I can Get (now) Satisfaction

GSIn view of my previous post about the three key tools of social media (Sprinklr, WordPress and Get Satisfaction), you can only imagine my own sense of satisfaction – indeed smugness – to see that Sprinklr has just announced it has bought Get Satisfaction.

Clearly there are sensible people, with money, out there who think as I do – which is always a reassuring thought.

The interesting thing about Get Satisfaction is that when it first launched it was a customer, rather than a corporate, tool. It was designed to allow customers or consumers to create their own community around the brands they wanted to talk to, or report upon. It was a bit like Trip Advisor – but for any organisation. It was a community owned by the customer to which brands were then invited to join. Indeed for those brands that didn’t join there was a wonderful one-liner “No-one from company X has sponsored, endorsed or joined the conversation yet” which I thought was a great metaphor for the state of social media at the time (notice the usage of the word ‘yet’). I used this in all of my presentations  (see pictures) and I was convinced that this marked the dawn of a new era where control of corporate reputation would shift to individual customers operating within structured or semi-structured online communities.tomb

Things haven’t worked out quite like that (yet). Get Satisfaction itself shifted to become a corporate-based product, probably because it’s management decided (sensibly as it turned out) to commercialise first and then build a corporate user base rather than build a big consumer user base and then try to work-out how to commercialise it. However, I think the fact that it started out as a tool for the customer has given it an edge as a customer service tool for brands. It has a recognition that all things start with the customer (rather than the brand) coded into its DNA.

As a brand, if you use a tool like Get Satisfaction you cannot fail but become more connected, in real-time, with your customers. It’s four imperatives – ask a question, report a problem, share an idea, give praise – represent all the things that customers want to base their relationships with brands upon. Creating a customer service community may not be easy because doing it effectively means building a new process which will have tentacles that reach out much further into your business that the traditional marketing, sales and communication processes ever did. It will certainly be harder than simply pumping industrial volumes of content out into the social void. However, it is worth remembering that the easy things to do are not usually the best things to do.

I hope that this acquisition marks an end of the phoney-war of social media – and also an acquisition that cements Sprinklr’s position as the leader in ‘enterpise social media solutions’ (I hate that phrase but you know what I mean). I hope it marks at least the begining of the end of the phase where brands thought they could simply put a ‘social patch’ onto their traditional, audience and content based approaches and then carry on as normal. I hope this marks a growing realisation that brands have to adopt a fundamentally different approach to creating relationships with customers in the social digital space, the world of the individual rather than the world of the audience. A world where brands understand how to harness the power of connection rather than distribution. A world where (as I have said in my ebook) you are successful by not speaking to 97 per cent of your audience – just the three per cent (frequently much less) who, at any given time, want to talk to you.

Or, as I have also said, there are only ten customers critical to your business and social media can help you find them. The only catch being these are the people critical to your business right now, and in 10 minutes time it could be another ten people. I.e. these are the people who, right now, want to ask a question, report a problem, share an idea or give praise.

 

Social media: the three (wise) tools

I am often asked about which social media tools to use. My stock answer is to say “the answer is never a tool, social media is not a tool-based challenge.” I then invoke the analogy of the carpenter and the chisel, i.e. a carpenter will probably use a chisel, but having a chisel won’t make you a carpenter – carpentry, like social media, is a process-based challenge, not a tool-based challenge.

3 toolsHowever, I am prepared to make an exception in three cases. The tools I recommend are linked to the three pillars of any successful social media strategy: conversation, content (information management) and community. The reason I recommend them is that none can be misunderstood as a channel (like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram et al can) and all involve construction of a process in order to use them effectively.

Netvibes as a path to Sprinklr

The first addresses conversation (i.e. listening and responding to the things people are saying about your brand which is the only conversation brands have permission to join). The tool I initially point people to is Netvibes. Netvibes is still the only decent free tool that you can use to establish a comprehensive monitoring dashboard. When I show people a Netvibes dashboard their response is almost always “wow – I want one of those”. Hootsuite does this a bit, but Hootsuite is more set up to publish outgoing than it is to monitor incoming. However, if you are looking for an ‘enterprise solution’ – and if your organisation is of any sort of size you will need to do this – the solution is Sprinklr. Sprinklr has now swallowed so many platforms and technologies you cannot really call it a tool, but the reason I recommend it (them) is that of all the major platforms players they are the only one that fundamentally ‘gets’ the fact that social media is a process management challenge rooted in behaviour identification and response. I note they have just announced another new service, the ‘Customer Experience Cloud’. Now I am a bit sceptical about the concept of customer experiences, but this is when a generic (sometimes called consistent) customer experience is broadcast down this thing called an omni-channel. However, the Sprinklr approach seems to be more about how you manage your response to individual consumers – i.e. giving your customers the individual experience they want, rather than forcing onto them an experience the brand wants them all to have. It could also help in the important business of identifying and recruiting superfans (see point 4 in this post).

WordPress (social hub)

The second tool is WordPress. Now I know WordPress has finally become all conquering (although I can remember the days when you had to torture digital agencies to get them to use it), but the more specific usage of WordPress I recommend is the creation of a content / social hub. Without something like this a brand cannot have a real-time voice: it cannot provide answers to questions or link together its usage of any of the other tools such as YouTube or Twitter. A website can explain what you do. But a social hub can demonstrate how you are doing it. It will also help you target Google spaces (i.e. the places where people are asking the question for which your brand provides the answer).

Get Satisfaction

I really enjoy recommending the third tool  – because no-one has heard of it. This tool is Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction is an out-of-the-box customer service community. I believe that within a few years every single organisation will have to have one of these in place in the same way that it became expected that every organisation needed a website. In fact I think websites will basically morph into one of these anyway. Why? Well, as I highlighted in this post on Edelman’s recent Brandshare report – consumers are telling brands they want them to do eight things – and the four most important of these can easily be addressed with an online customer service community.

I have looked back over my presentations and noticed that I first started talking about Get Satisfaction at a conference in Budapest in 2008. I keep waiting for it to become ‘big’ and remain disappointed, in fact appalled, at the extent to which so few ‘social media experts’ have latched onto it – but I think this just reflects the extent to which we all still see social media as a distribution challenge, not a connection challenge. Community is all about connection, in fact I think community will become the new media. Wherever we look we see relationships between brands and consumers being disrupted by the intervention of communities (Trip Advisor, Airbnb, Wikipedia – even Google itself). Brands need to understand how to operate within these new community spaces, but also how to create a community space for their brand. People would much rather talk to a brand within its own community space, rather than have a brand invade their own spaces in networks such as Facebook. Facebook (as it is spending advertising dollars saying) is for friendship – and you will never be friends with a brand.

We are starting to see what communities such as Yammer, Jive or Lithium can do in creating more efficient relationships between people within your business. Get Satisfaction can do the same for creating more efficient relationships with your consumers or customers. Better still, if you create an online customer service community, the process you will have to build around it will force you to become more effective in the way in which you operate the rest of your social media strategy. This community will become the hub which defines the rest of your activity.

So – let us kill of the age of brandfill (content) and bring on the age of community.

A political rant about stories, poppy seeds and lettuce

(N.B. This post is not about social media.  It is a political rant, but after last night’s initial election 2015 TV (non) debate, I just had to get it out of the system).

So – the campaign has started. As an electorate we now have the opportunity to see exactly what is on offer. There may be cock-ups, controversy, confrontation and commentary ahead, but there will be no ‘new’ policies. I put new in inverted commas since this pre-supposes the existence of some identifiable policies (as distinct from just initiatives) to start with.

So how do we all feel? Are we energised? Are we enthused about the debates to come? Do we sense that we are living in a vigourous democracy that thrives on the exchange of ideas? Do we even feel, as did the people of Scotland in their independence referendum, that there are clear choices presented to us?

Well, I will tell you how I feel. Continue reading

Hiding in plain sight: the ISC report on GCHQ surveillance

Yesterday the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee published its report into the security services.  The thrust of this investigation was to look at the whole issue of the bulk interception of data – an issue dragged into the limelight by Edward Snowden – and determine whether this constitutes mass surveillance. (See this post for more detail on the difference, or not, between bulk interception of data and mass surveillance).

What the report has really done is both flush out some important issues, but then allow these to remain hidden in plain sight, because the Committee has failed to grasp the implications of what they have uncovered.

The BBC summarises the key point thus: (The Committee) said the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) agency requires access to internet traffic through “bulk interception” primarily in order to uncover threats by finding “patterns and associations, in order to generate initial leads”, which the report described as an “essential first step.”

And here is what is hiding in plain sight.  The acknowledgment that GCHQ is using bulk data to “find patterns and associations in order to generate initial leads.”  What is wrong with that, you might say?  Here is what is wrong with that.   This means that information gained by swallowing (intercepting) large chunks of humanity’s collective digital activity is being used to predict the possibility that each and everyone of us (not just those whose data might have been swallowed) is a … fill in the gap (potential terrorist, criminal, undesirable).  We all now wear a badge, or can have such a badge put upon us, which labels us with this probability.  Now it may well be that only those of us that have a badge with a high probability then go on to become ‘initial leads’ (whose emails will then be read).  But we all still wear the badge and we can all go on to become an initial lead at some point in the future, dependant on what specific area of investigation an algorithm is charged with investigating.

Algorithmic surveillance is not about reading emails, as the Committee (and many privacy campaigners) seem to believe.   This is an old fashioned ‘needles in haystacks’ view of surveillance.  Algorithmic surveillance is not about looking for needles in haystacks, it is about using data from the hay in order to predict where the needles are going to be.  In this world the hay becomes the asset.  Just because GCHQ is not ‘reading’ all our emails doesn’t legitimise the bulk interception of data or provide assurance that a form of mass surveillance is not happening.  As I said in the previous post: until we understand what algorithmic surveillance really means, until this is made transparent, society is not in a position to give its consent to this activity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Swimmers ‘failing’ at mountain climbing says Brandwatch study

FireShot Screen Capture #217 - 'Retailers 'failing' on Facebook and Twitter, says Brandwatch study I PR Week' - www_prweek_com_article_1333814_retailers-failing-facebook-twitter-says-brandwatch-studyHere is a report on research from Brandwatch that I think neatly encapsulates where many brands have got to in terms of understanding and using social media.  OK, so it doesn’t actually say that swimmers are failing at mountain climbing, it says are that retailers are ‘failing’ on Facebook and Twitter because they are failing to listen and respond to their audiences.  But it may as well talk about swimmers and mountains because while it has identified the failure bit, it has reached the wrong conclusion about why the failure is occuring or what to do about it.

The failure is one of defining the challenge, it is not a failure of insufficient activity.  The challenge in the social media space is defined by behaviour identifiction and response (i.e. it is all about swimming).  The challenge in the traditional media / marketing space was all about channel and message, reach and frequency (i.e. mountain climbing).  So while Brandwatch correctly identified the problem i.e. failure to listen and respond it didn’t realise this was happening because it was positioned against the wrong challenge.  In effect the article is saying “you are failing to swim up this mountain, but if you flayed your arms about more frequently and thrashed your legs more vigourously you would be more successful .”  True enough, but you wouldn’t be that much more successful.  What the article should really say is “you are failing at swimming, but that is because you are trying to climb a mountain rather than cross a lake”.  Right activity, wrong context.  If swimming is what it is all about, look for a lake, don’t look for a mountain.

In reality, the reason most brands are not responding effectively is because this is not what they got into social media to do.  Listening and response is seen as the rather awkward consequence of being in the social media space.  It is seen as a cost that needs to be paid in order to fulfill the ambition of spreading their content far and wide and maximising  ‘engagement’ with their audience.  And like all costs, it should therefore be kept to a minimum.

Social media is entirely a behaviour identification and response challenge.  It is not a channel and message / reach and frequency challenge.  Listening and response is not a cost, it is the source of value creation.  Most brands haven’t really grasped this yet – but at least they are starting to realise that what they are doing has a problem (sort of).

 

 

 

Must read: Haydn Shaughnessy on the new ‘creative’ economy

FireShot Screen Capture #212 - 'Shift_ A User's Guide to the New Economy_ Haydn Shaughnessy_ 9781941420034_ Amazon_com_ Books' - www_amazon_com_gp_product_1941420036_ref=as_li_tl_ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creat“A decade ago we were wondering what the Creative Economy might actually mean. Now we can see it: it takes the form of delegation of responsibility to individuals who have to find ways to cooperate and ways to innovate while taking risks with their time and income.”  So says Haydn Shaughnessy in a fascinating interview with Forbes’ Steve Denning.

It is an article that raises a host of hugely important issues, so many that it is difficult to know which to highlight or how to summarise them.  For a start it recognises that what is going here is not simply about new technolgies it is about a change to societies and social relationships – especially the relationship between institutions and individuals.

It also makes the critical point that, despite what we all like to think about the ’empowerement’ of individuals in this new creative economy, that is not what is really going on.  Businesses are essentially outsourcing risk and while this is efficient from the perspective of the individual businesses concerned, it is generates much greater costs and inefficiencies for the wider economy and society as a whole.  In a nutshell, if you can outsource innovation to a ‘creative community’ of  10,000 individuals, you can then just choose the one that works best and discard the 9,999 others.  Great for you, and the people behind the one you picked, but not so good for the 9,999.  Not only does this create a society of chronic insecurity, it is also hugely wasteful of effort.

Shaughnessy also makes the point that while this may work in the short-term, if business as a whole is to rely on this approach, it needs to create greater certainty of supply.  In his words “The start-up culture is self-congratulatory. They celebrate several hundred Fintech start-ups in London. But in reality, we need thousands or even tens of thousands of start-ups. To get to 300 successful firms, you need 10,000 start-ups. We are not addressing that kind of issue. What it means is that we also need to prepare people for a different journey through life.”

I was also pleased that Shaugnessy deals with the issue of scale and the extent to which scale no longer confers an advantage (something I have written about before).  He highlights the ability of many new companies to grow huge revenues and operate globally with very few employees often as a result of the fact that they are ‘born social’ and have a social purpose as a facilitator.  In the process organisations such as WordPress and TED they can create an intellectual asset base of goodwill that outstrips the ‘bought’ goodwill inherent in models of many supposedly successful ‘brands’ such as Coca Cola.

Anyway – read the interview (and the associated book).  It is one of the most important things I have read in a very long time because it doesn’t just paint a picture of what is going on, it explains why it is happening and what we need to do about it.

 

Is the bulk interception of data actually worse than mass surveillance?

Where does bulk interception of data stop and mass surveillance start and in the world of Big Data and algorithmic surveillance is it even relevant to make such a distinction?

It emerged last week that these are important questions, following a ruling by the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal and subsequent response by the UK government and its electronic spying outfit, GCHQ (see the details in this Guardian report).  This response proposes that mass surveillance doesn’t really happen (even if it may look a bit like it does), because all that is really going on is bulk interception of data and this is OK (and thus can be allowed to happen).

One of the most disturbing revelations flowing from Edward Snowden’s exposure of the Prism and Upstream digital surveillance operations is the extent to which the US and UK governments have been capturing and storing vast amounts of information, not just on possible terrorists or criminals, but on everyone. This happened in secret and its exposure has eventually prompted a response from government and this response has been to assert that this collection and storage doesn’t constitute mass surveillance, instead it is “the bulk interception of data which is necessary to carry out targeted searches of data in pursuit of terrorist or criminal activity.”

This is the needle in the haystack argument – i.e. we need to process a certain amount of everyone’s hay in order to find the terrorist needles that are hidden within it. This seems like a reasonable justification because it implies that the hay (i.e. the information about all of us) is a disposable asset, something to be got rid of in order to expose the needles. This is basically the way that surveillance has always operated. To introduce another analogy, it is a trawling operation that is not interested in the water that passes through the net only the fish that it contains.

However, this justification falls down because this is not the way that algorithmic surveillance works. Algorithmic surveillance works by Continue reading

Seamless omni-channel customer experiences. Did the customer order one of these?

omnichannelYesterday I received an email invitation for a Social Media Today webinar which posed the question “are you providing an omni-channel customer experience?”  Now I have a suspicion that in 10 or 15 years time when marketing has finally moved-on, we are all going to look back at this sort of stuff and shake our heads.  How was it that we ever got ourselves caught up in such tangled nonesense, we will ask.

A ridiculous term like omni-channel customer experience is only born when we need to use language to disguise a fundamental gap in understanding.  Terms like this are a sure sign that we don’t really know what we are talking about.  We are just making things up that sound good and have the reassurance of seeming vaguely familiar.

According to Caitlin McCulloch, Director of Community Marketing at Social Media Today “Omni-channel marketing focuses on a seamless approach to the consumer experience through all available channels, including mobile Internet devices, computers, brick-and-mortar, television, radio, direct mail, catalog, and so on. When brands think customer experience, they need to think omni.”  A seamless omni-channel customer experience in fact – even better.

The problem here is that the social digital space is not about channels and messages (reach and frequency) and generic customer experiences.  It is about behaviour identification and response:  it works in a completely different way.  It is well nigh impossible to have a conversation with the same person in multiple channels.  You can only have a conversation with an audience in multiple channels – but the social digital space is the world of the individual, not the world of the audience.  A concept like a seamless omni-channel customer experience can only ever work in the world of the audience: the world of traditional marketing.  It just has no relevance in the social digital space, where people need to be treated as individuals.

Brands may want to bombard their customers with omni-channel experiences, but customers cannot, and will not, reciprocate.  They just want to talk to brands through whatever channel is most appropriate to them at any given moment in time.  The customer selects the channel and they never select an omni-channel.  The only part of this that needs to be omni is the ability for a brand to be available on all the channels, thus have to ability to listen and respond at the time and in the place that its’ customers want.

Customers don’t want ‘customer experiences’.  When has a customer ever asked for a ‘customer experience’?  They want brands to listen to them give them answers to questions in as close to their time (i.e. real time) as possible.  In fact, the closest thing to an omni-channel, from a customers’ perspective, is Google.

But hey, providing a seamless omni-channel customer experience sounds really great. It fits into the statement “we at x brand are totally committed to providing a …”  It then opens the way for agencies who can then sell seamless omni-channel customer experience marketing solutions.  Ker-ching and everyone is happy (except the customer of course).

 

“Nous sommes tous…” what exactly?

This week , the magazine Charlie Hebdo will publish a defiant response to the terrorists who assassinated 8 members of its staff and four shoppers  in a Jewish supermarket. This response will involve publishing an image of the Prophet Muhammad.

Is this an appropriate response? Is this the way in which we should demonstrate our defiance to such an appalling act?

Having the right to do something does not necessarily make it the right thing to do. We have (and must defend) the right to publish an image of the Prophet Muhammad, but with this right (as with all rights) comes the responsibility of deciding whether to exercise it. And in making this decision, we have to think about consequences. Indeed having rights creates the responsibility to think about consequences – something it is often convenient to forget or ignore. Continue reading

Organic social media is dead: but was it ever alive?

It appears to have become an article of faith that organic social media reach is dead. The reason for this, so the idea goes, is that the social space has become so cluttered that achieving cut-through is now too difficult. From this it proceeds that the way forward is to look at paid for solutions, or at least to ensure that any organic activity has paid for boosters attached.

My question though is this. Was organic social media reach ever alive? OK there may have been some examples where brands have managed to get themselves in front of a large number of people in the social digital space, but I would contend that these were, and will remain, the exception. I don’t think the social media space has ever delivered reach on a consistent basis and all that has changed is that we are waking up to that fact. For example engagement levels, on average, with brand Facebook pages have always been abysmally low. This is not a recent phenomenon, it is simply that we haven’t wished to believe this.

It has nothing to do with the fact that the space has now filled up, or, as has been suggested, we are arriving at an impending content shock. The trouble with this type of thinking is this leads to the conclusion that we simply have to make our content more engaging / competitive in order to achieve sufficient reach when, in fact, what we should be doing is abandoning the idea of reach altogether. Continue reading