Brian Solis's Blog, page 121

Welcome to the Revolution: Season 4 Coming Soon

In the four months since we wrapped Season 3 of Revolution, the production crew and I took some time to reflect on the last three years. We’ve come a long way but we believe we’re also just getting started. Changes are on the horizon for the show…and that’s a good thing. We moved the set thanks to the Four Seasons in San Francisco. We’re introducing a twist to our existing format. And the guests, well, they’re hand picked to help you navigate life both personally and professionally.

I’m proud to announce that a new series of Revolution will debut here on Mashable on January 30th.

- Craig Newmark Founder of Craig Connects

- San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee

- Behavior expert Kare Anderson

- Seth Combs Co-founder of SOL Republic

- Investor and entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar

- Wendy Lea CEO of Get Satisfaction

Here’s a preview of what’s to come…

Connected societies are leading to a connected world.

In a time when there are more questions than answers.

It takes a revolution to bring about meaningful change.

Subscribe here. In the mean time, make sure to catch the last episode with Joe Fernandez founder and CEO of Klout.

Social media is not your saving grace: Experiences should first be defined and supported

Social media experts will tell you, and they’ll make a pretty good case too, that it is the golden key to unlocking meaningful customer relationships and the gateway to surprising and delighting them over time. So how does social media do this? Well all it takes is to listen, be part of the conversation, curate great content, run native advertisements, and oh yeah, be transparent and authentic. Done and done.

Well, wrong and wrong.

Social media isn’t going to save your business nor is it going to make it. This may sound commonsensical, but to succeed in business takes much more than a Facebook or Twitter account. Hostess baked over 400,000 likes on Facebook and yet the iconic American brand is now shut down. Even small businesses are not immune to the real world. According to the SBA, over 50% of small businesses fail in the first five years. Social media isn’t saving those businesses either.

Michael Ames author of Small Business Management, assembled the top 8 reasons that contribute to small business failure and you’ll notice not embracing social media isn’t one of the contributors:

1. Lack of experience

2. Insufficient capital (money)

3. Poor location

4. Poor inventory management

5. Over-investment in fixed assets

6. Poor credit arrangements

7. Personal use of business funds

8. Unexpected growth

From experience, there are two other ingredients that serve as harbingers to the future of any business, under scoping or underestimating sales and marketing and underemphasizing product quality and customer experiences.

In any one of these scenarios, social media is not your saving grace—regardless of business size, number of followers, or however many viral videos you’ve introduced.

Am I saying that social media is useless?

No.

It is after all where connected consumers are spending a significant amount of time these days. Nielsen recently found that Americans spend 121 billion minutes per month in social networks, which is significantly up from 88 billion just one year ago.

I do believe that many experts are however taking their eye off of the ball in the name of social media. But, success takes design, intent, and the relentless pursuit of opportunities even when they are elusive. As a digital analyst and also an entrepreneur and investor, I’ve learned that technology is always going to introduce new channels for engagement. And, that’s a good thing. But they are not in of themselves channels for necromancy. The ability to surprise and delight customers starts with the ability to understand how to exceed expectations. And, even before that, it takes an understanding of what expectations are and where they’re met or missed.

So, here’s where social media can help.

Listening with Intent

Listening is among the most valuable ways to use social media for business relevance and ultimately success. However for it to offer true value begins with the questions you chose to answer. For example, in addition to asking, “what are people saying about me or my competitors,” also ask, “what are people saying or seeking in to improve what they’re doing today?” It’s the difference between information and insight and also listening to and hearing customers in a way that inspires innovation or iteration.

Designing the Experience

To deliver exceptional customer experiences takes experience design. You have to articulate, thoughtfully, what you want people to feel, say, and share. This is more than defining differentiators and value propositions. Businesses must think through how products and services evoke the original inspiration for starting or joining a company and the ongoing aspirations necessary to exceed expectations in the future. Social media then represents a series of open windows to engage customers during each and every moment of truth before, during and after transactions to reinforce experiences and desired sentiment. Think marketing, sales, service, support, and word of mouth.

Paying it Forward

If social media is about conversations you can bet that much of it is based on people asking questions. People are often looking for answers or direction. Rather than “Googling It,” it’s easier to ask those you trust. In this economy where trust is fleeting and transparency is elusive, there’s a tremendous opportunity to become the resource in your community. Don’t sell…instead; sell through the art of reciprocity. Customers feel a sense of appreciation for those who help and provide value.

The Power to Tell

As my good friend Peter Guber says, storytelling or Telling to Win helps people align with your mission through aspirations or solutions. Don’t sell just on price or features. Make your customers the hero by helping them see what they can accomplish simply by aligning with you. If you use social media, don’t just post questions, polls, or random pictures, unleash a gravity that pulls customers to you because they can clearly see that you “get” them and the things they struggle or hope to accomplish with or without you.

These are just a few ways to think about social media. But, there are many many other initiatives that you can consider that deliver value during each moment of truth. You have to consider though, that social media represents a series of new channels that complement other avenues that define your digital and real world opportunities. There is no one way to reach all of your customers and prospects.

Mobile.

Web.

Digital signage.

Geolocation.

Social.

And that’s what makes these times so challenging. You can’t assume however that building a distributed presence is good enough. You don’t have time for that. Growth and success are intentional, which means you can’t afford to stumble your way around them. There are customers to earn now and yes, technology is changing how you’ll reach them over time. See, the people who represent your customers 10 years from now are not the people who you reach today.

Ten years you say!?

Well, perhaps that’s too far to appreciate. The same is true though for three and four years from now.

Start with getting to know who your customers are and what they need…and how to help them. Then let it inspire you to create meaningful marketing strategies, relevant products and services, and desirable engagement channels in the moments of truth in the medium of preference.

If you don’t continually invest in the awareness of your value or experience you cannot benefit from consideration.

You are now perpetually competing for the future. Social media is one of the channels that now present you with yet another opportunity to truly engage with your customers. In the end, you have to think deeper about this opportunity. Just because you’re in business doesn’t mean you’ll stay in business. If you stop competing for attention and relevance you by default stop competing. This is your time to not just survive but thrive.

What do you think? How else can social media help businesses contribute to business success while helping foster customer and employee relationships and experiences?

Originally appeared in AT&T’s Networking Exchange Blog

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The End of Business as Usual is officially here…

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Facebook: Can It Keep Growing?

Guest post by Ekaterina Walter (@ekaterina), a social innovator at Intel and the author of “Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg”

This question has been of great interest to investors since the 2012 IPO that saw the company valued at $100 billion. Facebook already has 1 billion users worldwide and 44% of all internet users have a profile. Facebook pages make up one in five page views on the internet.

So is there a limit to this growth?

International growth

4 in 5 users are currently outside the US and that is where Facebook will see its biggest growth in sheer numbers. India already has 51 million Facebook users, but with a population of over 1 billion, the potential for growth is massive.

But growth cannot continue indefinitely: around 35% of the world’s 7 billion people have access to the internet, and China has blocked use of the site for now. The number of Facebook accounts could double, even triple as internet usage continues to grow, but there is still an upper limit.

So if there is a limit to the number of people who can have Facebook accounts, how can the site continue to grow once it reaches saturation point?

“[Facebook] is shaping a broader web,” says Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. “If you look back for the past five or seven years, the story about social networking has really been about getting people connected… But if you look forward for the next five years, I think that the story people are going to remember five years from now isn’t how this one site was built, it’s how every single service that you use is now going to be better with your friends… People are really going to look back and say ‘wow, over the last five years all these products have now gotten better because I am not doing all this stuff alone, I am doing it with my friends’. That’s what I am most excited about.”

The answer is the type of growth, not the scale of growth. Mark’s dream of connectivity means that Facebook will become more deeply embedded into the internet experience; users will continue to share more and more about their buying, entertainment and networking habits, and be able to feed back more information to the brands that supply them.

Greater integration

Farhad Manjoo, writer for FastCompany.com, predicts Facebook ‘will never sell your personal data to anyone–that’s one thing users would never accept. But it doesn’t need to; there are potentially huge markets for aggregated bundles of user info.’ As more and more apps are integrated onto Facebook there is a vast and growing source of data for the way users interact with everything from ads to pages to entertainment, with extensive demographic information on themselves and their networks. And Facebookers aren’t just clicking, they are actively commenting on and discussing what they are using. All this means greater revenue potential for Facebook, but also more relevance for users: no-one wants to be pressured by irrelevant ads, but they may want to know about the interests and recommendations of their friends.

Brand pages

8 out of 10 US companies now have Facebook pages, but the recent introduction of Facebook’s Global pages shows that the company is looking outside of the US to achieve the same sort of figures. Non-personal profiles represent an enormous area of growth for Facebook and with greater feedback into people’s Timelines when friends Like or Comment on brand profiles the potential for companies to reach new audiences is enormous.

f-commerce

Beyond Farmville, there is growing potential for third party apps. With everything from product purchasing to ticket booking, entertainment viewing and social interaction, the amount of time people spend accessing and sharing information via Facebook could soar. Beyond this, there is the opportunity for f-commerce, which in 2011 brought in $557 million, a fraction of their total income of their $3.7 billion. Facebook takes 30% of revenue from third party apps that use it as a platform for selling and is only just starting to exploit the possibilities.

Mobile

60% of Facebook users are accessing the site through mobile devices but Facebook has only just begun to explore the potential here. There are two major strands: one of revenue as mobile use is not yet monetized through advertising, and one of the opportunities for geo-located apps to create a whole new Facebook experience for users to interact with the world around them. The potential for brands is particularly exciting as marketing could be done in real time as people move around a Facebook-activated environment.

Paul Adams, the Global Brand Experience Manager at Facebook, describes the shift from the way people are using the internet and the move towards greater social networking: “[The web is] moving away from being built around content, and is being rebuilt around people.”

Facebook can continue to grow, but the definition of growth might not be a traditional one. As people spend more time on the network interacting with the world around them their experience of Facebook will change. There may be a limit to the absolute number of users, but Facebook’s growth can continue to penetrate more areas of people’s lives, and it is up to Mark Zuckerberg and his team to set the limit for how far that can go.

From the Big Screen to the Little Screen: The evolving relationship between TV and search

As a digital analyst, it’s my job to study how technology disrupts business markets and models. As an aspiring social scientist, I also study technology’s impact on culture and behavior. These two worlds are colliding with increasing velocity as each day passes. One of the trends I’ve been following over the last several years is the relationship between TV, smartphones, tablets and PCs.

There’s no longer a doubt that we are becoming a society of multiscreeners. The reality is that people will watch TV while multitasking on other devices. They do so now without benefit of your vision or direction. Their second and third screen experience is for the most part theirs to define and yours to study. At some point however, the multiscreen and viewer experience will benefit from your architecture and in doing so, your business will benefit as well.

Mobile apps, social ads, Twitter and Facebook engagement, these are all initial areas of investment. I’d like to take the next several hundred words to explore a much simpler but also important aspect of multiscreening. Here, I’m specifically speaking to any business that either creates programming, advertises on TV, places products in shows, or is active in any industry that popular shows touch upon.

Google published an in depth report on the new multi screening world that I’ve spent quite a bit of time reviewing. In just a few short but important slides (29 – 32), Google focuses on the changing role of television in a multi-screen environment. Specifically, Google focuses on how people, well, Google while watching TV.

There was a time, a long time at that, when TV was the epicenter of the home and the attention of those within it. The Internet however now rival TV, but the truth is the two will co-exist and over time, play a harmonious role in engaging consumers.

According to Google, 77% of TV viewers use another device while watching TV. As we see here with Lori’s example, people are shopping, emailing, surfing, etc.

Beyond the casual second screen engagement conveyed by Lori, people are taking specific actions based on what they see on TV. As we see with Kelly’s example, the desire to seek more information about people, products, places, events, etc., can prompt a view to learn more. And, those searches will take place in the traditional Google search box, as well as Google Images and also Youtube.

Naturally, Google found that TV is in fact a major catalyst for search.

Depending on the second screen, smartphones and PCs can trigger a variety of different actions based the occasion for search. For example, with smartphone users, 22% of viewers are promoted to search based on what they see on TV. 17% of those viewers will take action based on a TV commercial.

This leads to a new moment that Google calls “found time,” the combination of device accessibility and spur-of-the-moment usage to get something done in the moment. It is in these “micro-moments” that Google found viewers to search, shop, communicate and keep entertained across multiple screens. The result? Marketers and advertisers are now presented with additional touchpoints to engage consumers throughout the day.

In these moments, viewers will search using the screen that’s the closest to them. More often than not, that device is likely to be a smartphone or tablet. Some will however, go find their PC as it is a more familiar and capable device according to their preference.

Search is just the beginning however. Found time is the key driver for spontaneous search with 80% and 52% taking place on smartphones and PCs respectively. However, of those spontaneous searches upward of 44% do so to accomplish a goal.

Customer Journey Architecture and Optimization

Marketing around found time and these new micro-moments creates the need for customer experience and journey architecture. Knowing that a viewer can at any moment Google or Youtube your business, product or service on any one of three screens, what does that path, result, and experience look like today? Chances are it needs to either be designed and or optimized⎯for each screen. Additionally, the context and intention of the search should be considered to frame a dynamic and personalized journey. What’s most important is to design several journeys around the intention or possible state of the viewer to make it not only more efficient but also rewarding. If upward of 44% of those spontaneous searches are started to accomplish goals, then understand what those goals are and streamline them through a dedicated click path optimized for each screen and intention.

SEO and SEM is no longer good enough to cater to multiscreeners who engage in found time. Experiences and outcomes now count for everything. And, they require architecture and refinement over time. This requires what I believe to be a new role that looks beyond customer experience to include customer journey design and management.

Originally published at AT&T’s Networking Exchange

Connect with me: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Google+

The End of Business as Usual is officially here…

Image of TV/mobile device courtesy of Shutterstock