Social Networking in the Business - Part 1

Social Networking in the Business – part 1
Customer relationship Management (CRM) and Social Networking

Social Networking continues to grow and although there is a lot of trivia being discussed there are also some serious business discussions and related business information being passed around. We should not ignore this information as it may be useful to our business and I don’t believe the phenomenon (if that is what it is) of Social Networking will go away. If anything we will see more people joining in the discussions and more products and innovative ways of communicating coming out of it, so if you don’t engage early then you may be in danger of missing out on any opportunities that evolve. Engagement doesn’t mean you need to start ‘Tweeting’ straight away or anything like that but as a minimum you must understand these technologies and track their progress. I would also recommend you consider some minimal involvement if only at pilot level.
What is this business information that might be so interesting? As an example we may see information posted about what our clients are saying/doing, what competitors are saying/doing, changes in the markets we operate in, regulatory discussions, new product launches, strategic appointments, expert opinions and much more.
The difference with the social network world is that it is instant, prolific and often from unknown sources. This means we are also in danger of information overload and sifting the information into useful and non useful is very time consuming. It also gives us some potential concerns as we don’t know how true the information is and whether it is genuine or malicious.
If however we can somehow control that aspect then shouldn’t we be linking social networking technologies to CRM (Customer Relationship Marketing)?
CRM is mainly a contact system (Whom you know and what you know about them) and used for Customer and prospect management mainly by people involved in sales and marketing activities.
Social Networking is more search engine/ introduction broker/ discussion board and is about relationships (Who knows who) but also instant information on what’s happening at a moment in time and sharing of that information and would include products like:-
- Social networking for lead generation and qualification (Plaxo, Linkedin, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc)
- Alerts (Google alert for Customers and prospects, Twitter alerts)
- Discussions (Blogs/ Twitter/ Huddle etc)
- Contact networks (relationship search engine that resides behind the firewall and analyses CRM/outlook/resume documents/ communication patterns in email)
- Visual/Vocal information (Podcasting/ YouTube/ Flickr/ Slideshare etc)

The benefits of linking the two areas of CRM and Social Networking are ensuring you have all the latest news (and gossip) available in your CRM system so you can be in a better position to talk to the client about things that are affecting them at that time. This would give them some confidence that you were taking time to understand their business. It may give you more information about their pain points and how your services/products could help. It may also generate ideas about how you can respond to market trends or competitive products. Even in this new world the old adage of knowledge is power remains key.

It should go without saying that this is additional or supplementary information and should not replace the normal marketing research and business news information that you may currently receive from known and trusted sources.

The problem is going to be what you let through into CRM from these social network systems and how you add this supplementary information to the main information you hold at that level. There are ways to apply some form of filtering but it could be very time consuming and expensive if you have to employ somebody to filter it.

There are products that are now trying to interpret the information and filter it into topics or specific market areas in order to see trends rather than one off comments that may be misleading. I would expect as the market matures we may well see more of these types of products. We will also see the main stream CRM players integrate Social Networking into their products and these may well include some form of filtering as standard.

It is an exciting time and I don’t expect it to stand still for very long.

Will the CIO role still be relevant in 2015?

Attending the CIO Dialogue summit in December. For details see
http://www.cio-dialogue.com

Involved in the open forum discussion on 'Will the CIO role still be relevant to the business in 2015?'

Will be publishing some thoughts soon for comment but if you have any thoughts in the meantime please contact me

Top 100 IT Industry Blogs

Adrienne Sara Carlson's blog 'Online IT Degrees' has included a Top 100 IT Industry Blogs and I am pleased to announce that she has included this blog in the 'Top IT Industry Blogs From a Leader' section, so thank you Adrienne.
There are some interesting blogs in this list, nicely divided into sections and well worth a review. See link

http://onlineitdegrees.org/top-100-it-industry-blogs/

How can technology help your company win business?

In these times we need to do even more in order to sustain business levels and at the same time try to increase them with new clients or customers.
The question here is can technology help your company to win business and following a lot of research that I have been carrying out the answer seems to be yes, although not necessarily directly.

What that means is that the core to winning business will still be based around the product or service, the price and possibly the relationship. At the end of the day the customer wants the right thing at the right price delivered in the right way and by somebody they have confidence in.

So how can technology play its part?
Technology can help in numerous ways mainly around automation, providing access to information, analysis of information, specialist systems and improved collaboration.

The specifics identified in my research seem to fall under a number of headings although like most things when you try to put them into a single box they spill over into other boxes but here are my groupings:-.

Customer
Satisfied customers can and do defect. They are often seeking more than a service and want solutions that are innovative, add value and remove their pain points. They also like being delighted when they receive a service that provides unexpected value.
In order to achieve this I believe we need to understand not just the process that we use to deliver service but also the customer’s process and to involve them in this analysis. This will help us to seek out where value may be added.
Some of the areas the research indicated that are customer related were:-
• Providing the customer with improved process
• Giving more transparency with direct access to information
• Improving the customers experience and ensuring relevance
• Providing online systems that are product or service based and that can shorten the supply chain
• Understanding the customers requirements and pain points and delivering unique solutions in response
• Demonstrating relevant technologies that give the client confidence and maybe demonstrate cost containment or quality assurance
• Demonstrating security and data leak prevention to install confidence

Analysis
Knowledge is power and analysis of your knowledge (data) may highlight some interesting results. Your company will have a mass of data, sometimes buried in different systems, but if this can be harnessed and analysed, often known these days as Business Intelligence, then it will assist in the decision making process and hopefully guide you on where to concentrate your new business activities. Results of the research were:-
• Use Business Intelligence to spot growth areas
• Use predictive analytics to identify opportunities and likelihood of success
• Identify profitable areas and focus new business on these



Marketing
The best marketing is still about understanding what the customer wants, listening to their feedback, matching your offering and then getting your message out hopefully in tune with your clients and your target markets. Clients are also interested these days in technology and your capability, your security and your innovations to name a few so these are worth getting over in any pitch or tender. Supporting the marketing message are numerous systems with Web sites and the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) as the prime marketing database. The march of social networking technologies continues and not just in the personal communication market. This is a brand new set of technologies that can be exploited in your marketing campaigns and the power is integrating these new technologies with the existing core CRM products which could open up new prospects, markets as well as providing better data on what your customers are doing. A lot of this trend was identified in the research and included the following specific points:-
• Using social networking for lead generation and qualification
• CRM systems to maintain relationships and information about prospects
• CRM integrated with social networking site contacts
• Google alert type systems to track clients and filter to CRM
• Reporting systems on deals lost and delayed for lessons learnt
• Demonstrating technology capability in pitches
• Web analytics
• Web sites that sell your services and allow easy contact

Internal Business
The remaining area was about using technology to improve internal processes which would not only enhance the client experience and support the business goals but also free people from unnecessary tasks so they could be more productive in marketing and selling. In particular the following research data fell into that category:-

• Innovative businesses models/Streamline/ automate to reduce costs and make product/service more competitive
• Use of technology to free up people time
• Support business goals and expansion plans

So it would seem that Technology is in a supporting role but used properly in conjunction with other initiatives it can help to win business

The Importance of a Project Management Methodology

One of the things that is important to project success is having a consistent methodology across the whole organisation.
The alternative of allowing different methodologies or no methodology is often inefficiencies, higher costs, longer schedules and of course higher risk.

Consistency means having a standard way of managing all projects. It ensures that all aspects of the project are considered, evaluated and documented.

Methodology is a collection of agreed processes, methods and tools to accomplish an objective. It becomes a road map for managing projects and provides guidance to project teams.

Advantages abound in that you can achieve common:-
• Training
• Understanding
• Process
• Tools and techniques
• Measurements

And of course a key advantage is that the risk of failure is reduced.

And as more projects are completed using the methodology it becomes part of the fabric of work, speeds up the project process and can help to reduce change management issues as more of the work force understand the process, where to find information and who to communicate with.

The methodology does not need to be rigid and can be modified to suit the particular projects although the core process will remain. The tools and techniques become a tool chest from which the right tool can be chosen for the right job. One essential tool on any project of a reasonable size is suitable software to help manage the project. The number of tasks and resources being managed becomes very difficult without some software to assist particularly once changes start coming in requiring some replanning.

A lot of organisations will take a common method such as that from ‘PMI’ or ‘Prince’ and adapt it to their own requirements without losing the essence of the methodology.

They can of course go wrong and this is generally a result of over enthusiasm which creates a monster by following methodologies to the finest detail regardless of the size of the project or the capability and type of the organisation. Other problems occur when core elements are bypassed usually as a result of weak project management.

Setting up a methodology in the first instance does require commitment in terms of resource and money. The most important aspect is buy-in from top management and if it isn’t driven top down then it will fail.
There will then be which method do we go for, do we need to adapt it, what are training requirements, communication to the business and help with introducing the chosen methodology. In most cases external consultancy help is needed in choosing the methodology and in helping to introduce it into the company.

A project driven company is often a successful company and one that can delight clients by delivering change in a timely and efficient manner.

Back again

Lost the service for a while due to DNS problem but all seems to be back now.

Silicon CIO50 2009

Maybe a bit of self promotion here but hey ho!
Very pleased to have been voted in the silicon.com Top 50 CIO's
see link below:-


http://www.legalitprofessionals.com/index.php/news/619-peter-birley-amongst-50-most-influential-and-innovative-uk-cios

I think this is one more example of the power of Social Networking in combination with the more traditional ppromotion of articles and speaking which get your messages out.