Tag Archive for: Facebook

How Cisco's SocialMiner helps improve the conversation with customers (a John Hernandez interview)

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One-on-one interview with John Hernandez

John Hernandez is General Manager of the Customer Collaboration Business Unit (CCBU) at Cisco, which provides contact center and interactive voice applications to enterprises and service providers. In this capacity he oversees product and market development, and is closely involved in the business with the Cisco sales force and partners.

The Strategy Web spoke with him about the launch and benefits of their new customer care product SocialMiner.

What were Cisco’s most successful social medias tactics in the last 2 years? How did Cisco came across the new solution SocialMiner? Why is social media monitoring so important from a strategic point of view for businesses?

Cisco is very active in social media. Our employees were some of the earliest adopters of Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites. We have tens of thousands of active social media users in our company, as well as a robust and vibrant corporate presence on the social web.

Social media monitoring can become a key strategic advantage for businesses. From a contact center perspective, social media could be treated as “just another channel” in a multichannel approach. However, the public nature of social media, along with the sheer volume of social media postings, makes social media as much a business intelligence tool as a new way to engage with customers. Cisco believes that proactive social media customer care will have a transformative impact on how companies engage and serve their customers.

The concept of the SocialMiner product came from our observation of the changing communication habits and Internet usage of consumers. As consumers have adopted social media channels for their individual communications on an ever-increasing basis over the past couple years, it is only natural that they would consider interacting with a business via social media. This concept of social impacting customer relationships is a very active topic within the emerging “Social CRM” community.

Is SocialMiner just a Customer Service product? Bearing in mind that social conversations on the web affects the whole business…

Cisco SocialMiner is an engagement product, not a “listening product.” SocialMiner is designed to scale the quality and quantity of social media interactions performed by a business. SocialMiner can be used for a variety of business functions such as Support or Sales, but we believe the customers that derive the most value from social media will also use these engagements to drive business process change. For example, an organization could use SocialMiner as a source of business intelligence to provide real-time customer appreciation or criticism of a product or service (or of a competitors’ product/service). Social media can direct their business strategy. Cisco believes that companies that learn from social media will become closer to meeting their customers’ expectations and this will drive overall business success.

Which three benefits do business users have using SocialMiner compared to other tools in the market (Radian6, Alterian, etc.)

1. Cisco SocialMiner is complementary to brand monitoring dashboard solutions. It is designed to support scaling social media by leveraging the best practices from contact center type operational models: Queuing, Service Level Metrics (Average Speed of Answer), and productivity metrics for users. By contrast, many of the brand monitoring dashboards have pieces of workflow capability, but these capabilities are either relatively limited or recently introduced functions.

2. Cisco SocialMiner is a component of the Cisco contact center portfolio which currently includes an installed base of over 10,000 customers. SocialMiner is packaged, priced, and delivered along with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express and Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise solutions, and therefore it supports the same installation, deployment, serviceability, and user experience as these other Cisco collaboration solutions.

3. Cisco SocialMiner is a very easy to install and operate software appliance. It runs on premise or in a customer controlled data-center hosting facility and offers unlimited capture capability. Cisco SocialMiner is an API-first product with 100% of functionality available via REST API’s and all user interface delivered as OpenSocial gadgets with documented source that can be modified by Cisco channel or customers. This model supports the preferred consumption model of most enterprise organizations along with a broad customization capability.

Can it be used as a stand-alone product or only in combination with other Cisco products for customer service? Do you have any case studies of success?

Cisco SocialMiner can be used as a stand-alone solution. We have several case studies that illustrate SocialMiner’s success. Zone Labs is one of them. The small wellness company was looking to accelerate revenues & grow 1000% in next 3 years, implemented Cisco SocialMiner to increase customer engagement, customer satisfaction and sales. Zone Labs started developing social communities on their own website as well as Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets. They used Cisco SocialMiner to route and queue contacts to experts within their organization.

Using SocialMiner, experts were able to proactively answer health and wellness questions via Twitter, providing encouragement to consumers on the Zone Diet, customer service and expert advice on questions such as vitamins and healthy recipes. Zone Labs saw improved agent productivity by automating capturing and responding to social media posts (currently estimated at ~10x). They gained greater customer satisfaction & brand mind-share from faster first inquiry resolution on the web, and were able to compete on comparable scale with larger companies. Their social media activity reduced their customer acquisition cost and created a larger funnel with more leads, that were converted more easily and more quickly than before.

Within 4 months of using SocialMiner, Zone Labs saw tremendous results:
– Web site transactions up 189%
– Revenue up 203%
– 202% increase in total visitors to www.zonediet.com

Thank you for your time, John. And by the way: I like your commercial for the product…

"We have effectively created a two-way direct dialogue" – World Economic Forum & Social Media

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The World Economic Forum will host its annual meeting in Davos from 26-30th of January 2011. Year on year prominent business people and politicians discuss at the event the state of the world from economics to political issues up to environment topics. In 2008, I have written about the first Social Media approach of the WEF. It became the most read blog post until today, probably as of the event’s popularity.

At the end of last year, I met Matthias Lüfkens at the LeWeb10 in Paris and I wanted to get some input on their Social Media learnings.

About two years ago, I have written about the World Economic Forum and your open social web-strategy. How do you think about your approach in 2008 today?
I think it was the right decision to engage the World Economic Forum on social networks. We are present on the key networks and now have 15.000 fans on Facebook, 13.000 subscribers on YouTube and 1.4 million followers on Twitter. We have shown that our engagement on social networks was not a short-lived PR operation but is a continuous effort to participate in the conversation.

What are the main achievements of your social web activities?
Beyond the number of friends, fans and followers the main achievement is to have given the general public a voice in the Forum. For three years running we have invited citizen journalists to attend our meetings. In 2010 Julia Lalla-Maharajh from the Orchid Project won the YouTube contest and had her own panel in the programme addressing her cause, the fight against female genital mutilation.

Where do you see the difference between PR people and bloggers from today’s point of view?
Social Media has blurred the lines between bloggers and PR people. Today anyone can have his voice heard through blogging or micro-blogging: the consumer, the blogger, the PR representative but also the CEO directly. If there is citizen journalism, there must also be room for CEO journalism, a new more transparent and engaging form of public relations.

What will be your highlights of the WEF 2011?
My highlight is to see how much Social Media has become part and parcel of our events. At the Social Media Corner participants are encouraged to reply to questions on YouTube and Facebook. Many are actively using Twitter to share their thoughts about the meeting. It will be interesting to see how many will check in on Facebook Places and Foursquare.

What is the value of the social web and active social medians for an event like the World Economic Forum?
Social Media has opened up the World Economic Forum events. We have effectively created a two-way direct dialogue between our participants and the general public.

Thank you for your time, Matthias!

Why Check-Ins need to improve in the future…

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Early adopters show big interest (see study) in location-based platforms like Gowalla, Foursquare or Groupon and obviously Facebook Places. Though only 4% of the US internet users use it, and probably the number is even lower in Europe. Nevertheless, Check-Ins could become the pull mechanism for offers on location-based direct marketing campaign in the future.

However, the check-in technology is still not completely evolved. People can still log-on from places around a building (though often not in the building…) -like we check-in on our airlines for flights today from all over the world- and still earn their “check-in credits”.

Some months ago, I wrote about loyalty cards and how the intelligent use of Social Media at point of sales, i.e. cash points at retailers or in shops, could make our purse loose some “plastic weight”, and make loyalty cards a thing of the past.

Now, combine this thought with the new location-based technology and think where we could be if these platforms could embed loyalty programs in their technology/apps. Automated check-in via apps. No second hand-over from loyalty plastic cards. Quicker engagement and upsale opportunities for companies and brands. Brave new world!?

This presentation by the DASH7 Alliance looks at the state of location-based check-ins in the past, today and the need for a global standard for check-ins (and check-outs) in the future.

The Future of Check ins

View more presentations from DASH7 Alliance.

Digital Death – Celebs social life gives real life

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This campaign is one of the most remarkable ideas I have ever seen where Social Media can underline it’s potential. This week some of the world’s most famous celebrities have committed “Digital Death”. How? They stopped posting on Twitter and Facebook profiles to raise awareness and money for World AIDS Day.

Starting December 1st VIPs like Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, and Usher won’t be active with their digital lives to generate money which will help save millions of real lives affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and India.

Are you missing your celeb social output? Well, then go to buylife.org, get their output back by making a donation. There won’t be any updates on their social streams until 1 mio. USD is raised and there is quite a way to go from 160K at the moment…

Does work still work at work?

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What is the future workplace going to be like? A question many of us have been asking themselves in the last years. Jason Fried, founder of 37signals did a great presentation at TEDtalksDirector on why work doesn’t work at work. As managers look into the future of work, some tools and techniques affect the productivity and he is asking if the Western work world is China when managers ban Facebook or Twitter. The real problems are the M&M’s (managers and meetings), Jason thinks. Managers job is not to turn up in meeting and to interrupt people. Meetings are just toxic as they are organized by managers to make people talk – and this kills creativity, productivity and spontaneity. His suggested solutions: Silence, passive communication and yes, … cancel meetings.

These are quite provocative views. As some of you are managers as well, what is your take on them and how would you make work work at work in the future?

News Update – Best of the Day

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Although Facebook is seen as a danger from a user’s perspective in terms of data capture, it offers great opportunities for businesses. Companies better see “the Facebook opportunity, get their site and grab their buttons” suggests David Carr.

What are the targets for companies engaging in Social Media in 2011? The “2010 Social Media Benchmarking Study” from Ketchum and FedEx shows us what 62 researched companies are aiming at…
– Increase awareness and interaction with brand: 94.1%
– Create community for customers/fans: 76.1%
– Increase traffic to website: 55.1%
– Identify and react to customer needs: 50.3%
– Identify new business opportunities or leads: 49.0%
And the reason for all this? As Facebook and Twitter are the new normal. At least their co-founders Chris Hughes and Biz Stone make us believe that…

If this commerial won’t remind you of “Jaws” (1975), then none will. Y&R created a funny video ad for LG Electronics latest vacuum cleaner…

The way to the real-time future of marketing mix

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When you hear the term “marketing mix”, what do you think…? Pause! Think… Pause!

Does that sound familiar to you? For some of you it might. To others it blurs as they follow the hypes as new marketing topics that are shouting at them. Or did you listen to their silent tones? Isn’t it better to varify and understand the client before start creating a new marketing-mix.

Watching the latest videos on your Youtube channel, talking to “friends” on Facebook or following the latest conversations on Twitter is one thing. Drawing conclusions out of these conversations on the social web world is another. And taking actions like evaluating adwords versus email versus social network marketing or blogs versus micro-blogs) for your marketing mix afterwards is a third step.

Conclusions might also be that marketers realize that B2B people still read print preferably to online or love real face-to-face conversations. They might find out that these business decision makers think twice before they engage in conversations. Reasons might be social media guidelines or policies. Steps are needed (like social media monitoring) before you start understanding your own marketing mix could pay out (i.e. online and offline focus groups).

Other marketing opportunities have never died although social media still hypes. And there is a reason why the “marketing mix” phrase was created by Neil Borden some years ago. Not only as it is an easy to understand phrase. More as we use it in our daily business as marketers without even noticing anymore. It is in our DNA. It is a necessity. Will it ever be removed? I doubt it…

Isn’t it interesting that we never had something like “The ultimate approach to market your products and services”?

Obviously, there is none. In over 50 years nobody found one. Why that is? Well, the world is driven by human beings and their attitudes to become familiar and aware of new things is a dynamic process. Some people adapt quick, other slower. They prefer to get informed via paper. Some like online (via publisher platforms, social networks or blogs). Some still stay offline (as they are often on planes or trains). Others record TV news programs and watch them on-demand with their iPads. And then others use mobile readers or apps to stay up to date with their favorite brands.

Seeing the social hypes in our business world from an outside perspective, I sometimes get the feeling that marketers have to refocus on where users are in their “adaption of technology evolution”. And not invest all their money in one horse race. Or to use another business anology from a tactical HR point of view: Never let the whole sales team be on the same flight.

Where is the difference in marketing?
Is there one? If all your marketing budget goes on airport billboards and then an oil crisis comes up, the invest equals zero in terms of earn out. Or if you buy just one ad in a service provider catalogue on the web but the world uses Google and cannot find the provider in the first ten results, the budget might be wasted.

Some companies think investing in Twitter or Facebook saves their brands awareness in the future but forget that these sites go down once in a while. And then the data is gone or not accessible. Lucky are those who can be approached from other access points then – be it via a phone call (at most companies I am searching hours for a phone number), at an event promoted with social media maybe, at their corporate website, or the self-hosted community that is not on the popular social networks.

The cocktail of having different access points available, and those interacting with each other, is the marketing mix of the future. Although they might have a single target or focus the are aiming at, the marketing mix should be aligned to one common strategy: Engage the client.

Spot on!
As we are automizing our marketing more and more, we always have to keep an eye open which tools and trends are coming up. As technology evolves quite quickly, human beings tend to forget that they need to adapt their marketing mix accordingly. Having said that it does not mean they have to switch their marketing mix approach immediately. Watch out for the tipping point when your power buyers, your brand vangelists, start using different technology. This is the time when the “adaption of technology evolution” happens…

News Update – Best of the Day

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The new report Social Media and Online PR Report 2010 by Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia shows that 95% of companies have tried Social Media and 40% didn’t really get it. The main findings on tactical use can be taked in this picture…: Facebook. Twitter an Youtube rule.

Marketers and PR people often ask what are the mian pitfalls in B2B blogging. Jeremy Victor has put together a 10-point list which I do fully support…

In the morning I was talking of the revival of the print ad if used with social or mobile elements. AXA insurance just brought it to life the idea with the ned of an iPhone.

Social Media study on digital natives released by Volkswagen and MTV

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The new international study “MePublic – A Global Study on Social Media Youth” by Volkswagen and MTV Networks presents some interesting insight into media use and value ethics in the group of 14-to 29-year-olds (digital natives). No surprise that they will respond to one of the findings: Young people want to see networking apps extend to the car… and Volkswagen already works on that app.

“With just under 500,000 fans on Facebook and over ten million visitors on YouTube since the company profile was set up at the end of 2008, Volkswagen already has one of the largest fan communities in the automotive industry. And together with our fans we are breaking new ground in the social web – as confirmed by the recent “App my Ride” competition where we gave prizes to the best developments for applications in car infotainment systems.” Luca de Meo, Group Marketing Head, Volkswagen AG.

The findings show the intensive use of new media and their commitment to brands by digital natives…
– 58% spend time on social networks on a daily basis
– 50% follow product recommendations in social networks
– 43% post their favorite brands on the social web

And the digital natives are well equipped to have best possible access to the new media.
– 94% have a mobile phone
– 92% have a TV set
– 75% an MP3 player

Obviously, there a country-specific differences as the “MePublic” the study lays open. In Japan 40% of the young people primarily use mobile access to their social network which already can be compared with some outlook on the mobile future. 57% of US digital natives use online sources prior to buying a car. In Japan it is only 38% as the young people tend to seek advice direct from the dealer.

The study “MePublic” states six user types based on criteria such as frequency of use, motivation and goal. Amongst those the characters for a “pro-social” world are i.e…
– Mediacs: most active and demanding, technically literate, strongly committed, always looking for something new
– Crewsers: social networks = place to meet up with friends
– Funatics: spectators = like to observe, but are not very active themselves

Spot On!
Generally speaking, the study shows that social networks have been added to digital natives perception of mobility. They want to be available when the are driving. When 60% of the 14-to 29-year-olds are convinced that the significance of mobile social networks will increase over the coming years, it speaks a clear language. If you fear the digital natives are “tweeting and driving”, Volkswagen takes the fear of you: “The driver’s safety remains the top priority.” This nice PR message comes along with the ambitious word about their next iPhone app called “Dieter App”. “The planned application assumes the role of the co-pilot and loyal companion and is in line with the wish for a personalized vehicle expressed by the young people”.

Is this a new approach to humanize a brand perception? Installation of apps that appear like human charaters? What do you think about the study findings?

News Update – Best of the Day

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Every marketer is looking for the key to Facebook success. A study by Vitrue, a social media marketing agency, reveales a secret… which is not a secret in my eyes anymore. As we know it from the email marketing era: Couponing and savings are driving engagement. Images and photos outperformed video and text by 22% and 54% in terms of engagement. Text received 63% more engagement than video when it came to Vitrue’s consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. On quick serve restaurant (QSR) brands images got 136% more engagement than video and 182% more than text.

How are books looking like in the future? This is defintely a neat idea on how the future of massive text work could be looking like…

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The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Social Media is about fans. Football as well. Just look at the power of fans in the stadium. Not virtual! Real! In paper and print!