Marketing Influence & Thought Leadership

Innovating the Customer & Citizen Experience

Innovation is THE buzz word spinning out of control. Even Obama talked about how we must all innovate. REALLY! In this blog I provide three short stories of innovation with some valuable insights into the innovation process. In my experience as someone who has actually innovated, vs. those who have just studied it and wrote then wrote about it, the innovation equation almost always boils down to people, process and technology. There are many authors and self proclaimed innovators out there that study innovation and sometimes the process that leads up to it. However, there is nothing like living the innovation experience as I have now in two careers, marine science and information technology. The challenge of innovation is that there really is no equation or recipe for it beyond those three parameters.

As an innovative marine scientist at Woods Hole we leveraged the MOCNESS system, (pictured above) which enabled us to study the stratification of plankton populations in our oceans, (I won’t bore you spelling out the acronym.) We were the first scientists to walk off a ship with all our data on floppy drives. And when it came time to really understanding the behavior of juvenile cod and haddock we used remotely operated vehicles and small submersibles to see them in real time. We selected the best people, looked at process, and then leveraged the technology that was available, but most importantly there was trust amongst all which lead to unabridged collaboration. In the 1980s collaboration in a scientific community was unheard of but we had the right people and only one of us had a PHD.

In looking back at our team we had the right chemistry and cast of characters:

• R Gregory Lough the PHD of oceanography with intense focus.
• Dave Potter the fisheries biologist with unending energy.
• Hal Merry the retired Air force Pilot turned electronic technician.
• George Bolz the likeable and intense fisheries biologist.
• Peter Auditore the invertebrate zoologist that identifies everything.
• Phil LeBlanc the ichthyologist with a Napoleonic complex.

 In my blog Innovating the Customer Experience , I discussed different types of Innovation, business model, product, services, organizational, and why creating a culture of collaboration which leads to innovation is king, http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore1/38046/innovating-customer-experience. What was amusing about this blog was a comment that questioned how I could use innovating as a verb. Well, guess what that is just me. Last fall Dr. Henry Chesbrough of Berkeley’s Center for Open Innovation, and I embarked on an innovation research journey that profiled companies in two industries and one governmental organization that innovated their business processes.

• Insurance: AAA Michigan
• Automotive: Colmobil Israel
• Government: City of Birmingham, United Kingdom

Rather than entering into long elaborative discussions about how these organizations innovated, I will provide short focused seminal insights from the interviews that Dr. Chesbrough conducted. So let’s start with AAA and end with GOV who in my view really needs innovation in nearly every way to serve us citizens.

AAA of Michigan Innovation: Customer Experience Management

The objective of AAA’s Claims Core Redesign Process was to reduce the increased cost per claim due to inefficient processes, in order to improve the efficiency of their Claim Organization and the service to our members and improve employee morale in the claims processing unit. An innovator was brought in to evaluate and make changes to the claims processes.

Business Process Environment

• Organization and processes were fragmented with 3 different claims systems, plus 4 or 5 ancillary systems, this made it difficult to identify areas of inefficiencies that needed to be addressed.
• Call times were 15 minutes on average or longer.
• This translated to increased cost per claim because it took longer to resolve claims.
• Customer satisfaction needed improvement.
• Employee morale was the lowest of the whole organization.

Net/Net

The innovator realized that the problem was not simply one of technology, but rather one that required addressing people, processes and technology; so the project moved from technology only, to an initiative that encompassed people, process and technology.  They created cross-functional teams to address the people, processes and technology. 

People Innovation:

AAA senior leaders understood that this was a complex initiative, and realized there are moments where you need to balance the right amount of communication as you run into challenges that inevitably occur during development. Initially they had weekly steering committee meetings and that moved to bi-weekly, and finally monthly.  As the project rolled out, perceptible improvements in employee satisfaction emerged.  Now they are “not a bad place to work” and there are improvements in job turnover and retirements as well.  There are still parts of the company using the old processes, and when those adjustors see other adjustors using the new system, they get envious.  “When can I get on the new system?”

Process Innovation: One of the insights that emerged was the existence of 6-7 layers between managers and the claims adjusters, in order to improve our processes; they took out layers of management, and segmented by product line. 

Technology Innovation: Their goal from the beginning was to integrate their claim application with policy management and existing financial systems, along with other core applications in the company.  AAA needed to align cost, expense, and customer service through the same data, rather than requiring different views of the data through different applications.  The goal was to be able to use the claims record as the core hub of the process, and view all of their processes through a single shared file and they did this by standardizing on a single vendor.

Colmobil of Israel Innovation:  Customer Experience Management

Colmobil imports some of the leading automotive brands in Israel, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and Mitsubishi, traditionally each brand was a separate company, with its own unique business processes and IT requirements.  Today the customer has become more and more important, and they could no longer afford to be so product centric.  The same customer might appear to them in three different ways across three brands.  They might be a fleet manager, responsible for a dozen or more Mercedes trucks, they might drive a Mitsubishi SUV, and/or, buy a Hyundai for a relative.  Their systems could not track this. 

Business Process Environment

• They shared IT resources, but had three flavors of IT, one for each brand and very product centric. 
• Every brand had a long product cycle, from the initial placement of the order through to delivery, maintenance and repairs, recalls, and so on post-sale. 
• The information travelled with the vehicle and the customer data they had was subordinated to the vehicle data, and the VIN was the centerpiece of each data record in the system. 
• They had no way to modify these systems and solve this due to their deep product centricity.

Net/Net

People and Process Innovation: The world is becoming customer centric and they needed to change their culture, processes and how they would work to address this.  If they tried to do it in stages, they would get lots of resistance from employees.  So in the end they did it in 20 months, and after 2-3 months of breaking it in, they were back in business and there was only a marginal impact on business during this transition.  Now they’re in the second phase and plan to make the system more intelligent. This also gave them confidence to reorganize the company to be market focused. 

Technology Innovation: They perceived only two options, either implement a CRM system on top of the product legacy system, and train our people to work on two systems simultaneously; or reinvent everything to free themselves from the constraints of the legacy systems.  This way the employee would only have to work with one system, and the CRM would generate all the transactions.  All the ERP would be done under the hood, so to speak.

In summary, they now have a passenger vehicle division, a premium vehicle division, and a buses and trucks division. When the customer comes to them now, they have a full view of him/her. In summary, they had 25% more vehicle sales this past year with no increase in headcount.  Their stock keeping in spare parts is much improved, and their data is more accurate now as well, and most importantly, the owners are very happy.

City of Birmingham United Kingdom Innovation: Citizen Experience Management

The City of Birmingham has a “corporate director of business change” and they are responsible a wide variety of business services that spans everything from refuse collection and includes child social care that serves three different groups: disabled children, antisocial behavior in children, and children suffering child abuse.  They have one of the most unique business change process methodologies I have ever seen in GOV:

• Visioning
• Design
• Build
• Testing
• Implementation and realization of benefits from the business model change.

 

 

Net/Net

People & Process Innovation: One of their business model changes was to move from a reactive model to a more proactive model, where they could utilize analytics to identify at-risk children and households.  This has allowed child services to make interventions long before the behavior occurred, such as providing coaching on parenting skills to the parents.  They still need to react when problems arise, but they are trying to shift to a prevention focus and are running a series of concurrent pilot programs in schools to test this, and to compare which interventions are most effective in reducing later incidence of anti-social behavior or child abuse. The people management changes were rolled out one directorate at a time.  They started with the corporate directorate, where there was strong support for the change.  Having brought that off, they rolled it out to other directorates

Technology Innovation: They started a program to transform their business models in 2006, covering about 2/3 of their business functions and delivered through 9 different work streams.  These changes were enabled by IT and three of the core change programs depended heavily upon ERP.  The financial back office change was a big bang approach, with no pilot testing and it delivered the goods by reducing headcount in the back office finance functions by 28% and by performing financial processes accurately and efficiently. 

My Net/Net

People, process and technology are consistent in all these innovation stories along with buy-in and support from senior management and strong governance processes. Change management is often overlooked in many attempts to innovate, however, it was an important parameter in these innovation successes. And for the most part customer experience management is one of the primary objectives of each innovation initiative. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium. 

 

Innovating the Customer Experience

Innovation is the buzz word of the millennium. Everyone, every company and now even governments are trying to innovate. Why? Competition in many industries is global and many companies see innovation of products, services (especially customer service) and business models as the path to maintaining competitive advantage, and creating sustainable profitable growth. The age of the Internet and now Web 2.0 has disrupted government and forced a new era of transparency that has never been seen before. Governments are now in a situation where citizens are now customers demanding enhanced services.

Many companies think they can simply “silo bust” and force feed a collaborative culture and bam they get innovation.  It doesn’t happen that way. Technology can be a key enabling platform especially for innovating the customer experience, but it is nothing without the innovators.  Everyone is not an innovator, just like everyone is not an entrepreneur, but the two share similar characteristics. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word innovation harkens back to Hartz Darm 1297: Innovation= the action of innovating; the introduction of novelties; the alteration of what is established by the introduction of new elements or forms. This is quite an eloquent definition and it somewhat fits modern day organizational process.  When I think about innovation today I see four pillars, all of which in some way are related to the innovation of customer service.

The Four Pillars of Innovation

• Product innovation
• Business model innovation
• Services model innovation
• Organizational innovation

Building a culture of collaboration isn’t the instant answer to creating innovation or innovating your customer’s experience. However, leveraging the newest collaborative applications can help find your innovators and ultimately lead to innovation. The biggest challenge facing organizations today are finding the innovators in their organizations and/or, recruiting innovators. Creating, managing and enabling a culture of innovation is a difficult task and as I always say, “you can’t make huskies run like greyhounds.” I discussed the cultural aspects of innovation in my blog the Silicon Valley Way and how culture has played a key role in the rise of the valley.  http://myventurepad.com/peterauditore1/54784/silicon-valley-way

Who are the Innovators?

Three years ago I became an active member of the Berkeley Innovation Forum, (BIF) which includes a selected group of innovators along with those companies that are trying to innovate. BIF is the genius of Dr. Henry Chesbrough, Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation, who has brought together a “who’s who” of innovation from many global corporations. Dr. Chesbrough has also written a series of books on innovation which I would highly recommend, including:

• Open Innovation, HBS 2006
• Open Business Models, HBS 2006
• Open Services Innovation, Jossey Bass 2011

My colleagues and I at SAP have attended the meetings and participated in three innovation challenges. Interestingly all of which have been directly related to innovating products, services and business models:

• Best Buy Challenge: Selling and Marketing of Electric bikes.
• Nike Challenge: Selling Biometric clothing to a target market.
• SAP Challenge: Acquiring a billion users. 

Innovators are a rare breed and like entrepreneurs they are major risk takers and are not afraid to fail. Sometimes an innovator is an entrepreneur. Many come from cultures of innovation like Silicon Valley or were raised by innovative parents or family members.  They think differently and when they were kids they got the birthday card that said, “You march to the beat of a different drummer.” There are innovators in your company, and/ or organization, the way to finding them is by empowering them. Innovation is also driven from the ecosystem surrounding the organization including its partners, but this also includes customers.

At the BIF meeting this spring, Scott Cook CEO of Intuit presented their approach to finding the innovators and executing what he called “small experiments” that were product and/or services model innovations.  This was a very new and unique approach to finding ideas and innovators in Intuit and it was done through an IT platform developed by a new employee that came into the company and said Intuit’s knowledge management sucked. They empowered the employee and built a new “Facebook like” collaborative knowledge management platform for sharing ideas in hopes of facilitating innovation. This has enabled Intuit to find the innovators and empower them, the old knowledge management platform was seldom used by employees as are most because there was nothing in it for the employee. SAP has recently announced that it will be bundling its collaborative platform named Streamworks into its business portfolio, making it easier for its customers to find innovators and share knowledge across CRM and ERP systems.  

Innovating Customer Service

During the late 1980s CRM emerged and one of the first proactive steps in customer service was the customer satisfaction survey. There was even a company named CustomerSat in the valley that I worked with. Customer satisfaction information can be easily acquired now by sniffing the digital exhaust of the social customer. In the case of social customers that don’t post reviews it is not that easy, but you can bet that they are reading online reviews even if they aren’t posting them.

In my view innovating customer service begins with understanding the complete end to end customer experience. This is not easy and many companies in retail services like Starbucks for example, have gone to third parties to hire “secret shoppers” who chronicle their experiences. Today’s customer experience doesn’t begin at your website; it begins in the social media ecosystem. I walked into an AT&T store last week to add another IPhone to my account and as soon as I walked in the door I expected poor service. It was not, the service was excellent but why? The representative was armed with all the information about me that made the visit PERFECT and his understanding of AT&T products and services was outstanding. Here is where the training comes in and we all know about the employee turnover rates in retail.

Knowing the customer is king and when you look at competitive differentiation today for many companies it’s all about the customer experience. In order to wow them you must know them. This means understanding the discipline of business intelligence and leveraging it to harvest the rich data sets that are easily accessed from social media. Innovating the customer experience requires more than CRM systems and information technology, and/or collaboration between employees that probably aren’t innovators. You must find your innovators, they may be your customers and/or your partners. Intuit’s example is a great one; I have posted a series of blog on BIF on this site and www.myventurepad.com. One thing I have learned about innovation in scientific and technology careers and at BIF, is that it is not a defined process with a cookie cutter menu. And this is what many companies try to implement. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium.

 

 

 

 

The Social Media Crescendo Effect

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a crescendo as “a musical direction indicating that the tone is to be gradually increased in force or loudness.”  This is exactly what is happening with influence as behaviors and interrelationships continue to evolve in the still new world of social media. In analyzing data from a recent research project with the Society of New Communications Research; our team defined what we call “the social media crescendo effect.”

Our analysis didn’t just jump out of the data; it came from over two years with each team member blogging regularly at least once a month. We combined this experience with the latest data set from the New Symbiosis of Professional Networks research survey to come to one of many conclusions the crescendo effect perhaps being the most important.  

The crescendo effect is simply how many Tweets, Facebook, LinkedIn mentions and other digital means of notification a blog may get. This is paramount because the new flow of influence, (which has metamorphosed into a new form of advertising and word of mouth marketing,) acts like a crescendo through the ecosystem of whoever liked your blog enough to recognize it. Make sense? It is not the number of views that the blog gets but the ecosystem of the viewers, how they collaborate and how the influence flows from it.

When we first started blogging we envisioned our success would be the number of blog views and how many comments we received. Two years later after building our influence and gaining readership, we are experiencing a new form of collaboration in the crescendo effect. Last year our team created more than sixty blogs that generated around 100,000 readers, few commented, but many shared with their ecosystem through Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Some Key Findings:

• The Amazons of influence are now Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Just like magazines social media communities are all about content aggregation.
• Collaboration is less about exchange but more about endorsement.
• Information doesn’t have to be exchanged to be an endorsement, just viewed.
• Endorsement is the interaction that flows into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yelp and TripAdvisor for example.
• In professional social media networks people trust the information enough now that it is accelerating business decision making.

Actionable Information

For years I have watched analysts and journalists, academics, and luminaries tell us what is happening and most of it is all rear view mirror analysis. Where they nearly always fall short is helping us to create actionable information that enables us to gain competitive advantage, insight, or sustainable profitable growth in the case of corporations.

What the crescendo effect means to companies, organizations and governments is that they need to:

1. Know who their influencers are.
2. What their ecosystem of influence is.
3. Where that influence flows.
4. Understand the dynamics of their influence outside of the social media world.
5. Know when that influence wanes.
6. Engage and create sustainable relationships with influencers that enhance your position and brand.
7. Do not create episodic and adversarial relationships.
8. Be extremely careful on who you promote as an influencer.
9. Find out who are the influencers and thought leaders inside your organization.

10.  Leverage the organization’s influencers and expand their ecosystem of influence.

Net/Net

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to read more books, this month I picked up The Man Who Sold America, HBR press by Cruikshank and Schultz. This is a great book about Albert Lasker, an original Mad Man it would seem, who began the modern advertizing industry. Mr. Lasker was responsible for the creation of many brands, including Kotex, Palmolive, Sunkist, SunMaid, Lucky Strike, etc, etc. The beginning of this book starts out with, “we live in a world of mass persuasion,” our mass persuasion now comes in the form of social media.

Social media has created a new platform for interrelationships as the evolution of social media behavior continues to evolve with a new form of collaboration for the masses. Gary Hamel aptly said, “influence is like water it flows everywhere.” Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium. 

 

The Social Media Data Tsunami

The data tsunami has arrived. According to recent research from the MIT Center for Digital Research, digital Information is doubling every 1.2 years and will exceed 1000 Exabytes in the next year. And the size of the largest data warehouses is tripling every two years. There is so much data now related to our “own lives” that it is overwhelming and almost unmanageable. This is especially true for the social customers who are becoming more powerful every day through the new word of mouth marketing platform called the social web.

Let’s take a short walk down data memory lane. Before the Internet we had tons of data collected and managed first on punch cards, large hard drives, flat file data bases and then came one of the most powerful technological innovations in the form of the relational data base. This was quickly followed by the advent of the business intelligence market and data warehousing platforms which enabled CRM. 

The MIT researchers also point out that an inflection point in information technology use began right around 1995 when the Internet took hold. At that point purchasing of industrial transportation and other business equipment leveled off as information technology purchasing skyrocketed with business process reengineering that enabled the digitization of business processes. In 1993 Michael Hammer and James Champy’s book, Reengineering the Corporation delivered the thought leadership and acted as a catalyst in those smart companies and organizations that understood IT is a competitive advantage.

Pre-Internet Data

• Flat file and RDBMS
• OLTP transaction
• Business process transaction
• Email messages
• RFID
• Real-time machinery diagnostics/engines/equipment
• Bar code scanner data
• Stock market transactions

Enter the Internet, a massive disrupter that changed the way we do everything. Corporate web sites flew up with reckless abandon in hopes of innovating business models and creating more sustainable profitable growth. It was all about clickstream data, site visits, stickiness, and the data for the most part was rudimentary in nature, but the big search engines knew more about everyone and everything. There was even a search engine called Alta Vista, but they became road kill very quickly because of geographical cultural issues. More importantly, however, there was one company that thought that it could quickly build its own Internet on its own standards and we know who that is now. As Socrates once said “the very thing that makes you great will be your undoing.” Amazon was the first to begin sniffing the digital exhaust and began to harvest the gold in ways that none had visioned with one click shopping and predictive analytics.

Internet 1.0 Data

• Clickstream/Page views/Web transactions
• Web links
• Alta Vista/Google/Yahoo Searches
• Wikipedia updates

Now a tsunami of social media data is upon us. During my evolution to Social predator I left such a large plume of digital exhaust to be honest I couldn’t believe it. Most of it wasn’t through Twitter, although our most recent SNCR research clearly shows it as an Amazon of social media. What surprised me was what I wrote about in the Crescendo effect, and in the Ecosystem of Influence blogs, was that hundreds of people read my reviews of restaurants and hotel stays. Now we have even more powerful data to work with, like the customers or a potential customer’s location in addition to preferences likes and dislikes about food and environments. This leads us further down the experience economy path where brand experience reins king.

Social Customer & Web 2.0 Data

• Mobile phone/GPS/Location data
• Blog references
• Facebook updates
• Twitter feeds
• LinkedIn Updates
• Yelp Reviews & TripAdvisor reviews

Net/Net

In the New Symbiosis of Professional Networks research respondents told us that LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook where the top professional social networks. What we have going on here is a dramatic sea change in human collaboration and interrelationships that is already digitized and available for harvesting. Other findings I thought worth mentioning are:

• A strong 60% of the population used social networking to increase the own professional network
• And 60% of those surveyed were using it to monitor brand.
• Nearly 50% of the respondents indicated that they also participated in specialized or industry specific social networks.
• Apple is the portal to social behavior as 67% of respondents used an Apple mobile device to access a social network. Apple IPhone apps for social networking rose from 180 in 2009 to 736 in 2010.

So what does this all mean? It means that those “Amazon like” companies that understand the basics of analytics and data harvesting can gain a massive competitive advantage over those in their industries that do not go “web farming.” This is an incredible bonanza for data miners who can essentially know everything about us and now where we are. In 1999 I ran across a book entitled Web Farming for the Data Warehouse by Richard Hackthorn, that provides a cook book for web farming the information resources of the web, a great book way ahead of its time.

The Game Changer

In Memory data management is one of the newest technology innovations that portends to change the way we collect, manage and make decisions on data. Along with predictive analytics and other business intelligence tools, this brings a new way of looking at data and will enable “real time data mining,” even of OLTP data bases. This is something that many companies asked for in numerous surveys that I conducted during the 1999-2000 period. The good news is that now memory is cheap. In the simplest of terms, In Memory computing enables you replicate and mirror data sets from any data base in memory on a separate hardware device or within the BI system and/or platform. That means that I can look at data as its collected in real time and watch it trend enabling “real time business decision making.” These technologies are not out of the reach of small and midsized businesses that will leverage the cloud.

 

 

The disciplines of data warehousing and analytics are now taking on special meaning in our society from predicting where and when parolees recommit crimes, to enriching our customer experience at the theme park. Companies that harvest the rich web of social media will undoubtedly gain competitive advantage in their industries and governments can also serve their citizens with enhanced services. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium.  

 

The Year of the Social Customer has Arrived & My Top Ten 2011 Social Media Predictions

2011 is the year of the social customer. Never before has the power of one been more powerful in the history of business as we know it. You cannot hide from the social customer as I have demonstrated on several occasions with big brands like UPS and Starwood. Those of you who read my blogs last year know that I became a social customer, blogged about it and demonstrated how it can impact brand, reputation, product and service. I must admit I had a lot of fun becoming a social customer.

 

My Top Ten Social Media Predictions for 2011

1. The power of one has arrived.
2. If you are not a social business you are not in business.
3. The social media police have arrived.
4. Mobile applications will provide a new platform that enhances the business to customer experience.
5. B2C, B2P and B2B Marketing will be challenged to create and manage thought leadership.
6. More and more people will begin interacting with news reports and journalism creating a totally new platform for information exchange and influence.
7. Plagiarism and (now called content scraping) will rage out of control.
8. Data, data everywhere, analytical tools will be key to controlling brand reputation.
9. Everyone is a journalist

10.  Measuring and identifying influencers will become more difficult.

The Power of One http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore1/30085/united-parcel-service-gets-social-media-customer-service 

“Encouraging illusions of personal power in this way is ethically questionable.” This is a quote from a comment on my Social Predator blog late last year. The last time l looked 834 people had seen my reviews on Yelp and hundreds viewed my Trip advisor reviews posted during my travels in 2010. And one tweet solved a yearlong issue with UPS. Today you can check on the reputation of nearly any product and/or service on Yelp and other sites including piercing and tattoo parlors and auto service. I rest my case.

If you are not a social business you are not in business. http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore1/25685/why-you-need-know-your-social-customers-because-they-control-your-brand

This is really a no brainer and if you aren’t already aware of your reputation in the world of the social customer and aren’t interacting with them I am concerned about your business. Think about how to leverage social business to build yours and demonstrate thought leadership through blogging. Know who your social customers are! And remember in business there are always customers that you want to send to the competition, social business is no different.

The Social Media Police have arrived http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore1/32103/social-predator

After nearly thirty years of writing my content was censored for the first time by my own company in 2011. The Social Predator voted one of the best blogs by members of this site was removed from the highlight list because some “marketing people” thought it was too aggressive for my company SAP. Get ready for more of this as those who can write begin expressing their opinion, which may not be what some in the company want. But it might be what the company needs! In today’s a sea of words, blogs and social media peer groups no one remembers your name unless you say something memorable.

Mobile Applications http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore1/28039/social-customer-goes-mobile

The explosion of inexpensive mobile applications has help drive Apple’s market cap beyond Microsoft’s to $317 B. I really like Vogue magazine’s new stylist application and the way it interacts with the consumer. This is the way of the future. Last year I even tried to call coyotes in the desert with my IPhone’s Quik hunting calls application, it didn’t work but you get the point. The mobile buying frenzy during the holidays reflects this.

B2C, B2P and B2B Marketing will be challenged to create and manage thought leadership. http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore/27449/four-cs-social-media-marketing-content-connection-communications-and-community

This will be key as many marketing organizations are not organized and/or have the talent to create thought leadership let alone manage it. Facebook fan pages are not a simple answer here but they are a beginning for many companies but how will you leverage them?

More and more people will begin interacting with news reports and journalism creating a totally new platform for information exchange and influence.

When I read news now I am amazed at how many people comment and I have begun commenting, organizations now have instant gratification when it comes to news reports and I find the comments fascinating. This offers a new platform for interactive journalism.

Plagiarism

As a scientist by original training I have always been sensitive about people stealing my ideas and yes this year there has been another case of someone stealing my original content in “the five Ps of marketing.” The link below is to a blog that my colleague Don Bulmer wrote last November 1,  If Facebook were a Country http://everydayinfluence.typepad.com/everyday_influence/2010/11/if-facebook-were-a-country.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+EverydayInfluence+(Everyday+Influence)

This idea showed up in the San Francisco Chronicle Business Report January 11, 2011, entitled “The many facets of Facebook,” the Facebook Nation, I mean this is kind of disgusting in my view and reflects that journalists are scraping content.

Data, data everywhere, analytical tools will be key to controlling brand reputation and predict social customer behavior.

In the first wave of social business many companies quickly assembled reputation and brand protection swat teams to monitor social business. New intelligent monitoring tools have emerged and many IT vendors are now integrating these tools to identify and monitor influencer and social customers into CRM products. Many more will emerge this year and some will begin to employ predictive analytics, what will my social customers do?

Everyone is a Journalist http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore1/29302/everyone-journalist

This was my most popular blog out of the 37 that I wrote during 2010, and when you think about it if you can blog you are a journalist. Although many blogs are written by people that really have no place blogging because of lack of experience, their voice can be heard and their opinion felt. Journalists would argue that you might not have the training and research background to provide objective opinion, I don’t agree with them.

Measuring and identifying influencers will become more difficult. http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore1/30607/measure-me-profiling-social-media-influencers-analysis-paralysis

This is a continual battle and using search engines is not the answer. Blocking and tackling still needs to be done, you need to go to conferences and look beyond their followers they may not be who buys your products and services. Look closely at their ecosystem of influence and how it aligns with you company’s business. http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore1/30873/ecosystem-influence

Net/Net

Proctor and Gamble is way ahead of the pack when it comes to understanding the social customer, they even build places for us to live and interrelate! An article last week’s in the NYT “As the Web turns “called them out as having a reputation of unusual marketing; I think it’s called modern marketing. Their newest site ManoftheHouse.com is again genius marketing, but what is surprising about this article is that both analysts quoted don’t get it. Forrester’s Josh Bernoff called it the new version of “As the World Turns” a 20^th century version of the soap opera. We are not surprised by this after Forrester prohibited many of its analysts from blogging and building their brand which ultimately enhances theirs. Even Mr. Oywang of the Altimiter Group doesn’t see the big picture here; he said all of these discussions are already happening on Facebook and they should be careful about overusing the brand. Really?

This is no different than what P&G did with the mommy network and teenage girls and they are clearly targeting a market and will undoubtedly leverage this into supply chain logistics, brand building, price and product testing etc. etc. Get it; the analysts don’t, as I have always maintained if you don’t know the market better than the analysts you are in big trouble. Until next time I wish you get selling and marketing in the millennium!

A list of my social customer blogs for 2010.

• Social Media Rules of Engagement and $10,000 at Tweet December 6: 795 Views
• The Social Predator November 9: 1294 Views
• Measure Me: Profiling Social Media Influencers & Analysis Paralysis September 29: 2225 Views
• United Parcel Service Gets Social Media & Customer Service September 14: 2511 Views
• Everyone is a Journalist August 31, 2010: 3948 Views
• The Social Customer Goes Mobile   July 28: 1001 Views
• 4 Cs of Social Media Marketing: Content, Connections, Communications and Community July 16: 1720
• Why you need to know your Social Customers: Because They control Your Brand June 21: 1002 Views
• Designing a Social Media Peer Group For Best Buy May 4: 467 Views
• The Economics of Social Business April 22: 474 Views
• Is the Social Media Bubble Bursting or will the Tsunami Continue March 30: 343 Views
• Thought Leadership and the Social Customer March 18: 242 Views
• The B2B Social Media Olympics March 9 2010: 614 Views
• On the Front Lines of Social CRM February 18: 548 Views
• The New Mobile Social Customer is Here are You Ready For Them? February 2: 118 views
• I am a Social Customer January 15, 2010: 417 Views

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Social Predator & Your Brand

I have evolved beyond the social customer; I am now a social predator. I am more mobile, the weapons I use to find and grade your business and services are now at my finger tips always. I use a rich suite of applications on my IPhone that lets me find you anywhere I am. It doesn’t matter if you are a theatre, pharmacy, gas station, hospital, bank, hotel, bar or restaurant, I can find you in seconds and read about your products and services. I am your brand’s best friend or your worst nightmare, you decide. I own your brand. I can rip right through your brand so fast you will bleed to death before you get to me. And hundreds of people in my social networks will read all about your greatness or your weakness before you can do anything about it.

My Weapons Include:

• My smart mobile device, IPhone 4
• AroundMe  gets me to you and knows where I am in any city
• Yelp provides me with an instant gratification platform that can make your brand bleed.
• TripAdvisor provides me with an audience in the thousands that trusts me.
• FaceBook and Twitter connect me directly to my networks globally and now my friends read my trustworthy reviews from Yelp and TripAdvisor here.
• BC reader my latest IPhone app lets me scan your business card quickly into my contacts.

You don’t own your brand experience anymore the social predators do. In the swamp under my tree lay the discarded carcasses of many brands that did not see me coming; only a few noticed me and reached out to me. They paid the price in bad reviews for shabby service and products and never knew why the customers went to a competitor. In many ways I am your competitor but I do not seek bad service and yearn to write about it. I have the simplest of taste, I only want the best. In fact most of my reviews of your products and services have been positive, and if you look closely most of the social predator brethren’s reviews are of the same ilk. And most importantly I can do nearly all of this without a significant investment, Yelp is free as is TripAdvisor and so is AroundMe, but I did pay for my IPhone and some of the apps.

When I joined TripAdvisor in March I would never have imagined it now has over 40 million reviews; here are my most recent TripAdvisor stats and hundreds of people had read my reviews, I know because TripAdvisor sends me the stats.

Trip Advisor Reviews:

 November 4, 2010 Carmel Ranch: One of the Best Experiences in California and Best Value

Rating 5.0

Oct 15 2010 Berkeley: Hotel Shattuck Plaza: There is No Service like No Service

Rating 2.0

July 14 2010: Medford: Rogue Regency Inn: Great Value and Location

Rating 4.0

July 13 2010: Portland : Westin Portland: Over Priced Without Air Conditioning and Service

Rating 2.0

June 11 2010: New York City Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers: Shabby and Unsecure

Rating 3.0

May 21 2010: Orlando Hilton: Elegance in the Humditiy: Rating 5.0

April 30 2010: Bloomington: Sofitel: Rating 5.0

March 8 2010 Houston: The Houstonian: Class in Houston: Rating 5.0

March 8 2010: Healdsburg: DuChamp Class in Healdsburg: Rating 4.0

 

On Yelp I am known as the "The Guy from Gloucester" nearly 700 people have reviewed my profile, here are my stats from Yelp. I have reviewed 38 restaurants, and have posted six review updates. Below is the synopsis of my reviews which I believe are very fair.

 

 

 

Net/Net

 

Know your social customers; there are many more of us every day. As a consumer of products and services, I feel tremendously empowered by the ability to express my opinion in the hope of changing a poor experience into a better one. I want more value for my money in this age of global economic restructuring, because now I have morphed into a new consumer, and I can be your social predator if you ignore me.

 

Earlier this year I became a social customer and posted two blogs about my experiences I am a Social Customer “Know Me You Get My Business and I Promote Yours” http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore1/25670/i-am-social-customer, and I quickly became a mobile social customer, The Social Customer Goes Mobile, http://thesocialcustomer.com/peterauditore1/28039/social-customer-goes-mobile.

 

I feel even more empowered now by the fact that hundreds of people will see my reviews and some will trust my judgment. Last Friday I had a poor service experience with a manager in the wine department at a high end super market, I Yelped it, but have not gotten a response back yet. Many businesses are not prepared for the social customer, let alone the social predator. In the course of reviewing ten hotels and writing 38 restaurant reviews I have been contacted only three times by the business I reviewed, The Sheraton and Towers in New York City gets it, so does La Costanera a Peruvian restaurant in California and The Bastille Café and Bar in Ballard WA, gets it. Why don’t you? Knowing the social customer is no doubt a competitive advantage today. Until next time I wish you great marketing and selling in the millennium.

 

 

Social Media is Changing SMB Marketing + Hurricanes & Marine Micro Fauna

During the course of this year’s AMI-Partners Social Media Marketing awards presentation on November 11^th in NYC, MyVenturePad received the best of class award in social media marketing demand generation. I want to thank the Social Media Today staff and all the bloggers and members of MVP for their continuing participation in this growing community focused on the issues facing small business. Nearly all the major technology vendors, AT&T, Dell, HP, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Intuit, Oracle and Avaya received awards for excellence in social media marketing to SMBs globally. SMBs are an increasingly important opportunity for technology vendors as there are now an estimated 80-100 million small and medium businesses worldwide. http://www.ami-partners.com/index.php?target=news&mode=details&news_id=157#157

It is always great to receive awards but I thought the data AMI presented about social media in the SMB world would be of significant interest to the MVP community. AMI-Partners presented an excellent overview of how SMBs are shifting to electronic media & information sources driven by relevancy, trust, and interactivity. This is really no surprise, although there are a lot of old schoolers out there that are ignoring the opportunity to get closer to their customers. Let’s take a big picture look at their findings from a purely business perspective first, as a “data dog” I love research, reading the data, and found their data points to be insightful.

Key business challenges facing SMBs globally are:

• Decreased Revenue
• Canceled Orders
• Restricted Cash Flow
• Slower Payment
• Tight Credit

Nothing surprising here, but what was really interesting about their findings was that only 5% of those SMBs surveyed were aware of any stimulus packages and were benefiting from it. Nearly 50% were unaware of any stimulus money available for them. So much for the stimulus packages, were did the money go?

Globally there was a slight decrease in concern about economic conditions, which ranged from 70% in North American and close to 50-55% for the LATAM, EMEA and APAC, this is again very insightful.

SMBs are Shifting their IT Decision Making

Information technology can and is delivering competitive advantage in all business and new media is gaining significant ground on traditional media when it comes to the purchasing decision making for IT products.

• Traditional Print and Media (decreased significantly in small businesses).
• Internet sites (increased overall globally).
• Search Engines (increased overall globally).
• Social Networks (significant increase overall globally).
• Referrals VARs IT consultants (decreased significantly globally).
• Trade Associations & Industry Conferences (decreased significantly globally).

AMI’s findings show that an estimated 4.8 million SMBs in the U.S. and (76%) use some form of social media for business use. This represents $180 billion in information technology spend and 48% used some form of social media in the purchase decision making process.

Two other important points:

• Nearly $23 billion of information technology sending was impacted by Social Media in 2010
• AMI projects that social media will impact $53 billion in U.S. SMB ICT spending by 2013

Vital Statistics:

• Data collected during Q1 2010
• Total sample size N=378, from a sampling pool of 11,000 US SMBs.  The sample was representative of all employee size bands, verticals and geography.
• Employee size bands:  1-4, 5-9, 10-19, 20-49, 50-99, 100-249, 250-499, 500-999
• Verticals: Agri/Min/Utils/Trans/Cnst/Bldg (AMTUC), FIRE/Finance/Real Estate (FIRE), Manufacturing, Professional Business Services, Retail,  Wholesale, Other Services

 

 Net/Net

Social media is accelerating the purchase decision making of SMBs and enabling them to purchase more technology faster. This is something that early SNCR research identified last year in The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks study which can be found on this site http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/143500. The growing level of trust in social media peer groups is now certainly a factor in many B2B business arenas and definitely a major factor in purchase decision making in anything B2C.

The Personality of Fish: Hurricanes and Marine Micro Fauna

Now that hurricane season is nearly over I think it is safe to talk about them. What always blows my mind about Atlantic hurricanes is that many of them begin their evolution as warm air and dust that blows off the Sahara desert into the Atlantic Ocean. Research shows that dust collected during hurricanes in Barbados originated from Africa and the Alps. These mini storm systems then follow the traditional track of the westerly’s (the trade winds the early explorers used) into the Caribbean where they begin to intensify into tropical storms and hurricanes. In many cases they find the Gulf Stream and follow it up the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and approach Cape Hatteras, once known as the graveyard of the Atlantic.

 I have spent many days at sea and the day I awakened to find myself near the Cape was one I will never forget. I didn’t know exactly where we were, but I distinctly remember the smell of fear in the air; there was something different about this place and its energy. I thought as if I could smell death. Thanks to modern meteorology Cape Hatteras is no longer the graveyard it once was.

Hurricanes have a seminal role in the distribution of plants and animals, primarily because of their tremendous strength, long track duration and course. Marine micro fauna in the form of plankton like Foraminfera, Ostracods and other high order microorganisms are transported great distances by hurricanes. In 1967, the ship Vidal encountered rain with fresh water diatomites in the middle of the Atlantic. Birds, butterflies and insects often find refuge in the eye of a hurricane and are transported great distances. In 1917 a paper by Hurd, he details the transportation of insects, in this case locusts over 2000 KM from the African coast. We still have a lot of work to do when it comes to understanding our atmosphere-ocean interface and in this case the distribution of organisms like marine micro fauna. Who knew that hurricane rain would be a good garden fertilizer? I hope you have enjoyed this year’s personality of fish sections and I wish you great marketing and selling in the millennium.  

 

 

 

The Ecosystem of Influence

Social networks are radically changing the way we do business and are a new ecosystem of influence. They are virally creating communities within communities that are driving brand recognition and experience, product innovation and everything else associated with communications.  Social networks facilitate and automate vast interactions, connections and networks of people by enabling collaboration with colleagues, clients and suppliers anywhere and at any time. This new ecosystem almost completely eliminates the need for travel, and incorporates a rich suite of evolving Web 2.0 applications. Most importantly, however, within this new ecosystem there are individual influencer ecosystems with their own dynamics interrelationships, characteristics and influence models.

The Global Bazaar

The impact of these far-reaching social networks on business is becoming clearer every day as millions of consumers, partners, suppliers and businesses discuss and share their brand experience. Enter the new business to person (B2P) paradigm. Mohan Sawhney, author of The Global Brain reinforces this in his book, “social customers are driving innovation, they are empowered and collaborative, they are the drivers and initiators of innovation and are increasingly viewed as a strategic asset to companies. Today’s customer is looking for a personalized experience and relationship, demanding solutions rather than products,” in what he calls the global Bazaar.

As a former marine biologist I am often intrigued by how often ecological terms are used to describe business. The term symbiosis is often used to describe a business process, event or association that is viewed a synergistic or favorable. Symbiosis is not necessarily a good thing as parasitism and mutualism are also forms of symbiosis. So sometimes I have to laugh about the use ecological terms as metaphors or analogies in business because they don’t make sense. But let’s get back to the concept of an ecosystem of influence. First let’s define an ecosystem here is the scientific definition and my definition of a social media ecosystem.

Scientific Definition: An ecological system, a natural unit of living and nonliving components which interact to form a stable system in which a cyclic interchange of materials takes place between living and nonliving units, Dictionary of Biology, 1971.

Social Media Definition: A highly collaborative global area network of interconnected machines and people who communicate, collaborate and spread influence at the business velocity of the Internet.

 

Observation is King

When studying a biological ecosystem there are many parameters that have to be identified observed and quantified, the same goes for modeling an influencer ecosystem. The most important activity to conduct during and evaluation of an ecosystem is observation. This is paramount. Observing interactions and interrelationships within the ecosystem unveils its dynamics. But remember another important aspect of any modeling exercise is, understanding that there are always unpredictable and unmeasureable parameters and also influencers.

The Influencer’s Ecosystem

• Economic market conditions in which the influencer exists
• Geography global, regional and/or local reach of the influencer
• Competitors who don’t agree with the influencer
• Other Influencers who think the same and are part of his network
• Partners who support the influencer
• Customers who consume influencer content and trust it
• Vendors who work with the influencer
• Channels of influence, Facebook, twitter, blogs etc.

 

So let’s model the dynamics, interactions and interrelationships of Paul Greenberg a prominent influencer in the world of CRM and SCRM influence. Most notably Paul is the author of CRM at the Speed of Light and is one of the most prolific writers in the industry and it seems like he is competing with Ram Charan for world’s most traveled business influencer. What makes Paul successful is of course his knowledge and insights into everything CRM, but what separates him from the traditional one man boutique research and consulting house is the ecosystem that he has built around him.

Paul is also a visionary and this is something that I don’t see in the ranks of traditional market research companies anymore and his work on the concept of social CRM is way ahead of the pack. In fact his knowledge and use of social media as a channel of influence is a best practice in the industry for any influencer. One of the key advantages that Paul has in the market is business agility, he is not confined by any management team and/or antiquated culture that is holding back many of the traditional market research companies when it comes to social media. 

I have been working with Paul now for three years and here are some of my observations:

• He is a major influencer in everything CRM and is the father of our newest acronym SCRM and he participates in a highly competitive global industry where the market conditions vary with geography.
• He is global and is asked to speak at events globally and consults and advises companies on everything CRM and now SCRM.
• There are some influencers that think that customer experience management is more important than CRM.
• Paul has an ecosystem of influencers around him that he leverages including traditional market research companies; however, he differentiates himself by understanding the business value of technology and how to apply it to achieve business objectives.
• One of the most powerful aspects of Paul’s influence is the ecosystem of influencers around him including the conference and associations he participates in, and the CRM playaz. http://crmplayaz.com/
• Most CRM partners and vendors work with Paul in some capacity leveraging his insights and influence.
• Paul has a huge following on Twitter, he is always on Facebook and his ZDnet CRM blog is the most read in the world.
• The majority of the information that Paul provides insights on is accurate and trustworthy.

Net/Net

Last month I posted a blog entitled Everyone is a Journalist and Paul’s ecosystem picked it up and broadcasted it through their Twitter and Facebook channels, before I knew it I had over 3000 readers. This demonstrates the power of his ecosystem. People are joining and participating in social media peer group and communities globally and are forming ecosystems of influence of their own. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium.  

 

 

 

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Facebook in the Experience Economy & Cephalopods Pelagic Raptors of the Deep

Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s book, The Experience Economy 1999, was a harbinger of the end of the services economy, which according to these authors peaked some years ago. As observers of the rapidness of commoditization in nearly all markets and business they were vaticinators of the experience economy we are now realizing in social media. The social media tsunami is fueling the experience economy as people, groups, customers, partners, companies, and governments and many other organizations are interacting and forming interrelationships via the social media peer groups in new and unforeseen Web 2.0 ways.

The societal and anthropological aspects of social media peer groups are just now beginning to be understood and the ramifications of these interrelationships are just being felt. These new platforms are enabling communications that leads to interrelationships between people, and groups that has never been seen before. They now enable us to create, build, maintain and reestablish previous relationships from other points and times in our lives, and are enabling new relationships with our government, NGOs, and the companies we consume products and services from.

Enter the social media landscape: craigslist, facebook, youtube, myspace, twitter, flickr, photobucket, linkedin, digg, ning, yelp, tagged, squidoo, scribd, stumbleupon, hi5, bebo, reddit, myyearbook, technorati, caboodle, Friendster, flixster, xanga, epinions, plaxo, mybloglog, yuku, metafilter, blackplanet, care2, getsatisfaction, friendfeed, clipmarks, cafemon, newwvine, omgili, gigya, ballhipe, current, revver, ping, tribe, magnify, digo, dzone, xing, faves, tweetdeck, ecademy, twine.

(The Fifty Top Social Media Sites from Website Magazine’s Feb 2010 issue, I added craiglist)

The Good, the Bad, the I don’t care and now the Ugly

In the world of Sociobiology our father E. O. Wilson taught us about societies and behavior previously unknown to man, the hierarchy of termites, ants and other insects that have one common trait, altruism. Each member of the community communicates, interacts, behaves and performs a function that is predetermined by the community hierarchy and all are in the best interest of the community, harvesting, defending territory, nurturing eggs and gardens within. Humans don’t act like this and when presented with a new community like social media they will act in many ways that are often predictable and sometimes nefarious. What we don’t know about Facebook and many of the other sites is how humans are really acting and what the good, the bad, the I don’t care and the ugly experiences are.

The Good

Two years ago I found my long lost cousin in Australia on Facebook, wow we Skype nearly every week now. This is a good interrelationship. I have found enormous professional value in being a member of LinkedIn and my network has expanded to several hundred colleagues and professional connections. My Facebook community of friends and colleagues is mixed with both, but I would prefer that it be only my friends and that is where the line blurs. I know that HR people can profile me now on Facebook and even decide whether I am culturally fit for a potential job, this is good and bad. I could be culturally unfit just because I am too old or because of their perception of my sexual preference. This is good and bad. Facebook in particular has now become a great tool for social media marketing for small and large businesses alike in addition to non profits who want to get closer to their customers.

The Bad

The beginning of the bad is when relatives that did nothing for you suddenly appear and want to be your friend. They are the relatives that you wanted to forget, but they are still there back at you as if nothing really happened. It’s like that Rodney Dangerfield joke, “would you be friends with your relatives if you weren’t related to them?” It can get really worse if you are stalked by a former girl friend or boy friend and Facebook has many stalkers, I even had one person do what they thought was a cute video of me during the last holiday season. There is a tremendous amount of information out there on all us and it is growing every day, so be careful when you share information about traveling and other personal issues. Remember that according to statistics a high percentage of identity theft comes from your own relatives that are jealous of you. There are also many stalkers that use Facebook’s IM to get people’s attention to start a conversation; they may come from your friends networks. For example some men will IM every women they know to be single a happy mother’s day wish even if they don’t know if they are mothers or not. This just happened to one of my friends. 

I don’t care!

Then a series of old friends from high school came back into the picture, and I connected with them, but have found their world to be one that I don’t live in anymore. They talk about the little insular and provincial New England town that I was raised in and invite me to groups and events important to that town. These events aren’t important to me, I don’t live there and to be quite honest I really don’t care about them. Nor do I want to enter into relationships with people that I really have nothing to share with anymore. I am not trying to be snotty or uppity but I really don’t care about their home town lives. I don’t live there.

The Ugly

The ugly stories keep pouring in and with hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and within other social media peer groups, I bet there are hundreds if not thousands of stories like the following happening all the time. Last weekend I had lunch with a friend that hates Facebook. He claims it has wrecked his brother’s and his best friend’s marriages. In the case of his brother, his wife left a marriage of 23 years and a 14 year old daughter to be with another woman. Unfortunately, she forgot to de-friend my friend and is flaunting her new life on Facebook for all to see while abandoning her husband and daughter.

In the case of his best friend his wife also left because she found her high school sweetheart on Facebook and recently just up and left another 20 year marriage with two children to be with him. I heard the same story from my hairdresser on Monday of last week about how her sister just up and left her family. It would be easy to dismiss these situations based on unhappy marriages and the times of uncertainty that we live in today because of our broken government and financial system, but I don’t think so. Facebook and the other SMPGs are enabling communications that would have never happened before. What do you think? How many stories like this have you heard?

The Personality of Cuttlefish

Cuttlefish (Sepia sp.) are marine invertebrates and are actually are mollusks in a class called Cephalopoda which is highly adapted for swimming. They are the fastest swimmers of all marine invertebrates and employ a highly evolved jet propulsion system using water. Some species can actually propel themselves out of the water and are known as flying squids. There are only around 650 species in the class which includes squid, octopods, and nautili, the largest are the giant squid. Giant squids inhabit depths along the continental shelf to depths of 600 meters and the most famous of them the Humboldt squid range in large schools up and down the Pacific coast.

 

All cephalopods are kings of camouflage and can change their color instantly and in some cases their skin texture to match their immediate surroundings to hide from predators or lie in wait for prey.  Cuttlefish are slower swimmers than streamlined squid and leverage their small shell for bouncy along with fluid and the gas nitrogen. Light is a major factor for Cuttlefish and it regulates its bouncy the more light the less buoyant. They spend the day burrowed into the bottom and at night they become active gaining more buoyancy to swim up into the water column to hunt. Cuttlefish and squids are what is called highly adapted for raptorial feeding and carnivorous diet, they have ten arms arranged in two arrays of five around the head. Eight are short and heavy while the other two are twice as long and are called tentacles used for seizing prey.

Some Cuttlefish live at depths of more than 1200 meters and others live in shallow tide pools in our warmer oceans. These animals have the highest degree of nervous system development of all marine invertebrates which enable their mobility and carnivorous nature. They are diecous (meaning there are males and females) and they engage in copulation with normally the male seizing the female head on. Cuttlefish can display complex color changes which are thought to be directly related to behavior and most species change color when alarmed. I hope you have enjoyed this blog post and good luck selling and marketing in the millennium. And how will your behavior change the next time you log onto Facebook, will you turn a different color?

Why you need to know your Social Customers: Because they control your brand!

I am a Starwood, Marriot, Hilton member but it gets me almost nothing to be honest, I have been a United Mileage plus member twenty years, and I even have a frequent parking account. But what really frustrates me about a lot of these programs is that they don’t know who I am and many organizations are not leveraging them for competitive advantage. When I arrive at hotels they never upgrade me, and for the most part I never hear from these programs anymore. I remember a time when we got monthly statements about our activity and then they were moved to quarterly and then disappeared completely! Why because they forgot about us, their most loyal customers.

I expect more for my loyalty, don’t you? What many companies don’t understand is that they no longer control their brand, the social customer does. All of us should become social customers; this will enable us to drive up the overall quality of products and services in many companies and industries globally. Most importantly companies need to know who their social customers are; here is a real world example of how social customers are impacting business today. I am a social customer and now hundreds of people are reading my Trip Advisor hotel reviews. Here is my most recent post read by 100 people in less than a week, and so far the poor reaction to my comments about this hotel from its management.

Sheraton NYC Towers Trip Advisor Review

This was my second stay at this hotel in less than a month and I have to say it needs a major overhaul, all the way from the rooms down to the bell desk and into the club lounge. What was most scary about this place was the overall lack of security especially at 1-2am when no security people were at the elevator entry areas. I did really like the club level and the breakfast is fun and coffee nice along with the overall environment. The bar at the club was missing the martini stirrer and didn't have absolute vodka, a woman next to said “it’s always like that here.”

But let’s start at the beginning, we arrive late its 85 degrees and humid as we enter our stuffy room on the floor twenty and the air conditioner doesn't work. I call down to the desk and they say they will send up maintenance, thirty minutes passes no one arrives. We pack up our stuff and head down to the front desk this time pissed off. We ask for another room and I complain about the room assignment, the front desk attendant says "what do you expect me to check out every room to see if the air conditioner works?" I ask for a manager and he is even ruder, and guess what? I am a ten year Starwood member and our company recommends this hotel, I remind him of that, but he doesn’t care. They assign me a room above the club level, make sense? I don't think so, the next day I ask for the day manager, Zoe Cohen and she is nice and gives me 12,000 Starwood points. 

Two days later it is raining and we attempt to go out for dinner, the cab line is long and the bell captain is nowhere to be found, so I jump the line and get my own cab. The next morning we leave at 5:45 am and guess what? There is no bell person to help with anything? What is up with this? Overall a great location and it is unfortunate that all our European visitors are treated to the same level of poor service. I noticed many Italians during my two visits. The good news is our maid service was very good, but I don't think I will stay here again, because as a Starwood member I expected my room to be ready at 1AM. On my previous visit my colleague’s room wasn't ready either and we checked at 6:30PM.

Sheraton’s Response to my TripAdvisor Review

Dear Paul,

Thank you for taking the time to provide the feedback and recap of your visit here in NYC.
The content, although some of it painful is critical to our performance and garnering guest loyalty. I would like to discuss your visit in more detail if you have the time. During this conversation I will also update you on our direction for renovations that are coming soon.

We look forward to hearing back from you on how to connect.
Sincerely
Mark Sanders

Net/Net

 

Identifying and managing your social customers is paramount in the social media landscape of today and it can be a clear differentiator in many industries, in this case especially hotels as they are very vulnerable. I think it is great that Sheraton at least corresponded with me but the same lack of sincerity and thoroughness about their product and services was reflected in their response.  First of all they got my name wrong, they did not address one of my issues and a security lapse in NYC is serious. They did not recognize me as a Starwood member or even say we are making sure that the club bar is stocked an appropriately appointed with martini stirrers. I pulled the latest statistics off TripAdvisor and although the site says that 67% of travelers recommend this hotel, the number is actually closer to 57%.

The general manager was nice enough to offer the opportunity to talk with me, but to be honest; I am not too interested in communicating with you if you can’t even get my name correct. The power of social media today is the power of the community, not the power of one. If I was the manager of a large iconic hotel in the most visited city in the America I would be shocked that only 2/3^rd s of the visitors to my hotel could recommend it. TripAdisor, Yelp and many others are now the voice of the people and their voice travels globally at Internet speed. As a business, know these communities and leverage your customers loyalty in new and exciting ways that can keep them loyal and provide you with the opportunity to find new loyal customers that can enhance your brand.

 

Sheraton NYC Towers Reviews All (1,464)

67% of travelers recommend this hotel

 

·         Excellent                                             331

·         Very good                                            484

·         Average                                               275

·         Poor                                                     222

·         Terrible                                               138