Jenny Sussin
Senior Research Analyst
1 year with Gartner
3 years IT industry
Jenny Sussin is a senior research analyst in the ITL Enterprise Software group of Gartner Research, with primary focus on social CRM. Read Full Bio
by Jenny Sussin | May 7, 2012 | 9 Comments
Maybe I am being dramatic, but if I hear the word “social” one more time today I am going to throw my laptop at the window.
“Social” has unfortunately become a buzzword. I would say this has happened over the last year or so (does anyone agree, disagree?) It’s driving me bananas (not a Denny’s plug, just the way my brain feels right now.) With these last three sentences of vented frustration, you’re probably thinking: hypocrite. I know, I am a social CRM analyst. Let me share with you how I avoid feeling like a hypocrite on this by sharing with you the way 40% of my client inquiries start:
Client: Hi Jenny, we need a social strategy.
Jenny: Okay and what is it that you’re looking to do?
Client: See what people are saying about us on social media. Oh, and brand awareness, general marketing.
Jenny: In order to…?
Notice how I am not using the term “social” when I talk back. I practically beg and plead with people on a daily basis not to go after “social” for “social’s sake” – and yes, people have told me that is a meaningless phrase and to those people I say, go work in corporate marketing for a week and come back to me. What I am saying in an overly complicated way is that the word “social” is stigmatized. “Social” is something employees are supposed to be/do and businesses are “being.”
The word makes people angry and defensive. A few weeks ago at an event I was told by not one, but two attendees that I wasn’t an expert on “social” and that they have been “social” for their entire careers. If when we say “social” we’re talking about talking in person, or through email, or on the phone, or attending an event – then yes, you and the cavemen have been social forever, no one is debating you. The problem is, they know and I know that, that isn’t what is meant when people say “social” now. When someone says “social” now they’re talking about mass:mass media, and more often than not they’re talking about externally facing social networks like Facebook or Twitter.
And externally-facing mass:mass media isn’t something everyone or every business should be leveraging. Just because Autodesk used social media (a peer-to-peer community) to cut customer support costs and realized ROI of about $6.8 million [clients only] – doesn’t mean you will. And that is okay! I know that isn’t what you’re hearing from your management, but it is!
Along the what-we-mean-when-we-say-social thread, the term “inherently social” is also misused “on the regular.” Since we can all stop arguing for a minute and agree that “social” doesn’t mean socializing in the way we’ve meant it for the past hundreds of thousands of years, saying something is inherently social would probably have to mean it is built off of/or with a connector to Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Here is all this rant and rave is really asking for: please stop defining “social” as the dictionary does whenever someone comes to you and says “we need to get social!” Additionally, when someone says that to you, can you please ask them or take it upon yourself to define potential business benefits [clients only] for the actions you are about to take? Thank you.
P.S.: And for the record, I have not ever, and will not ever, be calling myself an “expert” in anything. There is always room to learn, analyze and form new perspectives, which is fortunately what I do for a living.
P.S. x2: Try to forgive all of the grammatical errors. Just try.
Category: 360 marketing social crm social media Tags: facebook, gartnercrm, marketing, sales, social, social CRM, social media, socialcrm, twitter
by Jenny Sussin | April 16, 2012 | 6 Comments
I’ve been hearing this in bits and spurts and it came up again today. “Millennials are walking away from Facebook.”
You know what bugs me? The articles that say things like this claim to have a sampling of 18-24′s that prove their point, but the psychology behind why people in this age group are on Facebook would not back up an assertion like this, regardless of who this mysterious sample is.
Stay with me: did you hear that this weekend Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt finally got engaged? If you did, this was less than 48 hours ago and you know and formulated some sort of opinion even if it was “I’m over their relationship.” If you didn’t you’re thinking “I thought they were engaged/married,” or “they’re so weird,” or “finally,” or something like that. Guess what the bottom line is? YOU DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW THEM.
Think about why people are interested in celebrities. It is because they are a common article of gossip for all of us. We all love/hate them together based upon gossip we’ve heard about them.
This is something you do back in school too. It’s why cliques exist. We love to align ourselves either with or against people. Facebook is the magazine/tabloid of school and then post-academic life. It has never been that for people who didn’t initially adopt it in school, but that is why those people can’t understand why Facebook is remaining popular.
Remember when “news feed” first came out? (And if you don’t, and you claim to be a social media expert…) Everyone hated it. It was an invasion of our privacy. That’s how gossip works though, isn’t it? I can know about you, but you can’t know about me. There are DEFINITELY privacy concerns with Facebook, but the fact that I can log on to the site right now and see pictures of kids in their freshman year of college getting drunk goes to show you that this isn’t a primary concern for this demographic.
Maybe I’m wrong. There are a bunch of surveys that say I am. Yet those surveys also cite the growth in presence amongst millennials on Twitter as one of the reasons Facebook use is in decline. You can use different networks for different things, but what do I know? I’m just a millennial.
Category: 360 social media Tags: 18, 24, cool, decline, facebook, millennial, millennials, networking, social, twitter
by Jenny Sussin | March 29, 2012 | 14 Comments
And now for our third, and perhaps final (but who knows really) post in our (my) Social Networking for Business series, we’ll cover everyone’s favorite social network: Facebook.
And now for my disclaimer: I want to start each post in my new “Social Network for Business: Etiquette” series with a quick one liner about why I am doing this: too many people in business (marketers, you are the #1 culprit) very obviously to users on the social networks, do not understand the medium they are working with. No one is asking you to create new content. We (we the people, the cool cats on these networks) just want you to put a little effort into making sure the way the content is presented is appropriate for where you’ve placed it.
In talking about Facebook, I am going to split the blame. I’ll take a little away from marketing and I will give some of it to customer service. The most common abuse of Facebook I see by businesses is ignoring questions or legitimate comments on the business fan page’s wall. Some people don’t bother to try and defend themselves, they know they are “doing it” wrong. My three biggest frustrations come with the following three excuses. I will title this section, “Suck It Up.”
1. “Well we have a Q&A tab and that is where we’ll acknowledge and questions.” – Really? Guess what, you don’t make the rules here. If this is your excuse then you’re really just a poser in the social space anyway. Do you remember why you got on Facebook? I do. It was so you could “reach” more people. This is social media not a megaphone. They’re reaching back to you, it’s what you wanted isn’t it? They are using the wall to communicate with you on your Facebook because that is how they communicate with everyone else on Facebook. You wanted to be one of their friends? One of the guys? Well now you play by “the guys’” rules. And if you’re asking me whether or not I care if you already invested in a Q&A tab, the answer is I don’t, not unless you also manage the comments on your wall. It’s called courtesy.
2. “There are too many comments up there, we can’t possibly respond to them all.” – Then don’t have a Facebook fan page. You don’t need to respond to everything, I’m not advising you do that. I am advising that you be able to respond to any legitimate question coming in and not just have a billboard on Facebook where kids (your customers) draw graffiti. Buy some software to help you. Social CRM doesn’t = FREE.
"Storefront Metal Gates of New York" by Dan Nguyen, found on Flickr
3. “Oh a different department owns the Facebook page…” – Really? Because if you weren’t someone who works in a corporation, you would not understand that excuse. I (Jenny Sussin the 20-something that spends at least an hour a day on Facebook) do not care who “owns” your page, solve my problem! Answer my question! You are you! You are not You Lower Limbs (catch my drift?) Gartner clients I have a read recommendation for you on this one. It’s called “Don’t Let Customers See the Cracks in Your Social Media Presence” and if you have ever uttered the phrase “oh a different department owns XYZ” to someone outside your organization, you need to read it.
With the advent of new “rules” around Facebook fan pages in the timeline layout, we the consumer should be able to ignore many of your other common infractions – but please work on these three.
Are you seeing anything else that irks you with businesses on Facebook?
Category: 360 customer service marketing social crm social media Tags: business, crm, facebook, marketing, networking, scrm, socbiz, social
by Jenny Sussin | March 19, 2012 | 2 Comments
I feel like the title of “Lessons Learned” is so boring, don’t you? Instead I went “Occupy Wall Street” on you.
Image from "Technosyncratic"
For those who didn’t attend 360 this year, let me give you a quick recap of how days went: breakfast meeting, meeting, presentation, meeting, meeting, thinking you don’t have a meeting but you do have a meeting, lunch meeting, meeting, coffee meeting, presentation, meeting, meeting, dinner meeting, sleep, repeat. Needless to say, my brain was on overload and is still in recovery mode so I am sorting the “lessons learned” into three categories: confirmed truths, things to revisit and things I was totally off on.
1. Confirmed Truths
- Biggest issues for organizations looking to implement a social CRM plan are cross-teaming (the good old silo issue) and figuring out how to budget headcount for the work to be done.
- Marketing is still leading the social CRM revolution/evolution, followed by customer service and IT. Sales is still saying “prove it.“
- IT is still trying to figure out how to convince LOBs they should be included in social CRM planning.
- Technology is not the issue – people and process are. All the software in the world can’t make up for poor people and process planning.
- I look ridiculous in a suit.
2. Things to Revisit
- There is a MAJOR divide in the maturity of social CRM strategy and implementations.
- Some businesses, we’ll call them the 1%, are rolling. They’ve created a single view of the customer (social, CSS, sales,) they have a cross-departmental team in place to guide the enterprise social CRM strategy, they have budget, they are measuring what they have done, they are putting it into an ROI model.
- The 99% are still trying to get their strategy off of the ground. They need traction. They need help identifying their business case. They need strategy advice. They need execution advice. They need tactical advice. They are at levels 1 and 2 of The Five Stages of Social CRM Adoption.
- The 1% are sick of people calling themselves social media experts, so while there are only 1% of us: please stop calling yourself that.
3. Things I Was Totally Off On
- The timing of my presentations. They took 25 and 35 mins of the 60 planned. (Nice, Sussin.)
- My jokes…I am not as funny as I like to think I am.
- Very little else, it actually makes me feel alright that I am not so off.
Anyone else at 360 – what did you learn? Anything surprise you? Any feedback for the crew here?
Oh, and first person to find 3+ grammatical errors in this post, wins!
Category: 360 customer service marketing social crm social media Tags: #gartner360, 360, communities, community, customer, customer service, customer360, garnercrm, gartnercrm, it, lessons learned, marketing, media, sales, social, social media, socialcrm, software
by Jenny Sussin | March 5, 2012 | 13 Comments
“Social Network for Business: Etiquette” series disclaimer: too many people in business (marketers, you are the #1 culprit) very obviously to users on the social networks, do not understand the medium they are working with. No one is asking you to create new content. We (we the people, the cool cats on these networks) just want you to put a little effort into making sure the way the content is presented is appropriate for where you’ve placed it.
Today we tackle the all-mighty Twitter with it’s PR-filled postings and the outright lies about being passionate about *insert B2B-sold tech object here.*
I know that there are likely thousands of “what to do on Twitter if you’re a business” blog posts out there – most were from two years ago a la the blog posts on Pinterest (am I a hypocrite?) swirling around right now – but I believe the time has come to assess some of the silly little things we’re still seeing out of business Twitter handles and lay down our collective pleas for the universal “you” to stop it. (I think I really missed an opportunity here to headline these blogs “Hey you! Stop it.”)
As a little precursor I want to say, this list used to be so much longer. Companies are doing a great job learning from their mistakes in the past – so don’t be discouraged when reading these, just keep them in mind.
Let’s throw out a couple of gripes we’ve all had with “you”…
1. Sounding the alarm then putting in the earplugs and taking a nice long nap: stop it! I’m actually cool with companies marketing to me assuming I’ve opted to follow them (that is a dig at promoted tweets) but then when I want to ask you something, you listen. You not only listen, you respond.
2. Acting like a robot: stop it! Continuing from the gripe above, you not only respond, you respond like a human – not a robot. I didn’t go to your self-service site because I didn’t want a canned answer. I know we’re all busy and it’s easier to provide our employees with canned answers rather than training them on etiquette from medium-to-medium, but by being on Twitter, this is what you signed up for. Are these standards too high? I don’t think so. Personal example: I had a jolly old exchange with UPS over them sending my package to the wrong address. I was pissed that my package was across town, but I actually forgave a pretty substantial error because the person tweeting from @UPShelp was so real with me. Now I’m not the “every man,” but I immediately thought much more highly of UPS. (Plus my new UPS guy at home keeps bringing my packages into the foyer instead of leaving them on the porch, but I digress…)
A gratuitous why-I’m-such-a-pain-in-the-neck:
3. Businesses that ask employees to do their bidding from the employees’ personal IDs: stop it! Why? For one, everyone knows it wasn’t your employees idea to tell their friends about your product – unless they are a regular product evangelist, they won’t have followers who care and your sweet “impressions” number means nothing. For another, what if someone then comes back to that employee to answer a question and your employee either doesn’t know the answer or is not usually on Twitter so they see it 5 days later. It reflects poorly on the company for the employee to say “hey I don’t really know what I was just talking about, go on this wild goose chase to find out” or to not respond at all. Plus we all pity the employee and think a little less of him/her for being such a slave to the groove.
4. Hijacking a tag for competitive communications purposes: STOP, please stop. Some of you may be familiar with hijacked tags advertising adult themed products or services, but there has been talk in the past of hijacking tags for a competitive purpose. An example of this would be if during one of Coca-cola’s events that had a hypothetical hashtag of #cola2012 where attendees were discussing things happening at the event, Pepsi came in and said something like “Pepsi is better than Coca-cola as proven in taste tests #cola2012.” All you’re doing is spamming a community. “But it’s relevant and clever.” No it isn’t. If people wanted to talk to you about your product/service/topic they would have used a tag that called you to attention. Back off. You’re ruining Twitter.
5. Overcomplicated hashtags: (credit to Charles Tuite) No one can figure out what you mean. Putting your name in front of a practice or universal item doesn’t make the conversation yours, it makes it a private conversation, where you’re talking to yourself. If you want to join the conversation, use a broad hashtag so that people outside of your usual reach can find you and speak to you. “But I can’t track how many people tweeted with my tag then!” It’s going to be okay. Impressions is a bologna number anyway. If you really need, you can run a search or create an archive for tweets with two hashtags in them, one being your company name and one being the broad topic – that way you’re hitting multiple audiences.
What else bugs you about businesses’ approaches to Twitter? Anything you see that you actually really like?
Category: customer service marketing social crm social media Tags: #gartner360, 360, gartner, gartnercrm, twitter
by Jenny Sussin | February 15, 2012 | 10 Comments
I want to start each post in my new “Social Network for Business: Etiquette” series with a quick one liner about why I am doing this: too many people in business (marketers, you are the #1 culprit) very obviously to users on the social networks, do not understand the medium they are working with. No one is asking you to create new content. We (we the people, the cool cats on these networks) just want you to put a little effort into making sure the way the content is presented is appropriate for where you’ve placed it.
I know it’s so “riding the wave” of me to start the social networking for business etiquette series with Pinterest as it is what’s hot right now – but I think this post is needed following a blog post I saw about ways to market your business on Pinterest that was so alarming I had to do something. (Side bar: this tends to be a thing with me – I see something that irks me so much I need to write a passive retort. This thought is for my therapist…)
Let me explain something to you (the “you” in this case is a marketer or salesperson, customer service folks are in the clear on a lot of this etiquette business:) no one wants to see your brand name plastered all over Pinterest except for your executives and while it may often be taught that they are your target audience, they are not the business’ target audience. STOP putting your brand all over everything. An exception here might be a luxury retailer like Chanel that people dream of being affiliated with, but if I can buy your brand at my local mall, don’t bother.
That isn’t to say don’t bother posting images of your product or affiliated ad campaigns, but don’t bother putting your brand name on them.
Consider the medium you’re working with an why end-users are there. On Pinterest, we’re looking at aspirations. These are things people want to do, see, be, get – not what they are doing, seeing, being, having. It’s literally a series of virtual “dream” boards (which is why it attracts females, we know men don’t put their dreams on display, perhaps there is something in that generalization that can explain why men don’t understand the significance of flowers…another one for my therapist.)
But away from my gender warfare, let’s talk about how you really get something “re-pinned” on Pinterest. If I put a picture of a cool looking building and post it to both my “Cool Buildings” board and the public “Architecture” board, people who like architecture are likely to re-pin it, assuming what I think is cool actually is cool to other people. Now let’s say my reason for posting it as I want people to know that Gartner is cool and modern and this is one of the buildings we have an office in, so I throw “Gartner” up on the image. Now other people who look at it perceive that they are no longer re-pinning a cool image, they are re-pinning a brand. For them to do that, they’d already have to have some brand allegiance to Gartner, strong enough to share with their personal friends (Pinterest helps you import your Facebook friends, assuming you create your login with Facebook, which I see is very common.) BE SUBTLE. You’re not being deceptive by captioning the image with “Gartner Singapore” vs. putting the Gartner name on the image. You’re not being deceptive by linking the image back to Gartner Singapore’s page where the image sits and there is information about the building’s architecture.
On a site like Pinterest, your content is only good if it’s re-shared. If you hear there are a million people using Pinterest daily, that doesn’t mean you can reach a million people. It means you have the potential to, but only if you can get each of their eyes on the content you’re trying to share. The way you do that is by making the image compelling enough to re-share. If you’re brand is on it, you already decreased the likelihood of a re-pin. I don’t have the stats on the likelihood of something being re-pinned with or without a brand name on it. No numbers, just common sense from a chronic social networker.
End of rant. Comments welcome 
Category: customer service marketing social crm social media Tags: 360, crm, gartner, gartnercrm, pinterest
by Jenny Sussin | February 3, 2012 | Comments Off
For the record, I considered putting an image of guts here but I recognized it was too disgusting and couldn’t expect anyone to read the blog post with guts in their face.
So you might be wondering, the guts of what? This previous week an effort on the part of myself, Michael Maoz and Adam Sarner was finally published and it gets into the guts of peer-to-peer customer community software. (Gartner clients see Critical Capabilities for Peer-to-Peer Customer Community Software.) This piece of research gets into the insides of peer-to-peer community software, outlining what clients are looking for and how good of a job some popular vendors in the space are doing at providing both what is considered to be an industry standard and that which is innovative.
A little sneak preview you ask? Then I will comply…
…you asked for it! Alright, alright. So in the note we identify four capabilities and then break each of those down further until we can differentiate one gut splattering from the next. The four critical capabilities are: content creation and curation, member management, knowledge management system and agile social platform. For the actual, clean dissection of these capabilities, you will have to read the note, but I can tell you this: even the strongest community vendors have room for growth in the area of agile social platform.
So here is the action item I give to you coming our of this research and having done a bit of detective work surrounding the Total Cost of Ownership of Social CRM for Customer Service SaaS solutions (Gartner clients): know what you’re looking for, know what you can and can’t live without based on your business use case, and ask questions! In speaking to a variety of vendors, I do believe that most if not all are sincere in wanting to deliver the best product they can to their end users, but like my landlord once scolded me, “if I don’t know something is wrong, I can’t fix it.”
College Jenny had bigger things to worry about than mold on the ceiling, like laying out on the docks of the river all day.
And now I have an ask of anyone reading this. What are your biggest gripes with community functionality? You don’t need to list the product you’ve used, keep it general. We’ll open it up to internally-facing and public-facing communities you’ve been a part of. If there are no responses, I will assume everyone is 100% happy with the software they’ve used in the past or are using now.
Category: customer service marketing social crm social media Tags: 360, communities, community, crm, customer, gartner, gartnercrm, media, peer, peer-to-peer, social, social media, software
by Jenny Sussin | January 11, 2012 | 6 Comments
Alright, I know I don’t normally blog multiple times in a week, even a month (my monthly cadence is shameful, I know) I’ve got to shout this from the rooftops/Gartner Blog Network:
MARKETERS: DO NOT RUIN PINTEREST FOR ME.
Seems ironic I am saying that given my job is to help companies determine social strategy and leverage popular social media to generate business value. Here is what I think you might have heard:
MARKETERS: DO NOT MARKET ON PINTEREST.
Okay now go back and read what I actually said the first time. I said don’t ruin it. When marketers first got on Twitter, and some still do this today, they completely saturated it with billboards. Awful idea. Nobody likes to be told, they want to be a part of the conversation. They want to be part of coming to a group decision about something being cool or wretched.
This blog post is to serve as a warning more than anything. Please be subtle. I’m cool with your marketers pinning sweet duds to public pin boards, but let’s not overdo it by sticking some info under it about your new fall line coming out and a URL. Understand the medium and how it works (hint: you don’t need to do that to get people to your page,) don’t abuse it, k?
Your friend,
Jenny
Category: marketing social crm social media Tags: 360, crm, gartner, gartnercrm
by Jenny Sussin | January 9, 2012 | 15 Comments
Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of “he wrote the book on…” or even “I wrote the book on…” and I am wondering why I’m unimpressed.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive to write a book. Writing a book is a lot of work, a lot of research, a lot of conversation; but writing a book doesn’t make you the end-all be-all expert. It just doesn’t.
Keeping up a blog on a topic, to me, is more impressive. Keeping up a blog means that the blog author(s) is/are constantly learning about a topic and articulating what they know to their audience. It requires continuous acknowledgment of the evolution of individual and personal disposition and again, the articulation of why. (Maybe a year or so down the line I will look at this blog and think, “really, Sussin?!”)
While a book is the representative of the accumulation of knowledge, a blog is the continuous regurgitation of most recently acquired knowledge that has been swashed around, chewed, swallowed and then shared (this sounds a little sickening.) The book was vetted by the publisher, sure – and they blog may not need any sort of review approval – but there is a difference in timeliness of delivery.
Net of how I think about it: we’re constantly learning. Freezing cumulative thought is difficult and commendable, but it isn’t a bragging point as for as I’m concerned. It is a point of pride to admit “I am open to learning and I am dedicated to articulating and sharing what I’ve learned with my peers day-by-day or week-by-week or month-by-month.”
Category: social crm social media Tags: 360, crm, gartner, gartnercrm
by Jenny Sussin | December 8, 2011 | 1 Comment
Want to know a secret? Things aren’t always what they seem.
In our roles as analysts, we have the opportunity to speak with dozens, hundreds, thousands of companies a year about the good, the bad and the ugly within their organization.
A few months ago was the first time I got a glimpse into any sort of disorganization behind the scenes.
I was speaking to a major B2C tech company (can’t say who, can say I have multiple products of theirs in my home) who had been really impressing me with their creative approach to social customer service and support. They have a hierarchy of Twitter handles and a library of videos that would make Dewey Decimal swoon. I was thrilled to get the chance to speak with them and find out how they were doing it.
So I get them on the phone and we’re talking and here is what I find out.
- They’ve got two employees handling all of the Twitter-originated support questions from a social monitoring dashboard.
- All Facebook support questions are dealt with right through Facebook.
- These two handle 500 to 1000 interactions per week on Facebook and Twitter.
- They do not share this dashboard with the marketing department. The marketing department hands off any questions regarding support to the two of them on Twitter or Facebook by tagging them in their reply posts. There is nothing going on behind the scenes to organize this – you would never know.
- The video support team is a different team from the one this employee worked with. Efforts there aren’t really joined.
- The kicker is - no one is measuring the impact of the social support being given. They strive to respond to all social inquiries within an hour but there is no time to first response being measured, no calculation of cost savings – nothing.
I’ve got two lessons for readers of this blog coming out of this story. The first is: no matter what mess you have behind the scenes, no matter how poorly your customer service or marketing or HR department work together internally, don’t make it the customer’s problem. As a customer of this organization and as someone who keeps an eye on them in the social sphere, you would never know they were working in such a rudimentary manner. And you know what? Good for them. I’m not saying they shouldn’t get there act together. They are missing out on the extraction of cross-departmental business insight and value in this current style, and disorganized initiatives are not long-lasting.
So that bring me to lesson #2: please, please, please, I am begging you: MEASURE THE VALUE OF YOUR WORK. Are there no measurements in place already? Boohoo – create some! It’s not enough to tell me you have 200,000 fans on Facebook – Lindsay Lohan has more than that and I don’t know if you want your company to be seen as the Lohan of the business world. Show me business value!
Gartner clients, I am going to take you guys one step further and give you some follow up reading to help you learn how:
Don’t Let Customers See the Cracks in Your Social Media Presence
Analytics for CRM Customer Service: Key Roles and Metrics
The Five Stages of Social CRM Adoption
Avoid Five Critical Failures in Social Media Projects
Category: social crm social media Tags: 360, crm, gartner, gartnercrm
