Part III of this series looked at the how the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) could use social media to lead the company in customer relationship development. This installment suggests ways the senior marketers can use their expertise in social media to lead the company into deeper adjustments to their business model and reap the rewards of cost savings, increase customer loyalty and more. Read the full article.
Part IV: CMO Guide to Social Media
Manage the brand, the brand experience, and even the brand co-creation
One of the most exciting aspects of the underlying power shifts and market changes we find ourselves living through is the way social technology can help companies adjust their business models to become better adapted to the fast-paced, margin-squeezed economy. Many of these strategies involve deepening social relationships between the company and its audiences, engaging your audiences' energy in your success and, in the process, creating many more "touchpoints" through which you can affect the customer's brand experience (without annoying them). CMOs who have been proactive in employing the "whole elephant" customer engagement strategies discussed above can become natural leaders in helping their companies take advantage of social tools and evolve their business processes throughout the entire prospect/customer lifecycle.
Engaging your market in co-creating value - including them in helping create competitive advantage - is a very company-specific process or it wouldn't be so competitively useful. Although not exhaustive, here are a few B2B and B2C examples that demonstrate how companies are using social technology to bring their customer base into the business process itself, increasing customer loyalty while simultaneously (in some cases) cutting costs and (in all cases) improving customer satisfaction.
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Co-creative IP Development: Bearingpoint uses wiki technology to engage its customer base in helping to evolve their open source data architecture model, opening their collective work to the public on the theory that it will lead to greater standardization. This strategy is designed to increase Bearingpoint's credibility and market awareness while building its competitive advantage on their deep understanding of the intricacies of the evolving standard. The fact that their customers collaborate with them in building this technical resource for the entire industry to use only enriches those customer relationships.
- Product Development: "Idea Sites" used by Starbucks and Dell to
solicit and prioritize customer input are some of the best public
examples of how companies can structure deep dialogs with their large
customer bases and invite them into the product development process.
Truly crowdsourced companies like Threadless,
however, go even farther and outsource pieces of the development and
design process to customers who participate free of charge or for non
fee-based reward.
- Customer Support and Engagement: National Instruments' "Nerd Network"
engages over 110,000 users to answer 46% of their customer support
questions while also engaging them in new product discussions and
student mentoring programs.
- Partner Collaboration: IBM
uses social technologies, inviting its 100,000 partner network to
collaborate with its employees and with each other to help grow their
collective business success.
- Employee Engagement: Albeit slowly, Intranets are transforming into socially empowered centers of value creation, morale building and brand reinforcement. This is fantastically exemplified by Best Buy's BlueShirtNation. Not only are employee programs being transformed by the active social participation of the employees, but the very nature of managing a business is evolving.
No matter which audience you engage at this deep level and for what purpose, the principal is the same: invite your audience into helping you create your value to them. The payoff works on many levels, reflecting itself tactically through more reliable sales projections from more deeply engaged customers and better employee retention, and showing up strategically in greater brand loyalty, positive word of mouth and shareholder value. There are many proprietary software tools to support your deeper audience engagement strategies, but sifting through them requires a solid strategy and business plan. These plans go beyond the marketing department, but the CMO is the perfect champion for using social strategies beyond marketing because it is the CMO who is tasked with brand building and at the end of the day, brand building is the area of marketing that what social strategies have the opportunity to effect most deeply.
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Part V in the series will delve into the the third recommendation for how a CMO can use social strategies to build a dynamic brand identity. To read ahead and view the slide presentation, visit my web site or download the full article.
