Scott Nelson

As I have been talking to many firms about their social networking strategy, a problem often comes up in the conversation that is more personal to the people involved. As they are, correctly, exploring the social media themselves, they begin to feel the effects of information overload and want to know how they should handle it.

I do not pretend I know all the answers on this subject. But I think it is something that all of us that play or work on line tend to feel at one point or another. And I know if my case, I have found a couple ways to deal with it.

1. First, and most important, come to grips with the fact that there is information that yes, indeed, you will miss. I find that one of the problems is that people continue to feel information overload because they are fearful that they are missing something. You are. But you know what? It is OK. Life will go on. Important information as a way of coming back to you and you will likely find it.

2. Much of the information you are worried about is not information at all. It is fluff. Not every tweet, every link, every status update is gold. Let them pass by. Again, the important information has a way of coming back to you.

3. Use tools to help. I like Seesmic Desktop and Digsby as two tools that work for me. They do not organize the info, but they alert me as I am working so that I know what is popping up on sites I follow. That allows me to respond to what I need/want to, and ignore the rest. Helping with point #1, above. There are lots of good tools out there to use. Some like to use Tweetdeck for managing Twitter. This allows tweets from people you might care more about (family or coworkers for example) to be seperated out from all the others. Look around and try some tools that work for you.

4. Develop a strategy for personal and business use of social media. Many people have allowed their Facebook and Twitter accounts to grow haphazardly. The result is that they have mixed their personal and business contacts. This may make it difficult to stay on top of messages that you really care about. As many of the sites add the ability to create user lists this may get easier. But even before that there are thinks to do. My colleage Ray Valdes has some interest ideas of this in many of his blogs and writing.

5. Find the social networking sites that you like and that work for you, and stay with those. One of the problems I find is that some users are experimenting with 4, 5 and 6 different sites. That makes it very had to stay on each and learn how applicable they may each be for your firm. Pick one or two and concentrate.

If you are reasonable, you can handle the information overload out there. Remember, it is not going to go away on it’s own…it will only get worse. Have a strategy now.

Thoughts on other ways to address this problem? I have several clients that would appreciate the ideas.

I came up on the database marketing side of marketing departments. We had the people, the budgets, the toys, and the power in most organizations. Marketing was all about targeting and segmenting, and whether we contacted via direct mail, or later, email, we pretty well drove the results of the marketing group overall. That is not to say that the creative and advertising people weren’t important, but since it was hard to quantify their contribution, my fellow database marketers always felt pretty smug.

I think that the power is shifting now, however. Not back to the mass media guys. I still believe that, while important, the period of power that group once had is long gone. No, I believe that power is shifting to the Head of Social Media (or whatever title he or she might have). This may seem strange as many firms do not even have a person in charge of that area yet. In fact, one bank I talked to recently said that they planned what passed as social media strategy over lunch with a 20 year old intern who was the only one who knew anything about the area. But in those that do, increasingly, the social media head is driving the social marketing strategy, and in the process, the broader marketing strategy.

This does not mean that they have the budget yet. Or that they are reorganizing the marketing function. But it is in their area that all the real activity is occurring. Direct and email is still going out. Commercials are still being run. Collateral material is being printed. All as it has for decades upon decades. But the real buzz is coming from the social media area.

I recently talked to a manufacturing client that I have talked to for years. They are rather conservative when it comes to marketing in general. They were well behind the curve in campaign management and analytics. Gartner would classify them as a type C, technology laggard. But they realize that the future of marketing is social networking and social media. So they appointed a young woman right out of college to start developing their strategy. She called me the other day and we talked about the normal things…Facebook, Twitter, and blogging. But she also wanted to bounce some ideas off me that I didn’t expect. How to use Wave. How to tie into gaming systems. It was a real interesting discussion, but it became even more so as she starting talking about her vision of making the products seem “cool” on line. About how they would tie all the other channels to reinforce what was going on online. In other words, she was driving the marketing strategy. The reason? The head of Marketing is 64 years old, has his secretary read emails to him, and in general, sees no need to worry about this new fangled Internet thing out there.

Extreme, to be sure. But a harbinger of the future. Social media is going to drive the marketing department of the 21st century. And firms that want to take advantage of it want to get some good, sharp talent in that roll sooner rather than later. And listen to their “crazy” ideas.

I can’t help it. I am not just an analyst by training, but also one by nature. I naturally tend to group people and concepts to try to find an order to it.

I say that because as I have been talking with clients, I have realized that while there are a lot of reasons why firms get into social media. Some are good, and some are not motivated by the best strategy. But there are some natural groupings. This list is not exhaustive by any means. In fact, I would be interested in know what other categories people see.

1. The first group are the Lemmings. These are where I think most firms are. They do social media because everyone seems to be doing it. They have no strategy, and usually their use of the media shows it.

2. Next, we get the Airline Flight Magazines group. These are firms that are doing it because someone in senior management told them too, usually because they read an airline flight magazine about it so they figured that they should do it too.

3. The third group is the New and Trendy group. These firms just love to do stuff while it is new. If it is more than 6-12 months old, they have lost interest and moved on.

4. Fourth, there are Money Makers. They see revenue in social media, and want to use it for Sales and Marketing. They don’t see much else, but the dollar (or euro or Yen signs) are driving them

5. Fifth, the Service Nuts. They don’t care as much about making money. They want to take care of customer needs. They are driven by immediacy of response, and care the most about customer satisfaction.

6. And finally, the last group are the “We just want to talk to our customers”. This group has no particular expectations. They are interested in creating a dialog. They throw comments out, they respond to comments back. And they want to learn.

I am most encouraged by the last group. There is a sense that says any reason you are on social media is good. And I do not disagree. But the fact that the last group knows they will make mistakes, and want to learn, means that they will go the furthest. Let’s hope more firms want to learn and are willing to make a few mistakes.

An online community that I am part of has been having an interesting discussion on their personal and professional use of social media, especially Twitter. The discussion was started when one member stated that he was not going to user Twitter any more because “there wasn’t much in it for him.” The conversation expanded to include other sites such as Facebook and Linkedin as well. And as expected, the debate split into the normal list of pros and cons. But what caught my eye was that every-one’s comments, whether they liked a site or didn’t like it, revolved around what was in it for them. Comments such as “I don’t find anything interesting/useful”, or “it takes up too much of my time” were common.

I realized that this is the problem that many companies have in assessing and developing a social media strategy. They worry too much about what is in it for them and there company. No one ever thinks in terms of what they can do for the community in general, and their customers in particular. What if firms started to think about giving customers easier access to customer service channels? Or allowing customers to get faster responses? Or giving customers better visibility into marketing efforts? Or helping them to feel closer to companies they feel a closeness to? If firms thought that way, would they find social media strategy so difficult? I suspect it is a matter of not worrying so much about what is in it for you, and worrying more about what is in it for your customers.

I received several interesting pieces of feedback from my post of yesterday, so this is a bit of a continuation on the theme.

Many of the folks that contacted me seem to have a once and done mentality when it comes to social media and how it relates to CRM. By that I mean that they say things like “we have a Facebook page”, or “we have people monitoring Twitter”, or the ever popular IT view of life “is there a piece of software that I can buy that will do all this?”. In each case, they view social media as a project that they can finish, and then move on to the next project.

It is important for firms to realize that social media is dynamic, and is an ongoing strategic commitment, not a tactical project. This is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which each sub segment of the media has it’s own rules, and expectation, strengths and weaknesses. You cannot have a “one approach fits all” or a single project will put this to bed view of the area.

Firms need to ask themselves some basic questions:

1. What does the concept of a customer ecosystem (the bigger world that your firm is in the midst of along with your customers) look like?

2. Do I hope to use social media for revenue generation, brand support, or service (or some combination of all three)?

3. Do I have people on my team that understand this area, and use it in their daily life? If not, you should find some.

4. Are there things that we can apply from other areas such as mass media and direct marketing that might be useful in this arena? But at the same time, you should not view social media as just another form of either.

5. And finally, do I view social media as something disconnected from the rest of CRM? If so, time to rethink and restrategize, because it isn’t.

I am starting to realize that many firms come into this arena with the assumption that everyone out there is lying about their firm and the goal of this strategy is to set them straight. I believe that the successful firms will instead embrace the media as the best way yet to engage in meaningful dialogue with customers. Yes, some have issues that they want to air. But isn’t that part of having a relationship?

I just finished up participating in another  wonderful Gartner CRM Summit, this year in Phoenix. I spent most of my conversations with clients talking about how social media fits into the broader CRM strategy.  What interested me was that I would talk to them about having a broad strategy for social media, but often they would come back with, “that’s all fine but what about Facebook, or Twitter?”. In other words, they heard strategy, but they wanted to talk tactics.

I pointed out that two years ago, if we were having this conversation, we would be talking about Second Life. Last year, we would be talking about MySpace. Next year? Possible XBox Live. The space is in flux and these sites come and go. Too much time worrying about one particular site is going to fail to set you up long term for this inevitable change.

Firms need to think about the fact that the ecosystem (to use an overworked phrase) that they are part of, along with their customers, is growing, and the rules and the power are shifting. What they need to do is think about how they are going to play in that customer ecosystem. That requires a strategy…long term and able to handle a changing marketplace. It will require software tools. It will require written policies. But mostly, it will require creativity and a desire to experiment and learn. Once that is in place, certainly firms will tactically address sites like Facebook and Twitter. But those tactical approaches should be driven by the larger strategy.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a client that is undertaking an ambitious portal project. One the call with me were two fellow analysts. Before we started talking, I asked the client why they were undertaking the portal project. All of a sudden my IM popped up with a message from one of the other analysts on the call. His message: “It’s rude to ask them why they are doing something like that”. As I was reading the rebuke, the client admitted that no one had ever asked them such a thing.

They thought for a while, and finally admitted that they didn’t know why they were doing it. They just were. Was that a problem? I told them that it seemed to me that for all the people and money involved, there should be a reason for it. Whether the topic was ERP, CRM, Portals, BI or any other the other IT buzzwords, there should be a strategy as to why you are doing it, and what you hoped to accomplish.

I still stand by that. I was surprised that they had never been asked such a question (apparently about any major IT project). But I was more surprised that a fellow analyst would think such a question was rude. If you can’t answer that basic question, it seems to me that the other questions are kind of worthless.

Thoughts? Agree? Disagree?

I had a series of meetings with clients yesterday. One was particularly interesting. It was a large industrial firm that traditionally never had any real application strategy. By that, I mean that everything they did was rather opportunistic. If a business unit wanted something, they installed it. They had a mixed hardware environment, and almost 1000 different applications. The business was moving along well, but the IT shop was completely tied up in supporting the current environment.

When the economy weakened, they, like many firms, decided that IT had to cut expenses. But this firm went in a different direction to do that. They decided to actually have an application strategy, and to pursue an enterprise platform migration to a unified technology stack. This was a major expenditure, tying up over 400 employees. Expectations are that they will go from 1000 apps to about 200. Conservative estimates are a 3x improvement in the cost structure of the firm. And the real benefit? They feel that when the rebound comes, they will get a slingshot effect to pass their rivals.

This struck me as very interesting. They are viewing that having an Application strategy will allow them to spend less. They view that spending a rather large sum right now to migrate their systems will make them a leaner firm later. They will be able to spend less, and do more. And when the business is stronger, they will be making more money because of what IT is doing now. This is a very progressive way of thinking, and something that more firms need to think about.

It just shows that sometimes you have to spend money to save money. And success does not tend to come to firms that do not think strategically.

I started out in the banking industry, and transitioned to the IT side of things about 15 years ago. At the time, a good friend gave me a little article entitled “The 10 Commandments of Information Technology”. It was a simple little article, and I found it interesting as I was trying to navigate this world of three letter acronyms (TLA’s) and hype cycles.

Recently I came across it again. Although it has to be 20 years old (my copy of the the article is undated), I still found it useful, and realize that it has shaped a lot of my thinking as a Gartner analyst. I am reprinting the list here for everyone’s perusal. I would give credit to the author but I do not have that information available.

The 10 Commandments of Information Technology (My comments in parenthesis)

1. Remember, this is a business (isn’t that the truth)

2. Talk to the user (that’s a concept. Problem is, often we don’t know who the user is)

3. Understand your customer’s business (often they don’t even know that)

4. Use the vendor’s knowledge (I have often commented that you are not buying software, you are buying the vendor’s best practice library)

5. Training costs are not discretionary (I often hear clients that are off schedule on CRM projects say that they can make it up by cutting training. Great….)

6. Develop a staff with a mix of business and technical skills

7. Management issues are always more important than technology issues (the three P’s of IT…people, process and politics)

8. Make every contact with users a public relations opportunity

9. Spend time on strategy (wish more people realized that one)

10. Have a good time (especially in this market)

Good stuff. Not rocket science, but sometimes it helps to refocus on these sorts of things.

I was talking to a client the other day about Application Strategy. He had a goal to cut his next year IT budget, and to do it, he had done an application inventory. I asked him what he was going to do with the list of applications, he now had, and his answer? Form a committee.

I was nearly dumbfounded. That was the action plan? But then I discovered that committees was what this firm did. They had over 30 ( that they knew of) governance committees. They had committees to watch other committees. The formed committees to develop strategies in handling their committees. And then it struck me…a new acronym. Firms shouldn’t worry so much about ERP or CRM or SaaS. They should worry about CPM…committee portfolio management

This could be the hot growth area for IT in a down economy. Create tools to inventory the committees, and then new tools to manage those committees. Consulting can get involved to streamline committee formation, and existing committee processes. We could even have CLM…committee lifecycle management, except most committees never die so by definition there is no lifecycle. This could be big….

Seriously, with all the attention IT departments are facing right now, rather then shutting off maintainance, or delaying new projects, wouldn’t a good place to start be in figuring out what all these committees do, and removing them as the bottlenecks to getting real work done?