At the same time, AWS has revealed some of the glaring weaknesses of cloud computing. Anyone who has moved into full deployment on AWS has some horror story of cataclysmic outages affecting their cloud solutions. Amazon, to be blunt, initially just didn’t get it. Their customer service responses to outages were lukewarm at best. In fact, in one instance, they even used the old “Someone unplugged a cable” excuse to explain a mass of servers going down.

All of this comes into focus when one considers Enterprise Social Media. The vast majority of social software players run in the cloud, and gather data that comes from the cloud. The vast majority of enterprises however are still on-premise. This highlights a disconnect we’ve seen multiple times at Buzzient; a lack of awareness or responsiveness by PaaS providers to the 24/7, high availability requirements of the enterprise user base. More on this in a later post, but expect to see announcements from us in this area.

At the same time, I felt my west coast youth calling, and decided I would interview with a number of Silicon Valley companies. One of those was a newly public database company called Oracle. In the experience of interviewing, joining, and working at Oracle I learned a number of lessons that I’m only now understanding at Buzzient:

1. Draft best available athletes, then let them play:

When I joined Oracle, I was interviewed by Sales, Consulting, International and Marketing. There was no fitting me into a box, or only having me talk to one department. The attitude at Oracle was to get people in and let the candidate choose where they fit best. For me, I ultimately chose the International job, where I started in 2nd line tech support, then moved over to marketing. That experience gave me the opportunity to learn about the product, but also get a real customer advocate view of the world.

2. Encourage free expression, even conflict:

Anyone who was at Oracle during that time will tell you that half of the battles fought at Oracle were internal, not against external competition. I likened the Oracle experience to the Star Trek (geek alert) episode “Mirror, Mirror” where the fastest path to promotion was to assassinate your superior officer. Not to say that you want to create a culture of constant beating of chests and bumping of heads, but it’s important to enable the team to freely air grievances, new ideas, and defend those in a public forum.

3. You break it, you bought it:

As a corollary, if you break a process or strongly critique one, well, you better have an alternative. In other words, your team needs to focus on bringing new solutions to existing problems, not complaining about what isn’t right and just throwing it out there for someone else to fix.

These are three of the key dimensions I saw that were critical to Oracle’s growth as an enterprise leader. I think they still apply today.

Buzzient has always provided listening and reactive response.  With Publish2Social we’ve added the capability to proactively talk.

Talk-Listen
Imagine you use Publish2Social to schedule a post about your new promotion to Twitter and/or Facebook.  You use Social2CRM to harvest posts about it and integrate them directly into your CRM application (Siebel, CRM On Demand, Salesforce, etc.) so they get into your lead qualification workflow and reps engage over social from within your CRM system.  Maybe you’re also using Social2Chat to bring social posts into a chat for direct and quick conversation. Leverage the social channel to fill the funnel with prospects from the social channel without having to use separate application interfaces.

Listen-Talk
Maybe a problem with your product is blowing up on social media.   Social2CRM harvests and integrates these posts into your CRM application (Siebel, CRM On Demand, Salesforce, etc.).  You’re probably using Buzzient Filters to automatically create service requests when someone mentions problems.  However your customer service manager also sees these posts within the CRM interface as he/she is doing some ad hoc triage.  They immediately use Publish2Social to proactively send out a post that the company is aware of the problem and you’re digging into it.  This quick action can help mitigate the number of tickets coming into customer service.

But even if your needs don’t fit this talk-listen, listen-talk scenario you can use Publish2Social to speak any time you want.

And if you thought you couldn’t use Publish2Social from within your CRM system, have no fear.  Its embeddable just like any other Buzzient feature.

Be sure to check out Publish2Social here (free 7-day trial available!), Social2Chat here and Social2CRM here.

One thing the study doesn’t touch on is the amount of users who cross-post to both Facebook and Twitter, or even Linkedin. Does your Facebook social graph look the same as your LinkedIn social graph? Have you ever shared content across networks before? At Buzzient we have found that sharing content cross channel is key to reaching as broad and diverse of an audience as possible. Test my hypothesis: cross post this on your Linkedin profile, your Facebook wall and your Twitter feed. See which group responds and how the conversation is different. In case you need help to do just that (cough) sign up for a free 7-day trial of our recently released Publish2Social tool.

My thoughts are that the evolution of Enterprise Social Media breaks into three phases. Upfront I’ll acknowledge that these phases may overlap:

1. Social Media Monitoring (SMM)
2. Social Media Analytics  (SMA)
3. Social Media Integration (SMI) and Enterprise Social Media

I’ll briefly describe each of these, then save more detailed analysis for later posts.

Social Media Monitoring (SMM)

Social Media Monitoring (SMM) is the foundation of Enterprise Social Media. SMM is the basic listening function that all social products need to have. SMM enables a company to hear what social media users are saying about their company, products, brands, or even specific people. In general, listening is configured on a keyword, theme, or identify basis. The vast majority of listening tools require a human being to run the tool, and interpret the data. I liken SMM to the contrast knob on a color TV; you only notice it when it’s not there.

Most of the social media tools (over 100!) are in this stage of development. They provide basic monitoring, but they also require a human being to manage the application, and don’t provide any aggregated summaries or intelligence.

Tools such as Radian6 dominate the SMM market, which is generally seen in marketing and marketing communications teams.

Social Media Analytics (SMA)

The more advanced SMM applications include embedded analytics. These analytics range from simple post counts and tag clouds to deeper textual analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP). These monitoring tools that include analytics I categorize as Social Media Analytics (SMA).

With SMA, the raw social data is transformed into some type of measurable framework that customers can use to track changes in social media. So, words and posts are converted to a numbers. Some SMA applications include reporting of the social content in forms that can be distributed to non-social media experts, and without need for humans to be involved in their creation. Other SMA tools provide the ability to mash up the SMA data with Microsoft Excel™, so that customers can correlate SMA data with revenue, trouble tickets, marketing leads, or other internal measures. However, with SMA this correlation of social media with the business is still an outboard, discrete operation. As an example, a number of companies such as Dell and Gatorade have established “social listening” teams which use SMA to track the social impact of their products or brands. These social listening groups are eerily similar to the “dotcom subsidiaries” of the 90′s; discrete standalone groups that are not integrated with the overall business.

Radian6, Visible Technologies, and Buzzient all provide applications for SMA.

 Social Media Integration (SMI) and Enterprise Social Media

At some point, customers awaken to the need to fully integrate social media with business operations. As opposed to relegating social to the niche social listening squads, prescient companies realize that social media is enterprise content just like other data forms, and thus needs to be embedded in existing processes and workflows. With this shift comes the need for bringing social into the application user’s experience, in as native and natural a means as possible.

For example, a customer service representative looking at a client’s record would also want to integrate their Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare feeds into the client history. As opposed to waiting for the social listening team to share with them the “voice of the customer”, the customer service team can independently capture the social media relevant to customers, and assess how best to service the customer using social data as the catalyst.

Just as the Internet proved to be a powerful new channel for Enterprises, and eventually cut across all business functions (not just the dotcom subsidiary), social media is in the process of enabling customer service, HR, sales, QA, ERP and other corporate functions to directly interact with customers over social channels. The full integration of social with multiple business functions is the ultimate realization of Enterprise Social Media, where Social CRM, Social ERP, Social HCM, all emerge as the next iterations of existing application categories.

Buzzient is the only company positioned to integrate social media with multiple, heterogeneous business applications; Buzzient integrates social media seamlessly with Oracle, Salesforce, Infor, Interactive Intelligence and other applications.

As customers think about social media, it’s critical to understand what tools they have, as well as where these specific tools fall on the maturity path of phases 1-3.

Publish2Social is sold as a standalone product and you can sign-up today. Try it for free with a 7 day trial!

As part of the launch we have spruced up our website, so check it all out at http://www.buzzient.com

Metz mentioned in our webinar the work he did with Altimeter Group around “The 23 Use Cases of Social CRM”. One use case we thought was missing from this rather extensive list was Loyalty Programs. We see more and more customers asking about loyalty program integration and have identified three really interesting ways in which social CRM intersects with loyalty efforts:

1. Member Engagement and Customer Support

Loyalty programs are just about everywhere. (I have 5 customer loyalty cards on my keychain alone.) Aside from the obvious benefits of usage data that these programs present, they can really create a community for your best customers.

Your loyal customers are the ones you want talking up your brand online. It stands to reason that a social media monitoring system should be “member-aware.” Knowing when a high-revenue customer posts a positive or negative comment is critical.

While many social media efforts focus on getting the most-connected people talking about you, we argue that the ones that should have the most “clout” – with a “c”, not a “k” – within your organization are those that have the greatest impact your bottom line. Tools and processes that make it easy to keep tabs on your high value (read: recurring revenue) customers on social networking sites are paramount.

Having social media posts and interactions sit alongside all the other interaction data (purchase history, online activity, phone support calls, etc.) in the customer record in your CRM system is also critical. This is exactly why we integrated Buzzient Social Media Monitoring and Engagement platform with CRM systems like Siebel

2. Spreading the Word: Getting New Members

Loyalty programs are always looking to bring additional target customers into the fold. If you’re lucky, these customers always sign up for your loyalty program and you get 100% uptake.

If this is you, congrats, you can skip to the next section.

Otherwise, social media offers an excellent chance to capture new loyalty leads and convert them to members. Consider setting up alerts to find prime suspects and invite them through social channels to join your loyalty program. Look for certain keywords or phrases, or hand-pick users who have posted positive comments.

3. Sentiment Comparison

Loyalty programs can add a new dimension to sentiment analysis (which should be part of any social media strategy) by comparing member sentiment to the community at large. How does your brand affect the sentiment of the loyalty program members, and how big is the ripple effect on the general population over time?

When you have a link between your loyalty program and social media you can really see how much your program creates a halo effect for your brand on social channels.

And there are plenty of additional ways to use social media in loyalty programs. The most common request we hear is around awarding points or credit for social media interactions.

We see a strong emerging trend in social media leveraged for loyalty programs. To serve up a strong solution, we partnered with Oracle’s Siebel Loyalty team to produce an integrated system. For a detailed walk-through, check out Closed Loop Siebel CRM and Social Media. (The Buzzient part is toward the end, at about the 3 minute mark. The narrator doesn’t mention us by name, but trust us we’re in there!)

Buzzient is the only social media system integrated into CRM and Loyalty systems to enable these and other use case scenarios. For more use cases and to learn how Buzzient Enterprise can bring social into your CRM workflow, check out the Using Social section of our website.

With a title like that we had to read it right away. Basic gist is that they did a study with a few companies to see where their incoming questions were coming from. They found that 99.999% (yup 5 nines) of customer questions came from their website versus social media channels. This is about as dramatic a finding as can be, heck social is not even a rounding error. Is it time to reassign all those social media teams and Buzzient to find a new line of products to sell? We think not.

Rather than point to other data showing the importance of social media or try to poke holes in the report (which “Retail Client” was used in the survey and do they even have a Twitter/Facebook presence?, etc), I will just summarize our take this way:

Take a trip back in time in 1995. I bet you could find a similar report stating that 99.999% of all customer interaction comes via phone, in person or snail mail versus a company website. Should you have ignored the web and focused on the existing channels? Maybe you could have waited until the online channel matures (lets say 1999) to step in but I am guessing a few folks at Borders Books wished they had not waited. Even if you are not in peril of being left totally behind, why risk it?

Social is here to stay and customers will use it more and more. The Buzzient approach is one where you can integrate social directly into existing workflows used by the website and phone teams to handle incoming requests. The question is not if social is a “waste of time” but rather how to handle it without wasting time and able to scale up efforts as the social media tide rises.

The Buzzient approach is that of enabling our customers to leverage both the cloud as well as on-premise applications. For companies who need access to social media as the fastest growing data source, the applications which need this data are a mix of old school and new school. CRM applications with years/decades of customer information are very likely on- premise. New loyalty management initiatives on Facebook, Twitter, etc, are entirely in the cloud. In order to provide for a seamless experience, corporations need a social infrastructure that supports both.

Buzzient is the only social media application  that enables this on-premise and cloud deployment. In addition, we’ve seen the need to provide standalone social media analytics for those companies who don’t have either on premise or SaaS/cloud CRM applications.

So, in a complex world, where you can’t just throw out years of investment, “The Cloud is not Enough”.  Buzzient is the solution for those customers who live in the real world of hybrid systems.

http://www.buzzient.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Buzzient_Buzzient-Enterprise-for-Oracle-Siebel_OpenWorldSF11.pdf

Why is this important? Well, with all of the noise in the marketplace about the cloud, it’s important for vendors to realize that the majority of CRM users are still on-premise. Whether that be for regulatory reasons or just queasiness about moving critical customer data to the cloud, it’s a fact that more CRM is inside the firewall than outside.

Therefore, as the only provider of cross-application social crm, it was important for Buzzient to socially enable this type of user. Siebel is STILL one of the market leaders in on-premise CRM, so the extension of our Oracle CRM On Demand support to Oracle Siebel CRM was a natural.

The ability to pull social media from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media into the 5M+ Siebel seats globally will enable production Siebel customers to leverage this latest wave of consumer behavior, all transparently within their existing applications. For prospects considering new deployments of CRM, this integration makes Siebel relevant for new application developments as well, especially for loyalty management functions.

We’re excited and proud that Buzzient is the FIRST and ONLY way to deploy social media inside Oracle Siebel CRM!