Today, you have to be social

Social media has tremendous reach and its viral nature can harness word-of-mouth marketing like no other channel. Many customers value how social can deepen their engagement with the brands they love. As global audiences spend more time on social instead of conventional websites, consumer marketers – and retailers in particular – must build social sharing into everything they do.

Striving to integrate social at every turn, businesses are publishing content across multiple social presences and offering their customers the opportunity to share their experience at every interaction; through email, after purchase, through mobile scanning of 3D-barcoded posters or on their own forums. Branded social network accounts now sit at the heart of modern marketing campaigns, with companies investing in top quality content to recast their online properties as digital magazines and hubs for social interaction. Coca-Cola’s re-launch of its corporate website as “The Coca-Cola Journey” is just one example.

Customer service has also emerged as a key application. In the US, most large b2c corporates have added social media elements to their customer service function. A similar number are also using social media monitoring to augment their existing reputation management activities. But prioritising social doesn’t automatically lead to successful adoption. The rush to invest frequently takes companies down blind alleys, with the urge to “do something with social” resulting in expensive, tactical campaigns whose tweets, posts and updates offer little or no real measurable business benefit. Delivering true value means fully integrating social with a company’s customer management strategy and CRM infrastructure.

The vital social platforms

Eight years ago, Facebook members totalled 12 million; today there are 1.3 billion. With by far the largest concentration of consumers on any social media platform, Facebook remains the king in the UK, the US and globally. 67% of UK adults under 75 have a Facebook profile, with just over half of them active. Every day, more than a third of the UK’s adult population visits the site. With 15 million users in the UK and over 260 million globally, Twitter is the other vital consumer network. About a third of UK adults have a Twitter account, though only two-thirds of those use the service regularly. Used by 26% of adults, LinkedIn is the UK’s third most popular social option.

Twice the number of UK marketers chose Twitter as their most valuable social platform in a recent survey (F) than Facebook. In the US, the most popular social options for marketers were Facebook (92%), Twitter (70%), LinkedIn (70%), blogging (78%) and YouTube (56%).

Other networks are proliferating, with Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat all quickly growing their user bases. Further afield, there’s VK in Eastern Europe, India’s Orkut and massive networks like Ozone and Sina Weibo in China’s walled-off social world. Google Plus is staying the course and adding users, while messaging platforms like LINE and WhatsApp also have hundreds of millions of users.

Social marketing needs to focus on the bottom line

In the years since the birth of the social web, marketers have learned how to identify the networks used by their target audience, build promotions, craft relevant content and stimulate conversations. The tools used to manage social campaigns, like HootSuite and Keyhole, have also improved out of all recognition. Social display ad targeting is now extremely sophisticated and ad budgets are ballooning; social media advertising spend in the USA alone is expected to reach $16.2 billion by 2019, up from $7.3 billion in 2014.

But true value from social remains elusive. Global consumer brands from American Airlines to McDonalds and Burger King have wasted millions on failed social strategies. Pepsi notoriously shifted a large chunk of its marketing budget to social in 2010 – and saw its market share drop below that of Diet Coke for the first time in history. (K) Its activities divorced from the rest of the business, social “success” is usually achieved without reference to the bottom line. The nebulous metric of engagement, typically expressed in numbers of fans, followers and likes, is all too often the only goal.

A May 2014 survey by GBGroup (E) revealed that numbers of followers, likes, web traffic, engagement and activity were the only success metrics for social media investment at 60% of companies. Only 20% looked at the bottom line – the same number that performed no ROI tracking at all. In 2013, one survey found that only one in four (26%) companies are able to measure their social activities in any way. 87% of marketers want to know how to measure ROI for social media activities.

Rather than searching for success via vague measures of engagement, businesses need to focus on traditional sales and marketing goals; precise targeting, increased income and profit, or improved customer support. The honeymoon is over. To pay its way, social must deliver to its full potential – and prove it.

It’s all about the data

Many retailers are already building social sharing into the omnichannel experience. However, to derive maximum benefit from social, customers’ data must be recorded, then used to optimally manage every interaction. Social media offers incredibly rich information on the preferences, behaviour and identity of hundreds of millions of individuals. Their profile data, combined with the views and opinions that they share and the pictures, events – and brands – that they comment on are spontaneous expressions of lifestyle preferences and interests.

Once artificial likes and shares driven solely by the desire to obtain a discount or promotion are stripped out, what remains paints a broad picture of everything from birthdays, hobbies and interest to buying intentions and marital status. Numbers of friends or followers help judge the extent of networks, activity and influence. Even better, social data is arguably the most up-to-date customer information available. When combined with other data sources such as transactional history and web behaviour, it has the potential to drive unparalleled outbound targeting accuracy across ecommerce offers, email programmes or in-store promotions.

There are many business applications of social data, but the most important is customer insight. 56% of US corporates are now using social to better understand who their customers are, where they are, and what they like. Social insight is growing rapidly: 75% of all corporations plan to have some form of social-driven customer insight in place in 2014.

For retail marketers in particular, the priority is to use this insight to drive personalisation. One study (H) found that only 6% of brands were using social data in this way but of those, a larger proportion felt its impact on both ROI and engagement was higher than users of any other type of data, such as purchase history or web behaviour.

But most companies are still struggling to gather social customer data and extract actionable intelligence from it. In GBGroup’s client survey, finding quality data was the most challenging part of implementing a social media strategy. How can companies build that capability – quickly, accurately and compliantly?

A world of social information

Via a Twitter handle, it’s possible to link to a list of followers, which users are being followed and friendships, along with profile data for all of them. With Facebook’s Graph API, extended profile data and access to a user’s friends profiles opens up many more possibilities such as determining whether two customers are friends on Facebook, if they are members of the same family or not, or which customers have liked a certain page.

Personalising interactions with individual-level social data

Right across marketing – and especially in retail – there’s a shift to the use of individual-level data to drive personalisation. To play its part, social data must also be stored at a far more granular level, right beside the other information the company holds on each consumer.

This intelligence is often already available. The best social media monitoring applications can identify a brand’s most active followers and their networks, log how they influence their friends over time, segment by who is most influential and report on dormant versus active names. Their databases hold individual social profile data and related information like sentiment index.

But today, that valuable data is typically first aggregated and then isolated from the real customers who sent the messages in the first place. Where individual responses do go out, they are sent manually. Variables such as likes, impressions, retweets, sentiment, engagement and any demographics funnel into standalone reports showing the level and nature of the “buzz” around different brands, products or issues over time.

Aggregated sentiment about a product cannot indicate that a customer is at a particular stage of their multichannel buying journey. Nor can it help generate a sales proposition based on a customer’s previous purchases, needs and social preferences. No matter how many thousands of likes a social campaign generates, their value is unknown unless each one can be linked to a subsequent customer response, purchase or other action.

Without individual-level social data, it’s impossible to identify the customer behind a social message, reply correctly and then track and measure the effect. Individual-level data and the right systems are needed to truly understand and address each consumer. And this should be done automatically if possible, rather than as part of a costly manual process.

In GBGroup’s May 2014 survey, half the respondents using social data only had access to aggregated information. Overall, only 20% were employing social data as part of their customer database. Outside the corporates surveyed, the real figure across the wider business world is likely to be considerably lower.

GBGroup is proposing a step change. From generalised descriptions and manual processes to Social Identity Intelligence; individual, actionable personas that give the most accurate view yet of each customer – and the infrastructure to apply this insight in real time.

The Social SCV enables social intelligence

To make social media marketing truly accurate, measurable and actionable, individual-level social data must be combined with the Single Customer View (SCV) database. This integrated approach is part of the core message of Social CRM that has been evolving since at least 2009.

Adding social IDs to existing customer records is the first, most critical step. With that in place, companies can make use of profile data and start to add individual activity and message information to the database where effective. GBGroup calls the resulting customer persona the Social Identity

Social Identity opens the door to accurate ROI estimation. Now, instead of gathering likes from anonymous fans, it’s possible to see who is already a customer and link their social behaviour to the rest of their profile. Does positive sentiment in a tweet result in a purchase within a certain timeframe?

Marketing applications can access this integrated customer view and use it to optimise outbound message targeting, timing and offer creation in other channels. To support true omnichannel operations, retailers in particular need to bring social data into their data collection, storage and analysis processes.

Critically, a Social SCV enables real-time systems to identify inbound customer messaging and personalise the response. The ultimate goal is to be able to listen to and respond in real time to social actions. It also makes it possible for a human agent or software application to look up a customer and instantly see their latest set of social media interactions. Has this caller just said they like us or have they complained? And what should we do about it?

The Social SCV

With a socially-linked customer database, it’s possible to:

• Combine social network IDs with other channel contacts such as name, address, email, mobile and landline.
• Merge social messaging and behaviour with other individual or segment-level transactional, demographic, loyalty card and web behavioural data.
• Paint the most complete picture of each customer’s identity.
• Apply customer analytics to social and other identity data to drive personalised, optimised customer interactions.
• Aggregate up from individual-level variables to build the most accurate segments to inform customer treatments.
• Formulate processes that can be automated in order to respond to inbound social contacts in real time – because an immediate response is what social users expect.

Gathering social network IDs quickly and compliantly

The potential of identifying real people within social is clear. In a recent GBGroup client survey, three-quarters of companies saw holding social network IDs on the customer database as very valuable with a quarter of those saying they would be extremely valuable. There are three main ways to do this.

Appending social IDs to customer and prospect records is the way to gain instant access to profile data and activity. Multiple IDs are available across the different social networks that an individual belongs to. With ID (or IDs) appended, each network’s API can be used to access other relevant elements of profile and activity data. Relatively static data like age and marital status becomes a permanent part of the customer’s Social Identity within the SCV.

Faster-changing social data flowing minute by minute from network APIs is better held in a separate database linked to the SCV. Employing a non-relational database structure, marketers can use this platform to transform very high volumes of unstructured data into manageable indicators like interests, topics, sentiment and influence score. Transferring these periodically to the SCV gives the most up-to-date view of social identity.

With this central view of all communications and activity across all channels, the business can better understand the customer, their likes and how they prefer to interact. A fully-populated Social SCV means the most accurate, recent customer information is always available to base any decision on.

Understanding multiple individual Personas

Rich social interest and activity data is a valuable addition to the mix of feeds used to construct customer Personas. Like market segments, personas describe groups of similar customers. But rather than depicting them using common demographic, attitudinal or behavioural attributes, Personas instead use pen portraits of one or more fictional characters to represent a group’s members.

Focusing on real people with real needs, experiences and challenges gives everyone from website designers to email marketers a deeper understanding of their target customer. Whether it’s a creative treatment, copywriting tone of voice or the colour of a new product, this extra context helps them develop the most appropriate approach for each group.

By appending multiple social IDs to a single customer record, it’s also possible to gain a clearer view of each individual’s social media activity in different places and at different times. Via Personas, this can help inform how and when to contact different customer groups based on whether they are talking to friends (Facebook), showing family videos (private YouTube channel) or are involved in work (LinkedIn).

Applying social ID to multichannel marketing

• Use other outbound channels like email to kickstart social media campaigns.
• Pick the right advocates to message in social-only campaigns.
• Use social information to trigger, target and personalise messaging in both inbound (web, social) and outbound (email, mail, phone, display ads) channels.

Applying Social Identity Intelligence – the path to automation

It’s a fact of business life that unhappy customers are far more likely to share their bad feelings about a brand than happy ones are to spread good news. The danger lies in the ease with which social media lets them inflict serious damage. For 53% of customers who ask a brand a question on Twitter, an hour is the upper limit for a response. But if that tweet is a complaint, 72% want the same speed of response. If companies don’t respond within the hour, 38% feel more negatively towards the brand – and 60% will take action using social media

British Airways found this out when it failed to respond to a promoted tweet brought by an outraged customer criticising its customer service . Millions around the world read the story after global news outlets picked up the original tweet. Social customer service and reputation management typically involve scanning feeds for relevant keywords, with customer service or PR teams dealing directly with priority messages. With extra staff plus specialist training and systems, this manual approach can be extremely expensive.

Automation is now a credible option. Adding social media monitoring and a decision engine to a well-populated social SCV confers the ability to trigger real-time responses to social actions – completely automatically. In a service scenario, if the monitoring tool turns up a keyword in recent tweets, it can drill down into the report to find the individual social IDs. Via the SCV, a full picture of that customer is immediately available. Based on that and the sentiment in the tweet, a rules-based decision engine can then provide the most appropriate response.

That might involve an automated tweet or outbound email telling the customer their problem is being dealt with, alerting the contact centre to make a placatory phone call – or simply staying silent. Safeguards can be built into systems, such as manual message checking before sending. In marketing, the same approach could mean constructing inbound campaigns that listen for specific social keywords or activity within forum or Facebook discussions. When a keyword occurs, the marketing system can identify the customer or prospect and respond to them appropriately.

That might mean an email offer, a text reminder of an approaching renewal date or checking to see whether they are currently on the website and serving suitable page content. Channel, message, offer and treatment can all be optimised based on the customer’s history, the sentiment of the initial statement and any other relevant data such as stock levels and time of day.

Real-time Social Identity Intelligence for retail

Location-based marketing and iBeacon

A customer posts a question about which power drill to buy via a mobile social app which is also sharing his location. The retailer’s social media monitoring tool picks up the question and feeds it to the decision engine which initiates an inbound campaign. The engine finds his social ID on the customer database, recognises that he is currently in-store via iBeacon and sends him a text with a list of relevant power tool offers based on his value and buying history, a map indicating that store’s power tools section, and a “Call Me” button to contact its technical advisor.

Boost engagement, make recommendations

A customer tweets “which shoes to wear with this dress?”. The fashion retailer automatically tweets back a pre-formatted, personalised suggestion based on that customer’s profile and the products available. The tweet includes a link to a personalised web page on the retailer’s site showing different shoes visualised on a virtual model, links to live agents for webchat help and a “Buy it now” button.

Faster response to social messaging

A customer complains on social about a faulty product. The decision engine notes this is a high-value, loyal customer and triggers an outbound service call. The call centre agent has all the details of the message along with the customer’s contact details, profile and buying history. She calls, offers to exchange the faulty goods and offers a discount on the next purchase.

Given the sensitive personal nature of social media, the need to abide by best practice permission-based marketing is paramount. One 2013 study found that over half of Facebook users who left the site did so due to privacy concerns.

All data collected from customers should be fully opted in while the consent and compliance of any externally-sourced data appended to customer files must be beyond reproach. Supplier contracts must mandate this as far as practically possible and protect the business in the event of any complaint.

Companies must also consider the “Big Brother” effect. For example, consumers may be happy to share their profile data with sites like Facebook and consent to its use by that site’s online partners elsewhere to personalise, ease and enhance their web experience. But if that data is then used on a voice call or as part of outbound email content, it may step over the line of what is acceptable for that consumer

Companies must be upfront about why they are collecting and using social data, and the benefits it confers on their customers. The extent to which messages should be personalised and the response interval between the initial social posting and the response from the business must also be carefully weighed and, if possible, tested with representative customer groups.

How do we get from here to there?

Using Social Identity Intelligence to drive real-time automation for marketing and service has huge potential. Using only web behaviour to drive on-the-fly ecommerce offers, a quarter of marketers see returns of more than 50% and almost as many see 75% ROI. But to benefit from Social Identity Intelligence, retailers and other large b2c organisations must first put the infrastructure and processes in place to enable it. That may prove challenging for the many retailers who are still struggling with the basics of customer data management

For a start, the existing customer database must be well structured, upto-date and in sufficiently good shape to be able to accept new feeds of social ID data. The multiple applications for automating social response. – social media monitoring tools, decision engines, new databases – must be plugged into the existing customer database, operational marketing, sales, and service platforms as well as other systems like EPOS. As an expert provider of Identity Intelligence solutions, GBGroup can support the full range of SCV build, host and refresh, application integration, consultancy and ongoing management tasks. All the data and systems to enable Social Identity Intelligence are available as a part of a turnkey, managed service.

Building for a social future

Commercial use of social media is still immature. No longer a novelty, it has yet to become a well-understood part of business as usual. But with time and experience, social interactions will eventually be managed just like any other customer touchpoint. Moving towards individual-level Social Identity Intelligence and the systems to apply it is a key milestone on this journey. Extending the SCV to social provides the platform retailers and others need to deliver a consistent customer experience across channels, use insight to maximise inbound and outbound marketing relevancy and to accurately measure, report and understand the true impact of social marketing investment.

This data-driven approach exemplifies the same competitive advantages that have persuaded so many businesses to embrace marketing automation solutions: accurate, real-time personalisation of interactions, multichannel campaign optimisation and the ability to replace expensive manual processes while making otherwise impossibly complex tasks feasible. With this infrastructure in place, social can be used optimally either on its own or as part of a multimedia strategy. Developing this capability is no trivial challenge and will require serious commitment from a business and its suppliers, but the results will finally enable social to reach its true potential.