Posts Tagged ‘twitter’
Saturday, January 5th, 2013
‘Man is a social animal’, – as human beings, we do have instincts, but we also have emotions, sentiments and experiences. It is these that separate human beings from animals. In our professional and personal lives, we tend to use the right side of our brains as much as our left brains. Or should I say our hearts step into action and not just our minds in almost all our activities and decisions. People’s behaviours and interactions on the social and professional networks are not any different. That’s why it is critical for businesses to listen to the voices of the people and understand the emotional aspects underlying their conversations. This post dwells on how listening (a.k.a social customer care) help businesses to understand not only people’s voices, but also help them with the right solutions.
Listening is an art and science too
I think the two most critical factors that made social media popular are freedom of expression and the ability to go viral in no time. People on the social networks are free to express their views and opinions. Most often these comments tend to be positive or neutral, but occasionally users do express negatively. Also, note that these are not just about the products and services, but also extend to the brands, organisations and people too. Businesses have been realising increasingly that these conversations and comments – positive, negative or neutral, are a great source of improvement. Companies like Dell, Kodak, Lego and Sainsbury’s started actively listening to the customers’ views and opinions on the social and professional networks.
Image credit – Quinn Anya, Flickr
What is listening
Listening in the context of social media refers to the monitoring of the activities, interactions and mentions by users. Also referred to as Social Customer Care, the social media monitoring is one emerging areas invested by most leading brands. The main goal for the monitoring is to understand the activities and derive insights to help take business decisions and help support the customers. Listening does not necessarily mean looking out for the problems alone, but also for potential ideas, insights and innovative approaches. More organisations in private and public sectors are actively engaging with their customers and monitoring what they are up to on various social and professional networks. Small wonder then that today we have some fancy job titles such as CLO (Chief Listening Officer) and Insight Managers.
“Dell has been listening for four years and created a position called ‘Listening Czar’ two years ago. We are a leader in the listening space.”
- Richard Binhammer, Communications Executive, Dell
How does monitoring help businesses
Social media monitoring is not just a passive observation of what’s happening on social networks. It is extremely proactive in trying to identify the problems of people, understand their pain areas and resolve them in the quickest possible manner. Not just the problems, some times analysing the mentions and comments will help businesses with new and fresh ideas for improving their business, products and services. Often these conversations could potentially lead to new features and functionality but also new products. At a macro level, the social media monitoring and listening helps organisations to understand the customers’ “image” and compare it with their “identity”. Also, the mentions and comments on these networks move beyond just products and touch upon the experiences, emotions and feelings. Businesses can now reach out and unearth these, with minimal effort, cost and time. 
Thanks to the explosion of the Internet, mobile phones and social media, individuals and businesses nowadays are facing a big challenge. Information overload, BIG Data or whatever you may call it as, this data deluge is a bane as much as its a boon. Sample the impact of the social media usage and the amount of data its creating, just the “Retweet” button on Twitter is creating a data equivalent to 2 TeraBytes in one day.What should businesses do to overcome this challenge and make use of the data to their advantage to service their customers better? To sift through this data deluge and make some meaningful relations amongst them, businesses have to plan and approach this in a structured manner. Also, they must use the right tools to help them get the best and draw meaningful and actionable insights.
Social customer care tools
Some of the prevalent tools in use today for the social media monitoring are sentiment analysis, NLP (Natural Language Processing). Also, a few statistical tools such as Cluster analysis, Factor analysis are also being used to analyse the variables and dimensions. These and other similar tools and techniques enable us to look at and filter through the BIG data. The objective is to find the patterns, map the relations and draw usable insights from them. The outcomes are qualitative as well as quantitative and will aid businesses to take the right decisions in the right time.
“We get about 300,000 new mentions of Kodak every month and we don’t censor the comments or videos people create about our company.”
- Beth LaPierre, Kodak’s Chief Listening Officer
One important suggestion is to ensure that businesses must not ignore the negative comments or mentions about their brands and products. Instead, they must actively look for them, understand the root causes and step in to resolve the issues. They must also ensure that the problems are addressed to help prevent their re-occurrence in the future.
Hope you find the post useful. As always, feel free to drop in your feedback for continuous improvement. Wishing you all a very Happy New Year 2013. May the new year bring in joy and success to all of you. Until next post, ciao!
Tags: BIG Data, brand, business, CLO, customer, Dell, identity, image, insights, Kodak, Lego, listening, marketing, monitoring, NLP, Pardha Mantravadi, products, Retweet, Sainsburys, Sentiment analysis, services, social business, social customer care, social media, statistics, texavi, Texavi Innovative Solutions, tools, twitter, vision
Posted in Business Analysis, Information Technology, Social business, Social Technologies | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 21st, 2012
A few days ago, I was thinking about what separates the great organisations from the good ones. I tried to connect a few successful companies with the secrets behind their success. Here is a small question for you to get thinking on this..what is common to Google, Apple and simple? Of course the letters LE, but the prize goes to the correct answer, “their commitment to make people happy”. Google and Apple have positioned themselves as people-focused firms, creating innovative products and services that not only work for people but also delight them. They have established a clear differentiation based on delighting their customers, stakeholders and followers with simple and easy to use products and services. In this post, let us learn how any organisation which aims to become a social business, needs to focus on ‘the people’ to be successful.
Focus on people – Make them happy
Businesses traditionally have been focusing on people in one form or the other. Every organisation works hard to keep their customers happy as that would guarantee their existence. Some businesses focus on keeping their employees satisfied with good facilities, pay and perks.These companies think that happy employees lead to higher productivity and thereby better results. A few large organisations with deep pockets can afford to keep not only their customers and employees happy, but also extend their reach to the stakeholders like shareholders and suppliers. However, a social business needs to do all the above and a bit extra as well. Let us see in the next section what social businesses need to do to get it right.
Social business – Internal and external people
Social businesses have to optimise their business strategies, operations and resources towards the ‘people’. The people here means those who are both ‘internal’ as well as ‘external’ to the organisation. Internal people are the employees and other key stakeholders such as the management, sponsors and the shareholders. They are critical to the success of any initiative as everything starts with them, from the business vision to strategy, from planning to execution and delivery. External people refers to the customers and suppliers. However, in the context of social business, the list doesn’t end here. These external people include the followers, friends and fans on social and professional networks. Social businesses succeed by putting the people’s interests first beyond anything. Their business objectives and bottom lines are all dependent on their people-focus. Social businesses have to ensure that both the internal and external people are happy.Here is how they can achieve this. :
- Involve, encourage and empower the right teams
- Find, connect and follow the right people
- Educate, influence and engage your followers
In the following sections, let us see how the organisations can become effective following the above rules.
Involve, encourage and empower the right teams
Teams make or break your organisations initiatives and attempts for successful campaigns. Great teams often are one of the biggest success factors behind great social businesses. You need to involve the team members from the very beginning so that they none of the team members feel left out. Also, this would help build ownership in them and increases their responsibility. Encourage and motivate the team members to start delivering towards the goals of social business. Empower them to take decisions on their own, try new things and implement their ideas. No matter if the ideas are bad or good, let the team work on those ideas and realise the efficacy of these ideas, on their own. Empowering the teams enables the team to own up the social business initiative and deliver activities and succeed, all by themselves.
For successful social business, empower the team and allow them to:
- Estimate the efforts and timelines
- Come up with the plan
- Commit and agree upon the plans
- Deliver on the plans
- Bring out the problems, if any, during the execution
Find, Connect and follow the right people
Whereas the teams working on your social business are internal to your organisation, you also need to look outside of your business. These are customers, suppliers and others, speaking of traditional businesses. Often in the context of social business, this extends to those people in your social and professional networks. Follow these simple rules to follow the right people on your social and professional networks.
- Define the profiles of the people who fit your business requirements
- Create a persona with the demographics and psychographics
- Search, browse and look out for the people fitting in the persona
- Connect to these people and follow their activities on networks
- Interact with them by liking and favouriting their content
- Engage with the people by sharing their content across networks
Educate, engage and influence your followers
Following people on the social and professional networks, interacting with with them and sharing their content is one thing. It is quite another level to get people to follow you. Even harder is to engage people consistently with content that they are interested in. Of course, the most difficult step in the social engagement is to be able to influence your followers, friends and fans positively and increase their trust in you and your brand. The starting point for all of these accomplishments is to start sharing content which aligns with the interests of your followers. Make it worthy of their likes, and encourage them to comment upon and share it with others in their network. Influence your followers
Given below are some useful tips to help you with engaging your audience and influencing them.
- Identify the target audience from amongst your followers, friends and fans on networks
- Understand their interests and focus areas
- Align your campaigns and content to be aligned with their interests
- Interact with them, encourage people to like your content and share it
- Reach out to friends of friends (FoF) and widen your network reach
- Influence your followers to trust your brand and make them your ambassadors
Hope you find the above suggestions helpful in your social business efforts. As always, please let me know your views for improving this blog. Until next post, Ciao!
Tags: agile, Apple, business, customers, employees, empowerment, Facebook, fans, followers, friends, Google, happy, Innovative, LinkedIn, mantravadi, media, networks, Pardha, people, products, professional, Saradhi, services, simple, simplicity, social, solutions, suppliers, team, teamwork, texavi, twitter
Posted in Behavior Modeling & Design, Business Analysis, Information Technology, Innovation, Product Development, Social business, Social Technologies, User Experience | No Comments »
Monday, July 23rd, 2012
A recent report on social media by ACSI, American Customer Satisfaction Index puts Facebook behind other social networks such as Google+ and Pinterest on user satisfaction. Yes, going social is not enough anymore, nor is creating a Facebook page for your business, tweeting on a regular basis or having a LinkedIn profile. Successful businesses are no longer just about being active on social media, and collecting analytics on engagement and influence. Time has come to move beyond the fads and integrate your brand and reputation management activities to deliver congruent and unified experiences to customers and users. In this post, we will have a look at the various channels available for businesses and how these can be leveraged to successfully manage reputation in an increasingly competitive market.
1. ORM is not just managing ‘Online’ reputation
There are many different ways in which you can reach out to your customers and users. The evolution of the various channels and media can be considered as a continuum over the past decades or even centuries. From the times businesses have been used to traditional channels like print and word of mouth to today’s social media, communication and reputation/brand management channels championed the cause of businesses. Texavi created a framework that traces the various channels and also maps how easy or hard it is to implement each of these channels. The infographic given below provide a perspective on various channels such as traditional, digital, web, mobile and social platforms that contribute to the organisation’s reputation.
2. All channels are not the same
All channels don’t have the same flavour and they don’t behave in the same way. They vary in the way they are created, maintained and delivered through. For instance the traditional channels such as the print media might require initial installation and setup. On the other hand, the social channels such as social media networks like Facebook, Twitter accounts etc., need to be created, connected and integrated. These media differ on various aspects, each having its own set of characteristics and behaving in its own way. However, the real trick lies in how well you identify the right channels for your business and use them smartly. The following sections will help you in selecting this so that you will succeed at managing your organisation’s reputation.
3. Mix and match the channels for balance
Relying only on one channel at the expense of the other will only give negative results. That is why businesses need to focus on choosing the right mix of the channels and resources to manage their brand and reputation in a holistic manner. The above infographic also charts the evolution of these various channels/media and the ease of their implementation. Success in managing reputation in today’s world lies in identifying and using all the possible channels, based on the organisation’s expectations and experience. Also, note from the above infographic that the ease or difficulty in implementation could vary depending on industry, product, market dynamics and the specific organisation which is implementing it.
4. Get to know the critical factors
While some channels say, the print media could take longer time to implement whereas its comparatively quicker to create some others like web sites. Besides, other factors such as cost, resources required etc., could vary from one channel to another. You need to compare and contrast these various factors across the channels. I give below a list of some key factors that must be considered before you take any decision:
- Cost of implementation
- Speed of implementation
- Manpower required
- Materials and physical resources
The following framework provides maps the various channels on the cost vs. speed of implementation. You can see that there is a tradeoff and it is wise to choose the right channel(s) suitable for your industry, products and customers.
5. Don’t go by fads and trends
Just because everyone has a Facebook page, you don’t have to create one, unless your business really need one. Following latest fads will only leads you into frustration and confusion, as you don’t see the expected results coming out of them. Before adopting and implementing a programme, it is important that you carefully consider the past experiences, resources available and the expectations of your organisation. Also, keep in mind the critical factors like cost and time for the implementation of the selected channels. For an integrated, well-oiled reputation management initiative, I suggest that you should aim for a perfect balance by choosing the best among the available channels and media and using them in a unified manner.
Hope these tips help you in getting it right with your ORM initiatives. Please drop in your feedback and inputs for making our blog better. Until the next post, ciao!
Tags: ACSI, brand, business, channels, Facebook, GooglePlus, infographic, LinkedIn, mantravadi, media, online, ORM, Pardha, Pinterest, reputation, Saradhi, social, texavi, tips, twitter, Unified Experience, users
Posted in Business Analysis, Information Technology, Product Development, Social business, Social Technologies, User Experience | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
“Social media is not an option for businesses, any more!” and “Markets are conversations” – these phrases pretty much reverberated among the speakers, visitors and organisations participating in the Social Media World Forum-2012, London. Held over 2-days at Olympia, London from 27-28 March, the conference reiterated the importance and urgency of socialisation of business, marketing and media. Great ambience, pleasant crowds, nice talks on current topics, insightful panel discussions and 1000′s of tweets buzzing the twitterwall….the #SMWF ( as it is popularly referred to) was a great place to be for businesses and professionals alike! Texavi took an active part this year, exhibiting at the event, by setting up a booth and demonstrating our capabilities. During the 2 days, Texavi’s stand received good visitors and the feedback during and after the event had been very encouraging. For photos and more updates on the #SMWF, visit Texavi’s web site and our Facebook Page.
Active participation from businesses and individuals
SMWF 2012 was well attended by businesses and people from all around Europe and a few from parts of Asia as well. Focusing on the core theme of social media, the conference catered to five streams — Social business, social TV, social shopping, mobile marketing and of course, social media. Besides the well-decorated and themed booths spread across the entire hall, there were workshops, talks, and panel discussions on the five streams. The topics for these workshops and talks were carefully chosen, ranging from the ubiquitous Facebook-focused marketing to the semantic analysis, and the more strategic aspects of brand management and social business enablement. For more information on the event, you can visit the official site.
Texavi @SMWF,2012
Texavi is proud and happy to have been associated with the SMWF this year. We set up a booth and exhibited our offerings to the visitors who showed keen interest. The visitors to Texavi’s stand no.10 were both excited and impressed by what we had got on the show. Participating in SMWF proved to be a good decision for Texavi as we got to meet some really nice people and had interesting inquiries. Texavi’s offerings stood out among the exhibiting lot, because of our unique, simple yet powerful frameworks. Out of the very few organisations focusing on the most important aspects for social business enablement, Texavi’s unified and convergent experience framework and behaviour change and persuasion framework struck the right chords among the enthusiastic participants. For the brochures that we gave away at the booth, you can visit Texavi’s Downloads page.
What’s special at SMWF2012
The main attraction of the event had been a specially built Twitterwall right in the centre of the venue, with a continual stream of the tweets about and around the topics of the event. This worked almost like a live heartbeat of the buzz going around in the event. Even though it was early Spring, the sunny weather outside did make people hang out at the bar lounge right in the centre which kept the conversations going. There was a special gaming zone where people could get their hands dirty with the latest and the most entertaining games. The workshops and talks were held at the specially set-up theatres in the corners to streamline the participants. Add to that the special attraction at SMWF was the messaging facility, for those tired after going around the stands and attending the workshops.
Key takeaways from #SMWF
As you would have guessed by now, SMWF helped participants with the right information, insights and networking opportunities. Though there are many a takeaway from the conference, I am attempting to do the impossible task of summarising the key points, below.
- Social media and social marketing are not an option anymore for businesses
- Social media is not just the responsibility of marketing /PR departments
- Markets are conversations
- Brands can reach out to their customers and leverage their reputation, thanks to social media
- Gibson Guitars, Lego bricks are cases in point to show how big brands can be more effective when they get social
Hope you enjoyed reading this post. Please feel free to click through the links I provided all through, for more interesting photos, updates and information. Also, do drop in your feedback for making Texavi blog better. Until next post, ciao!
Tags: 2012, behaviours, booth, brands, change, Conference, conversations, event, experience, Facebook, innovation, London, mantravadi, media, Olympia, panel discussions, Pardha, Pardha Saradhi Mantravadi, SMWF, social, social business, Social media world Forum, social technologies, stand, talks, texavi, twitter, unified, workshops
Posted in Behavior Modeling & Design, Conference, Events, Information Technology, Social business, Social Technologies, User Experience | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 16th, 2012
“The old computing was about what computers could do…the new computing is about what people can do“, Ben Shneiderman’s saying is as much relevant today as it ever was. The impact of social business and social technologies on our professional and personal lives is so profound that businesses now are re-thinking their strategies in the light of ‘social’ context. The social web offers a lot of opportunities by harnessing the tremendous potential offered by multiple disciplines ranging from marketing, consumer behaviour, information technology, design, data analytics, gamification and customer experience and cognitive psychology, to name a few. The nice thing with the social strategy is that virtually anybody or any company can get on the board, however it does not guarantee success to all players in the game. The definition of ‘success’ in this context is debatable and fairly open, so I shall consider effectiveness over success. In this post, I wish to highlight the key pitfalls you must avoid, which would help you to get it right with your social strategy.
1. Giving only lip service to ‘people power’
All along, we have been hearing companies and people claiming “we are in the people business“, or “I am a people person“. In the context of Social web, these phrases are now acquiring new meaning and perhaps ‘the correct’ meaning. Now more than ever, opportunities are opening up, which will enable you to really do what you mean and put people in the rightful place they belong to and given the attention they deserve. Whether its the customers who bought your products, users who are facing problems using them or those people, who you think, know you by your name or brand are becoming your potential target audience. The nets are widening to reach out to the larger audience and in the broadest of contexts. The social channels are helping organisations reach out, listen to customers’ heartbeats and not just their voices, and providing support to the needy in real time. I have seen instances on Twitter when British Gas attempted to respond, advise and resolve the issues of their customers, on Twitter.
2. Getting aboard all the social trains
Resist the temptation to get on to every social and professional network available. As the old saying goes, “tell me your company and I shall tell you who you are”, the same holds true with the social channels and networks. Carefully consider who your target users are and identify those networks where your presence adds value to your brand, offerings and customers. For instance, just because everybody is creating a Facebook page, you don’t have to create one, when your product is targeted to the older generation users or high-security defence-component manufacturers. Look out for the maximum buzz and check if it suits you to have your presence there. Also, sometimes it is not the quantity that matters, but the quality. For example, Facebook and Twitter might have millions of users, but just focusing on them may not work well, if you are a large brand with global presence and rich legacy. To better leverage your interests and aspirations, a different network, say Pinterest could be a better bet, considering that it is the fastest-growing social network specially for the big brands out there.
Answering the following questions will help you choose the networks, wisely!
- Who are my target audience?
- What is my real offering and how does it help the users?
- Where (which online networks) can I find my target audience, the most?
- What is the nature of my business offering – social/professional?
- Which networks should I consider for my presence?
3. Thinking “Social is the flavour of the season”
From businesses, news corporations, traditional media houses, celebrities and common people, everybody is getting active on the social networks. Don’t just focus on the social aspects at the cost of losing the advantage with traditional media. You need to ensure that there is harmony and congruence in your offline and online presence. Yes, it is true that to host a campaign on Facebook or run a series of hashtag tweets on Twitter it might be a lot cheaper or perhaps costs nothing. Add to that it could be the easiest thing to create, track and manage campaigns on these online networks. However, without careful consideration and calculation of cost-benefit analysis, don’t ditch the traditional marketing channels and rely solely on the social channels. With all the positive vibes going around with the social media, there is also another side that needs to be looked at. These social media can make or mar the reputation of your brand in no time with as much ease and speed you had in creating the campaign. For instance, McDonalds ran a campaign on Twitter with the hashtags #McDStories and #MeetTheFarmers, but the campaign backfired thanks to the comments by some ‘enthusiastic’ users and their sarcastic tweets on McDonalds and their products.
4. Excessive focus on your products and services
Gone are those days when only your customers and users were talking about the products and services that they bought and used. You were happy interacting with the people you know – whether its your preferred partners, loyal customers or willing prospects. Now the context is changing rapidly and the landscape has been extending further to prospective customers, friends of users. The World is indeed becoming one global village with inter-connected networks and individuals, intersecting each other in a criss-cross fashion. The interactions that you encourage among the various stakeholders, customers, users and followers need to be focused on the brand and not necessarily the products or services alone. Newer measures and metrics such as awareness, engagement, influence, reach, buzz and total customer value are complementing the good old measures like sales per product line, customer satisfaction index.
5. Quitting before you start seeing the benefits
Let us accept it, just because you have hopped on to the social strategy earlier does not make you a leader in your industry. Getting social has become a sanity factor and more of a tick on your checklist, than a well-thought strategic directive. Often it takes more effort, time and perhaps other resources such as people, money too, to take off to a proper shape. Don’t give up just yet. Here are a few tips that will help you get better at the game of social media.
- Set realistic goals which need to be tracked on a continual basis
- Be persistent with your efforts
- Learn from the leaders and follow the paths which worked right for them
- Monitor the impact of social operations on your core business
- Track and analyse the key measures and metrics to assess how you are performing
Hope you find the above tips helpful with your social initiatives. Don’t hesitate to mix and match different things that could work wonders for you. Do share your feedback. We shall discuss more interesting stuff in the upcoming posts. Till then, ciao!
Tags: Ben Shneiderman, brand, British Gas, business, campaign, computing, customers, Facebook, Innovative, mantravadi, McDonalds, Pardha, Pardha Saradhi Mantravadi, people, Pinterest, social, social networks, social web, solutions, strategy, success, support, technologies, texavi, Texavi Innovative Solutions, twitter, Unified Experience, users
Posted in Business Analysis, Business Case, Information Technology, Product Development, Social business, Social Technologies | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
Remember the times when you read the online reviews and researched products on the Internet, only to buy them in showrooms and stores later. Now, people are increasingly going into the stores for looking at the products, but buying online for better prices. Showrooming, as the Wall Street Journal calls this behaviour, is on the rise and retailers have to brace themselves for the new revolution. This is just one facet with the Social Web, which not only is aiding online and mobile commerce but also helping evolve newer business models. Not just business, but it is aiding the emergence of related media buzz and technologies such as Big Data. However, Social web is not just about business and technologies, nor it is about content and media, but it is built around people. It addresses more fundamental aspects such as the convergence of people’s online and offline interactions and their social behaviours. At Texavi, we created the Unified Experience Framework, leveraging the social mega trends. In this post, I give a few tips on how you can embrace the social web to your advantage.
1) Meaningful conversations, not just loads of content
With the advent of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, content is being created, curated and consumed in humungous volumes. Sample this, every day just the ReTweet button in Twitter alone generates no less than 1 TeraByte of data. While it is true that now virtually everybody can become a publisher of content with ease, it is also true that there has been a deluge of content that is invading our professional and personal lives. A study conducted by University of Massachusetts concluded that there has been a decline in the number of blogs maintained by large corporates. This goes on to prove that just having a blog up for the sake of it, will not help, unless it is not helping the objectives of the businesses, in this case. Large brands need to track the conversations that are happening about them and also understand how meaningful these conversations to their own business and to their customers.
2) Sustainable commerce, not just sporadic transactions
People are getting comfortable buying, selling and trading online more than they were a few years ago. Businesses are realising that web commerce does not mean merely having 128-bit encryption and ‘https’ web sites to help people use credit cards for payment. The social web is making companies and people cross the chasm of the security, associated with the online commerce. The commerce here actually connotes the true sense of complete experience of offline and inline interactions. This healthy blend of offline and online experiences start from advertising to create noise, arousing interests, spreading the word of mouth, through reliable sources, prospecting, from trying and leading into buying.
3) Unified experience, not just web sites
Have you got a web site? Great, but don’t be ecstatic, just yet! You have passed the examination, but just scored enough to pass. To be able to compete in this ever-changing world, you need to be agile and nimble with your products and services. Web sites are, of course, more dynamic than print, but then they are not agile. To be truly agile and go to where the people are going, you need to get social. ”If you build it they will come” may not hold good now, one thing that will certainly work in today’s world is “Go to where the people are!”. That is what businesses and people are doing, going to the social platforms where the people are already hanging around, conversing, sharing and commenting. However, don’t get overwhelmed by this social revolution, and ignore the basics. Fundamental to your business is the core mission to deliver value and delightful experiences to your customers, users and partners.
4) Caring and championing, not just sharing
Social media are not all about sharing, commenting and liking the content created or uploaded by your friends. It is also about sharing the feelings, emotions, pains and pleasures of others. Human beings are social creatures and nobody can deny the power of social media to reach out the needy and those who need the help. Whether its the movements to oppose the suppression and dictatorship, or the protests to demonstrate the unity against growing consumerism, social media have been playing a significant role. From campaigns supporting the environmental issues to the campaign to help donate the bone-marrow to a promising young entrepreneur suffering from Leukemia, social media are being used to the right cause.
5) Actionable insights, not just plain numbers
I am a statistician by qualification and millions like me, around the world are happy to see the surge of statistics and analytics, thanks to the social media. From Google Analytics to marketing budgets and companies’ performances, numerical data are finding prominence. There are a plethora of services that came up in recent times to compute your engagement, influence, reach etc. Don’t be enamoured by the ranks and scores and target the influencers or mimic the content with high engagement scores. For instance, Paul Adams, in his book Grouped, quotes a research about how common people do not get influenced by celebrities or those with high scores of influence and reach. As per the study, people generally get influenced by people like them and tend to follow their behaviour. So, know fully well that the data and analytics that you gather are only as good as their use. Unless they are put to the right usage, context and value-add to your business and customers, they remain just numbers.
Hope you find this post usable, as always, welcome your feedback. I shall touch upon more practical challenges in delivering the unified experience and how you can overcome them. Until then, have fun!
Tags: big, blogging, commerce, data, experience, Facebook, Fortune500, framework, Grouped, Inc500, Innovative, Klout, Massachusetts, online, PaulAdams, PeekAnalytics, PeerIndex, retail, showrooming, social, solutions, Target, texavi, twitter, unified, University, web, WSJ, YouTube
Posted in Behavior Modeling & Design, Business Analysis, Information Technology, Social business, Social Technologies, User Experience | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, January 18th, 2012
Last week, Cadbury UK launched its new product Bubbly through their Google+ brand pages. I think this is a brave new attempt that augurs well for the social networks and the businesses, in general. Social media are fast becoming the mainstay digital platform and are eagerly waiting to get alongside the traditional marketing channels. Not just the consumers and media, but technologies and businesses too are drifting towards the ‘social’ side, thanks to success and reach of Facebook, Twitter and Google. No wonder that we have social networks, social technologies, social business…everything has a ‘social’ touch today. But what are the effects of this socialification (I don’t want to use the word socialization, for obvious reasons) on your products and services? How can you leverage these social trends to your advantage and bring about the positive changes in the way you operate & deliver? In this post, I give you some tips addressing these questions and also touch upon some key aspects of our Social Experience Framework.
1.Get social – The emergence of ‘social’ everything
There is little doubt that the buzz word today is social and the whole world is now geared towards a ‘social revolution’ of sorts. From the revolution in Egypt to the ‘Occupy…’ movements, social platforms are aiding the way people connect, unite and demonstrate for a cause. The revolution is not just restricted to mass protests and demonstrations. It is expanding its reach and making inroads into our lives and work. Just a few days ago, Google began including the content from their social platform, Google+, when searching and showing the search results. This is yet another example of how ‘social’ content and interactions are getting into the mainstream content. There are more people now who, before buying a product, read the reviews of “other people”. Before saying anything good or bad about anything, some people “google it” or when in doubt, check it out on the “Wikipedia”. The growing emphasis on the relevance of big data and open source technologies and tools, is only adding more ammunition to this social revolution.
2. Focus on people and their social interactions
Yes, they are all people. You once used to call them customers, users, partners and vendors. Your sphere of influence was restricted only to these stakeholders and perhaps extended to prospective customers. But now with social media and technologies, the reach has increased and the scope is broadened to cover more number of people. This includes not only prospective customers and product reviewers but also potentially friends and family members as well. Now is the time to make your business, and technology, products and services more people-centric, for real and reap the rewards. Listen, observe and understand the various ways people interact online and offline too. Make these interactions more meaningful by providing context-sensitive information which they can use readily and easily. Simplify their interactions and enrich them by offering value-add through seamless channels and platforms.
3.Make it work on multiple platforms, devices & channels
The developers and testers among you will agree with me that its a real nightmare to design, develop and test applications on the ever-increasing number of channels, platforms and devices. However, this is great news for all the customers and users as they have a plethora of options (often to the extent of getting spoilt for choice). With newer technologies coming into the fore to help you, it might not be as complicated as it might sound. HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, XML and other technologies, accompanied by the all-powerful bowsers, offer great ways to develop and deliver rich, interactive applications to your users.
4.Deliver social experience, not just user experience
As you have seen in the recent past, there has been a proliferation of computers, laptops, mobile phones and Tablets. Also, there has been a significant raise in the Internet usage for education, work and entertainment. All along you have been focusing on delivering great customer and user experiences through your products, services and solutions. With the advancement of social context, it is just not enough if you try and look only at your customers and users only. The experiences have to be broad based, reaching out to friends, prospects, family members and ‘people’. I call it the ‘social experience’, covering all these. Our SoX Framework is an integrated experience delivered via multiple channels, devices, platforms and media. SoX is a pervasive, personalized and persuasive experience, delivered in context-rich, yet simple way.
5. Not just quantitative, but qualitative
There is a plethora of online analytics services that measure the social media usage. From Klout to PeerIndex and recently PeekAnalytics, these have been serving up measures and metrics on the engagement, influence and network reach based on the activities you do online and especially on the social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. All of these provide the scores, ranks and numbers. While analytics are good, they can only be useful, if applied to the right cause. As business leaders and product owners, one needs to balance the quantitative measures with the qualitative aspects. How do you get to the qualitative information? Be open and actively participate in the social networks and reach out to the audiences. For instance, Dell appointed CLO (Chief Listening Officer) whose role is to follow and listen to the noise and voice of customers on the social networks. British Gas resolves customer issues on Twitter, using it as a platform for understanding, tracking and closing people’s complaints.
To summarize, social businesses, technologies are already in and we are left with no choice, but to embrace them and use them to our advantage. Delivering social experiences require today’s businesses to broadbase their focus to ‘people’, listen to them constantly and help them instantly. Let me know if you have a suggestion, question or comment. Until next post, ciao!
Tags: Bubbly, business, Cadbury, channels, customers, devices, Facebook, friends, Google, HTML5, Innovative, Javascript, mantravadi, media, networks, Occupy, Pardha, people, platforms, products, revolution, Saradhi, services, social, solutions, SoX, technologies, texavi, twitter, users, ux, Wikipedia
Posted in Business Analysis, Business Case, Social business, Social Technologies, User Experience | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011
In 2006, Apple and Nike joined hands to develop Nike+iPod, that changed not only the way people listen to music on the move, but also the way they manage their fitness and in effect, their health and lifestyle. Just about the same time, Nintendo launched Wii, that changed the way people play games from being passive to an active, out-of-your-couch experience . A decade ago, Google changed the way people navigated by shifting their focus from browsing to searching and now Facebook has changed the way people stay connected. All these products, beyond doubt, set out to change the behaviors of people who are motivated (I am not quite there yet:-) and are capable, if they are provided with the right resources.
You can change people’s behaviors
All the companies and products I mentioned above, proved that it is possible to use behavior modeling and design to effectively persuade people to do something positive. In this post and a few upcoming posts, I will touch upon how these companies and others have been successful in using the power of persuasion and behavior design. They have been effective not just in creating great products and services, but also in persuading and changing the behaviors of millions of customers and users, worldwide. Let us analyze and understand how they could do it and what really is the secret behind their success. In doing this, I draw my insights from Prof. B.J.Fogg’s Behavior Model (a.k.a FBM) to explain the relationship among behavior, motivation, ability and triggers. But first, let us understand persuasion and behaviors, in detail, in this post.
Persuasion as an art and science
Persuasion has been an art we have all been familiar with and it definitely is not new to us, human beings . Right from the time we are born and as we grow up into being professionals, we have been using different persuasive techniques to deal with family, friends, colleagues and customers. Marketers and advertisers, through the ages, have been successful in persuading us to look at, buy and use products and services. Its only recently that product companies have been looking at using persuasion and changing customers’ behaviors through structured and proven methodologies. More recently product companies like Fit Bit and DailyFeats-Jawbone launched wearable devices that help track your movements and proactively suggest ways to improve your fitness and health. Both these devices have been designed to persuade people to change their behavior, from a passive to a more active lifestyle. The key here is they have been successful in implementing the Persuasion and design and develop products to help change behaviors in a pragmatic manner.
What is a behavior
We keep hearing about goals, needs, tasks and activities, being used in our professional and personal spheres. Now you might be wondering how behaviors are different from these. Behaviors are perhaps more fundamentally ‘human’ and ingrained in us as human beings, than say, tasks or activities. No wonder then that behaviors could be separated from the other superficial aspects, such as activities and tasks . This is how I look at behaviors and I am not taking this from any specific source or resource. The personality of an individual can be dependent on both her attitude and behaviors. There are numerous theories suggesting ways to bring about attitude change. But as Prof. B.J.Fogg suggests, behaviors are better separated from attitudes for a clear definition and a focused approach to behavior change. So, I will follow the same approach and focus merely on defining target behaviors and bringing about the desired changes in behaviors of people.
Creating habits, not just products
Behaviors can come in different shapes and sizes. You might want to classify behaviors into different types based on the longevity or duration of their occurrence.
- Get people engaged in a one-time behavior Eg., Replace all bulbs in house with eco-friendly energy-saving ones
- Do it over some duration or for a defined period. Eg., Take bus/train to go to office, 3 days in a week
- Do it continuously over a long term, almost as a habit. Eg., Use hand-sanitizers to keep hands safe from viruses
It is in the last category, lies the interest of most organizations and products. Which company wouldn’t like to have customers using their product on a continual basis? Or better still getting habituated to using the product to the extent of forming an addiction. Recent examples for this have been Google, Facebook and Twitter…all of them did implement this long term behavior change in a smart way by creating habits in people, successfully. Google created searching as a habit by replacing it with the browsing navigation. Facebook created the habit of checking out what your friends are up to and sharing with your friends your recent escapades. Twitter provided a way for people to express and update their activities in a short sentence. If you want to be successful in your business, then start looking beyond your product’s features and users’ needs. It is time, you looked at making positive behavioral changes to your users in different contexts.
Behaviors and their flavors
Behaviors can also be looked at from the perspective of what you like to do to them. Some times, you may want to induce new behaviors, while in other instances, you want to change the existing behaviors – increase, decrease, or altogether stop them.
- New behaviors can be imparted to people. Eg., flossing teeth is new, compared to brushing
- Increase existing behaviors. Eg., Brush teeth twice a day, instead of once
- Decrease existing behaviors. Eg. Take less quantity of fatty food during dinner
- Stop existing behaviors. Eg., Stop smoking (hmm…this is tricky:-)
Now that we have covered the basics of behaviors, we are now geared to get into the details. In the next posts, I shall explain, taking help from Prof.B.J.Fogg’s Behavior Model, how you can be more persuasive in designing and developing your products. Until then, ciao!
Tags: advertisements, Apple, B.J.Fogg, behavior, change, DailyFeats, design, experience, Facebook, FBM, FitBit, fitness, Google, habits, health, Innovative, iPod, JawBone, mantravadi, model, Nike, NikePlus, Pardha, people, persuasion, products, Saradhi, services, solutions, texavi, twitter, user
Posted in Behavior Modeling & Design, Information Technology, Interaction Design, Product Development, User Experience, User-centered Design | 2 Comments »
