How to use social media to increase profits

March 12, 2012 by Jack Springman Leave a Comment
maslow_hierarchy_of_needs2

As was the case with web analytics, we are starting to see a plethora of measures to assess social media success.  The risk is that these measures obscure the most important question: is your business’ usage of social media increasing company profits by either reducing costs or increasing revenue? Harvard Business School professor Mikotaj Jan Piskorski argues that successful social media strategies have both a social and a strategic impact.  Essentially a social reward is provided to people who help the business achieve its strategic or financial objectives. The strategic impact involves persuading people – mainly customers but other stakeholders… Read more

Filed Under: Customer Management Tagged With: ,

Social media strategy must encompass all stakeholders

February 1, 2012 by Jack Springman Leave a Comment
Value exchange

In November last year Qantas became the third airline (after accident-prone United and the normally safe-handed Southwest) to be undone by social media when its twitter campaign #QantasLuxury backfired spectacularly.  In return for a First Class Gift Pack (see Figure 1 below to be wowed), customers were asked to tweet what their dream luxury inflight experience would be.                    Figure 1: The Prize – ‘A luxury amenity kit and our famous QF PJs’ Any hopes Qantas’s social media team had of receiving a few marketing ideas were swiftly quashed.  Instead they received… Read more

Filed Under: Customer Management, Strategy Tagged With: ,

Anchor social media investments in customer strategy

December 9, 2011 by Jack Springman Leave a Comment

Any CRM veteran reading through the array of analysts’ reports, articles and blog pieces on social media generally and social media CRM in particular could be forgiven for thinking of baseball legend Yogi Berra’s quote “It’s déjà vu all over again.”  Berra’s malapropism was sparked by watching two New York Yankee team mates repeatedly hit back-to-back home runs. With SCRM the opposite is more likely to be the case.  Unless there is a fundamental change in attitude, companies will strike out with their social media investments in much the same way as many did with their CRM implementations when the… Read more

Filed Under: Customer Management, Marketing, Strategy Tagged With: ,

For social media success, businesses must learn to listen

November 18, 2011 by Jack Springman Leave a Comment

Social media channels further shift the power away from companies to their customers.  In its first incarnation the web provided customers with far greater choice than previously as new entrants bypassed traditional blocks such as access to traditional channels.  Faced with poor service or monopolistic pricing, customers could more easily find an alternative.  Social media compounds this by providing dissatisfied customers with not just a voice, but a microphone, amplification and bandwidth to boot.  Not surprisingly, companies used to broadcasting brand propaganda are struggling to cope with inconvenient dissonance.  For these businesses their objective is simply to shove socks in… Read more

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To listen effectively, avoid the qualiquantification trap

November 4, 2011 by Jack Springman Leave a Comment

Measuring expenditure on listening to customers should be standard practice for any marketing team, as answered in my previous post.  But not all listening is equally effective in improving customers’ experiences.  Listening is shaped by the questions we ask and the questions businesses want answered typically fall into three categories: How valuable is a customer or group of customers to us?  How can we improve the service we provide to customers? How well are we doing with customers? All three are important, so a balanced approach is required.  But frequently the distinctions are ignored and too much investment is made… Read more

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What is your marketing talk-listen ratio?

October 31, 2011 by Jack Springman Leave a Comment

There is an old adage that we have two ears and one mouth and should behave in proportion – listening twice as much as we speak.  Some communications experts argue this is an understatement and we should adopt the rule lis-Ten – if we truly want to understand the person we are with, the talk-listen ratio should be 1:10.  Being listened to makes people feel good – it signifies to them that they are interesting and what they have to say is valued.  Imbued with the confidence this brings they reveal more about their beliefs and feelings.  It is no… Read more

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Why they haven’t made a film called Long Ball

October 7, 2011 by Jack Springman Leave a Comment

The film Moneyball, based on the book by Michael Lewis, has opened to great acclaim and commercial success in the US and will be coming to Europe later this year.  It celebrates how the general manager of the Oakland A’s used statistical techniques to put together a successful team on a minimal budget relative to other Major League Baseball franchises by employing statistical techniques to identify which players he should bring in.  The question this prompts is why haven’t British film producers made a film called Long Ball to celebrate the statistically-based eponymous theory that captivated, among others, Charles Hughes,… Read more

Filed Under: Behavioural Economics Tagged With: , ,

How to make sure your brand strategy isn’t just brandsturbation

October 5, 2011 by Jack Springman Leave a Comment

Over the past 20 years, branding has come to dominate the marketing agenda. Prior to that marketing had reflected the customer-centric philosophy espoused by Theodore Levitt – whose seminal article Marketing Myopia does not mention ‘brand’ even once – that was codified for generations of MBA students in the books of Philip Kotler.    But the value attributed to brands in a number of high profile acquisitions of consumer products companies at around that time, notably Philip Morris’s purchase of Kraft for six times book value in 1988 led to what Naomi Klein called ‘brand equity mania’, the rise of brand… Read more

Filed Under: Customer Management, Marketing Tagged With: ,

Should you drop the I-word?

September 16, 2011 by Jack Springman Leave a Comment

Type “innovation” into hbr.org and you will get nearly 4,700 results.  For many ills, innovation is seen as the panacea—management’s equivalent of motherhood and apple pie—and few would challenge its criticality.  Indeed, one recent news article described it as today’s equivalent of the Holy Grail.  So to suggest dropping it from your company’s vocabulary may come as a shock—many of you will see it as deeply heretical, particularly riding on the coattails of the recent posts extolling Steve Jobs’s innovative genius. Most innovation efforts, however, are doomed to fail; they direct focus away from what is required to succeed.  The… Read more

Filed Under: Strategy Tagged With: , ,

Reframe your strategy to avoid hidden biases

September 7, 2011 by Jack Springman Leave a Comment

The last ten years has seen increasing appreciation of how understanding behavioral economics can improve the practice of management.  Daniel Kahneman was awarded a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the development of behavioral economics; and with Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony he contributed an article for the June 2011 edition of HBR.  This describes the 12 most prevalent cognitive biases – including falling in love with ideas, self-interest, confirmation bias, anchoring, groupthink, etc. – and outlines the questions that a decision-maker should ask before making strategic bets to uncover whether the recommendation being made has been unduly influenced by… Read more

Filed Under: Behavioural Economics, Marketing, Strategy Tagged With:
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