Ustrategy

Monitoring Social Media: Google, eBay, Klout, and Constant Contact Talk About Tools and Case Studies

Last week, we attended Monitoring Social Media- a conference run by Influence People, a social media event and training company. Among the speakers were Radian6 CEO, and representatives from Seesmic , eBay, and Google. We found Klout  and Constant Contact to provide some interesting perspectives and case studies.

Klout may be best known as the free online site that spews out your  twitter influencer score (average Klout score is 11, in case you were wondering). But Klout also works with the big guys on influencer targeting. Klout’s thesis is that everybody is an influencer on some topic. Rather than focuse on the big guys, Klout focuses on the middle tail.  Klout recently worked with Virgin America to help increase the buzz around the airline’s new direct route between California to Toronto.  Klout identified 570 influencers based on Virgin criteria, who were offered a free roundtrip flight to Toronto. Of these, 264 people “clicked” on the link and 120 booked the flight.

According to Klout, the campaign resulted in 2,087 outside contributors who spoke about the campaign even though they weren’t offered the flight directly. This in return resulted in 41 million potential impressions and 1.9 million true reach (impressions) according to Klout. (The calculations were reached by adding up each member’s network.)

 

Constant Contact, a once gold-standard in email marketing, has  since expanded into the social media world with additional products, and has refocused to address the needs of small businesses. We think this is a smart move for Constant Contact: Most small businesses today lack the tools to use the social web effectively. They don’t have the time and resources needed to conduct marketing efforts, and there is no real consolidated, comprehensive social media marketing solution designed (and priced) for small businesses.

In a research conducted by Constant Contact, 63% of the small businesses they interviewed said Word of Mouth (WOM) and referrals marketing are the best indicators of growth for their business.  To help drive WOM results, Constant Contact is focusing on supplementing the physical responses of audiences (clicks, fanning, following) with emotional responses (likes, shares, retweets, mentions, and user reviews).  Their research shows that by adding a social-sharing tool bar, they were able to increase exposure of content by 60% across audiences—a good result for those small businesses fighting for attention in the inbox.

(This post was originally published on www.ubergizmo.com)

Live blogging from NewCommForum 2010

Today I'm at NewCommForum down in San Mateo. A best-kept-secret conference that impresses me with the quality of its sessions, conversations, and people.

This morning, the session opened with United Breaks Guitars on the screen--a video which has become one of my favorite examples of what New Media has been enabling people to do: express themselves as powerfully, and equally to what was once only possible for powerful customers and attorneys. Halfway through the video, Dave Carroll--the singer who created the video in protest of his poor experience with the airline--came on stage and completed the song live.

This, is the quintessential expression of the convergence between the online and the offline world that so many brands are trying to figure out and that consumers, are vying for whether they are able to articulate it or not. Just look at the buzz around startups Foursquare, Loopt, QuickMark who are looking to capitalize on that invisible—and yet so solid—line between our real and digital worlds.

Great start to a full day of closing gaps, visualizing the future, and connecting with those thought leaders who go beyond the twitter monologue and who are truly interested in—well, thinking, about the possibilities, the future, and our evolving culture.

And, a mid-morning update: Edelman's VP of Digital reported Carroll's campaign resulted in a loss of $180M...the equivalent cost of replacing 51,000 guitars. United is a client of Edelman.

WebProNews Interview: Enterprise Social Media: What to Expect and How to Plan Ahead

In February, I spoke at the Online Marketing Summit. You can read about key takeaways here and download the presentation, or watch this video in which Mike McDonald of WebProNews hits on the key points from the session. Your comments and thoughts are welcomed!

Social Media, PR, and Business: Horn Group, Google, Altimeter, SAP, and C-Change Weigh In

In November 2008—in the eye of both the economic debacle's and the Social Media tornados—the Horn Group, a leading communications firm headquartered in San Francisco,  held an event titled “Is Social Media Killing PR.”  As part of the event, an expert panel including Kara Swisher, Jeremiah Owyang, and Susan Etlinger shared their perspectives on where that new thing called Social Media was going.  (Remember, this was November of ‘08).

The Horn Group’s space, on its three levels, was near-packed and the air was thick with anxiety. I was live-blogging from the event and the response was surprising: People appreciated the update, the tangibility around the topic, and access to others who are at the same confused state as they were. Social Media, back then, was still the“wild west”; grounding was weighed in gold. And for PR professionals who were losing their jobs by the bushels, the conversation was paramount.

That was then. This month, the Horn Group held another event—this time focusing on Social Media and Business. The space was three quarters empty, people were tweeting and blogging, a tweeter feed displayed above the panel, and the general feel was, as in most of the Valley’s networking events, cordial with low level interest, focused on connecting and listening rather than on intensely engaging.

On the panel were John Byrne, formerly at NewsWeek and now founder of C-Change Media, Karen Wickre, Google Communications and Public Affairs, Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group, and Don Bulmer, Vice President of Global Communications at SAP.  

Below are some highlights from the panel’s discussion, starting with Karen Wickre.

Wickre: Content surfaces content.  Part of our job as communicators is to surface more, different, new news information.

New media is no longer about putting content out there but about the interaction of people and content. Media becomes relevant when you appropriately target. Mobile is a big push but companies shouldn’t mobilize all their content: it should be relevant to people’s needs and content consumption patterns.

Li: Companies should focus on building relationships, not transactions. SAP is a good example of that.

Byrne: A story is an intellectual campfire around which you keep people. If you orchestrate it so that it doesn’t die out, the content has even greater value than the original.

Bulmer: Social Media is a great opportunity for Thought Leadership for a B2B company. It has to have focus, depth, and continuity. Thought Leadership done well in this environment can yield ideas and insights that can transform an organization. 

Thought Leadership = Social Currency (here at Ustrategy, we really like this statement!)  If a company can provide information its audiences can’t get anywhere else  they provide Thought Leadership. Businesses prefer to do business with either the creators of content or those who participated in it.

Li: You can choose to do nothing and stay in the bubble: you won’t get hurt but you also won’t build relationships.

B2B structure, and the B2B executives aren’t set for Social Media. They need to control every bit of interaction and to avoid negative exposure. Uncontrolled conversation terrify execs. Mindsets are hard to change: change happens through small steps and demonstrated success. Traditional B2B executives aren’t “sharers” by nature.

Bulmer: I own 25% of budget and influence 75% of value delivered . When people see success they take ownership. I try not to get concerned by money but focus on value.

Wickre: (Speaking about success metrics) I’m not worried about the number of followers. The people who want that bit of info find it and forward it.

Byrne originated The Engagement Model for ROI on online produced content and user-generated-content on NewsWeek.com.  “We started with a goal of 15:1 return on content from others, got to 37:1, wanted to get to 100.” Got the journalist committed to taking part in the conversation, asked readers what they wanted to read about, picked stories and assigned to journalists.  The stories that were generated by readers were often more popular and generated highest traffic on NewsWeek online.

Li: Analytics aren’t metrics. Metrics tie to objectives. The ones that have meaning to you.  Analytics are the results (survey, google, etc) I don’t care about traffic and clicks- I care about engagement quality.

Three pieces of advice to an anti-social CEO who just doesn’t think he or his company needs to invest in Social Media:

1. Realize that you are not in control and you know it. You need to acknowledge that before anything else.
2. What’s really important to you today? Pick one of the strategic goal and see how Social can help with that.
3. Activities that are happening without you. If you’re doing nothing—that’s a problem. If a lot and you’re not part of it—that’s a problem too.

We have to be very disciplined about this. It’s a social disciplin. Even in google where people have a great deal of freedom, there’s also discipline. You create Sandboxes, and inside these, people can do whatever, as much as, they wish.

Bulmer: SAP just launched the www.everycompanyisamediacompany.com open forum blog. People are still under the perception that the term Media refers to advertising and PR while Social Media refers to Facebook, Twitter. People should keep in mind that Social Media is more than a front line issue. There’s a lot of value that can be derived from its core business operations.

Tips and insights for getting beyond where you are now”

Wickre: “I’m choosing to be retro”: Read the ClueTrain Manifesto and Dave Weinberger’s Small Pieces. They were written over 10 years ago but read them now with an eye toward social media.

Byrne: Use twitter smartly. I’ve been able to find the experts in any given field, benefit from what they’re reading, thinking, in real time that’s not possible anywhere else

Li: Cluetrain Manifesto and think about how every company can be a media company.

And my takeaway?  

Social Media is no longer a threat. Professionals and brands know it’s now a required channel in their overall marketing plan and PR and Marketing professionals now look for new tools, methods, frameworks rather than for a referee to call Penalty. 

Finally, I liked Tom Foremsky’s comment after a few long minutes  discussing the word of the evening: “authenticity.” Tom said: “Not everything needs to be authentic. (Sometimes) a press release is just a press release.”

Women and Social Media - 5 Factors in the Increased Adoption of Social Media by Women

As research about social media adoption and use patterns continues to flourish, so is the evidence that social media is a women-centric vehicle. A recent Compass study by BlogHer reveals that of the 79 million women online, 42 million (~53%) use social networks; Facebook reported earlier in the year that their fastest growing population is that of 35-65 year old women; and BusinessWeek reports that while both young men and women in their twenties are equally represented as members of social networks, young women are much more active on these sites than young men.

There are many reasons for this trend but at its core is the fact that social media is less about technology and more about being social. Unlike pre-web2.0 gadgets, operational software, or convoluted front-end algorithmic solutions that have been traditionally adopted by men first, social media is propelled and adopted by women.  There are five key factors influencing this trend:

1. Social media is gender agnostic. It is a channel open to all, at the same cost, no special club membership or lineage required. In fact, many of the traditional requirements such as formal education, location, full-time availability are obsolete in a social media world.

2. Social media is about expression. It is a platform for communication, for self-disclosure, for sharing--things women do naturally but have had to learn to keep under control in board rooms and team meetings. 

3. Social media is about people. It is a channel designed for those people who understand what others want, who can express themselves eloquently (and, increasingly, very concisely), and who can connect with others through words or actions. Most women are born with these capabilities: they tend to be better at relationships, they are more attentive and compassionate, and are happy to share with others while having no desire for immediate return other than recognition.

4. Social media powers instant communication. Live feed, comments, cross links--all enable immediate communication and feedback--which are key values for women. We thrive on communication: we want to know what others think, what works and doesn't work, how we can improve--it is part of our own self-awareness and growth.

5. Social media is as much about the process as it is about the results. It requires time, strategy, careful construction, fine-tuning, conversing with others, helping—all those things many women enjoy and are good at.

While there may be other factors that make social media a women’s channel and gives women advantage both as consumers and as job seekers, these five are key because they speak to the alignment between the nature of the channel/tool and the human nature of its users. And, as in any discipline, with alignment comes momentum, speed, growth, and, ultimately--success.

Enterprise B2B Social Media: To Twitter or Not To Twitter?

Invariably, in the last 6 months, each and every one of my clients, has asked me this question: “should we get on Twitter?”  It doesn’t matter if they are a 1-person copy-writing shop, a 26 people marketing firm, or a 200,000 computer manufacturer corporation—everyone wants to know whether they should be on Twitter.

But most pressing have been enterprises providing B2B solutions. I find it fascinating that a company providing data storage to large corporations wants to get on Twitter. Or that a large public sector division (and I’m deliberately vague here) who’s providing solutions to other divisions would consider Twitter.

When it comes to B2B Enterprise solutions, here are 5 things you should think about.

1. Twitter is not a strategy. It is a tool that is used to deliver on your outreach and inbound information gathering strategies. Before you even consider getting on Twitter, ask yourself these questions:

• One: Do you know what you want to accomplish by getting on Twitter? Have you set clear goals with measurable outcomes?
• Two: Do you know where those you’d like to reach out to are spending time online? Are they on Twitter or do they go someplace else, like forums and wikis?
• Three: Have you considered what information you can and cannot share online?  Do you have a policy around publically sharing information?

If you’re still not clear on these, or think you will through your use of Twitter, think again. Twitter is not for you.

2. Twitter is a conversation tool. Will you be able to have a dialog? Have you thought about what you will do when people start asking you questions? Who will answer them? What is the tone of conversation that is right for your company? What will you be allowed to talk about? What will you NOT be allowed to talk about? All these need to be clearly defined ahead of time or you’ll quickly gain a bad reputation.

Bottom line: if you’re not ready to converse with anyone who wants to converse with your brand, Twitter is probably not for you.

3. Twitter takes time and resources. Once you’ll get on twitter you’ll need to think of the following resources to start:

• Someone who’ll design your branded background
• Someone who’ll scan for relevant people you should follow
• Someone who’ll respond to followers’ questions and comments
• Someone who’ll inform your division/group/company of all activities and together, you’ll devise a plan on how to move forward
• Internal people with whom you’ll be able to discuss negative feedback and use it to get better

You’ll also need to think of these critical elements:

• Regularly adding content. Valuable content. Important content. Content that your followers care about and that propels your brand forward. This doesn’t mean spam
• Regularly monitoring your brand mentions online. You want followers? You’ll get followers. But with them you’re likely to get a great deal of mentions—and you’ll need to monitor, listen, and respond
• Getting everyone else in the company to listen to what your community on Twitter is saying and evolve the company message accordingly

There’s nothing worse than a dormant Twitter account. Or one that cannot answer questions. Or one that gets killed by the executive level just as it gets interesting. If you can’t commit to the right resources, content, and buy-in, Twitter is definitely not for you.

4. Twitter is not about you controlling your customers. It’s about letting go of all notion of control and being willing to observe what unfolds before you take action. Very often I get asked about controlling negative feedback. You can’t, is what I tell my clients, and you don’t want to either. What you DO want is to engage in an honest, authentic, conversation with your customers, partners, and other stakeholders and get real reaction to your products/services and to you as a brand. That’s the only way you’ll get better.

Your customers are talking about you online whether you like it or not. Isn’t it better to have them talk directly to you rather than everywhere else?

But, if you still feel you need to control Twitter- Twitter, is, most definitely, not for you.

5. Twitter will not replace your marketing activities. It’s true that recent research from Forrester demonstrates increase in budget directed towards social media activities compare to traditional marketing—but it is still miniscule in the large scheme of things. With time, an over-arching social media strategy may substitute some elements of your marketing campaigns—assuming your customers do spend time online—but it is not a solution to all your marketing cost reduction needs. It is merely a way to reach customers where they spend time now…online. If you expect Twitter to solve all your marketing budget and reach problems, take your hands off the Twitter—it’s simply not for you.

Fun aside, while it is not a strategy but a tool, Twitter represents both great potential and a moderate risk. Before you do anything, assess your company objectives, audit your existing marketing strategy, evaluate your customers and their customers—where do they spend time now online? Do they even go on Twitter? You have many other options to reach out to your stakeholders online…each involving time, money, commitment, and some level of organizational change. So do your homework, prioritize, choose wisely, ask the right questions, bring in the right people, measure, measure, measure…and only then start the conversation.

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Open Source and Social Media: Community, Collaboration, Freedom

Last week an article I wrote was published on ReadWriteWeb. The article, dealing with Open Source and Social Media came just as the Open Source Convention OSCON started down here in San Jose. Open Source moguls like FireFox, Wikipedia, Drupal, SourceForge, Linux, and many other leaders in making software open to all, gathered as a community to discuss next steps in Open Source software and demonstrate the great strides from behind the coding walls into mainstream. Below is the article. You can also check it out on RWW.

Open Source and Social Media: Community, Collaboration, Freedom

Written by Ravit Lichtenberg from Ustrategy.com / July 20, 2009 6:00 AM / 9 Comments

To most people, the term "open source" immediately conjures an image of two geeks sitting in a dark room (probably a basement) -- curtains drawn, McDonald's remains strewn across the desk, and 42 oz sodas within arms' reach -- coding away at their computers, listening to Linkin Park or a game soundtrack. People automatically associate it with endless lines of code, back-end technology, server rooms, computer science labs, and experimental (read: unsafe and buggy) technology.

In reality, open-source software provides stable solutions, created by people and for people and used by companies of all sizes. Use Firefox? That's open-source software. Google Chrome? It too is based on an open-source code. Ever look up a term on Wikipedia? The site is completely built on user-generated code and content. "In fact," says Allison Randal, Program Chair of OSCON, "chances are you're using a lot more open-source software than you know: on your computer or powering you favorite websites."

With the Open Source Convention (OSCON) set to take over San Jose tomorrow, we'll provide a glimpse here of open source in layman's terms and the potential intersection of open source and social media.

What Is Open Source?

"The ideas behind open source are about freedom," continues Randal, "that people should have certain basic rights in the software that they use, the same as every other part of life. It's about people's rights to create things they're passionate about."

Mozilla's founders, who spawned Firefox, walked away from the ashes of Netscape with a desire to change the Web browsing experience. Drupal and Joomla are content management systems that enable unlimited options in website building and publishing. Remember how difficult it used to be to build your own website? Now building one is free, open to all, flexible, and extendable: anyone with a passion or idea can build for it, and numerous companies are taking Drupal and Joomla and building easy-to-use website templates that anyone can use, no programming needed. Don't want to pay for Microsoft Office? You can use OpenOffice for free -- it will serve most of your needs.

In essence, these projects, developers, and organizations address mature, business-critical issues in better, faster ways. This form of crowd-sourcing enables businesses to use solutions that would otherwise have required a lot more time and/or people to develop at a much higher total cost.

Open Source Is Evolving

You may have heard the phrase, "Open Source is free as in speech, not as in beer." This phrase refers to the notion that while everyone can freely start and contribute to any project, the actual use of open source solutions may still come with a price tag -- often for services and additional product layers that a company bundles with the open code. But for corporations that already spend millions of dollars just to keep the lights on, investing in open source increasingly makes better business sense. For the CIOs and CTOs of these companies, it's not about the price tag of each solution but rather about the total cost of ownership over time, especially in a downturn economy.

In a study conducted by Gartner and reported by Matt Asay at CNET, CIOs reported they have increased investment in open-source software and decreased investment in proprietary software. CIOs reported that by investing in open source they were able to do the following:

• Reduce costs by 87% (while meeting or exceeding expectations),
• Improve quality by 92%,
• Ease integration and customization by 86%,
• Quicken pace of innovation by 82%,
• Improve support by 84%,
• Increase standards compliance by 91%,
• Decrease time to market by 82%.

Michael Fauscette, Group Vice-President of Software Business Solutions at IDC, recently highlighted changes in the adoption of open source. IDC found that as recently as 2007, CIOs were reluctant to adopt social media software for fear of IP infringement and poor support: two mission-critical elements of any enterprise. By 2008, says Fauscette, CIOs reported that they preferred open-source software precisely because of the quality of support it comes with. And as for their fear of IP infringement, that was no longer at the top of the list because of standards and self-policing.

Open source doesn't only serve IT companies, though. It is now being explored for government and health care data management and access. Open-source software, in other words, has moved from the basements of Linkin Park fans to the desks of the largest corporations in the US.

Sound familiar? The evolution of open source may sound a bit like the evolution of another web-related phenomenon, what has become known as Web 2.0 social media and social networking. Like open-source software, social media is about the basic human right to communicate, organize, and maintain control of one's own experiences. And both address the needs of companies to do more at higher quality with less money. Both social media and open-source software involve communities and are fed by content: code in the case of open source, and media content in the case of social media.

But unlike open source, social media has thus far primarily been a consumer play and is only now being explored by enterprises. Living on the Web, social media is also hardware and distribution-channel agnostic: it does not require pre-installation and does not compete with pre-bundled proprietary products. Historically, open source, being hardware dependent, has had greater distribution challenges: unless the software came pre-loaded on your hardware, notes Fauscette, you would rarely seek out alternatives to replace what you already have. Without a channel for hardware, distribution was driven primarily by hard-core tech enthusiasts.

Seeds of Change

Companies that erected insurmountable barriers to protect their source code now realize that the cost of innovation and competition may be just too much compared to that of their competitors that use open-source software. Take Google's Android, an iPhone competitor built on the open-source platform Linux. Android started off as closed-source software but very quickly became an open-source project. Developers can now build applications on top of Android's platform and then use the code for their own Android-like products, just as developers use Firefox code to build their own browsers.

2008 saw another significant milestone: the establishment of the Symbian Foundation to oversee the development of the Symbian operating system as an open-source platform, licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). The Foundation's members include Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T. With this development, a once highly protected closed-source cell-phone operating system has opened up.

Caleb Sima, Chief Technologist at Hewlett-Packard, calls this "a clear move on Nokia's part to try to catch up to the competition by using open source and the community to help evolve its features to those of smartphones." Companies are now realizing that open-source software is a competitive advantage.

What Open Source Means to Social Media

Open source is the natural platform for fast-evolving social media and social networking. Forget about having to scale the walled gardens of social networks or having to upload, download, and link together multiple applications. With open source, everything is seamless and transparent. Picture a huge festive dinner table, set with dozens of mouth-watering dishes for you and your guests to pick from. You can heap whatever you like on your plate or, better yet, just dab your bread into whatever dish your please, all while seeing what others are putting on their plate and seeing whether they're using a fork or a spoon and hearing the conversation around the table.

But with all of these capabilities and openness, people will face new challenges on the Web. One big challenge will be to make the Web more personal and make it possible to simulate live interaction. One of the most promising companies to address this is Kaltura, maker of the only open-source online video management platform, with a free community platform, now used on over 35,000 websites and soon to be integrated into Wikipedia for user co-creation of rich media content. (Disclaimer: Kaltura is one of my client companies.)

"Extensions like Kaltura make the Web real," says Fauscette. "Video is in fact one of the big things we'll see. This is an opportunity space, and first-mover advantage will be big." For Fauscette, trust is a major sticking point: with the proliferation of networks, friends, followers, and brands online, helping people figure out who and what to trust will be key to making the Web personal.

Whoever tries to control people's relationships will lose. Whoever enables people to create and share experiences that are relevant to them across any website, with anyone, the way they want will win. And open source will create many more winners than losers.

More About Open Source

OSCON is celebrating its 10th year anniversary this coming week in a four-day conference in San Jose, California. In addition to the usual technical tracks, OSCON has added people and business tracks and many free events. You can register for a free pass to the expo hall (yes, free as in beer) and attend the "Birds of a Feather" un-conference, Ignite party, Hackathon, and much more (all free). Check out the list of events.

Great resources online include Open Source Initiative Open Government, Open Data Initiatives, SourceForge (where you can find a list of ongoing projects and downloads), Open Video Alliance, and the excellent short and sweet write-ups by open-source experts such as CNET's Matt Asay.

Oh, and there's always Wikipedia (where smiles are always open).

For Enterprieses: 5 Building Blocks of Social Media

Last week, a piece I wrote about social media and enterprises was published on ReadWriteWeb. Here's the reposting. We've had some discussion in the comments on RWW (I love RWW readers--always very thoughtful comments). If you'd like to join the conversation, please go here and add your thoughts.

Enterprises and Social Media: 5 Must-Haves

Corporations know that their relationships with customers are drastically changing as a result of the new capabilities made possible by Web 2.0 and social media. Customers increasingly expect to engage with brands instantaneously and satisfactorily. They no longer tolerate long delays in response, live operators buried down the 1-800-line call tree, or the ever-mounting irrelevant spam.

Gradually, but extremely well, customers are learning to sound their voices for everyone to hear. Gone are the days when a customer needed to write a letter to an anonymous clerk at a random PO box address, leaving response to chance and corrective action to a Hanukkah miracle. Customers today can sound their likes and dislikes at anytime across multiple media, uncensored: no smart nephew, neighbor with a printer, or attorney needed.

Corporations are recognizing this shift as well. To survive, brands know they must interact with their customers in new ways across all channels: from outbound marketing to product feedback to sales to support. They also know that as undefined as the space is at the moment, they must take a highly creative and strategic approach to connecting with their customers online and offline. There is no corporate manual yet, no large consultancy slideshow to refer to. Customers themselves are setting the rules, which is a challenging model for most large corporations.

But some enterprises are starting to figure it out. They try different approaches, push the boundaries of experimentation, and continually test themselves, asking their customers to play judge. BurgerKing's WhopperSacrifice campaign is one example. When else has a large corporation asked people to sacrifice 10 of their friends? The campaign resulted in a whopping 233,906 people interacting with the brand in a new way (and to great controversy, always a good sign). Starbucks tried a safer approach after customer backlash against the automated coffee brewers it introduced in its stores. The MyStarbucksIdea campaign brought back some customers and put baristas back behind the coffee machines.

So what makes some brands more successful than others when interacting with customers online? What sets them apart? Here are five fundamental requirements for brands that want to form relationships with their customers in a Web 2.0 world:

1. Be a Panther, Not a Dinosaur

Size, complexity, and distance from the end customer play a substantial part in any enterprise's ability to effectively connect with customers. The closer a company's employees are to end customers and the more direct contact C-level executives have with customers, the faster the company will be able to adapt to new means of customer interaction, to allocate budget, and to get everyone on board with an actionable plan.

Zappos' CEO, Tony Hsieh, grew his company into a $1 billion a year retailer with his unmitigated commitment to customers. Hsieh applied a dynamic method early on, changing Zappos' offerings constantly and agilely (free shipping, new product lines, 360-day return policy) until they fit customers just right. Corporations today must learn agility, be able to adapt and change quickly, and commit to making all decisions based on customer benefit. The corporate dinosaur will not survive for long.

2. Evolve Your Organizational Culture and Structure

While some brands, like Disney and Zappos, have always put the customer at the center of their organizational culture, others, like Wal-Mart and Panda Express, are just now figuring out the importance of aligning their internal culture with their customers' culture. This evolution is easier for brands that are already structured around their customers, but for others it will be trial and error.

No matter how it gets there, every enterprise -- whether B2C or B2B -- will have to evolve its culture in the coming three to five years to survive. This evolution means re-examining traditional approaches to inbound and outbound customer outreach and being willing to shift ownership and re-structure so that each and every employee is responsible for the customer experience. Organizations will likely become flatter and return to cultivating leaders from within who can move the organizational culture forward.

3. Understand that Loyalty Is Key to Revenue

For most people, the mere thought of switching online banking providers and having to re-enter all of their information in a new system is dreadful enough that they just don't do it. Cell phone carriers in the US have contract termination fees that are higher than the cost of most phones. These companies rely less on loyalty than on "customer hijacking."

Other companies, including software and hardware manufacturers such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo, cannot constrict customer choice. These companies compete for mostly similar markets -- offering similar products, services, and prices -- and are after customer loyalty most of all. Ask any of these three corporations what it would like to be when it grows up, and it will point to Apple. Apple is the gold standard for generating customer loyalty -- no ransom required.

As Web 2.0 breaks down the walls among customers and between customers and brands, the tie between loyalty and revenue will grow even stronger, and brands that hold customers hostage will be deserted for those that provide real value. A corporation's ability to demonstrate value and secure loyalty will now be measured by their presence and customer relationships online.

4. Bring in the Right People

Traditional consultancies like McKinsey and Bain were once valuable to corporations because of their subject matter expertise. They provided top-down know-how that was adopted by executives and pushed down the chain of command. This approach is completely useless for expanding a corporation's connection to customers online. The right people today possess two key qualities. The first, which is the more easily found of the two, is "in the trenches" experience. People with this quality regularly interact with others online, use various social media conversation tools, are passionate about communities, and can mobilize others with a 140-character line.

The second, much more difficult to find, is the ability to articulate and translate this in-the-trenches knowledge in a way that makes sense to corporations. The right people for an enterprise's interactions with customers have to be able to connect the new psychology of customers with the traditional way in which corporations work. They must know how to help corporations create new strategies, foster change management, and create action plans that lead to clear and measurable results. Corporations will have a tough time finding people with just the right combination of qualities and capabilities; but once found, these emissaries will deliver crucial and uncompromising value to the customer-oriented corporation in the Web 2.0 world.

5. Have a Strategy!

Brands today that have an effective online presence didn't just stumble on the right formula. Getting things right takes work, commitment, experimentation, and genuine care. Whether they realize it or not, brands that are successful in social media have always acted on strategies. They have always set clear goals, developed a plan to reach those goals, and put budgets and people behind them.

Before Web 2.0, Southwest Airlines was the poster child of great customer service. Today, Zappos does for online retail what Southwest did for the discount airline industry. Wal-Mart may not pay its merchants to blog, but the merchants' time is paid for with their salaries. Corporations today, more than ever, need to reassess their strategies and ensure that those strategies are an expression of their desire to move forward rather than fear of losing momentum or control.

Having a Twitter or Facebook page is not a strategy. Nor is it very effective to hire community managers and charge them with reducing marketing dollars. The corporation today must first figure out its goals in the Web 2.0 world, set relevant metrics, invest in understanding customer needs, and map out an actionable plan it can implement. Only then will its full potential in the online social world be realized.

With 68% of online adults using one or more social media tools and 42% of online adults reporting an interest in at least one type of social application from brands they like, enterprises cannot ignore the changing landscape of customer relationships. In the coming years, corporations will not survive on product lines and competitive pricing alone. For corporations to remain competitive, they will need to become more flexible, put people at the center of their culture, and remain dynamically attentive to human needs. It is time again to realize that change should be embraced, not feared, and to put in place the right structures, strategies, and people to support this change.

The Social Media Ecosystem--Presentation

A few weeks back I was invited to speak at the Social Media Club of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We had a crowd of about 40 people, a fun sochu tasting from Haamonii, and a great conversation about social media and how to think of it in the context of the enterprise world.

After presenting how the corporate ecosystem is changing and discussing elements of Social Media strategy for enterprises, we then put things to the test and broke into small groups--each tasked with developing a Social Media strategy for a company in the retail, tech, of financial industry. It is not always easy to shift from thinking of Social Media in traditional terms of campaigns and demographics and speaking in "Twitter" and "Facebook" terms but most groups came back with real strategies, not just tactics (although we had fun ones too--like putting executives in high heels with Dr. Scholl inserts. Okay. Maybe you had to be there).

One thing I'd like to emphasize is that Social Media isn't a "fix" or a "thing" organizations now must do. It is a manifestation of new capabilities we have in a Web2.0-3.0 world. As a result, the ecosystem itself is changing in large corporations: what used to be a closed system between corporations, their partners, and their customers, is increasingly open and fluid; partnerships, once limited to large and established vendors or consultants is now expanding to include startups and their solutions--which means startups need to learn how to communicate the value proposition in their products in new ways; A traditional corporate-controlled push/pull model for customer feedback and marketing is now dynamic: customers can tell corporations what they need and want whether corporations ask for it or not--this also means that corporations can count on their customers to speak about those things they're excited about and spread the word at a fraction of the cost.  Just yesterday, Sandy Carter, VP IBM Software Channels and Social Media Evangelist demonstrated how IBM was able to save $100,000 on maketing campaigns using Social Media tools to mobilize customers (more about this later this week).

Here's the presentation I shared. Also check out David Libby's thoughts on the topic.

The Corporate Social Media Ecosystem

View more Microsoft Word documents from Ravit Lichtenberg.

You can also download it from Slideshare.

Dell Says ROI on Twitter is $3Mil

In today's New York Times' bits blog, Claire Cain Miller writes about Dell's stated revenue from its use of Twitter.

"Dell said Thursday night that the company had earned $3 million in revenue directly through Twitter since 2007, when it started posting coupons and word of new products on the microblogging site. In the last six months, Dell Outlet earned $1 million in sales from customers who came to the site from Twitter, after taking 18 months to earn its first $1 million. Dell has also earned another $1 million from people who click from Twitter to Dell Outlet to Dell.com and make a purchase there."

The full blog post is here.