• Social Broadcasters: top bloggers with a lot of followers looking to them for news and advice on the latest and greatest. They have scale but lack trust. You need them for awareness, but they are poor advocates.
• Mass Influencers: the minority that creates the majority of the influence may be at the core of any successful SM strategy. They make up only 16% of the influencers but account for 80% of the influence impressions about products and services.
• Potential Influencers have primarily networks of people they actually know in an offline context (friends, family, peers). These people are the most trusted by peers, but the most difficult to reach and activate. They make up 84% of the total population.

The full analysis ($499) is available on the Forrester website. Barb Dybwad also wrote an extensive (free) article about Forrester’s Peer Influence Analysis model on Mashable.

Other findings are not more encouraging for ERP vendors of all kinds:

• 57% of ERP implementations take longer than expected, with an average of 18.4 months.
• 54% end over budget.

So much for the promise of fast implementation and cost-effectiveness.

You can download the full report here (registration required).

]]> http://lostindots.com/?feed=rss2&p=846 0 http://lostindots.com/?p=836 http://lostindots.com/?p=836#comments Sun, 18 Apr 2010 17:08:35 +0000 Jean http://lostindots.com/?p=836 Here’s an interesting report on BtoB buyers’ use of social media (the single largest category of purchases referred to by buyers in this survey was IT equipment or systems).

A couple of take aways:

• While supplier websites remain a major source of information for BtoB buyers, social media channels such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook have the most influence at every stage of the buying process and in the final decision.
• 20 to 25% of the buyers under 30 year old use social media channels as part of their decision making process, which is up to five times more than “older” buyers.

> Download the report (PDF)

> Read more about this report

While I don’t think that there is a magic recipe to succeed in implementing an enterprise social software platform, I’ve seen four common mistakes that always lead to failure:

1. Assuming that employees starve to share information

One frequent mistake is to assume that once the tools are available, all employees will naturally come to use them. True, grass-root communities are popping up on the Internet every day. But passion is the cement of grass-root communities.  A common, and mostly personal, interest is what hold them together. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), most people are getting less passionate when it comes to sharing about their work.

Work is also about competition. A competitive spirit is generally good for the enterprise, but when competition becomes too much internal, employees start sharing less information to keep the lead… and the job! Underestimating employees’ reluctance to share their most valuable knowledge causes many communities to fail. They end up like a dusty library, full of unanswered questions.

2. Assuming that trusted leaders will emerge from the crowd

Efficient community leaders set the tone, share a large volume of valuable information, are pro-active in forums and more importantly, are given natural authority in their area of expertise. Unfortunately for enterprise communities, these “leaders” are often too busy applying their knowledge on the job to spend time sharing it. On the Internet also, consultants are responsible for most of the business content available on blogs and social networks. Only few professionals and operational managers bother to share some experience on their blog after a long day of work!

Getting the involvement of the most recognized experts in the company is a strong incentive for users to participate in a business community. Without their active participation, valuable users won’t follow and leaders with no credibility may take over, turning the community into a social club for losers. The kind of club you did not want to join when you were a college student.  Give trusted leaders some good reasons, and ideally some time, to participate!

3. Over engineering the processes and tools

Because successful communities are communities where users feel free to share and are empowered to do so, it is important NOT to set up too many rules and procedures for them to participate. Defining too many rules, too many controls, and marching everyone through a multi-step publishing process is likely to push back the most valuable users: those who are willing to share, but not at the cost of being monitored by power admins.

4. Underestimating the competition

I’m not speaking about competitors, but other internal systems that are competing to get their share of user attention. Users login to a system primarily to GET information, not to give. And they are unlikely to login to multiple systems on a regular basis. Many communities die before being live because users simply don’t see what they can get from it at their first login, and keep using older systems that might be less “sociable”, but are filled with useful information. Launching a brand new social software platform without preexisting content is likely to fail. You’re just calling on visitors to fill an empty shell, ignoring that their primary need is to retrieve the meat from it.

Beyond the technology, the greatest challenge of any social software platform project is to encourage use, right from the start. Disappointed first-time users won’t come back before long.  Whether it is with a “top-down” approach, a grass-root approach, or more likely a mix of both, focusing on THE REASON WHY employees may participate in your business community is, in my view, the key to success. But I’m just a marketer. You’d better trust a consultant or a scientist!

Worth reading on this topic:
> Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges by Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management

The idea is to wire forms from different websites into a single CRM database to help manage prospects’ inquiries consistently across business units. I realize that “the idea” sounds very much like a basic requirement in the era of “smart businesses seeking conversations with customers through social media”. However, it might be a basic worth to explore for the rest of us.

Integrating multiple data sources into one system inevitably creates a risk of duplicate entries and inconsistency across the system. Born in the era of direct marketing, most CRM systems are designed to manage duplicate entries effectively. By using postal codes, phone numbers and street addresses as a key, they keep a clear track of contacts for telemarketing and mailing purposes. CRM systems are keen on detecting that John Smith, Ohio, does not share much with John Smith, Arizona. But what if the address is missing? Some systems simply avoid the challenge by making THE postal address a mandatory information for new contacts. Including contacts from your website.

Unfortunately, only few Web users are likely to disclose their street address and phone number to access a free download or subscribe to a news feed. Understandably so, they don’t see the point of giving a physical address to get information that can be delivered electronically. More importantly, they don’t always value the information they’ll get at the price of completing an endless form.

As a result, most businesses rely on disparate systems to capture — and nurture — the fragments of information that they get from potential customers such as newsletter subscribers, PDF downloaders and other Facebook fans. If they capture anything at all that would not pass the ‘CRM compliance test’. But without a coherent system able to manage traces of interest from the early stages of the decision making process, they don’t leverage the full potential of their web marketing investment.

One (important) thing is to strategize a multi-channel, closed-loop marketing approach with the objective to nurture the interest of as many visitors of your website as possible. But executing the plan promptly and properly is as much as a challenge. In some cases, it starts with implementing a CRM system flexible enough to consider e-mail addresses, Twitter accounts and LinkedIn profiles as valuable targets for marketing operations as street addresses and phone numbers!

Building a social web strategy requires a change in the scale and granularity of listening strategies. We were surveying markets, identifying segments and addressing a limited number of “profiles” that were manageable by a couple of marketing managers. Now, we must listen to people, get involved in the right conversations and come up with a compelling answer for each. Multiply by a hundred social sites, then by one million individuals: here’s the evolution. Consider the fact that answers are due within minutes or hours, not months: here’s the Revolution.

To take part in this revolution, businesses must to set relevant goals and adapt their processes and infrastructure to this new way of “listening to the mass”. This project might lift you 10,000 feet off the ground of our day to day business. But this is where you get the best picture. Just don’t stay too long at this altitude (it lacks oxygen) and dive quickly back into action. A good start is to assess where your company, division or business unit stands regarding best-of-breed “listening strategies”, and do something about it:

• What are you doing with your market data, surveys or customer feedback?
• Are you tracking mentions of your company or products on the social web?
• Are you seeking out conversations online to identify flare-ups of business opportunities?
• Do you know how your marketing campaigns are performing before they end? Can you react to bad results?
• Are you gathering real time feedback or reviews from new customers? What are you doing about it?
• Are you proactive in soliciting your customers’ sentiment about your company and products?
• Are you able to target customers by conversation or area of interest in addition to traditional demographics?
• Can you anticipate what customers will ask for and how they will behave by looking at your historic data?

Knowing where you are will help set the goals and build the processes and tools you need to reach the next level.

Jeremiah Owyan from the “Altimeter” consulting group does not lack oxygen and offers a great tool to help you make this assessment. In his blog, he describes “The Eight Stages of Listening” (corresponding to the eight questions above) and shares an actionable “Web Strategy Matrix” that can help you define what to implement to move on to the next “listening stage”, gradually.

Great listeners make better speeches!

Dig deeper:
> Owyan’s Eight Stages of Listening

So I hesitated to add to this overwhelming learning agenda and teach you how to use Facebook as your press room. But I decided to go for it because:

1. This is actually something I find valuable for the many small businesses my company is partnering with.
2. It’s a pragmatic use of Facebook for BtoB marketers (and I did not find so many others).
3. How To’s are great way to feature bulleted lists in my posts, which is something that was highly recommended in the latest “How to make a great blog” lesson that I’ve read.
4. I don’t have many How To’s in my blog, and this is supposed to drive more traffic to it.
5. It won’t cost me much as I found a great article to re-post about this recently (not sure “re-post” is a word. I’m assuming it is, since “re-tweeting” became mainstream!).

So here you go: Read this article by Josh Peters on Mashable and you’ll have a newsroom up and running on Facebook in no time! I’m joking about How To’s—many of them are not worth reading—but this one should really be considered by the “all-in-one marketers” as I like to call marketing generalists, who are struggling with a thousand priorities and rarely get a chance to dedicate time to PR.

What How To’s do not teach you though, is WHAT to do with the “thing” you learned to do. And Josh’s article is no exception. But what you’re going to do with your Facebook newsroom is essential to its success. You’ll probably have to spend some time to think it through before jumping on this great social opportunity. Where are you going to find frequent and interesting news to publish about your business? What makes a news interesting to your customers, prospects and partners? Can you commit some extra time to this?

There are many ways for a small business to increase awareness at low cost with a good PR strategy. Even if you’re thinking that you don’t have ‘enough news’ to sustain a current newsroom, and I’m sure that you have,  give it a second thought. Consider your business in its environment: your partners, your suppliers, your customers, your industry! Beyond your walls, there’s a lot that you can leverage to demonstrate your business expertise and provide interesting news to readers. Facebook is just a vehicle. Don’t jump on it if you’re not ready. But it’s a great vehicle to consider when you’re a small business that does not get natural attention from journalists and industry analysts.

Since their first appearance in 2006, Apple’s PC-Mac commercials successfully  positioned the brand as the most innovative in the industry, with remarkably simple, effective, and funny ads. Playing the Innovation card against Microsoft’s Leadership has been a successful strategy. That was then: As Microsoft is catching up on innovation with its new ‘Mac-like’ Windows 7 operating system, there’s little exclusive features left to Mac OS X. Time to revise Apple’s battle card: Against Innovation, play the Trust card. And play it loud!

Remarkably effective. The more so as it remains simple, and funny.