1. What is your Social Media ROI? Who Cares?

    Thursday, 29 Sep 2011 2 Comments Posted by:

    The ongoing crusade of answering “what it the ROI of social media?”, comes around every season. Two years ago I blogged about “Coping with Social Media ROI” especially since ROI was the yellow flag thrown onto the playing field to stall social media efforts.

    The dogma? If you can’t measure the ROI, we can’t spend money on social media. This season, however,  I’m optimistic that the ROI question gets traded for “what should I measure?”

    In 2011, I am finally seeing valuable measurement discussions in place of ROI question. Many books, speeches have been given about measurement. Readers and attendees line up to hear about ROI. The ROI formula is easy, and in case you don’t have the formula handy, here it is:

    ROI

    But we might have been asking the wrong question. What we SHOULD ask is “what do I need to measure to signal success with social media?” And the question should be asked when designing social media strategies, not to prevent social media planning.

    We’ve mentioned the Social Engagement Journey in blog posts before. A critical theme within this transformation journey is insights and analytics, the outcome of impactful measurement.

    journey

    At the crux of this theme is that within different stages of the journey, businesses have different requirements for measurement. At stage 2, you should be asking, “what should I measure?” And within Stage 2, a simple answer is to measure what will get you to the operational stage – metrics that will signal success in your social media operation and align with your objectives. For example, if your objective is brand reputation, then sentiment is an appropriate measure.

    AT&T was at this juncture in 2010. ROI was being asked for, but in reality, the question was “what should we measure?” Together with Ant’s Eye View, measurements were determined and a new framework devised that would support stage 2 and beyond. This measurement framework is a nominee for 2011 Forrester Groundswell Awards.

    stage3 iconAt stage 3, your needs are a more for a coordinated measurement framework to respond to the needs of multiple social strategies and outcomes. A holistic measurement framework is necessary to coordinate and communicate across business units and disciplines. Measurement is the stitching that can bring together siloed social media activities across the enterprise. If your culture that looks for measurement to validate, then you will need to update or align your current measurement framework to be inclusive of social media metrics (that signal business outcomes). If your culture is lacking a measurement discipline, then a social media measurement framework can be built.

    Still struggling with measurement? Start with the following:

    1. Conduct a self-assessment to determine current stage of the social engagement journey.
    2. Include your analytics and finance teams to help validate your social metrics.
    3. Be patient, you start first with operational metrics, refine over 2-3 quarters, then start planning for ways to align with financial metrics.

    Let us know what you think. How do you measure Social Media ROI?

  2. What’s New on the Anthill: Reflections from our Third Annual All Ants Meeting

    Monday, 26 Sep 2011 4 Comments Posted by:

    Ants in AustinMy first real inspiration to leave Microsoft after 15 years and form Ant’s Eye View came in February of 2007.  At the time, I was General Manager of Community and MVP at Microsoft and responsible for the global online community and advocacy strategy.

    With the help of the Corporate Executive Board, I organized a roundtable event that gathered senior leaders from pioneering brands working on communities and “Social Media.” Early leaders from Disney, Dole, The New York Times, MTV Networks, Wells Fargo and many other brands were the first real practitioners I’d met that were doing the same things we were trying to do at Microsoft.

    Three insights became clear for me that day and they continue to drive what we do at Ant’s Eye View today:

    1. Business Transformation: Connected consumers and connected employees can and will transform the business, creating a catalyst for a whole new journey towards social customer engagement.
    2. Enterprise-wide impact: This journey can and will re-invent how we think about developing, selling and marketing products, as well as how we service and support those products.
    3. Practitioner experience mattered: Like all business transformations before, those in the trenches leading and managing change can and do play a unique role in business transformation.

    In a way, each of these insights catapulted me to found Ant’s Eye View, along with Jake McKee, Dustin Johnson and Sean McDonald. And we all agreed early on that the single defining factor that would lead to delivering on those insights was the notion of building a team of practitioners.  As such, we’ve worked hard to hire a team of proven practitioners, as we knew that’d be key to our success.

    Imagine my enthusiasm, then, when I walked into the room at our All Ants meeting in Austin, Texas earlier this month and found myself amidst one of the largest gatherings of proven corporate practitioners who are all part of one company – our company – Ant’s Eye View.  It was a humbling and amazing moment.

    With offices in Seattle, Mountain View and Austin, we’ve more than doubled our size since our last All Ants Meeting. We’re serving customers across Telecommunications, Retail, Food & Beverage, Financial Services, Technology, Travel, Consumer Packaged Goods and Professional Services. And we are continuing to grow.

    Today, we welcome two new Ants, congratulate another and expand our search for new practitioners with the passion to join our adventure.

    Welcome:
    Tammy Coleman: Tammy Coleman is not your typical hockey mom – a fan of the San Jose Sharks, mother to two boys playing on four hockey teams, and a marketing professional (most recently from Juniper Networks). Tammy’s marketing and enterprise acumen started with sales/sales management and spanned into global marketing with social components – all the while, maintaining a vigilant focus on customer centric messages and relationships. Most notably Tammy was part of the team that secured a finalist spot in the 2009 Groundswell Award for Talking category.

    Laura Feeney: Laura is best known for driving the strategy for web support programs and the Groundswell award-winning online community for National Instruments. Laura and the National Instruments community team have helped engineers and scientists get and give technical support as well as collaborate on the latest code and product improvements. When Laura is not connecting engineers and scientists (she holds a MS in Physics from the University of Texas,), you can find Laura cycling and crafting around Austin.

    Congratulate:
    Todd Shimizu: We also congratulate Todd on his promotion to Senior Vice President and Manager Director of our Silicon Valley office. In this capacity, Todd will have overall responsibility for our SV operations including client engagement, talent development, business growth and strategy development.

    Join Us:
    Our journey has only just begun. And we’re already making plans for our next All Ants meeting in 2012. Along the way, we’re looking for additional talent to join our team in Seattle, Mountain View and/or Austin. We’re looking for Sr. Consultants and Directors with a proven passion for driving impact. Learn more about opportunities at Ant’s Eye View. If you fit the bill, we look forward to meeting you!

    Lastly, I’m excited to announce a new project underway focused on Practitioners. Our client work has taught us that Social Engagement is a journey. We’re fortunate enough to work daily with senior leaders transforming their brands and organizations around social customer engagement. So, we’ve embarked on a project to develop an e-book to capture and tell the real stories from the perspective of real practitioners who are driving change in their organizations. We look forward to sharing our learnings in the months ahead, as we’ve discovered our clients are amazing at taking the ant’s eye view.

    Needless to say, I’m excited for this coming year. Onward and upward march the Ants!

  3. An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View: Niche Social Networks

    Tuesday, 23 Aug 2011 3 Comments Posted by:

    “Fish where the fish are.” That’s the advice we often give to companies seeking to connect with customers on social media channels. But as the popular channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) get increasingly crowded, it’s harder to wade through the noise. Niche social networks can provide an option to companies wanting to connect with a highly targeted, focused group of individuals.

    It’s not just about the eyeballs.
    Despite the impressions Facebook and Twitter might bring, it’s equally important to consider the impact of focused presence in a smaller, tight-knit community. By finding a community that aligns with your goals, niche social networks offer brands an opportunity to promote products and services to an engaged group of interested customers.

    We’ve collected some helpful articles on niche social networks for your reading pleasure. Let us know what you think in the comments.

    Next time you’re thinking about joining a social networking site, we encourage you to take a look beyond the usual choices and consider some niche social networks that might be more aligned with your brand and your goals. Who knows — you might find a vibrant community just waiting for your insights.

    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Jenna Jantsch, Joann Jen, Geoff Knox, Ali McCourt and Sam Eder. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.

  4. SXSWi 2012 – Tired of @#%ing Social Media Experts?

    Monday, 22 Aug 2011 No Comments Posted by:

    August in Austin, Texas – 105 degrees, football just starting and SXSWi Panel Picker wide open. And with the SXSWi panel picker ready for votes, now is the time for self-promotion. So here it goes…

    Back by popular demand, Sam Decker and I are hosting a New and Improved “Tired of   @#%ing Social Media Experts?” – the game show where the audience laughs, learns, swears, and has the opportunity to win a grand prize.  If you are skeptical of a prize, last year we crowned the Social Media expert and took a picture (pretty nice, right?)sxswi

    At SxSWi2011 we kicked off this idea. The reception was so overwhelming we decided to get the band back together. We thought about how we could improve the panel – the truth is that 2011 was solid gold, no improvement necessary. But still we are open for feedback on ways to improve our panel (go to panel picker http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/8951?return=%2Fideas%2Findex%2F10%2Fname%3ATired+of+%40 and leave a comment).

    If you love SXSW, but are overwhelmed, then join us for some comic relief from the barrage of data and people that you meet at SxSWi.

    So here’s what we’d ask of you:

    1) vote!

    2) get your friends to vote!

    3) please comment with your ideas on how to promote the panel

    Voting ends Friday, September 2. Stay cool.

  5. An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View: Google+

    Tuesday, 9 Aug 2011 No Comments Posted by:

    As the number of people on Google+ has grown, the tool has shown itself to be highly polished in some areas, but still lacking in others. This not surprising given the fact that Google+ is still technically in testing and not officially ready for primetime. While this isn’t out of the ordinary, as all social platforms are constantly evolving over time, the use of third-party extensions to manipulate the user experience demonstrate areas of weakness in Google+’s infancy.

    Look at some of the discussion about the “must have” extensions:

    One common theme that you see in Google+ browser extensions is that often the extensions are adding a feature that Google should already have built in by default. These add-ons sometimes change the UI, such as with Comment Toggle, or sometimes add in the ability to easily share with other sites such as Extended Share. But for each, what they really do is make changes to how the user interfaces with Google+.

    Given that a large number of these extensions are for Google’s Chrome browser, it would seem that Google can take advantage of the data it gets on the popularity of these types of extensions to make decisions as to future updates to Google+ and bring features in natively that it knows are supported by its user base. This makes even more sense when you consider that many of the extensions that are popular are not quite ready for primetime themselves, and have been reported to cause performance issues with Chrome. Sergei Sokolov has a great piece over at ReadWriteWeb on the negative impact these hastily coded extensions are having on Google’s browser. Using this kind of crowd sourced development, Google can leverage one product (Chrome) to improve its new product (Google+) and end up with both emerging stronger in the end.

    Companies are still waiting on the sidelines for Google to let them in and play, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t keep tabs on how the evolution of Google+ and how its users interact with it plays out.

    Have you played around with Google+? What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments section.

    For more information on Google+ for enterprises, check out Christopher Carfi‘s post on The Social Customer Manifesto: “How the Enterprise Can Use Google+.”

  6. Forrester Groundswell 2011 Awards: AT&T – Proving the ROI of Social Media for Customer Service

    Tuesday, 2 Aug 2011 6 Comments Posted by:

    The question often posed to social media practitioners by senior executives is: what’s the ROI of Social Media? Learn what AT&T did to quantify the impact of leveraging social media for  customer service.

    Background:
    In the summer of 2009, the customer service team at AT&T made the decision to address negative sentiment and unresolved customer service issues on the social web.  In 2010, the team resolved 21,000 customer issues on various social channels and earned positive sentiment for their work as well as a flood of direct customer feedback through Twitter and Facebook that validated their efforts.

    Customer Verbatim

    “A big thank you to all of you! I have had issues before and I have used the Facebook team to resolve those issues, more than I have 611. Everything has being working great so far! I will continue to use this route on Facebook! It’s a great …avenue to express and share the ideas and thoughts of us fans! I hope you guys keep it going!” – Brian Foret

    “Loving the fact that AT&T is a company that cares and properly using Social Media to communicate. Thank You @ATTMollica for your help!” – Alex Hyman

    Despite these impressive results, Senior Leaders still questioned the ROI of Social Media for Customer Service.

    How do you prove Social Media ROI?

    Normally in a customer service operation, ROI is avoidance of an expensive customer contact. But in this instance, there were additional values generated by the Customer Care Social Media Team. What executives were really asking is “what is the value back to the AT&T brand?”

    The  team, along with strategic partner Ant’s Eye View, created a ROI framework that measured nine financial and relationship impacts.

    Financial Values:

    • Call Shed: savings from calls avoided when customer care issues are resolved by the Customer Care Social Media Team
    • Customer Retention: potential future revenue of loyal customers when the Customer Care Social Media Team resolves customer issues
    • Customer Influence: influence of positive word of mouth that both increases visibility on the social web and can lead to new customer acquisitions.
    • Site Referrals: revenue generating and/or cost savings activity from referral traffic

    Relationship Values:

    • CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score): the degree to which AT&T’s products and services meet customer expectations through faster case resolution
    • SLA (Service Level Attainment): value of customers’ SLAs being adhered to through intervention of the Customer Care Social Media Team
    • Early Warning Radar: ability for AT&T to more quickly identify and respond to upcoming customer issues
    • Facebook Wall Advocates: value of influencing other users to gain brand loyalty for AT&T, specifically on Facebook
    • Twitter Followers: building deeper brand loyalty with customers and humanzing the brand, specifically on Twitter

    With these measures in place, AT&T is able to show that social media is, indeed, good for business.

    Social Media ROI ATT

    Social Media Customer Care Measures of Value

    The Results:
    In 2010, 21,000 customer issues were resolved and more than 37,500 customers were served by the AT&T Customer Cares Social Media Team. By leveraging the ROI framework, AT&T  executives received concrete numbers for Social Media Customer Service ROI, as well as additional points of value being generated. Ultimately, these measurements provided a business case for future investment, staffing of AT&T’s social media operations and goal setting for the team.

    To vote for AT&T: Proving the ROI of Social Media for Customer Service, here’s a link to our official submission on the Forrester Groundswell Awards site.

  7. Another Practitioner Joins the Ranks: Patrik Wijkstrom

    Thursday, 14 Jul 2011 3 Comments Posted by:

    Patrik Wijkstrom_BioOne of the reasons we founded Ant’s Eye View just over two years ago, was because we saw a need in the market for experienced practitioners who have developed and implemented social business strategies at scale. 50+ clients and 20+ employees later, it’s clear there was, and continues to be, demand for this type of experience. Today, we’re excited to welcome another experienced practitioner to the team: Patrik Wijkstrom.

    Patrik joins Ant’s Eye View from Juniper Networks where he held a position of Senior Manager, Community and User Experience. Responsible for establishing a vibrant user community across Juniper’s website properties, he drove the successful rollout and re-design of Juniper’s technical communities and forums, developed social media marketing programs that tripled user community participation and led the team that transformed juniper.net to deliver an improved user experience.

    A native of Sweden, Patrik has spent the last 13 years developing rich end-user and partner web experiences at a variety of Fortune 500 companies, including Nortel and Bay Networks.

    Patrik lives on the Peninsula with his family. You’ll most likely find him on a squash court, at the symphony, reading Tranströmer, or traveling somewhere off the beaten path.

    If you see Patrik at the new Silicon Valley office at 154 Dana Street, please join us in giving him a warm welcome.

  8. An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View: Facebook Storefront

    Tuesday, 12 Jul 2011 5 Comments Posted by:

    Last week Ant’s Eye View VP, Eric Weaver offered some insights around the importance of shifting engagement and content to social sites rather than hosting conversations on brand owned dot-com sites. Instead of making your target audience come to you, it’s about bringing your content and products to where your audience is. In fact, lately we’ve seen several examples of brands taking this idea a step further and not just transferring engagement and content but also purchasing and transactions through Facebook Storefront.

    Several brands that are currently using or testing social commerce include: 1-800 flowers, Procter & Gamble (client), Express, Best Buy, and Carnival Cruises.  These brands are looking at Facebook Storefronts as an extension of their current online and offline conversations with a goal of engaging customers and increasing interactions.

    Whether you’re already using Facebook Storefronts or thinking about testing it out, here are some ideas on how to make the most of Facebook Storefront:

    While Facebook Storefront is an interesting idea for consumer brands, we also want to emphasize the importance of first mapping out your company’s presence framework and identifying where your target audience participates. Facebook Storefront is not the only type of social commerce – in order to be successful, brands need to take time and choose opportunities that align with core business objectives. That said, if Facebook Storefront is the right option for your team, make sure to keep your target audience top of mind and adjust your strategy to fit the social channel and conversation happening today.

    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Jenna Jantsch, Joann Jen, Geoff Knox and Ali McCourt. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.

  9. 2011 conference season focuses on consumer behavior

    Tuesday, 5 Jul 2011 No Comments Posted by:
    An Ant's Eye View on 2011 Social Media Conferences
    View more webinars from Eric Weaver

    Well, the spring social media conference season is finally behind us. I had the privilege of speaking at several conferences this spring, including the Social Media 301 Conference at Microsoft, Mount Royal University’s Social Media Shift, and Jeff Pulver’s 140 Characters Conference New York. Typically, these conferences feature practitioners sharing case studies, panels taking a deeper dive into some niche topic, or motivational social pundits pimping their latest book. This spring, a new topic seemed to be repeated at every event I went to: a focus on consumer behavior.

    The talk that caught my attention the most was from long-time social media veteran Stowe Boyd. Contrary to popular opinion that increased socializing leads to distractedness and inefficiency, Stowe suggested social conversation actually leads to better mental performance.

    Stowe mentioned a study by Dr. Reynol Junco of Lock Haven University, in which his class was split into two groups. One used Twitter as a class journal, the other group wrote everything down on paper. The study found that students using Twitter improved their GPAs across ALL their classes by an average half a grade. Dr. Junco’s conjecture was that constant feedback via Twitter led to higher retention. And that Twitter offered a low-stress way to ask questions of other students and the instructor.

    Does social interaction — “social touch” — increase performance — or revenue?

    Stowe also mentioned that the best basketball teams were ones that had the most physical contact. When people touch, levels of a bonding hormone called oxytocin go up in the brain. This causes the heart to relax, stress to reduce, and performance to increase. Stowe posited that  constant, friendly “touch” – even if done over social channels – can produce this oxytocin and rather than resulting in defocus and stress, can actually lead to increased performance.

    One growing body of evidence suggests that interacting with a brand in the presence of friends may increase revenue as well. In 2010, Chadwick Martin Bailey produced a study that showed that 51% of Facebook users, and 67% of Twitter users were more likely to purchase from brands when engaged via social channels. And according to a February 2011 study by Leadformix, 1 out of 2 leads coming into B2B websites are coming from LinkedIn. One has to wonder, why is that? Does having the constant “social touch” of friends and family (or colleagues) help relax the wariness we often have toward marketing?

    Consider this statistic: in May 2011, Starbucks reported that while Starbucks.com had 1.8 million unique visitors, its fan page had 19 million – a number over ten times greater. Coca-cola reported that its dot-com site received 270,000 uniques…but its Facebook fan page received over 22 million = EIGHTY ONE TIMES HIGHER [via the Wall Street Journal]. Consider the emotional warmth you might feel while looking at asomething on CocaCola.com versus what you would feel within Facebook, with new friend requests coming in, photo uploads from family, or chat notifications from a loved one. While this is primarily an issue with B2C brands, where would you prefer to engage with a brand?

    I feel therefore I am

    Which leads me to a statistic I use in my talks. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman did a study of cognitive behavior and found that, despite our notions of being reasonable, rational creatures, the vast majority of our decisions, perhaps up to 95%, are made based on emotional drivers and very little from rational decision-making. Kahneman suggested that our perception is that we 1) think something, then we act, and then we feel something about that decision. At least, that’s what we believe. But the reality is that possibly 95% of our decisions are done by 1) feeling something, then acting, and then thinking/post-rationalizing that decision to bring our rational brain into alignment.

    Why is that? Because emotional decisions can be parallel processed. We can feel happy and sad at a daughter’s graduation. I can be excited and nervous while speaking to a group. Parallel processing is often chosen because it can be processed more quickly, whereas rational decision-making is serial, linear, and slower. If x is true, then y. If y is false, then z. While emotional thinking is the result of millennia of primate survival, rational decision-making literally takes more time and more caloric energy.

    And in our time-starved world, where we encounter endless bits of information demanding our attention, which kind of decision-making do you think we’ll default to?

    Because of this, it makes sense that emotional decision-making is more likely to take place in an environment saturated with the oxytocins produced via social interaction as well as the time-demanding firehose of social interaction produced by Facebook.

    My final thought: why leave the comfort of our friends to engage with a brand on some lonely dot-com site? Some organizations, particularly those who are consumer-focused, may want to reconsider their investments to shift engagement and content to social sites rather than their dot-com. The engagement provided on those social sites by friends, and the brand, may lead to a more revenue-friendly environment for marketers. As long as we don’t destroy those oxytocins with self-interest, deception or distrust.

  10. An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View: Birthday Surprise and Delight

    Tuesday, 28 Jun 2011 2 Comments Posted by:

    There’s no better excuse to celebrate your customers than their birthday.  But these days, it takes more than an emailed discount luring customers to your website to make them feel appreciated and generate some unexpected birthday word-of-mouth. Instead of assaulting customers with messages, promotions, or your own agenda, try finding creative ways to acknowledge loyalty with a twist of unexpected delight – we’re looking at you Southwest Airlines birthday drink ticket.

    Here are some ideas of how companies are going beyond the ubiquitous “Happy Birthday” Facebook wall post, and surprising customers with something special.

    Here’s how to avoid falling into the generic-birthday-email-club

    Celebrating customer birthdays is an opportunity to cement your relationship and show you care.  Regardless of which tactic you select to execute, a well thought-out idea can go a long way in generating loyalty karma. Ultimately, we can apply the motto our mothers taught us when we received that hideous sweater from Grandma – it’s the thought that counts.

    An Ant’s Eye Point-of-View is curated and written by Senior Social Business Consultants: Kristy Bolsinger, Jenna Jantsch, Joann Jen, Geoff Knox and Ali McCourt. Ideas and reactions are welcome in the comments section.