Retail Social Blueprint

@rajeshviswa

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rajeshviswa

Table of Contents
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Rajesh Viswanathan

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1 Notes
[11/15] How to create social media metrics that matter? Social media is generally a weak vehicle for direct sales. But awareness, consideration, loyalty & advocacy all contribute to sales. Awareness with a social media monitoring tool, measure the number of mentions of your brand or website URL Consideration look at onsite parameters such as visits, page views and time onsite. Loyalty easy loyalty measurement include number of comments and interactions, sign up on sites & number of friends and followers. Individually, none of these items show loyalty, but looking at them collectively provides loyalty insights. Advocates this can be measured by capturing the number of retweets, reblogs, mentions and positive sentiment of your brand. Realistic and true social media success is captured over time and short term success is probably not being a true indication of market reality. How Educators are Embracing Social technologies? Skype / Google Hangouts for language teaching digital pen pals Mobile Phones - Exchange questions and answers with their teachers via SMS. - Browse classroom blogs for additional instruction. - Students can quickly trade notes or take a snapshot of the blackboard for later studying. Twitter [11/17] Business Objectives - Revenue - Customer retention - Client engagement - Satisfaction [11/18] Social Business - Social business embraces networks of people to create business value. - Social business is a profound change that impacts all departments in the organization. - Companies must first prepare & align internal roles, policies, process and stakeholders Social Readiness Research customer profile, current social audit Planning crisis response plan, organizational models, Policies Policy Disclosure / ethics policy, social media policy, community policy Resources social strategist, community manager Reporting web analytics, community analytics Detailed health scores - Customer profile - Market analysis

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Audit Process Organizational model Policies Roadmap Education Communication Roles Stakeholders Monitoring Reporting

Holistic or Honeycomb Org model each employee is empowered, Dell & Zappos [11/21] Why brands & companies should be using Google+? https://plus.google.com/117139907586011263319 1. Google+ pages are official search profiles for brands. a. Direct connect b. +1 with expecting analytical features. 2. Business dont make customers happy, people do a. 90% of people rely on personal recommendations from friends before they make unfamiliar decisions. b. 84% of people do online research before they make any final purchase decision. c. Google is uniting the idea of recommendations and research through Google+. 3. Google+ drives conversations, not just comments. a. 95% of social posts online go unanswered and un-responded to. b. Peoples expectations are so low, they dont expect a response, so when they do get one, they love it. c. Hangouts d. Enabling key users to interact with the brands they know and love by having a real conversation with the people behind them will promote that positive public reputation your brand needs. 4. Google+ lets you better manage and target your audience a. Circles & Ripples [11/22] John Hagel on Social Technology Adoption 1. Change management process is not a rational process, its a political process. 2. Bus + Spare parts example 3. Where do people spend most of their time exception handling. 4. Social technology finding the right people, finding the right information and getting them to work together. Social software is a perfect fit for exception handing. 5. [11/28] Return Visit Aware concept different products depending on when you last visited. For example Facebook displays recent stories vs. Top stories since last visit. Social Proof - http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/27/social-proof-why-people-like-to-follow-the-crowd/ 1. Expert social proof approval from a credible expert like a magazine or blogger can have incredible digital influence. 2. Celebrity social proof 3. User social proof

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4. Wisdom of crowds social proof 5. Wisdom of your friends social proof [11/30] Social Shopping refers to those people who turn to their social networks for advice or research when they are considering a purchase. IBM data shows that people who arrive at a retailers site from Facebook are nearly twice more likely to buy something than other people. From a click-based experience to a people-based experience - Rather than clicking through pages and pages of Google search results, people are turning to their social networks for advice. The implications for retailers (or any business) are clear: you must identify, nurture and promote brand advocates, ratings and reviews, and social conversations. These are the people whose opinions will influence your sales across a network of people everywhere. Social shopping matters for one achingly simple reason: in the age of the empowered consumer, you are marketing and selling your goods and services to people who have a multitude of ways to broadcast their opinions to thousands upon thousands of other people (and potential customers). [12/2] Groundswell + Facebook 1. Listening 2. Talking a. Personalization based on Open Graph b. Involve customers by keeping their attention with photos, relevant, and interesting information. 3. Engaging a. Share / Like button b. Facebook reviews / share everything from the original product, to after their purchase, to their review of product itself. 4. Supporting 5. Embracing [12/5] How blogs influences purchases & recommendations? # State of the Blogosphere 2011 - Bloggers comment on brands and post to social media expanding reach. - 38% of bloggers post about brands that they love or hate and 34% write product or service reviews. New Trends Empowered Customers - Consumers are bringing their own devices into stores and expecting to shop on them. - Consumers are bringing competitors into stores, whether its another retailer or virtual competitors such as Amazon or eBay. - Consumers expect their store experiences to be web like information rich, personalized and flexible. - Retailers must find ways to bring capabilities traditionally locked in the enterprise ecommerce, order management, analytics etc. Stores Predictions 2012 1. Mobile The great unifier a. Much of excitement around mobile is not about transacting, its about influence providing local information shoppers are seeking about a store and being part of that conversation.

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b. Mobile will define the movement to unify all channels of retail. It is poised to become a tipping point in the quest for a true omni-channel business and will likely be a predictor of tomorrows winners. c. Mobile devices have access to deep data resources and enough capability to perform analytics. Greater optimization is within reach for retailers who embrace mobile BI. d. The time for watching and learning is over. The risk of not at least dabbling in mobile is much greater than the risk of not getting it exactly right the first time. Analytics Mission critical a. The challenge is that every mouse click and tap of a mobile device produces streams of data. Along with data coming in faster than ever, business problems are getting bigger and the analytics needed to solve them are becoming more complex. b. The days of managing by guesswork are behind us; retailers want to manage by fact. c. The relentless growth of data has led to the phenomenon of Big Data. Monetizing that data with an eye toward increasing operating margins or solving markdown optimization problems, for example, will monopolize retail IT shops in 2012. d. Engineered systems, where software and hardware are optimized to work together, will become more prominent in 2012 as retailers aspire to achieve analytics at the speed of thought. IT cloudy with a chance of greater visibility a. Near field communication is moving into more and more devices. Its creating demand from consumers, which should speed up deployment inside the store. b. Intelligent virtual agents for online customer service have become more common. Now, as voice response enters the retail lexicon, merchants will need to apply this knowledge as they address future customer interaction. c. Video analytics to map in-store activity will begin to reshape business objectives as retailers gain insight to workforce management, customer engagement, out of stocks, shopping patterns and more. Social going beyond like a. Retailers cant control the conversation about their brand, but listening to what shoppers are saying, gleaning insight and reacting to their feedback is yielding dividends. b. Retail brands are part of the conversation. If businesses are cavalier about their most important asset they may lose it. c. Companies will embrace analytics that help retailers understand the sentiments being expressed in the social realm and turn unstructured data into valuable assets. d. Facebook and Wal-Mart struck a deal that will allow users of social networking services to connect with their local stores. When the worlds biggest retailer says this is important, expect others to quickly follow its lead. Customers ruling retail a. Retailers need to rewire their operations to be more customer-centered, more relationship-oriented and more transparent. b. Practice co-creativity with your consumers and do more than just listen to the conversation react. c. Its time to figure out how to reward loyalty without being promotional. Store set the image a. New generation is looking for a seamless shopping experience for todays omnichannel shopper is ongoing. b. Among the questions retailers will wrestle with in 2012: Whats more important, the brands in the store or the brand on the door?

Rajesh Viswanathan

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Retailers need to control the shopping experience, using all channels to make it seamless. You cant operate 20th-century stores if you want to appeal to 21stcentury shoppers. d. Labor issues continue to vex some retailers. In the next 12 months task management will become more important as retailers attempt to move staff through critical activities in an orchestrated way. 7. #Groundswell Widgets - A stand along web application that can be embedded on 3rd party sites. - Widget use cases o Video / Audio players o Weather o News / Blogs Feeds o Twitter updates o Facebook status updates / likes o Flickr / Photo sharing albums o Maps o Slide shows o Audience / User polls - Why widgets o Keep people on your sites o Point people to related / relevant content on or off site. o Supplement copy with audio, video, slide shares, image galleries etc. o Provide useful information maps for directions, stock updates o Poll your site users. Wikis - Editable websites that allow end users to create and collaborate on content, web pages and site navigation structure. - Use cases o Document collaboration o Knowledge base o Project management o Intranet / extranet o Conference planning / networking o Neighborhood / community o Fan site Podcasting - Audio / video on demand. - Portability - Content as it is published - Syndicated programming - Convenience - Episodic content - Podcasts are available on all digital platforms / devices - Can complement existing content. - Use cases o Chat / interviews o

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# Focus on purpose, not on technology. #Groundswell Talking Objectives - Gain new customers - Promote your companys services & offerings - Find new employees / partners - Position yourself or your company as an industry thought leader. - Raise awareness of industry issues - Become a valuable source for credible and original industry insights for media. Define your target audience - Potential customers - Existing customers - General public - Influencers press, public - Industry experts Define your target market - Areas near your business locations - Cities where you might consider opening new locations

Rajesh Viswanathan

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Done well, socially-designed programs can help create a community of loyal advocates; done poorly, you brand yourself as inauthentic, out-of-touch, and maybe worst of all, boring. Purchase intent is influenced more than ever by both positive and negative online reviews. Smarter consumer is More instrumented use 2 or more technologies when shopping.

Add a social layer across all business functions. Pursue a policy of integration and specialization Build, activate and maintain a vibrant social graph

Rajesh Viswanathan

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