Incrementality

Les tendances de la Valley, par 1000mercis... par PetitShow

I wanted to write this blog post after having watched this video. CEO of 1000 mercis Yseulys Coste is speaking about the hypest words in the Silicon Valley at the moment: Incrementality and people based marketing. I wanted to get some thoughts on the first item.

Indeed, Incrementality is the graal of marketers: Being able to have a clear identifiable impact on sales, and hence, on the results of a company. Today, thanks to big data, we have more and more information that could help in this quest of identification. Same thing for category management and retailing: If I enter a new SKU, how much extra sales could I expect from it? Moreover, how much it will cost me to extend my product range (the infamous COGS I discussed several times here).

But this quest is far from being easy. Nowadays, we have so many factors that could impact sales that it is difficult in a 360 marketing approach to measure individually each factors:

• The quality of the product: Something that people tend to forget, but if you have an average innovation launched in a crowded market, your elasticity will be low
• The mass media advertizement. Even though going in limbo compared to Internet and social media budgets, mass media like TV, radios or billboarding are still very efficient sales booster, even though it is hard to link direct sales to it.
• Retailing effort: You know it is my forté, but you need to invest in your retailing channel (as a brand). End of the aisle display, interractions with the shopper, make sure you have the right stock available in store not to miss sales.
• Of course, Direct marketing campaigns, including social media, emailing, or even website visiting, where you can have a lot of info about the shopper path toward the sales.

Here are also some aspects you need to take into consideration:

Behavioral Data
One of the key component of segmentation today is to be based on customers behaviors. Indeed, social and geographical segmentation is no longer applicable, as customers adopt their consumption based on what they believe rather than historical background.

Dividing your Data Base into 2 Groups
One of the best ways to measure incrementality is to have two groups of people: One who will see the ad, and another one that won't see it (for example, one will receive an email, the other don't). Three aspects to keep in mind:

• Let's not forget that you won't master the other aspect of your 360 marketing effort. For example, do you know that your first group of people has seen no products in its local store? It has not seen the billboard campaign? It has been away on vacation at the moment? 
• One of the issue that I have is that it is ok to test, to experiment, in a R&D effort. But if you really want to have a deep impact on sales, it is also important to have an impact on 100% of your data base. And that is something sometimes CRM experts tend to forget.
• You need to have large enough groups, and specifics group, in order to extract real information of the testing. If you do it on a data base lower than 10% of your overal data base, the info won't mean much. Moreover, if you have only 100 people for the test, it won't really be good infos either.

The topic is wide and interesting. I 'll probably write more in posts to come.

US Magazines Try New Business Modells To Boost ROI of Advertizers

ROI is a key performance index for marketers, and new technologies allow to have a clear picture of the performances of new digital media. This is one of the reason why some more traditional media such as newspapers and magazines are struggling.

I read this very interesting article, discussing about a Wall Street Journal article. In Norther America, some magazine companies have implemented a new interesting business model. If an advertizing campaign has not significantly increase sales, the magazine company will give money back. 

3 conditions:

• Your campaigns need to be set to reach 125 million readers (about 40% of the US population, which means a huge campaign) at least three times during a 12 months time frame. 
• Brands need to raise their budgets at the magazine company in order to cover the potential cash back cost.
• Products sold by the company needs to be monitored by third party market research companies: Nielsen Panels, Catalina loyalty reward program monitoring... The idea is to have a clear third party able to identify objectively the impact of the campaign.

Studies established by the Time Magazine Company shows that one dollar invested in advertizing with them triggers $17 incremented sales. 

I believe the initiative is great. For sure mass market media are key marketing tools to launch new products or set strong brand equity. Actually, I am kind of deceived on how advertizers use social media like Youtube or Facebook to advertize, as it looks more like spamming than anything else. 

It is kind of a cultural revolution for those companies to think that way which I actually like. They have a strong tool to advertize, and the risk of losing is low. 

Which Is The Most Efficient Social Media At Driving Ecommerce Business?

I am sure this question interests you. Social media advertizing budgets have skyrocketed and know what is the most efficient usage of social media remains key to manage your campaigns properly.

Here is an interesting tweet, giving some Shopify data on where the crowd comes from.

#Facebook is by far the #Socialmedia driving the most #sales - #Infographic by @Shopify #Twitter #Linkedin #Reddit pic.twitter.com/q5OJAeyZhN

— Paul Bachelier (@Bach_Paul) August 2, 2015

I have several comments to make about this chart.

First of all, don't get fool about the Facebook stats. Indeed, below you wil see a chart with the active monthly users with dates close to the chart of Shopify. Facebook counts about 194 times bigger than Facebook or LinkedIn. The only one where can clearly see that is not performing well is Youtube, where the gap with Facebook is huge compared to the number of users.

Secondly, What is very interesting about the chart is to have a category management analysis: some categories tend to be more efficient on Facebook than others. But there is a clear bias. I don't believe Facebook fits well those categories, but I believe social media may fit better those categories. And it is hard to tell if you may have better results with other social media.

Permission Marketing: Thoughts On How Social Media Leverage Their Potential On Advertizing

I wrote not so long ago an article about how people were blocking ads on social media, and why it was a threat to the ecosystem. Don't get me wrong, I still believe the same way. But I am a high consumer in Youtube videos, I use to listen to shows and/or music online. And since several months, I am spammed by massive number of commercials. It is nearly impossible to have over 5 minutes of content without a commercial popping out.

Another issue, is that most of the time, it is continually the very same commercial that pops out. It has been for weeks Engie, the new merger between GDF & Suez, but also commerciales about clothing soaps, among others.

I point out two issues:

• The number of ads proposed, which doom the user experience
• The fact the threshold effect is reach so fast, as it is the very same commerciales showing on...

Social media and online advertizing was supposed to be the age of customized and rich content, with retargeting technique, and accurate message at the right time. None of that.

In a race to be considered as a key social media company, a lot of global corporations are spending massive amount of money to flood the web with their commercials. They use the same techniques online than for a TV campaign. And that worries me. 

1. Worries me as a user, because I can't enjoy a good experience
2. Worries me as a marketer, because I believe we are far from the permission marketing and one to one marketing as it should be done with social media
3. Worries me for the social media eco system companies like Twitter, Facebook or Youtube needs in order to keep growing and developping their amazing products.

I believe social media have a part of responsabilities, as they are the ones who permits announcers to publish commercials. They therefore should take a good care of their user experiences, because if not, maybe people will turn to other social media.

How Social Media Changed Our World

 

A quick blog post about an interesting graph I found on Internet: whathappens online in 60 seconds. What is fascinating is to see the volume of interactions you have in the world thanks to social media. We have never been so interconnected. That also means it is much more difficult to control your image and/or your communication. In this world, it is important to master social media, to embrace the conversation, in order to be able to leverage it as a marketing tool, but also to manage potential crisis.

Some Thoughts On How You Measure Influence on Social Media

It has been a while I wanted to share with you this very interesting article of Techcrunch. The article questions the way people apprehend who are influencers on social media, and how we recognize them. Indeed, one of the first way brands and companies are targeting influencers are the number of people who follows them, and how many of them retweet or reply to their posts. Obviously, by doing so, you focus on the ability of one message to grow and to have a large audience. But does it really mean these people are influencial?

Indeed, in terms of marketing, is it enough to have people allowing you to grow your audience of a specific message? Does it really implies that it will lead to more business?

Social influence scores, such as Klout, measure how likely the Facebook fans of Mitt Romney are to engage and share his updates with the rest of their social media friends. However, given that many followers of Romney are already die-hard Republicans, would they have already seen a video he shares on the Drudge report anyway? If Romney solicits his followers for money, would they have already contributed through another website? In other words, social friends are sheep-like: they read the same articles, download the same apps, and give money to the same causes and politicians. Aral says that caring about high follower count could be a “waste of money” if so-called “influencers” are not actually changing behavior. According to the paper, it turns out that follower counts and retweets may be much less important than demographics, such as age, personality type, and gender in determining who is influential and who’s susceptible to social media manipulation.

One of the obvious issue, is to check at brand fanned on Facebook. The brands that are more liked are luxury ones, whereas we all know those brands are niche market ones, meaning they have very few clients. Does having a large number of followers imply more business with the few that are real clients? 

Probably, one of the best way to really see what impact social media have on sales would be to identify customers with their social media accounts, but this is not really yet the case. 

Thanks to the big data, the large number of users, soon we'll be able to have a clearer view of how social media impact sales, and the way people consume. It will be very interesting to follow.

The Real Costs Of Social Media Marketing

Here is an infographic I found on the website of Percolate about the real cost of social media marketing. 

It gives a pretty clear view about how much each components of a social media campaign costs. What is not put into prospectis is the reach you may have with this strategy. These figures are based on the Nestlé marketing campaigns, and I believe that depending on the size of your company, and foremost the size of your online community, the cost/reach will be very different from one account to another. Anyways, I would also like to see the comparaison between these figures and traditionnal media such as radio, TV etc... to see actually what is the most cost efficient.

Zappos Experimenting Social Shopping With Pinterest: Pintpointing

Social Commerce and Social Shopping have brought a lot of hype those past two years. Social media indeed has sprung up to become part of our daily lives. And marketers are still looming on how to leverage sales and marketshares thanks to these new media. But not a lot of them have been able to unlock the real potential of social media in terms of sales growth.

Amazon's owned company Zappos is one of the most creative e-merchant. They have about a year ago a new project in order to leverage Pinterest's success into a source of marketing and sales. The project was called Pintpointing. It allowed Zappos to propose product propositions based on Pinterests posts of one person. 

Zappos already lets users share what they buy through Facebook Inc. (FB), Twitter Inc. and Pinterest. While consumers share more often on Pinterest than on the other two social networks, sales from Pinterest posts contribute the smallest amount of revenue, Young said.

Zappos users were 13 times more likely to share a purchase on Pinterest than on Twitter and 8 times more likely to share on Facebook than Twitter, Young said. Even so, posts on Twitter brought in the most revenue -- an average of $33.66 an order -- while Facebook posts garnered $2.08 per order and sales from Pinterest were 75 cents on average, he said.

Pintpointing is a real marketing one to one project, and I wonder if it really worked. Indeed, I have tried to look for concrete results to share with you, without success.

Nevertheless, I believe that such an experimentation is important, because indeed, proposing great proposals based on social media activities is probably a great marketing tool.

Some Thoughts About Facebook's Long Term Strategy

I wanted to share with you an article (In French) I found about Facebook's Strategy for the next 15 years.

Here are the bullet points:

- Mobile as the heart of the strategy: Social media users migrate more and more to a mobile usage. That means applications must be developped on this channel to keep on growing their data base. The goal of Facebook in 5 years from now is to convert its users to its other mobile applications, such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and Search. And then only to monetize this audience. This is this point that annoys mean. I mean, Facebook has already reached a large number of users, billions are using the service, it is now a public company, and is actually experiencing difficulties to keep some of its audience that are not using Facebook anylonger. I don't know if it is still time to grow the audience first, and then seek for monetization systems. Facebook needs to be profitable ASAP, in order to leverage these profits in new projects.

Splitting Facebook's Activites in several applications. The goal is to provide a better user experience. Indeed, when you have such a big Facebook activity, it becomes sometime overwhelming. It will probably also allows to have more advertizing product to market in order to get revenues out of it. Mark Zuckerberg believes that the different usage of Facebook actually respond to different target, with different interests. This is also something that is scaring me. Indeed, the Internet has based its success on the accessibility, and the freedom it allowed. But if Facebook really starts to master all the component of people's relationship online, Facebook would become a sort of private web, which everybody used and hence would be forced to use. 

Allowing The Most To Access The Internet: Mark Zuckerberg has goals to provide Internet to poor countries in order to the most people to access its service, which is something cool. 

The good thing about this stratgegy:

It is long term, it has a real vision. And I believe it is based on a good strategy, on the right path.

The bad thing about this strategy:

This strategy still delays the time when Facebook would become really profitable. I believe that Facebook has already mastered its competition, and can now focus on its business modell. Its IPO was meant for that reason. But Mark Zuckerberg don't really expect any revenues before a dozen of years... It is very risky.

What To Think About #Foursquare New Strategy?

Foursquare has been a company I have been following right from the beginning. I loved the concept, about geolocalization mixed with social media. The application was also working great. But Foursquare have been struggling for years now to actually concretly find a business modell.

They have not been able to get a large enough audience to really go on with the original idea of gaming, which could ultimately become a way to advertize geolocally. They have not so long ago relaunch their application, abandonning the initial concept to become a geolocalization application of businesses, much more like Yelp. 

But I believe that it was the issue: How can you be better than Yelp that has been there already for years? It seems that the relaunch has not yet experience much success. Once again it is not because the application is not good, it is just that Foursquare was not able to turn its application and audience into a real business modell.

I don't know if that was a great strategical move, as geolocalization is doing great, especially with the new ibeacon technology. Maybe Foursquare should have more focused on this technology, because they already had a pretty good know how in terms of geolocalization advertizing.

 It is hard now to find the next move Foursquare will make, but I believe that they are still a talented company, and wish them the best, hoping they could find a way to make things work.

Nutelladay.com Case Study: When Customers really take the power

Nutella is one of the most powerfull brand I know. It is quite often taken as an example on how strong branding can leverage high revenues. Despite some contreversy, especially linked to the use of palm oil in its recipe, people still love Nutella. Actually, Nutella is known for its vast group of fans, making it a great topic for tribe and social marketing guru.

Nevertheless, an article caught my attention about a recent story. Nutelladay.com is a website created by fans of the product in 2007, which were working on creating a Nutella Day to celebrate the product. In 2014, Ferrero, the producer of Nutella, decided to shut down the website, for no official reasons. My guess is that Ferrero wanted to take over the control of this popular website which became with the time a reference about their product. 

But social media and the Internet in overall has changed the game. When you have such a popular brand, it is nearly impossible to control how people use your brand for either positive messages (which was the case for Nutelladay.com) or negative (which is the case for activists against palm oil).

What is funny is that Nutella has such a high asset with its group of fans hooked to its product, but because of old corporate reflex they tried what they could to stop it to gain control.

What do you think about it?

Study Questions Social Media As A Traffic Source For E-Retailers

Social media's budgets and expenses have raised fast those past few years. As social media gained exposure , companies tried to leverage these new media in order to raise sales, especially by reaching customers in a brand new way. Hence, a lot of market studies and professional articles discussed about how an appropriate social media strategy helped companies to trigger sales, and raise revenues.

Nevertheless, it seems that the real potential of social media as a revenue generator is still questioned. A recent study showed that social media is already lagging as a direct traffic source for e-merchants. 

"Social media represented just 1.55 percent of all ecommerce traffic, way behind search (31.43 percent) and trailing email (2.82 percent). And social media traffic numbers were down from Q1, 2012, when they were 2.36 percent. The data lead to the question: Should brands change their approach to social marketing?"

I have always been an early user of social media, but also an evangelist. Despite these facts, I have also studied a lot how to use social media like Facebook, Twitter among others in order to generate more business, and in general to improve customer relationship management. And as I have become an expert of the question, I still wonder sometimes how to use these tools in order to have concrete business results.

By the nature of social media, even though they are set with a large amount of customer data available (what people calls "big data"), it is difficult to link one sales to one action on social media. 

What is for sure is that companies that have invested important budgets in social media most of the time are the ones who thrives the most on their market. This study is for sure very interesting because it sets two facts we should never forget:

• Social media remains small compared to other mass media like TV, radios, or even newspapers
• Social media return on investment is not that easy to measure. 

I believe that social media is here to stay, and that there is a lot of room for improvement in order to have better results with their usages. 

Social Media And Retailing: How Lidl Uses Facebook In France

Social medias uses in business and retailing starts to be common. Most of retailers on a fan page on Facebook, and sometimes a Twitter account. But today I wanted to write about not a standard retailer, but a hard discount retailer that have decided to communicate on social media : Facebook.

Lidl is one of the largest retailer in the world. Despite a low cost model, short product ranges and very little advertising, it has been able to spead all around Europe, and (even though they don't communicate their sales figures) it is believed they are in the top 5 ranking of the largest retailers.

Lidl has never communicate much. It is in its strategy. As a hard discounter, its goal is to minimize every cost possible, in order to sell its goods as cheap as possible, maximizing the mergins. 

But Lidl has changed over the time, as the hard discount model is starting to go in limbo. They have hence decided last year in France to create a Facebook Fan's page. After one year, they already have 280 000 fans! What is even more impressive, is that they have way more fans than retailers that are at least twice bigger than them in France: Intermarché (200 K), Leclerc (133 K) and Carrefour (the largest one with only 34 Ks). 

We must say that a year ago, Lidl has made a large advertising campaigns on its leaflets in order to launch their fan page.  But nevertheless, even though they don't communicate that much now about it, the fan community growth pace is still fast.

What does Lidl post on it?

Well, mostly, promotions and products reviews. Clearly they don't have a budget to animate the community, like some other brands have (proposing games, specific discounts, content such as receipes...). Despite the little budget they own (once again there are only two people dealing with the whole Internet presence, which is also encompassing emailing campaigns and the website maintenance), they really bond with the customers, as they have a 10% interaction rate on most of their posts...

Some thoughts about Lidl

Even though Lidl is a concept based on private label, and on proposing no brands, Lidl is not a no-brand, it is actually a strong brand, with which customers bond. This is the reason why they have been able to create such a connection with their community.

Social Media in Lidl Strategy

Lidl is evolving fast, leaving the traditional hard discount concept to a more modern one. Nicolas Calo, the communication manager of Lidl France, declares that the social media investment is part of the overal strategy of the group to modernize their concept. He also adds that "the concept goes more toward modernity and proximity: that is what Facebook is bringing to us: Modernity of communication, and proximity to our clientele".

I find that amazing that Lidl, despite very little budgets compare to its competition, despite a concept that is based on very little advertizing and customer service, has been able to become one of the best success story in the Facebook's retailing world.

What do you think about it?

Backplane: Should Companies Create Private Virtual Communities?

It has been years now that Facebook interests companies in order to bond with their customers/communities. Marketers have understood how powerful social media could be to create brand awareness and to reach their customers in a unique way.

But Facebook almost monopoly on social communities bring some questions: Is it a good thing that companies rely on a private company's tool to connect with its customers? Indeed, it is a normal behavior for a company to want to master and control what it is doing. Indeed, Facebook can whenever it wants change its policy which could have great impact on people's community.You should see what is going on with Google's decision to charge company using Google Maps: People are moving away from Google's tool, which can have many consequences.

Also another important question is: Is Facebook really the best way to connect with my customers? Facebook has a specific way to create Facebook pages, and it is not as easy to customize the page.The main strength of Facebook is that it has already a large number of users, and it is therefore easier to grow a community quickly. But afterwards comes the will to animate this community, and maybe there are better tools than a Facebook page.

This is the reason why, a lot of companies are willing to create their own social media, outside of Facebook. And this is where comes Backplane. Backplane is a company which has built Lady Gaga's virtual community.The famous pop star is known for having a large community following her both on Facebook and Twitter. The Backplane's ambition is to leverage the know how brought by the Lady Gaga's experience to other companies willing to create a similar link with their communities.

"Backplane is exploring the possibilities for mainstream brands, from Nike to ExxonMobil, to create virtual communities that foster deeper relationships with customers. (In the case of ExxonMobil, the likeliest passion for the firm to tap is not for petroleum itself, but for the different brands of car it powers.) The trick is to find those key influencers and amplify their voices. Mr Carter says that experience with Lady Gaga has taught him that what a super fan says can sometimes have a bigger impact on fellow fans than a word from the Lady herself. "

It reminds me sort of of Tripnity, a company which has developped a long time ago now (at least 5 years) a community for Air France's passengers to connect with people taking the same flight at the same time (bluenity). The community is still on, but I am not really sure about the success.

The question is, should companies try to create their community outside of Facebook, and use the service of a company like Backplane?

I am not sure about the answer: I think it is risky to rely on Facebook, because Facebook could decide soon (as they will become more eager to generate profits as they will be in the stock exchange market) to charge professional use. We all know that, at the spike of the social commerce hype Facebook asked for huge commissions in order to use Facebook for selling purposes.

Now Facebook knows how to create powerful communities, as they have a long experience on it.Also, you have now a lot of people with the expertise of communities on Facebook (advertizing agencies, companies...) because they took part of several of them. It is therefore easier to leverage this expertise.

But I believe that the main strength of Facebook is that people are already registered in Facebook ,and entering a community is much easier for a user than to register on another service.I believe that the registering process is a real threshold, and Facebook has the chance to have people already on it.

Nevertheless, I think the question should be asked depending on the budgets and the ambitions of the brand.

What do you think about it?

Let Your Customers Speak Out

"Always Remember: If customer don't have effective way to voice complaint, they just quit doing biz w/ the co."
This sentence is a quote from @tedcoine I found out on Twitter. I believe it is a very interesting one in term of customer relationship management. Indeed, social media have changed the way companies interract with customers.


They can not anylonger avoid listening to angry customers, and they must now deal with it. This is the job of community managers, a new trade which is blossoming.


It is not a natural behavior for a company to let its customers to speak out its complaints and issues. A company sells products, and is seeking for efficiency, which implies standard processes in order to save time and costs.


But ultimately, customer satisfaction is the key factor which will bring success or not to one company.


A lot of companies have looked for ways to silence unhappy customers. They believed that by doing so, they will be able to keep the happy ones happy, and that eventually, unhappy ones would come back.


But it is no longer possible. And this is the reason why they must deal with it now.




This is the reason why it is important to have a strong feedback management system. A one which is able to deal with the large number of media one customer may use to get in contact with the company:

• A call center if it is via telephone.
• A customer service if it is by mail or email
• A community manager if it is by a social media
• A sales person if it is in a store
• An after sales service if it is because of a broken product.

Those media are expensive to manage, and to keep active. But they are vital, because it will minimize the lost of clientele in case of problems.


Also, something very important to think about is how to manage and leverage the large amount of information you may get from all those different sources.


The infromation will come from various ways, but it is important to have a tool which will allow the analyse of all the dysfunction customers may experience.

Will The Internet Kill Mass Media Marketing?

The communication market is changing fast due to the rise of Internet usage, and more especially the spike of social media usage. For over 30 years, marketing and communication have been strong tools for companies like Mc Donald’s, Coca Cola, or other global companies to gain market shares and become tycoons. The boom of TV and radio equipment allowed those companies to reach a large number of customers nationwide, and to impact sales in a great way (even though it is difficult to measure accurately the link between a TV campaign and sales, every one agrees that TV campaigns have a great impact on sales growth).

But nowadays the communication landscape has evolved, due to the multiplication of communication tools, but also with the rise of Internet. Internet is by definition the opposite of a mass media, which pushes the content to the audience, whereas the audience decide which website they want to visit.

This change is happening right now. We can clearly see that TV audiences are decreasing while Internet usage is booming. Nevertheless, television advertising remains a must for most of those companies, especially when they are leaders or strong challengers of a market.

For decades, some communication gurus have ruled the world of communication, letting us known what to consume, but the new tools they will have to use for the next decade (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, blogs…) are not set up to become “mass media” tools. The whole idea is actually to segment the audience, in order to suit better their needs and points of interest.

Some brands have already experienced great successes by using social media for campaigns, but I believe that we are not done yet. And I believe that this decrease of power of mass media will not only change the way commercials will be designed, but also it will change the way companies will think their products, by focusing more on customization, and adaptation to customers’ needs.

What do you think about it?

Global Companies Thrive On Social Media

Social media is becoming mainstream, and global companies thrive on it. At the beginning, when the whole web 2.0 started, a lot of experts, including myself were wondering how global companies, which are control freak most of the times, could adapt to start conversing with customers thanks to these media. But it seems that actually they quite understood how to leverage those tools.

This is what is explained in a very interesting report I found, about how Fortune 100 companies use the four main social media platforms which are Facebook Twitter, Youtube and blogs, as a marketing tool.

Burson-Marsteller 2011 Global Social Media Check-up

View more presentations from Burson-Marsteller

And the results are quite impressive:

• An increase of 25% of the number of companies who are using all four social media tools versus last year.
• 25% of Fortune 100 companies combines the 4 social media in their strategies.
• 67% of companies using Twitter use the “@replies” feature to converse with users.
• An impressive 84% of those companies use at least one of the platform
• 80% of Fortune 100 companies are talked about on Twitter.This is the main reason why it is important to look after what is going on Twitter…
  

Nevertheless, there is still room for improvement:

• In Twitter, the average followers per account figure is 5 076: This is very few compare to the millions of customers those company have over the world, and compared to the millions of people using Twitter. Nevertheless, the number of followers grown in average of +241% last year.
• 84% of Facebook pages are posts in last week. It may seem a lot, but I believe that a good fan page should at least be posted 5 times a week…
  
  

Also, I liked in this report a very interesting point: Having multiple accounts allow one company to reach different stakeholder groups. I believe this is a very interesting point, because as a global company, you may have very different customer groups, but also very different products.

This is one of the basics of customer relationship management: Being able to adapt to your audience. And if you are really planning on discussing with your customers, it is way much easier to have accounts related to a specific topic.

For example, if I take as an example Microsoft:

• They have business to business activities, with their CRM products, Microsoft offices licenses, maybe we may even add in this category the Surface products.
• They are in the video game market with the Xbox
• They are in the cell phone market
• Of course they have softwares and operating systems for PC
• They are all over the world, and you may not interact the same way with US customers and Asian ones.
  

Therefore this is a great advice you should consider: Think glocal: You need to have a strong global brand, to use in the social media, but also several accounts allowing to adapt upon the typology of stakeholders you have.

Social Media vs Email: Ben & Jerry’s Case Study

Couple of weeks ago I visited the Foum E-Marking in Paris. As I have said in a previous post, I have been pretty deceived about the fair, as I did not see much innovation whereas the market is constantly evolving, toward more social media. @joelbirch said on Twitter it was both funny and scary, and I must agree.

I found this very interesting article on social media.

It is very interesting for 2 reasons:

• It explains the reasons why Ben & Jerry’s shifted from email to social media strategy.


• It is an example of a food company using social media, which remains rare.

Ben & Jerry’s decided to stop their emailing program, and to switch its effort onto social media.

Now Ben & Jerry’s count 1,3 million fans on Facebook. Nevertheless, some customers are not happy as they would rather receive offers via email than logging in Facebook.

In terms of customer relationship management, social media offers a great opportunity to bond with customers. But in this specific case, it is bad the fact that Ben & Jerry’s is ignoring a large part of its customers.

On the company’s side, there is one thing which needs to be seen: Emailing are pushed marketing campaign, while social media is pull: That means it does not exactly respond to the same problematic…


Now, does it mean that emailing is dead?
Some people are really thinking it might. In a rea with other media of communication like Facebook, Twitter, Instant messaging, it is difficult to picture the future of emailing. Now, of course, I know that a lot of people will say that over time no communication media disappeared, they tend to add up. But emailing might be considered as a part of microblogging activities (this is just a thought).

Emailing, on the company’s side has great strengths: It is easy to get data and measure the return on investment it might get.

Social media may also be a “push marketing” tool, as updates are getting inside fan’s data feed.

I believe that Ben & Jerry’s decision might be a little bit extreme, and emailing still has a bright future ahead of him, for at least couple of things. But it is very interesting to see how Ben & Jerry’s are using this new medium.

Cars Empowered With Social Media: The Future Is Near

I think I found what my next car will be. It is called the Mini Cooper Connected and it seems very promising. You will find here a video showing you out why.

The Mini Copper has a social media feed from Facebook, check your Twitter account, you may connect to Google maps to find places to visit... We may imagine a Foursquare feature which would propose you to check in in a glance.

This is a very cool way to think how the car will be in the future. Actually, it has been years that car manufacturers are thinking about bringing the Internet inside the car. But nobody has really brought those projects to life. It is actually interesting to watch this new concept. Indeed CEO of Renault Carlos Ghosn was at Leweb this year, and was discussing with Loic Lemeur about how to incorporate Internet in cars. And as you will see in this video, is why quite pessimistic about setting up a car empowered with Internet. In his opinion, for security reasons, car manufacturers should not equip cars with Internet because it could distract drivers. Of course I understand that security must be the top priority for a car...

I believe that in the end, we will all have the Internet in our cars, and this will be great. As Mini Cooper is part of the BMW group, I can't wait to see what these "connected features" will be in premium BMW models.

What do you think about it?

Utopia: If France Decides To Create Its Own Facebook

I am always skeptikals when I see some web 2.0 companies valuation. Indeed, some of these companies have not sold anything yet, but investors spend billions into it. Most of the time these evaluations are based on the number of users one company have, as investors are counting on the audience to sell advertizing space, either it is keywords, banners, sponsored articles, or "promoted Tweets".

Here is some of the valuation I found:

LinkedIn is worth $2 billions

Facebook $33 billions

Twitter $4 billions, even though they are still loosing money

Myspace was bought in 2005 for $580 millions

These are some of the examples I found.

A lot of people are scared about how big Facebook is getting. Indeed, Facebook is the ultimate social network, which allows you to find all your friends, chat, share pictures... And people are affraid about losing the control of their private life on the web to a private company. I understand it may be scary. This is the reason why some projects like Diaspora emerged. They are willing to create an open source social network to compete with Facebook.

Now I wanted to share with you another idea of mine. Let's imagine for a moment that France decides to create his own social network, and to use the full potential of the long tail.

There are 60 millions of French persons in France, and about 40 millions have a regular access to the Internet. Let's imagine all of them decides to invest in a Facebook-like company, investing only 20€ in it. You will have a company with an equity of 800 millions €, and if you translate it into US dollards, it would be over $1 billions.

Now let's consider a ration between the number of users and potential advertizing revenues:

Facebook: 33 billions for 500 millions users: $66 by users

Twitter: 4 billions for 200 millions users: $20 by users

LinkedIn: 2 billions for 70 million users: $28 by users.

If we really think about it, with $20 invested by 40 million of French people, we would be able to have a tycoon of the Internet of our own.

Of course, this is pure utopia, but I just wanted to show two things:

• Valuation of companies just based on the number of users is dangerous. You may not sure that your website will turn into a highly efficient advertizing platform, Like Google accomplished.
• There is some money in France, and I don't understand why people complain we are not able to finance interesting start ups.

What do you think about it?