Looking around the corner at 2010

 4ScreensMedia is about Customer Relationship Management and how the Internet, Television and Mobile technology can be leveraged to enhance the customer experience across the entire spectrum of brand touchpoints. Here are 12 developments that may play out in 2010.

If a tree falls in the forest, we can now hear it.

1. Customer Relationship Management will incorporate social media – the customer’s channel – and become integral to the  Marketing Mix. Like the self-serve kiosk, more business processes will be outsourced to customers as a result.

2. The CIO will play a key role  in implementing enterprise social media platforms as technology & process serve to enable campaign execution.

3. Google will provide the cheapest and most used social media monitoring platform; like the long distance telco market, the service will be priced at or close to $0.00.

4. Management consultants will take their rightful place in provide social media guidance and integrate into CRM. They will design workable business processes, provide sound methodology and standards. Accountability will be more important than ROI. ROI metrics will draw from existing marketing mix to include CLV – Customer Lifetime Value at the aggregate level.

5. More social media monitoring companies will go out of business than will be acquired – the industry will segment into pure technology plays vs. value added business insight using white-label monitoring services. Some SMM companies will merge with marketing analytics providers. The most business value will be provided by SMM companies that specialize in industry verticals, sentiment analysis and human interpretation.

6.  Proprietary monitoring capabilities will become the purvue of the largest Forbes Global 2000 firms and provide the best business applications such as integration with business analytics. This will dovetail into the creation of private label media networks and brand communities.

7. Mobile technology will have a dual thrust.  Fast growth in terms of user adoption rates and new functionality that enhances the customer experience.  Mobile apps will enable tighter customer relationships, reduce costs via self-service and provide more data about customer behaviour. Cloud computing will enable the data center to be accessed remotely further enhancing work station flexibily especially for mobile professionals in a global economy.

8. Predictive analytics and business intelligence will be the game changer – the Internet will be treated like a big data warehouse. Insight into consumer buying outcomes will be at the heart of this computing technology domain.

9. Location intelligence applications combined with data visualization and user information will become key elements in the business operations arsenal.  Any business where geospatial location matters – transportation, retail, health, policing, municipal services – will take a great interest in these applications.

10. Social networks in general will not be profitable or be close to break even but overvalued by the markets. They will also be seriously compromised by identity theft, fraud, spam and security breaches.

11. Marketing research companies will finally understand that billions of consumer-generated comments related to the brand experience are worth incorporating into traditional research methods. All major players will align with or have their own monitoring or business intelligence capability.

12. Television will be the most watched, most influencial medium in America. Google will have a strategy to buy a network. TV will see a resurgence on many fronts, most notably advertising.

Let’s check back in December 2010.

– Ted Morris

Manage The Experience – Control Your Brand

There’s been an awful lot of talk lately about  ‘social media’  and how brands are no longer in control. It’s now all in the hands of the consumer. What strikes me about this kind of thinking is that it’s never actually been proven, using solid data, valid business cases or testimonial by a company or brand that has fallen victim to the rise in consumer control.  

Hell hath no fury like a consumer scorned

Ok, so your first push back might be “What about the Jeff Jarvis Dell Hell”? or “What about David Carroll?”  He’s the travelling troubadour who suffered at the hands of United Airlines who allegedly damaged his guitar then lost his luggage. In both cases, the offending brands were mercilessly flagellated online  as the bad news spread like wildfire through dry sagebrush. Dell and United were either unable to plug the gaping hole in their corporate reputation or stood by with an air of utter indifference. The viral vituperative spread across the socialsphere and consumers were vindicated in (almost) real time. “The Man” was taken down.

"I am now in control here..."

So was this all about consumers being in control? Well, yes and no. Yes, in that social media is one of the best things to happen to consumers in providing a channel for consumers to voice opinions about their brand experience good or bad. No, in that brands still have ample oppportunity to do deliver on the brand promise. What this means is exactly that – deliver on what the consumer is promised regarding product performance, service quality and social responsibility.  Stand by your value proposition and make sure that your company is always firing on all cylinders across every customer touchpoint. Consistently manage all customer-facing processes and drive the use of customer information about preferences, contact protocols  and wants & needs across the enterprise. Make sure employees are enabled, trained and supported to delivery the very best, on demand.

Manage your company. Control your brand.

ESOMAR & Social Media: Brandmatters 2006 revisited

Then...

Although I did not have occasion to attend the recent 2009 ESOMAR conference in Chicago, I was struck by fact that the agenda was essential devoted entirely to social media. By contrast, Brandmatters 2006 had one session on social media, referred to as “Social Networks and Brand Communities”, a subset of the broader Internet ecosystem.

At that time, I was in the fortunate or perhaps unfortunate position of presenting “Listening to the Blogosphere: How Blogging can Impact Your Brand”. Fortunate in that I was probably regarded as part of a small group of pionners or forward thinkers (lunatic fringe?) on the subject of WOM: Word-of-Mouth media; unfortunate in that much of what I presented seemed to be something of an oddity to much of the audience. Here were some observations at the time:

> 10% of US adults created blogs; 32 mil. Americans read blogs;
> 12% of consumers posted content online
> many ‘bloggers’ has formed brand communities, notably in the automotive and entertainment industry verticals
> many bloggers were considered influencial in shaping a brand’s reputation

...and now.

Fast forward as we move into 2010: It’s most gratifying to see that Social Media is dominatingdiscussion within the marketing research industry.  Much of the thinking has expanded beyond mere curiosity toward shaping opportunity and providing increased business value to clients in a forward looking way. It was to the point that awards for building online communities have become the new hallmark for forward thinking marketing research.

It goes without saying that the numbers presented above would appear to be a mere speck of online activity given today’s dominance of applications such as Facebook, Twitter and You Tube, not to mention the hundreds of millions of blogs and forums that contain brand content.

Glad the world has changed so much. I was feeling a bit ahead of myself.

– Ted Morris, 4ScreensMedia