Social intelligence provider Mzinga has debuted a customizable platform for addressing targeted audiences at a deeper social level called OmniSocial Engaged.
It's a suite of features that can integrate into existing systems or be a standalone product for better search and meaningful experiences with analytics and reporting for better insight.
Engage with Customers
Creating better customer experiences is about how people feel. Can they find what they are looking for on your website? Do they get rewarded for being involved and even helping others? Online groups like enthusiasts, for example, will benefit from these kinds of features, but they are also good for improving customer support.
Retailers or service providers need as many ways as they can get to make support less painful, and one of those ways is to offer a self-service solution. This can include things like Facebook Page integrations, website widgets or full blown customized websites.
Multiple solutions are included with OmniSocial Engaged, and that means better targeting and happier customers.
OmniSocial Features
OmniSocial combines multiple solutions to meet these customer engagement challenges. Community managers and moderators can take advantage of things like banned and watch word filters, user permissions and a moderation queue dashboard. Additionally, managing content can be automated for removing harmful content and enforcing Terms of Service.
The product includes gamification elements, allowing companies to assign badges and reward icons for top contributors, engaged members or influential members to give customers incentives. Mzinga has been going down this road for some time now, and offering more personalized experiences is what the company is all about. That's important because at least one recent study has found companies see a lack of quality social business analytic products in the market.
That is particularly true of hard to measure things like ROI, sentiment analysis and identifying influencers. However companies are engaging customers, making support and search less painful are always welcome, even if the entire industry sill needs more fine tuning.
OmniSocial Engaged is available now, and pricing is available on request.
Mobile devices are moving audiences and advertisers away from the television set. But can they also help bring them back? Zeebox's second screen solution makes live programming more fun and potentially more profitable.
Let’s say you’re the television industry. A Nielsen study says that says 88% of tablet owners and 86% of smartphone owners are using mobile devices while they watch your shows. Some of them are playing Angry Birds, but some of them are Shazaming to get more information, checking into content with GetGlue and tweeting about plots in real-time.
This is the point that likely stands out to you: Bad Piggies, Shazam, GetGlue and Twitter are all making money by capturing your viewers attention on mobile devices. You, the television industry titan, are likely not. At least not directly.
So what are you going to do about it? You might try to make apps that provide a second-screen environment for each show. But those are expensive to develop, and they don’t deliver a great experience for channel surfers who don’t want to app surf simultaneously. You might promote the existing social media conversation around your shows, but that won’t directly promote increases to your bottom line.
Anthony Rose and Ernesto Schmitt
Perhaps it’s time to partner up.
That's what NBCUniversal, Comcast (which owns a controlling interest in NBCUniversal) and HBO have decided. On Thursday, the companies announced partnerships with Zeebox, a startup app designed to play sidekick to any television show. NBC and Comcast have invested an undisclosed amount in the startup. British Sky Broadcasting has previously taken a 10% stake.
Launched in the UK last January, Zeebox has been downloaded by 1.5 million people there. It launches in the U.S. Thursday.
The app isn't an alternative venue for shows the way Hulu and Netflix are. Instead, it aims to enhance programs as they're watched on a television set. The free app not only acts as a program guide--telling users, for instance, which shows are being most discussed or watched by their friends--but also as a remote. Meanwhile, it allows any broadcaster to add additional content like videos, games and polls to their shows' digital hub. Even if a show’s producers don’t participate, users will find a dedicated page for it with relevant twitter chatter, additional information and a chatroom on Zeebox.
Zeebox has no specific killer feature. Its biggest advantage is an appeal to broadcasters.
Like Shazam, it will extend its second-screen experience to advertisements. Unlike Shazam, it will share revenue from enhanced commercials with all broadcasters (Shazam says it does share revenue with some broadcasters, but declined to provide information about the circumstances in which it does so). Adding a mobile component to a commercial can nudge consumers toward action (think “buy this now” buttons) in a way that television ads can’t. You don't have to be an advertising executive to realize the potential for profit. Zeebox has also invented television’s first form of keyword advertisingby pulling important terms from shows' closed captioning data as they air. Users can click on each term within the app to see more information about it. Zeebox plans to sell sponsored versions of the terms the same way Google sells promoted links in your search results.
For HBO, which relies on subscriptions rather than advertising, Zeebox could provide an incentive for watching programming on cable rather than through iTunes or your parent’s HBO Go account.
If you’re still pretending to be the television industry, this probably all sounds awesome. But if you’ve lapsed back into average viewer mode, you might be feeling left out. What does Zeebox give you that you don’t already have? Short answer: Everything. At once.
Want to tweet about the show you're watching? Zeebox has a chatroom for group discussion with strangers. Want to share what you watch with friends? You won’t need GetGlue when you have Zeebox. Looking for what to watch next? There's a guide built in. More info on that celebrity the host just mentioned? Use Zeetags instead of Google. Games? Got those, too. Put your Bad Piggies away.
None of Zeebox's many features is the most likely source of new users. That would be HBO, Comcast and NBC, which will all help promote the app. NBCUniversal EVP of Strategic Integration Page Thompson declined to comment on the scale of the network's planned marketing effort, but Zeebox co-founder and CTO Anthony Rose said it “will be hard to watch NBC without noticing Zeebox.”
Digital marketing is being disrupted. New technologies, including social media, and increased consumer sophistication are requiring digital marketers to rethink how they engage their audiences.
As detailed in CMSWire's August 8th webinar, “Rethinking Web Engagement - Leading with Content Marketing,” by changing their approach to a content- and journey-centric marketing strategy, marketers can weather this change and distance themselves from the competition.
Read on for a recap of the webinar content and to access the full recording of the event.
The event featured presentations from Robert Rose, a 15-year content marketing veteran who authored the book, “Managing Content Marketing”, and is a contributing senior analyst with Digital Clarity Group and Ian Truscott, VP, Product Marketing, SDL Content Technologies Division and director at CM Pros Association. Barb Mosher Zinck, CMSWire's Managing Editor, served as moderator.
Marketing Processes Change
Robert Rose began the webinar by describing how marketing processes have changed in recent years. Media filtering technologies such as Netflix, Spotify and Twitter allow consumers to pinpoint what information they receive according to their specific interests, weeding out advertisements and extraneous information.
In addition, years of exposure to these technologies has trained consumer brains to serve as media filters, meaning a consumer looking at an online or physical environment full of marketing messages will only see the ones that meet a particular interest at that moment.
IT Strategies Must Also Change
In response to changes in marketing processes, where consumers can now effectively filter out any message they don’t want to receive, Rose said IT strategies must change as well.
Where content was once delivered in the 1990s through desktop publishing and in the 2000s by Web Content Management Systems, in this decade it must be delivered via combination of tools and process often described as Web Engagement Management.
“We must facilitate the buying journey,” said Rose. “It’s more important to get IT involved as the way we implement (Web Engagement Management) tools becomes more technical and complex.”
Rose said the marketing and sales teams must align as part of this process to understand the “buyer’s journey” and the personas of the consumers they are targeting. “It’s not enough to facilitate the sales process. We must look at the journey holistically. Web Engagement Management is delivering value to the customer every step of the way.”
IT can support this holistic view by helping deliver value to consumers through functions such as landing page management and delivering content through social and mobile channels.
Rose cautioned that in addition to communicating with consumers to ensure the engagement process is buyer-focused, marketers must clearly communicate their needs to the IT department, and must understand which systems the IT department care about (and will interfere with) most.
“IT guys don’t care which analytics you select,” he said. “At that point they’re busy playing World of Warcraft.”
Engagement Cycle Disruption Produces New CXM Model
Truscott then initiated his portion of the webinar by offering thoughts on how the traditional consumer engagement cycle has been disrupted. “Engagement used to be a linear process,” he said. “The customer would see and respond to messages.”
