Alignment in the New Social Enterprise
5 September 2011
Social Enterprise was the theme at Salesforce.com’s annual conference, Dreamforce 2011, which turned out to be the largest technology conference with over 45,000 registered attendees. The Social Enterprise vision presented is at the intersection of three major trends social media, mobile, and cloud computing.
This next stage of the enterprise software evolution unlocks an incredible new opportunity for organizations to create cross organizational alignment with their customers. The dream of real time customer collaboration is finally being realized by organizations which embrace the latest technology, tools, and techniques. These include inbound marketing, social media monitoring, enterprise CRM, customer social profiling, data enrichment, private social networks, and mobile customer engagement.
Effective implementation can accelerate innovation, improve customer experience, drive loyalty, and provide sustained incremental revenue. Both consumer and business to business brands are realizing these benefits such as Burberry, NBC Universal, Kelly Services, Symantec, and Crocs.
Related Videos:
CEOs on Chatter – Symantec
Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts is creating the ultimate Social Enterprise
NBCUniversal connects its employees across 20+ media properties using salesforce.com to build its Social Enterprise
Kelly Services builds a Social Enterprise with salesforce
Mobile Engagement is the New Frontier in Marketing
26 June 2011
While mobile marketing has been developing over the past 10 years from SMS to advertising to push notifications; mobile engagement has really just started to emerge in the last 18 months through branded mobile apps and third party apps.
Recently Carla Paschke posted 4 Rules of Engagement for Mobile Marketing on Mashable.com. This is one of the first articles specifically referencing mobile engagement, indicating a shift from outbound to interactive mobile marketing. As you can imagine from the title, the article provides rules to consider when engaging customers on the go. The 4 rules apply well to both marketing through third party apps and branded mobile apps.
Third party apps include all social media, news, blog, games and group buying apps. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Groupon and others representing the highest volume of mobile app usage and dominate the media. They offer new and innovative ways to market products and services. Just like in the web world these channels can be great for acquisition campaigns and ongoing public engagement. What they lack is intimacy and do not enable marketers to effectively drive loyalty.
Branded apps offer marketers a breakthrough opportunity to build customer intimacy and drive loyalty in ways which go well beyond what was possible on on websites. Beyond the fact that customers carry your app with them 24×7 and are just a click away from launching into a fully branded experience to learn and discover nearby products/services, promote experience to friends, get the latest promotions, and most importantly easily engage sales and customer service resources all from the palm of their hand. Marketers who apply Carla’s 4 Rules of Engagement to branded apps and deliver real value to their users will see improvements in adoptions which is reflective of loyalty.
Successful mobile marketing campaigns will require an integrated approach across all channels with a effective strategy for converting users interacting through third party apps to users of a branded app with high adoption (usage). This is like escorting them into the VIP room where they will get personalized treatment and be rewarded for loyalty.
How marketers tap into the opportunities for driving acquisition, conversion, and loyalty through third party apps and branded applications will evolve rapidly over the next 24 months. The new frontier of mobile engagement will require new rules, techniques, and tools to deliver value to customers to avoid simply taking up space or getting deleted completely.