Eating a Hot Potato: The ROI of Social Media

By Thierry de Baillon

When it comes to Social Media, determining and measuring (or not) the ROI of a campaign is and always has been a hot topic. Let us face it: you CAN (and must) measure the financial outcome from anything. Does that stop the ongoing conversation? No.

Olivier Blanchard recently gave a great presentation at Social Fresh conference, while Jason Falls is advocating a panel on the subject during the next South by Southwest Interactive. And so on. Discussions seem to be endless, and often pointless: every business leader is able to measure sales increase, better brand recognition, number of transformed leads, time to market reduction,… Underlining the fact that talking about immaterial assets like customers’ loyalty or brand advocacy is irrelevant won’t keep people from arguing. So there might be something else, isn’t it?

The answer is predictability. While traditional and digital media marketing have a predictable return rate, we are mostly unable to quantify the outcome of a social media campaign before getting into it. Marketing has become a process, and trusted predictability is part of process definition. As long as Nielsen and others are unable to assess N% financial outcome from a typical N months old Twitter account, we will be able to MEASURE ROI, but not to PREDICT it.

But, wait… Do you remember early days of email marketing and banners campaigns? It was a matter of trial and errors, times for experiments in the wild where we had to convince with only a few silly metrics in our hand. Times for starting small, measuring, starting over… Times for pioneers and adventurous marketers. Those times are back with Social Media.

And I just had one of these goofy 2.0 ideas. Why don’t we set up a wiki, Google doc, Ning community or whatever to share our results and measured ROIs? The more data and metrics we will have, the sooner we will be able to predict ROI for Social Media. And Web 2.0 is all about transparency, crowd sourcing, advocating and sharing, after all. We don’t need Nielsen any more. So, let us eat the potato, start measuring everything which is measurable, and take the future into our hands.

Luxury brands and social media: a natural (yet to be started) evolution

By Thierry de Baillon

When it comes to luxury, the words “exclusive” and “premium-priced” often come to mind, magnifying the fact that luxury brands are, with many reasons, cautious to market themselves on channels where they might lose control on the perception of their image or on their relationships with customers. But driving them with this kind of vision is somehow reductive in regard of the potential offered by the immaterial assets of luxury brands. And social media might be one of the best places to capitalize on these aspects of the brands.

What’s in a brand

Defining what a luxury brand is has always been tricky, but they all share some constant values:

• They are global, maintaining a consistent image throughout the world
• They are status brands, which means that acquiring an item gives some sense of privilege to the owner
• Their brand value is tangible through a distinctive universe. Luxury branding is in large part story-telling.

How can social media help to reach out customers while keeping a brand’s distinctive identity, avoiding the risks inherent to a broad exposure?

Answer local issues while staying global

One of the most desirable aspects of social media is the possibility to engage with customers to enhance customer service. Paradoxically, while luxury brands have hard time staying exclusive, they are all about service – premium service – and the web is a great place for them to enhance their customers’ experience. Staying global while taking into account customers’ cultural differences is probably one of the main challenges these brands have to face.  While Europeans, for instance, value singularity, Japanese won’t mind being thousands to wear the same bag; they will still find some uniqueness to it.

There is no obvious solution, of course. Louis Vuitton, for instance has taken the option to create a Twitter for American customers, therefore assuming the risk to fragment its brand image, which is not in my opinion the right strategy. One better way to engage with customers on Twitter would be to create a global account to interact with them and redirect them later on more intimate and personalized channels, like email or a phone service. In that way, you can at the same time improve and value your global online presence, while answering accordingly to more focused, local audiences.

Luxury brands do have fans

The assumption that luxury brands are reserved to high-end customers, with a large amount of money available, is part of their DNA, and conveyed by their image, but totally inaccurate. Besides Christian Dior Haute Couture, millions of “Dior j’adore” tee-shirts have been sold throughout the world. Louis Vuitton clutch bags are among most popular items in French popular suburbs. Luxury brands do have fans, engaging them through Facebook fan pages or Flickr groups will help them keep your brand in top of mind notoriety, along with driving sales. In the long term, ignoring your fans might generate much more backlash than engaging them.

Let your consumers tell your story

Story telling is another crucial part of luxury brands territory. Whether by focusing on their own history (like Aston Martin’s Heritage, celebrating history of racing excellence), funding cultural events (like Fondation Cartier), or even personifying a symbol (Hermès orange, for instance, is a unique identifiable color), they all describe a story which appeal to most of us. Entering social media, building communities around these unique stories, while time consuming, is a powerful way to make your brand shine and strengthen its immaterial assets. Even in the luxury world, best brands are moving brands.

Why There Might be Nothing Better than the Worst

By Thierry de Baillon

Every day, I read numerous papers and blogs posts about how brands and companies engage customers or internal communities through social media, and, from crowdsourced innovation to customers services, most, if not all, stories feature positive sentiment and best ideas sharing. The global feeling is one of an utterly optimistic networked world, somehow reminiscent of the hippie utopia, with a marketing bias: share a smile, and we’ll sell you better products while you work in better enterprises…

But is really spreading “the best” the way to go? What about encouraging people to share their worst?

Worst experiences help leveraging customer service

Encouraging people to share their worst experience is the best way for a brand to correct bad sentiment and to help build a stronger community. Those whose concerns are addressed in a satisfactory way will be your best brand’s advocates.

Best ideas are consensual, but innovation is never consensual.

Best ideas federate people, and such so are more prone to be rated or tagged. But are they innovative? Communities tend to favor ideas and initiatives they mentally master. On the other side, disruptive innovation often takes people by storm, jumping aside what they think as “best”. Unless you animate a community of innovators, “best” is just not good enough. A contrario, “worst” could highlight more unfamiliar, unusual angles to work on.

This might be my worst post ever, but I am sure there are plenty of other fields in the social media space where “worst” is much more insightful than “best”. What do you think?

EtoB : businesses in the era of social web – the social CRM

By Thierry de Baillon

It is quite an evidence to say that BtoB businesses do not focus on the same aspects of the customer experience. For a typical buyer/customer, a brand’s values are somehow less important than one-to-one engagement with the seller, as it usually involves a personalized and (hopefully) long-term relationship between both parts.

Whether in lead generation, selling, or customer service, human relations and personal qualities are keys, which mean that tapping into the social web will soon become unavoidable for most companies.

By public demand…

Generating leads is becoming a two-way process, and listening to your customers allows you, not only to know them better, but to serve them better. Every market is now quickly becoming a niche market, whether by fragmentation or by emergence of tailored products and services. Taking part to the conversation will allow businesses to sell customers what they need, not what they, as a company, think they need.

From leads to customer service, the social CRM

If generating a positive sentiment through brand’s engagement is still an important factor, always comes the moment in the sales process where concrete criteria of choice rule: performances, customer support, and price. As the way customers interact with brands evolve, traditional CRMs fall short in capturing one essential factor: the acceptance of these criteria. To be successful, a BtoB company not only has to sell its products or services at the right price, but must also ensure its customers stay happy with this price to build a long-term relationship. Sentiment upon concrete criteria will soon matter as much as those criteria themselves.

As more and more advices and experiences are shared online, listening about every aspect of a commercial transaction is becoming critical, and the use of social CRM tools will soon become mandatory to allow companies to leverage their own offering in order to foster trust and consumer loyalty. With no doubt, the social web is about to reshape the whole way companies do business, starting from the sales process itself for BtoB companies.

EtoB: businesses in the era of social web – part 1

By Thierry de Baillon

As the web evolves into « the social web », it is clear that companies have no other choice than changing the way they consider and interact with their clients and customers, which will have a tremendous impact on their inner structure and, gradually, in how they do business. Last week, I was lucky enough to meet Jeremiah Owyang at Paris Tweetup and assist his presentation of the 5 eras of the social web, which may serve us as a guidebook to understand the deep evolution in the way people will interact, create, and buy in the next years.

Whether B2B or B2C, businesses are facing a new challenge, and we soon will see the raise of E2B (employees to business) as a dominant paradigm. In the next few posts, I will try to focus on the changes that need to take place inside the enterprise, and the pitfalls to avoid.

B2C isn’t Business to Customers anymore, but Brands to Customers

Since branding isn’t a recent discipline, the last decade has seen the very end of the anonymous or generic product, and every consumer goods sold or exchanged through the world is now supported (or supporting) a brand. To be short, it now has a personality, lies into a more or less global strategy, is associated to definite behaviors. Product selling is now all story telling. But the whole branding and marketing process is now open to the public. The brand itself no more is a global voice talking to the customer, engaging with him through social media means that packaged brands are connected individuals who all add up to the customer experience as well as to the brand’s perception.

Choose the right spokespersons

It is up to the company behind the brand to carefully choose who will interface with customers. Customer service is no more a service; it is becoming a strategic front end to the brand, and people twittering or blogging in its name must convey and propagate the very values of the brand. Is the brand perceived as young and active? Its social media actors must deliver the same message to avoid affecting the brand’s identity. Choosing the right spokespersons is mandatory, and isn’t an easy task.

Don’t over impersonate your brand

Another danger is to concentrate your whole social media efforts into a single individual. Not only must your speakers deliver a message coherent with the brand, but they must add value to it at least as much as the opposite. In a world where people are valued over brands, achieving the right balance between both might become overwhelming. Think about what would happen if your social media manager leaves the company. Who will suffer most? If the answer is “the brand”, you have a lot to care about.

It is all about people

Besides your spokespersons, everybody in your company is now a stakeholder.  Same as your customers’ voices have to be heard and listened to, every employee is now on-board in your brand’s identity and behaviors, and has the power to influence its personality and perception. Yesterday’s brands could often be embodied by the founder or the CEO of a company, who imprinted his/her personal value and vision into the brand DNA. These times are now over, and E2B is the business model we all have to deal with. B2B companies are somehow less concerned about brands than consumers goods are, but are facing similar challenges.

To be followed…

Forget about global conversation, it’s all local now (again)

By Thierry de Baillon

Once upon a time, there was a Brand. It earned its reputation on behalf of great products and conquered a lot of markets. Marketing helped it to build its personality, and communication broadcasted and reflected this personality, encountering customers’ satisfaction everywhere. The Brand bacame a global brand.

Of course, the Brand had to take into account cultural differences between countries where it was now firmly established, which was acheived through local alternatives of its marketing mix (advertising, packaging, incentives,…) while fastening its global personality.

The Brand developped its online presence. Website, e-commerce… It carefully began to experiment with social media, listening consumers, joining the conversation. But how could it now keep on satisfactorily answering local aspirations, as the conversation is getting global? Very soon, a customer’s question texted from Konakri may have as much impact on the Brand as one posted on a blog in Los Angeles, albeit conveying totally different cultures and social environment. How will the Brand give anyone an individual answer, since everybody may listen and understand this answer differntly? How can the Brand make a distinction between global and local without partitioning its personality, sailing into dangerous waters?

Brands are nowadays facing a really big challenge, for which we have no answer yet. They learn about listening, they now have to understand, and to answer accordingly. We are just scratching out the surface of social media impact on branding.