Giving social business a human dimension
Over the past 15 years at IBM, Luis Suarez has carved out a reputation as a thought leader in knowledge management and more recently, in social business. He is currently the company’s knowledge manager, community builder and social software evangelist. IBM were one of the first companies to coign the term social business and it’s a core part of their Smarter Planet campaign.
What is social business?
Suarez is the first to admit that ‘social business’ isn’t really anything new.
“To me, social business is a philosophical movement where you redefine the way you do business with your customers following a people-centric approach next to a customer-centred approach - where it’s not you telling the customer’s what they need or what they should have, it’s the customers telling you what they need that you need to…
An introduction to the main social signals used by search engines and how this changes SEO
If you have followed the first 9 steps in this SEO series, you’ll have picked up tips on what have been the core elements of SEO since the optimisation of organic search listings began. In step 10 we move on to one of the newer components of SEO, one that is increasing in importance and likely to have a greater impact as search engines evolve from thinking about optimisation to rewarding interaction and influence.
Social media signals started to play a part in search engine algorithms back in December 2010 but it wasn’t until 2011 that the likes of Google really started to pay attention and dedicate more effort to indexing social content and using social signals to boost content in search results. For a neat…
How to prosper in a world of Digital Disruption
It’s become fashionable in business/ technology circles to talk about ‘disruption’. As a ‘good’ thing. Not like a broken-down train on the London Underground which causes chaos in the evening ‘Rush Hour’, or the alarming and possibly dangerous cracks in the structure of the M4 which shut down the main motorway from Heathrow Airport just weeks before the London Olympic Games, nor even the biblical scale flooding that turns Silverstone Motor Racing circuit into a sea…
Takeaways from IBM's global survey of marketers
Each year IBM interviews several hundred marketers to get a flavour of what the collective challenges, successes, fears and opportunities are.
It's interesting reading and always somehow comforting and inspiring to know you're not alone :-)
In this post I've picked out 7 of the key takeaways. You can view the presentation on SlideShare here and see the background on the study here, though I've summarised the salient points in this post and added the key charts below.
Here are our 7 key take-aways
1. The more successful companies expand the role of marketing in order to lead the customer experience - the success factors here are born around having influence across the 4P's and so being able to optimise their company's purchase cycle more effectively.
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Models to review your online engagement strategy
At first, online marketing was relatively straightforward, you had a website and you used different “traffic-building tools” like SEO, Adwords and affiliate marketing to drive visitors towards it to achieve the goals you were looking for. There were limited options to engage audiences on other sites, so it was all about traffic building. This is how I show it in my books:
But in 2012, developing online marketing strategies is much more complex with many, many platforms to consider. It’s important to prioritise on the customer touchpoints which are going to give you the maximum returns given a limited budget and time .
In this post I’ll summarise some different ways to visualise the range of options available for traffic building. I've mainly written the post to introduce the option of the Interractive Brand Ecosystem from Forrester which I show…
We're now in a constantly changing digital landscape
Did you see this Comscore report about "Digital Omnivores"? I think it's really useful for marketers. Not because the information is revolutionary in any way, but because it's offering some seriously hard facts that can be taken to management to support business cases, marketing planning and ideas generation for marketing. It may help to have this in light of your own analytics, maybe it can help inform decisions that you're thinking of making, or even realise that you need to make.
Increased WiFi availability and mobile broadband adoption in countries like the U.S., Australia and the U.K. are driving connectivity. Mobile phones already drive digital traffic around the world, while tablets are gaining steam. Tablets traditionally required a WiFi connection to access the Internet, whereas now they're increasingly driving traffic using mobile broadband access…
An example of aligning the Tesco.com digital marketing strategy with retail growth strategy
I was recently speaking at the Internet Retailing Expo and when attending, I noticed Tesco announcing their online marketplace. This has now quietly soft launched in the UK.
This interested me as yet another sign of Tesco responding to online opportunities, in this case by opening a marketplace to sell products from other retailers as part of its Tesco Direct offering. Currently marketplace sellers aren’t explicitly featured as in Amazon product listings, instead, it’s folded into search results for some products:
It looks as if Tesco are testing how to best integrate the marketplace approach now, as part of a soft-launch.
Tesco marketing strategy - 7 core principles for growth
I was also interested that at the show Tesco talked about how the marketplace supported…
Using segmentation to make your social media marketing relevant
We've mentioned the value of Forrester's technographics ladder before. It's a useful tool. Aimia, a Canadian company who specialise in loyalty management, have created a segmentation model that analyses the behavioral drivers of trust and control to identify six social media persona types – these are no shows, newcomers, onlookers, cliquers, mix-n-minglers and sparks. It's the behaviour angle which makes this worth a proper look.
“Today’s approach to social media measurement – racing to rack up the most ‘likes,’ retweets, followers and recommendations – is the wrong approach. Marketers must define success not by social media activity, but rather by customer value and engagement,” Doug Rozen, Aimia senior VP, lead author of the report
Naturally, Aimia argues that there's single social media channel can deliver a complete picture of customer behaviour, specific social media personas are identifiable which, if engaged directly, can reap benefits for…
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May 15, 2012
Social media marketing gives new options for segmentation
Since the 1950s, when the practice of market segmentation began, it has been the cornerstone of any marketing strategy.
Accurately define your market segments and then the follow on activities of targeting and positioning are much more effective.
With the advent of social media marketing, many are asking whether social networks, and their ability to engage with individuals interactively and in real-time, made the practice of categorising people into groups redundant?
The answer has to be a resounding “No!”, but the way brands categorise consumers is changing.
Towards ‘socialgraphics’
Consumers are considerably more socially mobile and transient than when demographic segmentation was first adopted by marketers. Also, as a result of the web and social media, consumers are much more informed and influenced, think 'Tripadvisor'. They have access to greater choice and their smartphones are…
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March 29, 2012
Of the sixteen tools reviewed which two work best?
This article explains why we believe you’d benefit from using these services for feeding back on web page designs. You'll find you can use them for everything from campaign landing pages to new home page designs.
Every week, our consultants meet to discuss the work they’ve created for clients. The process is fascinating. One consultant presents his or her work—a wireframe, a design, or maybe the client’s existing control—and the other consultants suggest how to improve it. This process allows us to draw upon our team’s wide-ranging experience.
We use collaborative feedback software to keep track of the suggestions made. Here’s how it works:
Consultants upload an image into the software. (It’s all web hosted, so it’s really simple to do.)
The consultants choose whom they’d like to invite to comment on the image.
Those invited annotate the image with their suggestions and comments.
Here's an example…
