Warren Buffet “If you lose money for the firm I will be understanding. If you lose reputation I will be ruthless.” [Presentation]

Please check out the presentation below that appeared on digital innovation today, there are a couple of reasons we found this interesting:

1) It is so important for companies to understand their reputation and in many respects build many of their business functions around the management of it
2) C24 as a business has been built on our reputation and we recognised very early on that reputation, business culture and desire to succeed are the ingredients to deliver really value for clients and us as a business

Reputation Management and Social Media from Paul Marsden

Thanks to http://digitalinnovationtoday.com/warren-buffet-if-you-lose-money-for-the-firm-i-will-be-understanding-if-you-lose-reputation-i-will-be-ruthless-course-deck-on-reputation-management-and-social-media-download/

Conversion rates and why they are so low…..

Spotted this great inforgraphic on the futurecmo website. Great site with some great information.

I found a great infograph from my former colleagues’ website. Tamara Gielen has one of the most red email marketing blogs in the world – Be relevant! emailmarketing blog . This inforgraph is about conversion optimisation in general and has a great message I totally agree with. Nothing beats the live testing with actual customers. A/B testing, multivariate testing, using segmenting and other tools for learning are the best and fastest ways for creation of reliable business cases in marketing. So, here it is. Enjoy

Big Data Promotes a Culture of Data-Informed Decision Making and Adaptive Marketing – Antony Young-Mindshare

Big Data is quickly being catapulted to the top of Marketing’s agenda, but it remains a challenge for many companies in preparing for this shift. According to a survey conducted by IBM, less than half of CMO’s feel prepared to cope with this increasing amount of marketing data over the next 5 years, with the data explosion cited as their #1 headache. The problem isn’t obtaining data, it’s figuring out how to turn it into marketing magic. I’m seeing a growing list of exceptional cases of marketer’s shifting their organizations to adopt a higher level of data-informed decision making, often with astonishing results.

It’s not so much big data, but smart data used at scale

Last week, I had dinner with Joe Rospars, founding partner at Blue State Digital, who served as Obama’s Chief Digital Strategist for his 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and asked him about big data. He responded, their approach “wasn’t so much big data, but smart data used at scale.” To win this election, they needed to get very granular in their targeting. By extracting voter files and collecting information via the tens of thousands of polling calls made to homes every night, they were able to identify by household individual voter likelihood, and then determine the communications they needed to deliver.

The Obama campaign expertly targeted via online advertising, email, door to door and phone canvassing very personalized messaging. They cleverly extended this strategy via social media. Nearly a million supporters that ‘liked’ the Obama 2012 page also allowed access to their profile data via Facebook Connect. This enabled Obama’s people to identify their Facebook friends in battleground States, cross tabulate with their own databases, which they then asked supporters to email or even personally call their friends that fit likely Obama voter profiles, to remind them to register or vote early.

Data is the engine for Adaptive Marketing

Data is allowing brands to move quicker and more decisively to gain a market advantage by dynamically informing their messaging and media.

Samsung a big investor in data, worked with insights firm Networked Insights, to use real-time social listening to help them keep a finger on the pulse of consumer sentiment and adjust their communications to capitalize on the web discussion about brands.

Within a couple of hours of Apple’s Tim Cook revealing their iPhone 5, Samsung reading the reaction in social channels, drafted new print, digital, and TV ads. The following week as the iPhone hit the stores, they aired TV ads mocking Apple customers queuing up for the new phone and some of its less flattering features. The commercial was a hit, and received more than 70 million views online.

They also used social listening as a real time guide to evaluate how effective their ads were with consumers by measuring what people are saying about them and what effect they’ve having on competitors’ brands. Stressing the importance of data in informing their marketing, Brian Wallace, the former VP of Marketing at Samsung, (who recently moved to Motorola to a global marketing role) said, “The data guys lead these conversations. Not the creative guys. Not the sale guys. And it’s not just analytics — it’s analysis.” He added, “[data] does not crush the art of advertising. It simply informs it — and ultimately improves it.” Samsung’s shift to a strategy of employing social data at the center was one of the key factors that assisted them to move from the number 4 mobile device manufacturer to pass the mighty Apple.

Creating a more personalized customer experience

I’m seeing a focus on data enabling marketers to create smarter, more engaged customer experiences.

I recently chaired a panel which included Sandra Zoratti, co-author of the book Precision Marketing. She cited Caesar’s Entertainment as a marketer that centralized data to better formulate its approach to marketing. They identified 0.15% of their customers that contributed to 12% of their casino revenues. This led to them employing Good Luck Ambassadors to monitor these customers. If they weren’t having a good night on the tables, they offered complimentary tickets to a show or dinner based on their known preferences to ensure they left their casinos with a positive experience.

Building a fluid organization that can capitalize on the data

Shifting to a fast moving data marketing organization isn’t just about software and strategy. It requires a shift in how the agency and clients teams work.

The Obama campaign quadrupled their data team from the previous election campaign, adding data technologists, behavioral scientists and mathematicians to crunch the data and help interpret them into actionable marketing insights.

According to Rospars, to improve speed of activation, they established a persona playbook on how the brand should speak, to allow them to delegate decision making down.

Personally, I love this shift to data-informed decision making. It is creating more adaptive, more relevant and more commercial marketing programs. We are barely scratching the surface, but it’s clear that going forward, data will be an enabler of more potent marketing.

Thanks to Brand Media Strategy

Homayoun Hatami: How companies use Big Data to find sales growth Mckinsey

McKinsey partner Homayoun Hatami cites examples of how companies used Big Data to drive growth. To take advantage of these opportunities, companies have to put big data at the heart of their sales organization — from recruiting talent to processes. Based on the book Sales Growth. Learn more at the Sales Growth site. [http://salesgrowth.mckinsey.com/]

The Social Brand Value of the World’s Leading Brands

In November 2011, social media consultancy Sociagility looked at the social brand value of 50 of the world’s leading brands, creating a revised top 50 ranking according to their social media performance, as measured by the consultancy’s PRINT Index™ KPI. The PRINT system compares brands on five key dimensions or ‘attributes’ of social media performance – popularity, receptiveness, interaction, network reach and trust – across multiple platforms. The Sociagility Top 50 report analyses the social brand value of the world’s leading brands and the competitive influences that determine their social media performance. Here’s a visual representation of just some of the report highlights

Why Predictive Analytics Will Transform B2B Sales & Marketing Execution

Consumer marketers have become adept at driving revenue based on predictive analytics. Potential customers are routinely scored on a wide variety of attributes from lifestyle to promotion receptiveness.  These scores allow consumers to be  segmented into groups based on shared interests, purchase likelihood, and total buying power. By starting with highly differentiated segments, marketers can design programs that are highly relevant and effective.

This is not the way that B2B sales and marketing works in most organizations today.

Yet, B2B is a ripe environment for predictive analytics: selling costs are high, sales probability is low, and resources are very expensive. While the language of B2B marketing and sales is full of references to probability — customer funnels, response rates, conversion rates, close rates, call-to-close ratios — it’s rare to see B2B organizations leverage prospect and customer data to score customer attributes, build discrete segments, and allocate resources to maximize the conversion and revenue.

But all of this is about to change. Over the next five years, common consumer marketing techniques will find a happy home in many B2B marketing and sales organizations.

Here are 6 reasons why:

• Electronic sales processes are creating massive amounts of useful data: Today, B2B buyers spend more time interacting with companies online than they do with sales people in person or over the phone. For every successful sales call they attend, a typical prospect may spend hours interacting with content, reading forums and blogs, and testing sample products. In today’s world, every buyer action leaves a trail of digital clues that signal their context, needs, purpose, and intent.

• Prospect attributes can be easily deduced from observable data:Most B2B organizations with CRM and content marketing capabilities have enough data to score prospects on purchase probability, likely problems or interests, and potential solution needs.

• Relevancy matters: Even as the typical portfolio of products and solutions becomes more varied and complex, B2B sales and marketing messages tend to be narrow and simplistic. The patterns that work most consistently are destined to be forever repeated. For prospects, this means that they are often hit with messages and a pitch that ignore the nuance of their particular needs and segmentation. For many prospects, this is a turn-off that is difficult to reverse.

• Sales & marketing funnels are based on probability: Typically, 2% of targets respond to a marketing campaign, 60% of leads are accepted by sales, 50% of accepted leads become opportunities, and 25% of opportunities close. When you look at the full marketing and sales funnel, a pathetic 1:667 targets becomes a closed deal. Using predictive analytics to improve any stage of the funnel has the potential to create incredible value.

• Sales resources are expensive and easily tiered: It’s not uncommon to see a three-tier sales model with tele-prospecting/demand generation representatives, inside sales, and field sales. Typically, these teams are divided with the goal of aligning the highest cost resources to the highest value opportunities. Unfortunately, the allocation of accounts is typically very crude with simplistic measures like revenue or employee count determining which accounts go to a particular team. By using predictive analytics to allocate resources based on real-world potential, sales teams could increase revenues while reducing the cost of sales.

• Marketing programs vary greatly in expense and effectiveness:If you have a stalled prospect that you want to move, a marketer has many choices. They could send an email, send a direct mail, invite them to an educational seminar, or bring them to a hospitality event. The continuum of marketing costs ranges from pennies to hundreds of dollars with corresponding variations in conversion rates. To maximize impact, marketers should save the big dollar investments for the highest probability and highest value segments. To do this, however, marketers need to use predictive analytics to score prospects based on their probability of purchase, their potential buying power, and the likely impact of a particular program or technique.

While smart organizations are beginning to put the foundation in place to better leverage data in the marketing and sales process, real obstacles still exist to efficient use of predictive science in most B2B organizations. First of all, one legacy of sales-sourced CRM data is a mess of information that is inconsistent and difficult to leverage. Second, the new art of data-driven marketing and sales requires a new set of skills that are hard to find in most B2B organizations.

But most critically, it’s hard to change both structure and behavior. The better use of data in the sales and marketing process requires changes to the way that people sell, the way that leads and accounts are allocated to sales people and territories, and the way that performance is measured. These type of changes can take a long time.

But with the current B2B shotgun marketing and sales techniques working just 1 out 667 times, the upside of change is immense.

Thanks to Paul J. D’Arcy is a CMO, entrepreneur, and writer based in Austin, Texas

The Impact of Social Media in Hospitality

How Social Media is Changing Hospitality

It’s funny, as word of mouth and social media marketing continues to grow in the new era of instant review and social media hotels, amusement parks, restaurants and even the airlines have to step up their game. No longer can a server, front desk clerk or any member of an organizations service staff let their guard down.

Beautiful Interactive Billboard Like You’ve Never Seen It

From the masterminds at Breakfast NYC. This billboard flawlessly marries kinect technology of today with an electromagnetic dot display of yesteryear to promote a new TNT television series premiering this fall called Perception. In addition to tracking and reflecting the users movement as he passes by the billboard, your movements can also be heard!This time by the masterminds at

Breakfast NYC. The billboard flawlessly marries kinect technology of today with an electromagnetic dot display of yesteryear to promote a new TNT television series premiering this fall called Perception. In addition to tracking and reflecting the users movement as he passes by the billboard, your movements can also be heard!

This solution could work so well in some of the UK’s leading retail streets. http://breakfastny.com/

 

How Social Media Is Changing the Sports Ticketing Market [INFOGRAPHIC]

Social media hasn’t only revolutionised sports fans’ experiences at the game — it’s also changed how they get there in the first place.

One in five fans use social networks to invite friends to games, according to a recent report by the Sports Business Journal. Nearly 15% of ticket buyers say their purchases have been influenced by Facebook posts.

And engaging fans on social media doesn’t just help sports teams reach potential buyers — it literally pays off. According to the same research, fans who buy tickets through social media links pay more than one-and-a-half times as much on average compared to all buyers. Why? They typically make their purchases farther in advance.

The graphic is based around US data, however the UK could learn significant lessons from them as our adoption of the media is on par with theirs.

thanks mashable.com

The Jury Is In – CEO Choose Big Data Over Social Media

A new studyby McKinsey & Company reveals that less risky and potentially more beneficial realm of Big Data software is a higher priority today than social media integration. The study consisted of 1,500 surveyed CEOs, CFOs and CIOs between April 3 and April 12, 2012.

Almost 50% of respondents stated that they are currently using Big Data to “understand their customers better”, whereas 32% stated they are using social media for “interaction and promotion purposes.” The survey also found:

– 13% did not consider Big Data a priority, so far as stating it was “not on the agenda”

– Over 50% state that flexible delivery platforms are a priority for the next 1-2 business years

– 19% of respondents have deployed digital marketing practices across the enterprise

– 4% used location-based software to target customer promotions

The study also found:

– 52% believe that organizational structures not designed to take advantage of either Big Data or social media priorities

– 51% say that lack of technology infrastructure and IT systems are a significant challenge

– 43% and 31% are having difficulty in finding functional and IT talent, respectively

Big Data and social media do not have to be mutually exclusive. A number of businesses are beginning to integrate the two, using Big Data solutions to analyze business content based on their social media activity.

Thanks to http://blog.drjerryasmith.com/2012/05/31/the-jury-is-in-ceo-choose-big-data-over-social-media/

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