Rights to Write - Personal Voice

Express your self

Have you heard of this term called as "professional voice"? I have experienced this 5 years back  and many of us still continue to... What it means is that you have a corporate dictate on who should speak, what to speak, how to speak, which font to use, what colors to be associated and list of so called rules to ensure consistency. Corporates take pride in being more consistent in communication than customer delight. Employees, though disgruntled, are forced to use there professional voice.

With the penetration of Internet and particularly social media these corporate dictates are getting broken. Think about what you are doing in the social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. You are expressing yourself. There is no dictate,no pressure on consistency, content. Write what you want and write your heart out. This is called as "Personal Voice". You have the right to write your opinions about the products you use, the company you work for or about your co-workers either in your company sites ( if they are open to listening) or in any of your personal blog or social networks. As an individual, you are more empowered that before. Your customers are also looking for your personal opinions and not the lifeless voice of your corporate. There is no place for a ventriloquist act ( with you the mouthpiece for your corporate voice)

To corporates: Web is not a medium which will act as a corporate mouthpiece or brochure ware. Customers sing, dance, play, share opinions etc on the web. Either participate in this rendezvous with your personal voice or   hold on to your professional voice and perish.

Its your Right/Write!!!

Facebook User - Do you have a "Status Fatigue?"

Status Fatigue

After Google, its now Facebook's turn to become a verb. People are hooked on to Facebook with rapt attention and curosity. Updates happens every second about one's dress, movies, iPhone, friends and what not.

An average Facebook user may have atleast 250-300 friends in his/her list. Usually, it starts with school/ college friends and extends to people with common interests whom we may have never met. This friends list is now an eclectic mix with or without a common connection.

In a friends list with no common connection, there is a good chance a status update may appeal to a set of friends while it may be irrelavant to the others in the friends list. For example:old school reunion may be relevant to my school friends but not to my Digital Marketing friendsters. When the status  is irrelevnt  to a set of friends for a certain time period , it may cause something called as " Status Hyperopia" ( friendsters losing sightof my status updates) and will result in my friends/friensters hiding the status updates or changing privacy settings to block my status updates.

Solution: Right content to relevant people

The way to avoid this is to tag status updates to specific /relevent audiences. This can be done using @friends name in status box or using custom settings near the status update box.

The idea is ensure relevent updates goes to the right audiences to avoid "Status Fatigue".

So, what's your status? Customized

Limitations of typical Problem Solution approach

Social Media is the latest buzz in every company.  The Marketing team  is on the look out for experts to solve their problems.

Active Listening

The typical approach: expert approaches the client and asks for their problems and then comes up a solution strategy and execution..Remember advertising agency creative brief approach. The client gives the problem statement and the agency comes up with answers.This is where the Problem Solutions approach gets exposed especially if it is about solving customer problems.

The expert presupposes that the clients understand their customer problems. In reality, sitting inside the fort, the marketing team make inferences based on data or rely on market research inputs to identify problems or generate consumer insights and discuss with  the agency to solve these problems. The result of this brief will be a marketing campaign or service enhancement or changes to the product followed by new set of communications aimed at increasing top-line/better market share/improved customer satisfaction.

This is called as Primal Ignorance. In mathematics, while solving a problem, if the first step is wrong then you don't need to verify the answer.

What is the solution to this problem?

An expert in Social media, at the start of the engagement, will never come to the client asking for problems. On the other hand, he will listen to the client's customer conversations in the Social Media i.e through Facebook or Twitter etc. The expert will possibly use a variety of  both free and paid tools like, Google alerts, Google Reader, Radian 6 . This will help him get an independent view of the possible problems. In my experience, I have seen clients surprised at seeing the difference between their understanding of problems versus actual customer complaints.

This preparation will help both the client and the expert to narrow down on high priority items and focus on solution strategy.

Social Media is redefining the ways of problem identification and solution strategy formulation.Its not just about keeping the customer at the center and creating experiences but more so keeping ourselves closer to where the customers are present and start active listening.

Make the difference to your problem solution approach by getting the first step right through Social media.

What's your next Step!!!

Decide what to buy using Facebook

Broadcast Search

Festive season always means shopping indulgence as well. This time I decided to gift myself with a brand new mobile phone with all possible bells, whistles ( 3G, 5MP camera,OS,touchpad etc) and Jazzy interface.As soon as I went to the shop the only thing that I was able to do with ease was to eliminate the 100's of non option mobile models. Finally narrowed down to 3 handsets which includes Blackberry Torch, Sony Xperia X10 and Nokia N8. The sales representative at the shop was of no help to me as he had only good things to say about all the  3 handsets. Guess its part of his job to confuse the customer....

So I decided to look for reviews in the brand neutral website( if at all it exists!!!). Took Google's help to find  few sites and I made an assumption that top ranked sites on Google Page would be my best bet to get answers. To my dismay, most of these sites gave product comparison like a standard brochure..

What I was looking for was customer feedback based on their experience with the handset.. Even though some sites had customer feedback, I couldn't relate to a strangers experience.

Pause..... What was I looking for?

Not just customer reviews and feedback about the handset in a credible website but how many degree's of separation is the reviewer from me.

Which is when I realized, I am better of posting this question on handsets to my friends and friendsters on any social media netwoks like Facebook or Twitter than seek this information on another site.Effectively, I am broadcasting my search. This attempt serves two purposes:

• Will get genuine feedback about these handsets from my friends. Their opinions and feedback will possibly be closer to my opinions or thought process
• When one is uncertain about what to buy, vast majority of us possibly make choices that will make us acceptable in our social circles. You wouldn't wanted to be ridiculed by your friends for buying the wrong handset

After all this I may or may not have found the right handset for me but for sure will be more certain than before on what to buy.

So much for Social Search and Acceptance

Companies that Ignore Social Media - Read on!!!

Lets rewind our clocks by 5 years... Things that were .

Scenario: Strategy to execution

Companies that Ignore Social Media

• Marketing formulates the  strategy
• Communicates to all within the organization
• Sales takes it to market
• Performance is reviewed 
• Solicit feedback from customers
• Review strategy

Lets view this through a microscope. Lot of things are regimented and cast on iron  in the corporate world.

• Marketing
• Strategy was shouldered by a select few and usually done within 4 walls
• Consumer insights were often generated by Market research firms
• Out of scope: Often execution of project or program was considered less strategic
• Consumer insights were generated through Market research work on a need basis 
• People &Collaboration
• Much was spoken about bottom up communication and nothing more than that...Top down  dominated the scene
• Collaboration and knowledge management within organization would just be restricted to document sharing and top down information communication
• Inputs from Sales team or any other team within the organization were used to confirm thoughts or ideas and not to seek information
• Consumers
• Consumers were mere statistics on the monthly presentation screens
• Brands were never approachable for the consumer
• Consumer feedback were recorded and addressed only if the customers were irate.
• Surveys and focus groups were the only preferred ways of interacting with consumers

Consequences

• No intent/means to get  feedback on strategy at the time of execution
• Even a flawed strategy will be executed to make it a colossal mistake
• Customer feedback were best learnt from customer advocacy sites..More time spent on new acquisitions than retaining existing customer

Much has changed in the last 5 years especially due to the explosive penetration and usage of social media platforms like twitter, facebook and the likes of intra-organizational collaboration tools like Yammer... How have these social media platforms acted as a catalyst for change in the corporate world.?

All this starts with the customers!!!!

• Customers have these platforms for self expression and have started discussing product reviews/brand feedback as one such item in their endless lost of conversations
•  Either through friends list or fan page  or twitter connections, customers have powerful way of sharing feedback on a real-time basis
• Consumers, as trust agents, can create positive or negative influence about products/brands experience almost on a real-time basis with their peers or friends
• No desperate attempts to market the product will help against a strong consumer feedback

Make or break of brands/products happens based on customer perception & experience and the communication gets viral.

This has forced a lot of changes in organizations especially in the mindsets of the top brass.Result:

• Brands have become very accessible to consumers through the social media platforms.Opening up to listening to customer feedback and solving  issues creates a better perception.. Comcast and South west airlines are  known for their consumer connect using Facebook and twitter
• Consumer insights from various touch points. Strategy makers have opened up new ways to connect with employers at various touch points to get real-time feedback/opinions about programs/product rollout and consumer feedback... We use Yammer within our company ,www.swaas.net, to get feedack from Sales, implementation and support to get a feel of the market on a real time basis
• This bottom up approach has ensured that strategy is no longer a standalone exercise but strategy is more of co-creation

Change is imminent. The rules of the game have changed..

• Connect with the consumer on a regular basis
• Keep your ears close to the ground
• Strategy and execution are two sides of the coin. Dare not delegate it
• Connect with every touch point in the organization. Innovative ideas can come from any corner

If all this looks too good to believe, here is an interesting case study of Parle's Hippo Chips innovative way of tracking their product stocks at various outlets... Guess what, they used consumers to track it using Twitter....

" On March 17th 2010, the @HelloMeHippo twitter account sent out this message: “Hippo ask you tell to hippo when you not find Hippo in shop. Hippo come there at once and fight hunger.” That’s what they call ‘Hippo English,’ ostensibly straight from the mouth of the mascot itself. As people followed the Hippo’s call, Parle Agro became beneficiaries of the first Twitter-based real-time nationwide stock checker. Then they acted on it, sending word to local distribution partners to get snacks onto the newly empty shelves. Thanks to their popularity, Hippo crisps flew off the shelves; thanks to social media, they flew back on them.

In a country where 92% of the snack market is unorganised retail, any entrant into the $1.5bn industry faces a tough job in tracking their inventory. At zero cost Parle Agro have managed to leverage tweeters, ‘mostly… in cities where Hippo is present but maybe temporarily unavailable,’ as an essential part of their supply lines. Let’s review the raw numbers: the number of people tracking Hippo stock has eclipsed 400, which is around 50% of its paid sales and distribution network itself. Due to the constant stream of supply, they also managed to up their sales by 76%."

Consumer generated secondary sale... Awesome work at no cost....Social Media is all set to make all conventional ways/systems redundant. Dare not ignore it

Want to be an Analyst? Use Social Media

While I was thinking on the topic to write, as flash, something on consulting popped up in my mind.. Not sure why it popped up but as I started thinking about it, started taking a different turn. In typical business consulting assignments some of the terms that we hear as a client from consultants/analysts are:

• Top 10 Technology trends as per Gartner or Forrester for 2011- 2016
• Best Practices given as Rx for success
• Some Frameworks or business models promising a glorious future keeping in mind the current day business risks

Record Events

I have no abject disregard for these predictions but when I think of the current economic recession or any major scam which hits the headlines, I am forced think as to what happened to those predictions or forecasting by analysts or top notch consultants.What we get to read is always the post facto analysis of  the event as though it was obvious and we as naive intellects neglected to see through or were ignorant of these early warning signs. 

Why is that we find it easy to find a reason for failure(s) and not way to predict such failures and help avoid it?

This trend really bothered me and I got some interesting insights from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan..

We,humans, have this problem of retrospective determinism.Once we have an issue at hand, say economic recession, we are really good at looking at the chronicle of events,take a deep dive into it and come up with simplistic answers and the worst part is that the reason failure will usually point towards a single event or two.One more possible reasons,although not conclusive, that can be attributed for this kind of problem is our " Confirmation bias". When we have a set of events in hand, we would like to simplify it using our inferential systems and confirm our opinions than just look at events as is - empirical studies..

I am not going to proceed to try and solve this problem as I am also a victim of these biases. But the one piece that is interesting to me is " chronicle of events". In the chosen topic of interest start recording all the relevant events that you read or listen to. But how to record it? I use the social media platforms for doing it.The central point in this blog is about how one can record the chronicle of events in the chosen topic of interest using social media platform at no cost. Once could use:

• Twitter favorites
• Digg relevant articles
• Share events or articles on Facebook
• Audio/Video content on Youtube
• Google Reader 
• Any form of content syndication

pretty much the same platforms that you use on a daily basis. The only difference is that you will focus on recording events on the chosen topic of interest.Lets say the topic is "new technology in mobile phones". As you record these events and do an empirical study on a regular basis,your ability to predict future events can get  brighter..Imagine a set of predictions from side, if taken up by the right people, brings about stability /growth in that industry. I know that it sounds too ambitious and wishful thinking but what's wrong in dreaming such a scenario. When I think like an earthly mortal, these  events recorded in the social media platform can used to do a post facto analysis or retrospective determinism which anyways we are really good at. 

Let the analyst in you wake up!!!!