There is no better place to be than in a company that has a CEO that sells. And that place today is Apple. Steve Jobs wears jeans during his keynotes. He has been known for showing up for meetings in bare feet, but I can tell one thing you never forget the day you met Steve Jobs. He is the icon of design and has again catapulted Apple to the forefront of content consumption from our global area network, now called the Internet. You may not think the IPad is not a worthy device, but if you think about it as a new platform for consuming and enhancing a web based information experience as a mobile social customer you will.
In my view it is well worth watching the video replay at the following link because it is a vision of the future that has already happened
The update section of this video highlights their success and clearly illustrates your path to the mobile social customer. This path will not always be through Apple devices, but now Apple has more than 140,000 applications already in its Appstore. Many of these applications link you directly to your social customers and prospects. Just look at a simple application like AroundMe and see how fast it brings you to what you need and how to get there including at map. This application is really great especially when you are traveling.
We have come a long way from the primal days of CRM when we built single subject data marts that provided simple analysis of customer loyalty, like who buys what, when and how much. The old CRM is dead and the future is customer experience management CEM and that means understanding all aspects of how your customer interacts with you and not just through smart devices. The mobile social customer will demand that you interact with them in ways that you have yet to discover. How you deliver your company's products, partners and services through mobile smart devices will be extremely important in most industries and knowing who your social customers are will be even more important.
Suggested Reading: The Era of the Social Customer
This week's suggested reading is Paul Greenberg's excellent book CRM at the Speed of Light and Part one begins with the era of the social customer. For those of us that know Paul he writes like he talks, which is in fact the hallmark of a great writer. I love how he uses new words like SuperStah to bring passion and emphasis to his findings, Paul provides tremendous insight into how B2B and B2C companies need to prepare for the social customer revolution.
Content at the Speed of Light
In the early WWW (World Wide Web) meetings we spent endless hours discussing security, client/ server issues and stateless vs. stateful protocols but in my mind it was really all about instant gratification, the content I want now. Nothing has changed other than that the WWW is progressing toward delivering us that instant gratification. Mobile social customers are a new highly connected species and learning how to engage them won't be easy. However, it would seem to me that great competitive advantage could be gained by providing easy and fast access to your content, products and services from all types of devices.
Relevant Findings from SNCR's research study: the New Symbiosis of Professional Networks
I had the pleasure of working with Vanessa DeMauro and Don Bulmer on this research (behind the scenes) and I would like to share a short synopsis of the findings that are relevant to the mobile social customer. What we found in the data was that not only do social media customers trust social media, but many were already accessing social media via smart devices. What I saw in the data is that the era of Social Media Peer Groups (SMPG) has arrived and that content will travel at a business velocity that has never been seen before enabled by the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies.
- Why Content is king for Smart Devices
- Content sharing and distribution via smart devices is skyrocketing at an amazing pace and you can no longer control your content.
- This is a major change in peer group communications and their interaction which facilitates easier and faster information exchange, ala your brand experience.
- This represents an inflection point and disrupter in global communications and interactions of the most powerful of all influencing environments, the Social Media Peer groups (SMPG).
- Information flow in SMPGs will operate at Internet business velocity and become almost instantly global.
I was recently offered, and accepted a Senior Fellowship at the Society for New Communications Research and will be conducting market research on mobile social customers this year. What questions should I ask your customers and prospects and what are your thoughts on how I should conduct the research? How should I field the primary market research and how should I conduct the secondary research? Your ideas and comments are most welcome and appreciated. I intend to share this research with all members of the thesocialcustomer.com.
- The only factor that will slow information exchange and interaction in the SMPG will be time zones and the bandwidth of infrastructure providers.
- New challenges are facing marketers managing social media network content and access to it from Smart Devices.
- Managing and influencing independent content will be the major challenge.
- Control of corporate placed content will be another challenge facing marketing communications; you will not be able to control it.
- Managing consistent messaging and content across the social network and traditional corporate communications pathways will also be difficult.
- Understanding and measuring the tonality and effect of social media content will not be easy.
- Making sure that your content is easy to access and use with smart devices will also be a major challenge facing many companies and organizations globally.