Weekend Reading: Your Customers Know What They Want, Do You?

Collecting information on customers is nothing new. But the quantity, variety and method of communications today makes for a slightly larger animal than the old surveys or focus groups. What started as a drop has become a deluge.    

This week we got some practical advice on how to tame that deluge to feed informed marketing campaigns. We heard why some of those campaigns fail, were led down the path of a customer journey and heard how all of these complexities are forcing changes in how we approach our work. 

Swimming in a Sea of Data

How to Untangle the Data Deluge

Phil Kemelor (@philkemelor):When did web analytics officially die? Perhaps a good benchmark was earlier this year when the Web Analytics Association renamed itself to the Digital Analytics Association to recognize that there is a lot more to the digital world than fixed web and that social and mobile channels also needed to be added to the mix. 

5 Tips to Improving Marketing Campaigns Using Data

Anil Batra (@anilbatra):Marketers spend millions of dollars on digital marketing campaigns every day. Analytics help marketers get the most of out of every dollar spent and drive great benefits for them and their organization. Data collected at each step of the way to conversion can help marketers and their agencies in optimizing each campaign's performance. Below I've outlined five tips on how to use the data to optimize marketing campaigns. 

The New Data Savvy Adaptive Marketing

Julie Hunt (@juliebhunt):Marketers for many organizations are facing evolutionary pressures to transform marketing practices and processes to the always-on state of Adaptive Marketing, a new iteration of direct marketing that wants to engender a unique brand experience for individual customers. 

At the heart of Adaptive Marketing is a customer-focused organization that is committed to constantly re-craft product offerings, sales initiatives and marketing tactics to match individual customer needs and wants. Adaptive Marketing is fueled by a matrix of customer intelligence analytics and maps into enabling continuously improved customer experiences.

Leveraging the Volume, Variety and Velocity of Business Data for Effective Marketing

Andrew Joiner: Analysts predict that within a few years, the CMO will have a larger IT budget than the CIO. Why is that? It’s because marketing is increasingly becoming a data-driven exercise and the organizations that can best understand and act on information will win the hearts and minds of customers.

Customers Know What They Like, Do You?

Lost at 'Like': The 10 Reasons Brands Fail to Convert Facebook Fans into Paying Customers

Mark Simpson (@markj_simpson): According to HubSpot, 93 percent of adults on the Internet are on Facebook, yet only one percent of a brand’s Facebook fans will ever make their way to the company’s main website.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Collaboration Circus

Is collaboration in your organization like a 3-ring circus? Are you the ringmaster or the clown; the trapeze artist or the animal tamer? 

Some of these questions were brought up because I just saw Cavalia (Cirque du Soleil with horses) recently and so the circus metaphor was on my mind.

Most enterprises are going through a vast transformation around collaboration. No longer are the 1.0 tools (SharePoint, Exchange, etc.) meeting the needs of the line of business or those with collaborative needs in sales, marketing, support, R&D, etc.

Since most collaboration tools are in the cloud, they are just going out and finding their own "acts" so to speak in new collaborative solutions more tailored to their specific problem or context. 

Trying to keep the old collaboration tools going is the ringmaster’s role, the trapeze artist is a group looking at new tools and trying to strike a balance between the old and the new. The lion tamer is a group that has adopted a new collaboration tool whether IT approves or not, and the clown is off in left field looking at new collaboration technologies with no eye towards their appropriateness within your enterprise.

Which role are you?

The Ringmaster

These days IT is in a tough place trying to hold it all together and keep things secure. Many of the IT groups we talk with are still trying to put the horse back in the barn (to keep with the horse metaphor), and that just does not work. Most of the conversations we have with these ring masters are very emotional. It really is not about the technology, but is about control.

Who wants to be told that over the last few years they have spent millions on SharePoint only to have people use it as a document repository, and a poor one at that! Microsoft sold SharePoint with the promise of true collaboration and when it did not quite work out that way, different groups went off to find their own solutions and became the trapeze artists, the lion tamers and even the clowns!

The question for IT today is do we continue with these big monolithic systems that are based on pre-Internet architectures, or do we cut our losses and go with something more modern? I currently have 208 apps on my iPhone. I paid nothing or little for each of them. I did not spend millions, need to create an infrastructure, get new hardware, negotiate licenses and assign a skilled person to keep things running. I just download and use them.

A few apps together can do much of what the big monolithic systems can. Instead of Exchange I can try to cut down on my email and use Box or Dropbox for content storage, sharing and synchronization. I use Meetin.gs for my calendaring and scheduling (ok, their native app is not quite out yet) I can use Gdrive to share a spreadsheet of receivables with my operations person … you get the idea.

Emotions and Control

When I was doing some work for a client a few years ago, I had an interesting experience that repeated itself over and over at different companies. In this case we had decided on a Unified Communications and Collaboration strategy by doing lots of interviews of all different roles at the company, as well as looking at a variety of vendor offerings (they were using Notes and the CIO wanted to move to SharePoint).

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com