CRM strategies. However, one of the true values of social media monitoring will remain in its data, insights and the way it can therefore be used to understand and shape the business and marketing strategy.

Tags: radian6, salesforce, salesforce.com, social media insights
Posted in General Marketing, Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

Strategies to Inspire Email Marketing Segmentation

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

Guest blog post by David Daniels, CEO, The Relevancy Group LLC

Segmentation is the topic of the latest e-Book in the Creating Engaging Email series that I am writing for Alterian. Segmentation is a hugely important email marketing strategy and tactic, particularly considering all of the marketing messages that bombard consumers each day. Segmentation is a necessary tool to improve message relevance and stand out in the crowded inbox, however our research at The Relevancy Group indicates that more than half of email marketers do not use audience segmentation as a tactic.

This latest e-Book “Creating Engaging Email: Segmentation and Targeting” provides valuable methods to begin organizing your customer data for several different segmentation methods. The tactics address proven segmentation techniques as well as new ideas to energize your email marketing programs. For example the document touches on behavioral segmentation and classic spending and monetary based schemes as well as emerging social attitude based approaches.

The document, which is available for free with pre-registration here, also offers new ideas on how to deepen and measure customer engagement. Through tactics such as triggered based messaging designing a custom built audience engagement index this contribution to the Creating Engaging Email series is full of strategies to advance the effectiveness of your email marketing program.

As we continue to build this content I’d love to hear your feedback on the second release in this e-Book series. Please feel free to reach out to me on twitter.

Until then, all the best
David Daniels, CEO
The Relevancy Group

According to Direct Magazine, David Daniels is “one of the most influential experts in email marketing, if not the most influential.” Until January 2010 he served as Vice President and Principal Analyst with Forrester Research and JupiterResearch. David is co-author of the book “Email Marketing An Hour A Day” and has been a contributor to the Weekend Today Show on NBC. David has held senior level positions at Apple Computer, Urban Outfitters/Anthropologie, Micro/MacWarehouse, ProTeam and CDA Computer Sales.

Follow David on Twitter @emaildaniels.

Tags: Segmentation, Targeting
Posted in Email Marketing | No Comments »

Social Media – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

I’m not sure if you are at all familiar with the classic TV sitcom “The Brady Bunch.”

If you are, skip this brief explanation. If you are not familiar with The Brady Bunch, I’m slightly worried about you.

Basically this family has six kids, three of which are daughters. The eldest is named Marcia, and the middle child is named Jan. Marcia is the supreme sister. Everything seems to always be about Marcia, and at times Jan just can’t take it:

How does all of this tie into Social Media and the world today? Everyone seems to be talking about SOCIAL, SOCIAL, SOCIAL.

As with any hot topic, there is the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good: It is a fundamental shift in marketing. It is exciting and hopefully fun (most of the time). It can be an unsolicited focus group online. You can learn about the pulse of your product, gain insight into a business and better understand your customers.

The Bad: With massive amounts of buzz comes confusion, misrepresentation and misguidance.

The Ugly: It can be overwhelming. What is the ROI? How do I measure success? Should I engage? When do I engage? Who does it right in this space? Who does it wrong? How do I start?

The best advice I could give anyone is quite simple. Start from the beginning and take baby steps. you need to realize that you don’t know what you don’t know! Seems simple enough, right?

Step #1 –LOOK at your organization. Look at your employees. Are they happy? How is your customer service? As a whole, is your organization social? Do they want to be? Do you have a hidden social rock star? Does your company do GOOD business? With the megaphone your customers have in the social sphere, the good can be great – but the bad can get ugly. So you need to truly assess your company.

Step #2…LISTEN! Tap into a vast, unsolicited focus group. What are people saying about your brand? How are they reacting to your products, services, marketing campaigns and customer service?

Step #3 – LEARN from what you see and hear. Look at the existing data that your company has on their customers and see if it matches what people are saying. Is there a disconnect? Is it in line with your traditional market research? What information can you share across your organization to improve your relationship and consumers’ view of your brand?

Companies are under an even bigger microscope in the social space, and doing good business is a necessity now more than ever. Each employee is a potential champion (and at times a liability) for you. At the end of the day pulling people into your world can be a phenomenal shift in how you do business. Have you integrated social media into your business, and what challenges did you face? Who do you think is doing this particularly well?

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

6 Blogging Tips from a Lapsed Blogger

Monday, March 21st, 2011

At the end of 2010, just before breaking for the holidays, I had a conversation with my co-worker about our New Year’s resolutions, and we got onto the topic of our “work resolutions.” We both mentioned that we wanted to do more writing and blogging both for Engaging Times and our own personal brands. We agreed we’d be sort of a support system – like gym buddies, except for blogging.

There are countless benefits to building one’s personal brand. You raise your profile, along with your company’s. The goal is to be considered a thought leader in your space and develop a significant online and professional network.

Well, it’s now mid-March, and while I’m still no gym rat, my blogging resolution is where I have slacked the most. So in order to give myself and fellow blogger wannabes a jump start, I decided to put together a list of basic tips to follow when blogging.

1. Keep it short. A blog post doesn’t need to be more than 3 or 4 paragraphs. We’re used to getting our news in 140-charater bites, so a blog post much longer than 500 words isn’t likely to keep your readers’ attention. Think about when YOU start to lose interest when reading an article online.

2. Make it easy to read. Use bullets, bold font and short paragraphs to help your readers identify key themes and navigate easily through your post.

3. Choose a catchy title. What will people be searching for? Many will decide if they want to read further just based on the title, so make sure it grabs their attention.

4. Use links. You can keep the length of your post under control and enhance your content by linking to external information, rather than going into detail on your blog. Let the reader decide if they want to learn more. Choose to have your links open in a new window or tab so visitors aren’t taken away from your page.

5. Please, for the love of blog, PROOFREAD! I catch some flack around here for being the “grammar police,” and while I don’t expect everyone to have an AP Style Guide on hand at all times, you can avoid silly mistakes. Use spellcheck. Have a friend proofread. Don’t force me to write another post on the difference between their/there/they’re, your/you’re and its/it’s.

6. Choose a topic to blog about consistently. What subject is interesting to you personally, and how does that relate to your professional life? For those who don’t know me, I’m the resident PR girl. I’m interested in social media and digital marketing, so expect posts from me on how those themes interact. What topic is relevant to you?

And there you have it – I’ve just publicly shamed myself into contributing regular blog posts, so check back for more. What other tips would you add to this list?

Tags: blogging, public relations, tips, writing, writing for web
Posted in General Marketing, Social Media Marketing | 5 Comments »

The Future of Customer Engagement

Thursday, March 17th, 2011

Customer Engagement is becoming a widely used term within Marketing, but what does it actually mean? Customer Engagement means marketers can Listen, Learn, Understand and Speak across multiple channels in a relevant and engaging way with individual customers. It’s moving away from push marketing and into two-way dialogues to engage with individuals consistently across addressable channels, which will build trust and lead to increased lifetime value.

This presentation, which I recently presented at TFM&A on the “The Future of Customer Engagement” aims to clarify what customer engagement is and reinforce the importance of cross-channel collaboration. It focuses on identifying the challenges faced by organizations striving to achieve this level of engagement and how they can be addressed. How mature is your organization’s marketing? Are you ready to engage?

The Future of Customer Engagement

View more presentations from Alterian

Tags: Customer Engagement, multi-channel, TFM&A
Posted in Campaign Management and Analytics | 1 Comment »

Customer Service and Social Media: Breaking down the disconnect

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

I nodded along to a recent opinion piece in New Media Age by Justin Pearse and felt compelled to explore the issue further. The issue in question? “Social media isn’t an easy fix for brands’ customer care.”

“Social media often comes across as something companies can slap on to avoid fixing the real issues,” elaborates Justin.

He is right that social media for customer service has been adopted largely in a ‘paying lip-service’ manner so far. Perhaps through naivety, but maybe also to paper over the cracks of an existing poor customer service system that is creaking under the strain of the new rules of online engagement, while facing up to the new challenge of customer empowerment via social media.

The rules of engagement are still being thrashed out by both parties – the consumer and the business. One thing that is evident is the need for the business to clearly communicate to the customer which route they should take when it comes to a customer service issue. If the first point of contact should be online, do your physical receipts speak of this direction? Does your website clearly identify how to get customer service or is it buried in the footer? Tell the customer where to get their issue resolved; don’t force them into taking their grievance online and their future business elsewhere.

If routing is effectively communicated, it won’t come as a surprise when there is a complaint on Twitter and how it’s handled through to issue resolution. As Justin puts it, “The only way social media will really transform companies is by winding the joy of real-time communication into every aspect of their business operations.” Imagine that – ‘the joy of real-time’ and not ‘the fear.’

Dell and Gatorade have received a lot of attention for their listening centres and putting customer service at the heart of their social media activity. However, there are signs that their non-social customer service efforts are now playing catch up, and in some instances, having to do the ‘corrective’ work of the traditional customer service channels when a customer voices their displeasure about lacklustre in-store or telephone support through their social networks.

Fragmented customer service in an increasingly online and networked field of play is possibly symptomatic of the near tedious “Who owns social media?” debate. If you plug in social across the business, plan for the possibilities of the open communication channels and monitor what your audience are saying and where, then social media customer service will be second nature and a near seamless part of what a business does to make things right by the consumer.

If marketing is organized in silos from an operational, digital and data perspective, then customer engagement will be a challenge. The objective is to engage with and understand the customer, and then to communicate and deliver in the manner that best suits them, at a convenient time, with their preferred frequency.

Tags: customer service, listening center, listening centre
Posted in Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

Wake up and smell the digital coffee – the Digital Business Britain Manifesto launched today

Friday, March 11th, 2011

The biggest motivator for me to get involved in creating this Manifesto was that when people talk about the digital future they talk about broadband in the home, but they ignore the potential for business. By doing this they also ignore the people within those businesses, who’s digital competence and mindsets are needed to compete in the global digital economy, which is vital to the trading future of the UK economy.

Around the end of the 90’s/2000 the business world woke up to the internet’s ability to give you global reach, lower costs, and conduct transactions online. At the time I was Chairing the UK Governments Information Age partnership benchmarking group – we were basically concerned with keeping up with internet infrastructure against the rest of the world. Britain was fairly well placed and then the dot.com bubble burst as we realised that only a few companies were really going to make it big as they formed a part of the internet trading infrastructure – Google, Amazon and eBay for example – with the killer applications being search and ecommerce. If you got those right and you drove traffic to your website, your job was done.

Now 10 years on business need to wake up to the fact that that was just the beginning, and that next big killer application (kill the brand if you don’t manage and understand it, in this case) is social media and social networking . This is particularly important for entrepreneurs that are starting out, as the right digital strategy need not cost the business a fortune, yet it can make or break an organisation. The SMB market in Britain is huge, as David Cameron put it earlier this week “There is no shortage of enterprise in this country. You see it in the 30,000-plus new firms that were started in January this year alone. I see it in the ideas and the energy of all the entrepreneurs I meet – British people selling curries to India and fashion to France.” The government has committed to helping SMBs because they can see the potential for Britain. These businesses need to see their own potential to engage with their customers, both B2B and B2C, through digital platforms.

The internet enables the natural human behaviour of “being social” through key social platforms, connecting and democratising the whole planet and socialising the worlds information and from a business perspective. This creates Word of Mouth Marketing completely out of the hands of the organisation. The only solution for businesses is to “get with the program” and that’s why I got involved with and what the Digital Business Britain Manifesto is all about. An eight point manifesto calling for the digital skills gap to be closed and encouraging UK businesses to develop a digital mindset, which enables them to leverage business growth opportunities at home and abroad.

SMBs specifically looking to learn more about how they can implement social media strategies in their organisation should look no further than Connie Bensen’s Social Media ROI Series.

If you would like to “get with the programme” click the image
on the left to see a full copy of the manifesto.

Tags: Customer Engagement, Digital Engagement, Marketing Technology, Social Media, Strategy, Why Engagement
Posted in General Marketing | 1 Comment »

The Customer-Centric Marketer

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

For today’s marketer, customer centricity is paramount. Yet with the proliferation of media – blogs, social media, mass advertising, email, text message and traditional direct mail, how do brands know how to best target their audience in the most relevant and engaging manner?

With limited alignment across countless customer touch points, no comprehensive view of the customer, lack of actionable analytics, in-consistent content, and in-accessible marketing technology to successfully implement an engagement strategy, this presents a challenge for marketers. It is not acceptable in today’s environment to communicate with your customers without some type of personalization. Sending mass marketing messages that lack personalization also lack authenticity and consequently results in in-effective marketing campaigns.

Social media opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the marketers, allowing brands to engage with customers like never before. A key part of customer centricity; however, is listening through all channels. So how can marketers know what channels to communicate through? Being customer centric is less about push and more about listening, learning, understanding and then speaking. While it’s important to communicate your brand message, most marketers fail to recognize that speaking is only one part of the equation.

Listen First

The goal is to really get to know the customer so you can deliver relevant, engaging communications – listen to everything they are telling you.

Learn Who Your Customers Are

Data from all your customer touch points should be part of a successful customer engagement strategy. Marketers need to take the information from various marketing, operational and transactional systems, strategically assessing what information needs to come together.

Understand What Your Customers Want

Tailoring content is dependent on knowing your customers. Apply insightful analytics to the data you gathered and act upon it to select content for future communications.

Speak to Them in an Engaging, Personalized Way

Seek opportunities to communicate directly with your customers, only when it is relevant and targeted – offline and online. If you frequent a local coffee shop, do they know your favorite order when you walk in the door? Why should it be any different when customers visit your website?

Overall, marketers must understand the transference in customer behavior – customers now own the relationship more than the organization does. It’s the responsibility of the marketer to recognize this fundamental shift in marketing.

Tags: customer centricity, multi-channel
Posted in Campaign Management and Analytics | No Comments »

WCM at the hub of Web, E-mail and Social Media Insights & Engagements

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

With the major trends in the WCM space being “engagement” and “social,” I chose to relate those trends to the application of a Web Content Management (WCM) system during my speaking slot at TFM&A earlier this week.

Applying WCM to centrally manage content, apply governance and enable auditing for more channels than just the web seems like a no-brainer from a theoretical perspective. Making this happen in the real world, being hampered by technology that creates all sorts of barriers, is of course, still quite a challenge. Watch the presentation to see how it can be done – with some real examples – then consider the 5 questions below.

WCM at the hub of Web, E-mail, and Social Media Insights & Engagements

View more presentations from Alterian

How would your organization answer the following:

1. Which digital assets need to be managed, now and in the future? Think in terms of web, mobile, email, social, print, TV, kiosks, games

2. Does your current Content Management System lend itself to manage content for non-web page purposes? Consider making this a criteria for a future (W)CMS selection process

3. Do the systems you use across other channels (email, social media) allow content – needed to engage – to be managed centrally? Try to avoid siloed systems and content duplication

4. Can you combine analytical data from various sources to get insight? This is necessary to build an engagement strategy toward the individual

5. Are you prepared to take down internal walls in the organization? Restructure your teams to get rid of the (legacy) split between web, email, social, campaign management and customer service / CRM

Hopefully this gives you something to think about. If you have successfully applied some of this in your organization already, what have you learned during that process?

Tags: centrally managed content, Email, Social Media, wcm
Posted in Web Content Management | No Comments »

Spicing up email marketing with event-inspired content

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

Email marketing isn’t easy. It’s not enough to include a compelling call-to-action for your customers and prospects. You must also wrap it up in a neat little package with an inviting sender name, brief yet compelling subject line with all the right keywords and none of the spam triggers, a call-to-action placed above-the-fold, images tested to properly render and a design that has been optimized for mobile.

After all that, is there any room left for creativity?

A recent email from The Gap offering up to 44% off in honor of the 44 US Presidents for President’s Day got me thinking that holidays and events offer the perfect opportunity to entice your email audience.

Event-centered emails aren’t just for retailers nor must they focus only on a handful of select holidays. Here are a few subject line ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

· Valentine’s Day – Spread the love – Review your latest Amazon.com purchase

· Daylight Savings – Don’t fall behind, spring ahead with these top 5 IT trends for 2011

· St Patrick’s Day – As luck would have it, we’re having a sale

· April 15^th, Tax Day – Save for a rainy day – Deposit your tax refund into a high interest savings account

· Earth Day – On April 22^nd, don’t just support Earth Day, help save all the planets (think planetariums, NASA or other space research)

· First Day of Spring – Spring is here, time to clean out your document management system

· Labor Day – White is always in, even after Labor Day (perfect for a certain iRetailer)

· Columbus Day – Discover a new world: Don’t miss our grand opening

Are some of these themes a bit silly? Yes. But do they also grab the reader’s attention? Absolutely. And is getting your email opened and read half the battle? Without a doubt.

So what do you think? Will you embark on event-inspired email campaigns anytime soon? Do you have additional event themes to share? What other tactics are you using to spice up your email marketing?

Tags: email campaigns, event triggered, holiday email
Posted in Email Marketing | No Comments »