From Social Media to Social profitability

During my many blogs addressing the collaborative social media tool of communicating from many to many, and giving enterprises the possibility to enter new markets and having new information of their costumers, it should be quite obvious that using social media is all about creating profitability in the enterprise.

Marketing has owned Social Media.

Social Media has been owned by the marketing department, who has used it to justify their increased value on revenue generating in the enterprise.  In fact Social Media is not a tool to justify the marketing department’s value towards the enterprise organization, social media is all about driving revenue, EBITDA, earnings per share and competitive advantage – it is a strategic element which should have the CEO´s and the top management’s top priority.  

CEO should take charge of Social profitability

The CEO´s has to take charge of the social media / social profitability to be able to control the profit of the enterprise company. The strategic value of social media/Social profitability is to gain increased revenue, competitive advantage and profit, all key performance indicators which should be in the top management’s highest priority. Another advantage of a social profitability strategy is a change in the information flow between departments in the enterprise company. Social profitability re-defines the flows of information and decision making between departments in the enterprise company. Changing focus from Social Media to social profitability you will have the entire enterprise organization from HR, Marketing, and Finance to production in the group as stakeholders. The CEO as the main stakeholder in the Social profitability should start asking the questions such as:

• How can social profitability affect the enterprise competitive advantage?
• What is the role of Social profitability within the enterprise branded business system, both internally and externally?
• What are the associated resource and capability implications?
• How are we applying social profitability outside of the marketing department?

When the CEO takes charge of social profitability – the marketing department can operate again.

With the CEO as the main lead of social profitability, the CEO will relief the Marketing Department from the burden of seeing the cross-enterprise potential of Social profitability and not having the authority to make it happen on their own. Functionally speaking, Marketing could very well continue to press the buttons on social profitability, with the difference that it now will be fully supported with the authority of the CEO.

The outcome of this change in lead and responsibility of your social profitability strategy will be embedded throughout the enterprise organization. The advantage for the Marketing Department is that the social profitability strategy is not seen as a marketing tool but instead as a means of driving profitability throughout the entire value chain.

Can social software help reducing youth unemployment in Europe?

There is no doubt that Europe faces three major challenges;

1. The growing unemployment among European youth
2. The increase of old people getting older
3. The structural and economic difference between north, south and east, west Europe

We have to face these challenges and find solutions in order to save our democracy, or we could have the same situation with social unrest they have in North Africa and Middle East. We in Western Europe have used a lot of means to save banks from collapsing – this has been wise to a certain point – now we need to solve the underlying problems. In the following I will try to look into how the new social culture and use of social media can help the European youth.

The growing unemployment among European youth!

 One of these problems is youth unemployment, which is a derivative of the banks' lack of lending to businesses who want to increase their business, compare also to potential entrepreneurs. Banks' reluctance has caused problems for society's growth and thus indirectly contributes to increasing youth unemployment. When a country as Spain reaches an unemployment rate among youth on 

56, 1 %[1] we are starting to loose a generation.

Europe needs to have some quick solutions and start to think out of the box to be able to recover from such a crisis situation of loosing a generation. The south European countries – Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal are in a massive danger zone where unrest and instability are causing trouble for democracy and creating possibility for extremist political fractions.

How can Social Media help to create new jobs?

Social Media and the social software used by the enterprises generate new opportunities of where a person should be situated and make it possible to have young people working in teams on a virtual basis. The Social Software market generally supports people working in teams, communities or networks which is ideal for cross boarder working and even with different cultures. The Social Software is not product or market specific, it is used to support a variety of collaborative activities within the enterprises, used by their employees and also by external costumers and suppliers and partners to create value for the enterprise.

With the collaborative social software it is possible to have employees present in various regions as the software is designed to be shared among teams and groups who are not forced to be situated in the same office or even region. The purpose of this virtual environment is to engage participants across the whole organization to create, organize and share information, as well as find, connect and interact with each other. This will in the long term secure that enterprises will be able to engage employees where the costumers are without creating expenses that can not be covered by the revenue that the social software creates. Social software includes both applications, which deliver specific functionality out of the box (functionality such as shared workspaces or communities) or platforms, with capabilities that can be used as a basis for contextual collaborative applications.  Where it is most interesting for the enterprise companies is when the social software are used in communication and information sharing and project  coordination within small teams or homogeneous groups. The social software gives the enterprise companies the possibility to the sharing of best practices within a business unit as well as the encouragement of communication, networking and information exchange among employees across the whole organization or with external participants in other organizations. These possibilities make it possible to engage people in other time zones and abolish physical borders which can prevent youth from getting a job in an enterprise company in another country. The social software gives the enterprise the freedom to engage people where the market is or where the most qualified people are. This new social world creates possibilities for creative enterprises to secure a highly qualified workforce without having any boundaries and helps in general the enterprise and their users to:

• Mine their networks of contacts and acquaintances for advice, references and referrals.
• Form teams, communities or informal groups and invite external participants from other organizations.
• Work together on the same work objects – could be engineers working on an new construction – time zone and borders would not have any importance
• Discuss and comment, sharing their work.
• Organize work from their perspective
• Identify relevant work – this will be of Hugh importance for the many unemployed in southern Europe.
• Discover other people with common interests.
• Alert users to information or events that might be relevant to them and can help them in getting their next assignment
• And last but not least be able to learn from other expertise which can help in the specific region

It is important that we start getting this new social software in use to prevent a whole generation from getting a work and be part of the society both in own country but also abroad. We need this to happen fast to stop this evil circle of youth unemployment.

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[1] The Guardian
September 2, 2013

How to run Social Blogs with your enterprise costumers

One of the most important things to do for an enterprise organization or an interest association is to facilitate the dialog with their costumers and make them interact on their behalf and be the facilitator for the dialog. What is important for an organization or an association is to make the communication interactive among their costumers or members to make them share information and create many-to-many conversations. These conversations can be applied in the enterprise organizations production or in the interest association member creation structure, generating mutual ideas creating new products or services with a new revenue for the organizations.

How you should NOT communicate with your members or customers

An example of what you should not do when you want to create a many-to-many conversation among your members/costumers is what the Danish Diabetes Association did to a member with a good idea.

A member of the association has created a blog: http://newwithdiabetes.blogspot.com/  for new members with diabetes.

The blog is a virtual tool box for new discovered diabetes type 1 members, who need to be properly regulated in their blood glucose level. The interest for this topic creates a lot of frustrations and anxiety for the ones who need to be properly regulated. This makes the blog a super tool of content which should be distributed to newly discovered members of diabetes 1 by the Diabetes Association.

What is in it for the association/enterprise?

The Diabetes Association has an interest in helping their members in this topic and generating more members in this category of members to expand the association. Apparently the Danish Diabetes Association’s communication department did not grab the dialog and did not want to facilitate this dialog. The Danish Diabetes Association used the first escape road – “we don’t refer to blogs but we do find your content interesting”. This escape will over time be costly and less rewarding to the Danish Diabetes Association. The value creation from the Diabetes Association is to secure that members of the association will continue to get information and discuss this information among the members to have the conversation. The problem for the association is that they will not create a dialog among their members and herby loose the grip of the members interest over time. In our Social world discussions many-to-many generates advantages and also disadvantages for enterprise companies and interest associations.

Advantages and disadvantages of social dialog

An advantage is that the associations and enterprises can generate new ideas and concepts by just listening and facilitating the dialog and herby benefit from the outcome. Most of the content developers will be proud and happy to create this content which can be used to help others and will not notice that an enterprise or an association can benefit economically on their idea.

The disadvantage for the enterprise or the association is if they reject the content from the costumer or member and then force them to create their own communication strategy towards the members or costumers the association or enterprise will not know what their members or costumers discusses and that could be fatal. When an association denies their members to have a dialog between each other by using a social blog, the association has created a negative dialog with their own members who will spoil the confidence in the association or enterprise product or cause. The outcome from such a decision can have fatal consequences for the association. One consequence could be lack of interest from the members in the associations dialog and events; another could be simple member getaway as the member community will be watched by the association rather than being facilitated. The importance of the many-to-many communication has to be recognized by enterprise and associations to get a sustainable success ahead.

Getting more sales out of your social media investment

As the economic situation in the northern part of Europe seems to lighten up, with the effect of investments from enterprises and a greater willingness of spending money from the consumers, the company sales forces need to be more efficient and be able to identify the right opportunities at the right time and determine the right people to contact?

How does this unique approach enable sales and marketing collaboration to drive productivity?

And, most importantly, how does it help you close more deals in this increasingly more connected world?  

These questions is the summer of 2013 most interesting questions to solve as it will be a competitive advantage to have your sales force aligned and trained in solving these questions.

One of the vital tools that every sales force should use to enter their prospecting in is the CRM (Costumer Relationship Management) system. The objective for every sales person is to identifying companies where they will have a high likelihood of sales success, getting to know their business – and doing all of this quickly so they will spend less time researching and more time selling.

Thanks to new technology, enterprises have access to real-time insights from thousands of content sources, including Thomson Reuters, Capital IQ, Jigsaw, and the Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, delivered right into your CRM application. The intelligence delivered within CRM mash-ups can save some serious research and prospecting time. Focusing only on timely, relevant information also helps sales and marketing build high-quality targeted prospect lists. Now you have the information from your social media and the CRM tool to mash-up the intelligence then you have to be in proper time at your costumers. Timing is crucial! Once you identify the right companies and the right contacts within those companies, the next step is determining the right time to contact them. Timely actions on key trigger events – i.e. changes within or outside your target company that can create the perfect opening for your products or services – can help you get in the door and close the deal. The 3 most important factors for success with your social media used for creating more sales are:

1. The Social Media information should be run through you analytics and delivered into your CRM system for sales use
2. Focus only on timely relevant information
3. It is important to approach the costumer on key trigger events

Bearing this in mind you will as a sales organization have more use of your social media information and be able to create competitive advantage by using your information in due time – it is not about who has the most information about the costumers it is about who has the best relevant social media information which can create more sales.

Social Media in a virtualized world

There is no doubt that it is difficult to develop Social Network Services that contains large amounts of Social Media by using traditional techniques with related to processing and transmitting it in large and Data Base systems for storing it. The rise of mobile and cloud applications where Social Media are used on is subverting existing IT management paradigms. The ability to handle large amount of Data – BIG DATA – (Social Media among other) on a single management console is moving from a nice-to-have solution to a must-have solution. The demand for collaboration where ever you are from what ever device you use forces products from complete solutions to point products having the same availability at a lower cost. One of the issues of working with social media in a virtualized environment is to have an increased ROI on client virtualization which must be achievable and measurable. Of course an enterprise company should not approach client virtualization only due to ROI. Client virtualization makes it much more beneficial to work a collaborative environment in an operational sense. Enterprise companies culture become increasingly driven by younger, more connected, collaborative, and mobile workers. Enterprises which do not build the foundation to support flexible and collaborative computing will find employees much harder to manage and to an extent, harder to retain in the enterprise.  There are 3 main reasons why Social Media has to be worked in a virtualized world;

·         The increasing amount of Data which is used to make Social Media collaboration.

·         The reduced IT-budgets drives IT cost by enabling IT to work more efficiently, and ensuring increased collaboration. This means driving the endpoint hardware by extending the life span of the equipment or repurposing them as virtual machines endpoints.

·         The Social Media collaboration demands a more flexible computing to ensure that younger employees will retain in the enterprise.

Virtualization on various devices can allow users ubiquitous access to their virtual devices which can improve overall user satisfaction and increase the Social Media collaboration. But it is a fact that client virtualization is still in the early phases so if the enterprises start investing in solutions that can better manage users demand for faster and easier collaboration, regardless of where they are or what device they are using in their Social and other communication. Enterprises failing to participate in the development of a virtualized communication platform will risk losing their competitive advantage in the long term and in the short term damage their overall business according to the 3 reasons why Social Media has to be worked in a virtualized world.

How to get your Social Media data operational in your strategy plan!

To get the proper use of your Social Media Data (SMD) in the enterprise structure, it is vital how good you are to crunch the unstructured SMD and make them operational.

This is not an easy task to make SMD operational as you as an enterprise have several parameters which you have to take into consideration;

1.      You have to match your SMD investments priorities with your business strategy- this is part of doing a strategy plan for your SMD.

2.      It is important to balance the speed, cost and acceptance in the enterprise organization to get success with implementing your SMD and get benefit from them.

3.      To secure focus and engagement from operation and at the same time have the proper capabilities you must have a plan to train the staff.

You have to match your SMD investments priorities with your business strategy- this is part of doing a strategy plan for your SMD
 
Integrating SMD with your business strategy calls for choices. Integrating of data and information can provide powerful insight but the cost of new data architecture and use and development of models and tools can be immense. In our world of scarce resources it is vital to prioritize our investments in SMD models and tools and make sure that we will get the best business strategy to work.
On very common problem working with your SMD is when the marketing function works in a siloed approach and have not been able to get the communication out to the individual business units in the enterprise. It is important for the enterprise that it works with one common approach. What is often seen is individual business units do send multiple offers across the enterprises entire base of customers, regardless of their profile or preferences.
Therefore top management must act towards the individual approach and decided that solving the problem would require pooling SMD in a cross-enterprise warehouse with data on income levels, product histories, risk profiles, and more. This central SMD database allows the enterprise company to optimize its marketing campaigns by targeting individuals with products and services they are more likely to want, thus raising the hit rate and profitability of the campaigns. A robust planning process often is needed to highlight investment opportunities like these and to stimulate the top-management engagement they deserve given their magnitude. 

It is important to balance the speed, cost and acceptance in the enterprise organization to get success with implementing your SMD and get benefit from them.

A natural impulse for executives who “own” enterprises SMD and analytics strategy is to shift rapidly into action mode. Once some investment priorities are established, it’s not hard to find software and analytics vendors who have developed applications and algorithmic models to address them. These packages (covering pricing, inventory management, labor scheduling, and more) can be cost-effective and easier and faster to install than internally built, tailored models. But they often lack the qualities of a killer app—one that’s built on real business cases and can energize managers. Sector- and company-specific business factors are powerful enablers (or enemies) of successful SMD efforts. That’s why it’s crucial to give planning a second dimension, which seeks to balance the need for affordability and speed with business realities (including easy-to-miss risks and organizational sensitivities).
Finally, some planning efforts require balancing the desire to keep costs down (through uniformity) with the need for a mix of data and modeling approaches that reflect business realities. But to develop a more sophisticated model to predict regional and seasonal buying patterns and optimize supply-chain operations, the enterprise has to gather unstructured consumer data from its SMD, to choose among internal-operations data, and to customize prediction algorithms by product and market approach. A balanced big-data plan embraces the need for such mixed approaches. 

To secure focus and engagement from operation and at the same time have the proper capabilities you must have a plan to train the staff.

When enterprises start investing in new tools for working better and more efficient with their SMD they often find that the productivity of its revenue management analysts is below expectations. This problem arises when enterprises neglect a third element of Social Media big-Data planning – engaging the frontline managers in the enterprise organization. But planning for the creation of such worker-friendly tools is just the beginning. It’s also important to focus on the new organizational skills needed for effective implementation. Far too many companies believe that 95 percent of their data and analytics investments should be in data and modeling. But unless they develop the skills and training of frontline managers, many of whom don’t have strong analytics backgrounds, those investments won’t deliver. A good rule of thumb for planning purposes is a 50–50 ratio of data and modeling to training.

The success with your Social Media big data depends on how good you are to make a strategy plan.

When a plan is in place, execution becomes easier: integrating data, initiating pilot projects, and creating new tools and training efforts occur in the context of a clear vision for driving business value—a vision that’s unlikely to run into funding problems or organizational opposition. Over time, of course, the initial plan will get adjusted. Indeed, one key benefit of SMD big data and analytics is that you can learn things about your business that you simply could not see before. The sooner executives change that, the more likely they are to make data a real source of competitive advantage for their organizations.

To get the most out of your Social Media data you need a strategy plan!

There is nothing new about creating a strategic plan for how you as an enterprise want to act in any given situation in your business. A strategic plan for your use of your Social Media data is simply to highlight critical decisions or trade offs from the collected huge amount of data.

Social Media data is considered to be critical data. Social Media data complicating matters in a new twist: critical information often resides outside companies, in unstructured forms such as social-network conversations. To be able to create value for your enterprise it is important to create a social media strategic plan at CEO/CMO level to establish investment priorities – balance speed, cost and acceptance and to create the conditions for frontline engagement.

Have you created a Social Media data strategic plan?

This seams simple and obvious to develop a Social Media data plan, but in many company cases the missing step to create a simple plan for how data, analytics, tools and people can interact to create business value is not as obvious as it seams. On the other side the power which such a plan creates in making a common language for management to discuss where the greatest returns will come from and, more important to select the two or three places to get started makes a huge difference for any enterprise. The essence of a good strategic plan – weather it is for Social Media data use or for another purpose -  is that it highlights the critical decisions or trade-offs an enterprise must make and defines the initiatives it must prioritize.

What will make management, to workout a Social Media strategic plan is if there is a compelling reason to act; One such reason is when business has to consider which part of the businesses will get the most capital, whether to emphasize higher margins or faster growth and which capabilities are needed to ensure strong performance in your social media plan. To make such a plan there are 3 elements the enterprise has to have in place;

• Data
• Analytical models
• Tools

Speaking of Data, it is important to have a game plan for assembling integrating and make an output of data which could create greater value for the entire business – this is essentials for the business. The next data question is do we as an enterprise have the right processing and storage capacity to create a format of data that could be used in sales and production.

But being able to integrate data is just not enough to create value. Advanced analytic models are needed to enable data-driven optimization (for example, of employee schedules or shipping networks) or predictions (for instance, about flight delays or what customers will want or do given their buying histories or Web-site behavior take the case of Sainsbury they have to collect their costumers buying behavior and even conversations and analyze the outcome. IBM Pure Data System for Analytics is a software and Hardware solution for working with advanced analytic models. The system which is based on Netezza technology[1] is a simple tool for data-intensive analysis. It simplifies and optimizes the performance of data services for analytical applications, making it possible to run very complex algorithms in minutes instead of days, which is important if you want to get value out of your social analytics.

Once you have taken the data in and analyzed it you want to have the proper tools to get your information out to management and frontline people in your enterprise and make them use the information to start getting the value out of the information. What’s needed are intuitive tools that integrate data into day-to-day processes and translate modeling outputs into tangible business actions: for instance, a clear interface for scheduling employees, fine-grained cross-selling suggestions for call-center agents and sellers, or a way for marketing managers to make real-time decisions on discounts. Many enterprise companies fail to complete this step in their thinking and planning—only to find that managers and operational employees do not use the new models, whose effectiveness predictably falls. If employees do not use the new models the social media investment will not be worth the time and effort – so it is very important that every single person in management and frontline takes the Social Media models seriously again to have a return on your enterprise investment.
It is important to combine the 3 elements to create the foundation which the enterprises can formulate an integrated a Social Media data plan. There are no doubt that there are variations from enterprise to enterprise and different sources of business value creations, but you have to have a plan and this plan should be a part of your strategy to create the most value out of your social media data and help grow your business. The next we will have to look into is the three key planning challenges – they will follow in the next blog.

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[1] Netezza (pronounced Ne-Tease-Ah) designs and markets high-performance data warehouse appliances and advanced analytics applications for uses including enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive analytics and business continuity planning.