Big Social Mobile

How Digital Initiatives Can Reshape the Enterprise and Drive Business Results

D. Giannetto

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137410405
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Big Social Mobile shows that big data, along with social and mobile media, can improve enterprise performance significantly, but only when implemented in a holistic fashion. This book offers an integrative process that has helped a wide range of businesses enhance what has traditionally made them unique, resulting in transformative results.

Part I

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SEEING AND THINKING BIG PICTURE

THE NEW SOCIAL ECONOMY HAS NOT changed how success in business is measured but rather how success is achieved.

Chapter 1

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THE INTEGRATED ENTERPRISE

JUST ABOUT EVERY MAJOR ORGANIZATION AROUND the world has invested heavily in three key digital initiatives—social media, mobile technology, and big data—in recent years. This investment has been in dollars and in people. Companies have recruited specialized practitioners for each of these digital initiatives, adopted new technology, and hired third-party specialists. They have a lot riding on the success of these initiatives.

Executives have been told they must re-invent themselves as highly social or highly mobile or big data-friendly; some say the sustainability of their enterprise is at stake, that these digital initiatives have revolutionized business. Big, social, and mobile are on all leaders’ minds, and they’re looking for results.

At first glance it may seem as if these efforts have paid off. Most organizations have seen huge percentage increases in friends, fans, and followers on a wide array of social platforms. A majority of larger organizations have launched mobile applications that are state-of-the-art, highly downloaded, and praised as user-friendly. They revel in the volumes of data they’ve generated or collected, proclaiming that they now know more about consumers—website visitors, social media followers, and mobile users—than ever before. And these things are all true.

But look below the surface of these results. They represent narrowly defined gains in separate, highly specialized areas and not much else. How have digital initiatives helped companies achieve traditional business goals: increasing revenue, reducing expenses, and improving profit? Has this new, greater understanding of or improved relationships with customers or consumers led to these tangible measures of value or the things that directly drive them? Have they helped businesses evolve so that they are better suited to operate in a global, digital world, where consumers inhabit both a physical and digital landscape?

The answer to these questions is a resounding “no.” Certainly the potential is there for social media, mobile technology, and big data to achieve these objectives. But that’s never going to happen as long as organizations continue to launch these initiatives in a segregated manner—segregated from each other and from the larger organization itself, its mission, and its objectives. As long as the emphasis is on boosting the number of friends and followers, creating ever more technically sophisticated mobile applications, or collecting increasingly greater amounts of data, these initiatives will have a minimal impact on the true measures of organizational performance.

If, on the other hand, these initiatives are integrated into the enterprise itself, woven together and into its people, processes, technology, and information, they can drive results that build upon and enhance the company’s differentiators and value propositions, properly position them to connect with today’s social consumer, and compete in a diverse new social economy, adding real, tangible value. When integrated properly, these initiatives can yield the results that executives are seeking and can turn any organization, both big and small, into a Big Social Mobile enterprise.

BIG SOCIAL MOBILE VERSUS THE TRADITIONAL ENTERPRISE

The differences between Big Social Mobile enterprises and ones that separate and isolate these digital initiatives are numerous and multifaceted. It’s not just a matter of actions but attitudes. Leaders within integrated enterprises, for instance, have a very different perspective on these three initiatives. These leaders esteem the traditional measures of organizational performance and the value proposition that made them successful and yet understand that social media, mobile technology, and big data are strategic initiatives that must be blended together and integrated into every aspect of their organization. They are constantly questioning and talking about how these initiatives contribute to major business objectives and the supporting goals of each department. They are actively and continuously involved in decisions that impact these initiatives.

In organizations that handle big, social, and mobile in the traditional, segregated manner, leaders often have little awareness of or involvement in these initiatives; each initiative is run by a separate, specialized subject-matter expert. Since executives do not focus upon them, their success is measured in terms that these specialized practitioners define as success: more friends or followers, more downloads, or more data.

Here are the traits that differentiate an integrated from a segregated organization:

THE SEGREGATED APPROACH—SEE FIGURE 1.1

• Runs isolated projects in each of the three areas. Marketing or digital marketing manages social media with a low-level marketer/analyst in charge; the Information Technology (IT) group manages mobile with the help of an outsourced third-party developer; and IT manages the consolidation of big data.

• Fails to tie initiatives to corporate goals. Social media objectives focus on numerical measurements of followership, engagement, and sentiment; mobile objectives relate to the number of downloads and usage metrics; big data efforts concentrate on the amount of data collected.

• Creates self-contained initiatives that aren’t woven into core processes. Traditional enterprise functions, processes, technology, and information outside of the three digital initiatives are disconnected from these initiatives; marketing promotions are not integrated with digital marketing efforts; sales opportunities arising in these areas are not handled by Sales; customer issues are not handled by Customer Service; and big-data-related information is not utilized for planning and decision making. The customer experience is inconsistent across mediums and channels.

• Lacks executive oversight of these initiatives. Corporate leaders see big, social, and mobile as supporting efforts that should be run by subject-matter experts.

• Does not tie social and mobile data (big data) to traditional enterprise data. Customers are unique within each data set and cannot be identified across each of these different digital spheres or across both the physical and digital landscape.

Figure 1.1 The segregated approach to digital initiatives, leaving them isolated from core, traditional enterprise functions.

• Looks at information as a nonstrategic asset of the organization. Perceives information to be relative to each initiative and separate from core processes and enterprise information.

THE INTEGRATED APPROACH—SEE FIGURE 1.2

• Measures the success of digital initiatives using traditional metrics such as revenue, expense, and profit and their ability to influence these, while also measuring elements unique to each initiative (number of fans, engagement, downloads, video views, etc.)

• Seeks to create a similar customer experience across both the traditional and digital landscapes, through all channels, creating processes to standardize this experience. Uses this standardization to create internal efficiencies, improve customer and consumer satisfaction, and increase brand loyalty.

• Views digital initiatives as directly impacting the company’s long-term success; information generated by big data is used to gain a strategic advantage, improve performance, and is used by every function within the enterprise; big data and traditional data are merged into one data set.

• Embeds digital initiatives into core enterprise processes, with subject-matter experts owning only the technology and processes specific to each initiative; subject-matter experts facilitate enterprise-wide involvement.

• Encourages department and functional leaders to be socially aware; digital initiatives are integrated into departmental planning, and this information is combined with traditional enterprise information.

• Disperses social media, mobile technology, and big data information throughout the enterprise; the enterprise runs active processes that seek to bridge the gap between enterprise and big data so that customers are uniquely identified and so that behavior can be analyzed using new techniques and can be leveraged with new marketing and sales techniques.

• Makes sure the owners of digital initiatives articulate and disseminate their vision for how their efforts will support the company’s core value proposition and drive traditional profit-oriented results.

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In looking at these traits, be aware that most organizations are not all one or the other. Few companies have achieved the ideal, fully integrated approach, and a dwindling number of organizations remain saddled with a completely segregated model. The goal of today’s executive should be to apply consistent and persistent pressure that helps their organization evolve to become a Big Social Mobile enterprise. This means breaking down the barriers that exist between each of these initiatives. It also requires tearing down the fences between these new specialties and the traditional enterprise processes and policies.

Figure 1.2 The integrated enterprise, where each digital initiative is woven into the people, process, technology, and information of traditional enterprise functions.

But this does not mean that the organization must be reinvented, magically transformed into something different, web-based, highly social, or purely mobile. Executives cannot allow the organization to lose sight of what made their company what it is and the value proposition upon which it is based. These traditional drivers of success are the stakes in the ground upon which everything big, social, and mobile must be tied. Despite the constant hype associated with these digital initiatives, the basic rules of business have not changed.

ONE COMPANY’S JOURNEY TO BECOME BIG SOCIAL MOBILE

For a large photography and imaging consumer goods company, the journey to become Big Social Mobile started with a simple question: What rebate amounts would prompt consumers to buy their products? Carl, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), was relying on historical information that varied discounts by geographic market and product. The results were highly influenced by retailer strategies, local economics, seasonality, and supply chain performance.

Carl knew that the company’s social and mobile initiatives might provide a different answer. His company had approximately 40,000 fans within their social media communities; an unimpressive number. But their largest retailer possessed a 7-million-member social community and was always eager to partner on promotions. Carl gave the green light to begin testing rebate amounts on their social community. Once it began, other retailers got wind of it and requested the same promotional programs. Carl was able to widen the tests, and his company’s social community quickly began to grow.

After the test had run for two months, Carl had sufficient data to answer the original question. And the information was specific; the CMO could now see the relationship between different rebate amounts and consumer demand. He deduced he could use these social communities to test new rebate price levels, even combining them with different promotions and marketing language to quickly see their impact on consumer behavior—something impossible with the traditional approach.

But in the course of doing so, Carl discovered that his company had no way of comparing data about online consumers who took advantage of the rebates to the customers in the company database. In addition, the data on the 80,000 users who downloaded his company’s third-party-developed mobile app were also completely separated from his traditional customer and social media data. Thus, customers had multiple, separate identities—the traditional data identified them by product registration or sales order numbers; the social media and mobile apps identified them by email address, user IDs, or mobile numbers. His company’s big data initiative didn’t tie these different identities together or uniquely identify their customers or consumers.

Even more alarming, the silos went beyond the data. No one in the Customer Service department was tracking, comparing, or responding effectively to issues raised by social media and mobile customers; no one in Product Development was tracking product improvement suggestions that came through social media; Sales was uninvolved when a customer was looking for an upgrade or a consumer showed interest in a new product; and no one was comparing the behavior of consumers online to consumer behavior in physical stores.

Carl began implementing a series of changes in response to these disconnects, including:

• Fostering executive involvement in all social and mobile initiatives so that they were tied directly to the achievement of corporate goals.

• Changing the focus of the company’s big data initiative so that it brought together all data—traditional enterprise, social, and mobile data—in a way that not only showed larger trends, but also identified specific customers.

• Introducing new types of analyses that tied consumer demographics to behavioral patterns so that functional department heads could integrate information into their processes and decision making.

• Modifying the existing Customer Service technology and processes to ensure that Agents received information about customers from both their traditional enterprise applications and social and mobile platforms so that they could respond to inquiries more effectively.

Mobile was a bigger problem; since the company’s primary products were cameras, smart phones, with their built-in cameras, were actually preventing growth of core product lines. Product Development was paired with Social Media to solicit suggestions from consumers for the company’s new line of “social products.” The company also fought back by changing its mobile app to embed discounted instant printing, to promote the functionality of higher- grade cameras, and to push discounts directly to consumers likely to upgrade at holidays or when big data revealed they were planning a vacation. Videos and articles were designed to highlight what could be done with real cameras that couldn’t be done with smart phones.

With these and other efforts, Carl put the company in a much better position to determine which customers represented the greatest opportunity and then use this information to target these customers with specific marketing techniques. They also were able to learn which customers were likely to need new supplies and at what times of year, allowing them to capture these customers with advertisements, discounts, and seasonal promotions. Carl was also able to leverage the integrated enterprise and big data to change how the company marketed, adopting a micro-marketing technique—targeting small and specific consumer groups with messages that were designed to have a higher sales success rate.

Perhaps the most significant change, though, was that every function and leadership level in the company became involved in social, mobile, and big data initiatives. Wider distribution of the information pulled from big data and process changes made social and mobile efforts meaningful to each functional department; social and mobile consumers became just as tangible to employees as customers who called on phones or sent emails.

While Carl’s c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Seeing and Thinking Big Picture
• Part II   Creating a Big Social Mobile Enterprise
• Part III   Capitalizing on the Connection
• Notes
• Index