An on-line study, commissioned by ATG (Art Technology Group Inc. – “the premier provider of personalized cross-channel commerce software and services“), identifies that consumers use multiple channels when seeking information about a potential purchase.

Just over a thousand (1,054) US adults where polled by an “independent service.”  The study focused on their use of computers, mobile devices, brick-and-mortar stores, and consumer service representatives to source information before purchasing a product or service.  The consumers used multiple channels when “browsing” for information.

The study states that “more than three-quarters of the consumers used two or more channels to research and complete the transaction.”  While nearly another third used “three or more channels.”  However, the majority admitted that they would ultimately go to a store to make the purchase as they wanted to “touch and feel the product.”

Surprisingly, less than a quarter of the consumers surveyed included social network sites like Facebook and Twitter as an information source.   Disturbingly, a similar number (22%) indicated that “they didn’t even know” you could use social network sites like Facebook and Twitter for this purpose.

The full ATG consumer research study can be found here (© 2010 Art Technology Group, Inc.)

As part of this month exploration of Twitter I’ve come across a really smart intuitive on-line tool for reporting Social Media metrics: SWIX (Social Web Index).

SWIX allows you track several Social Media Campaigns.  It simply enables you to track how you are doing, and where to focus your attention.  It very easy to configure the tracking “pods” for RSS Subscribers, or RSS Hits of your Blogs; or track the number of Twitter Followers or Friends over This Week, This Month, Last 3 months, … all constantly updated.  There’s also a  whole batch of different tracking pods available.  So you can track Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, Flickr, … SWIX also provides a Social Media Dashboard to which you can choose which metrics you have reported – numbers and charts.  Well worth exploring!

There’s also the obligatory YouTube video – enjoy …

I’ve just finished reading a couple of posts on Social CRM Strategies.  This prompted me to re-read Forrester’s “Topic Overview: Social CRM Goes Mainstream” (January 2010), by William Band, Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D., with Connie Moore, Andrew Magarie … and so to this post.

The free Forrester document focuses on Forrester’s latest research on the rise of social web and the changes this has caused in the way “customers” interact with organisations. The authors relate this change to the hot topics of customer management, business process, and the business value of “Social CRM”.  The document introduces Forrester’s seven steps of Social CRM success – see below).

Many traditional CRM, pre-Social CRM, projects failed (some analysts reported failure rates as high as 60%) because they didn’t resolve the classic issues of cultural change, performance and incentives, integration, or that most basic requirement, that’s essential for any successful CRM implementation, of data quality. These traditional CRM solutions would have brought together sales and customer data from disparate parts of the organisation and provide a view of an individual customer (B2C), or company (B2B), to help sales and marketing. Traditional CRM will continue to be implemented and used to aggregate customer data, provide analysis of that data, and automate work-flows to optimize business processes.  Social CRM merely adds new layers of complexity – mainly collaboration, ideation, and (preferably) to enhance the overall customer experience.
Continue reading…

What is the average age of the reader of your blog?  Or, what’s the age distribution of the readers of your “competitors” blog, tweets, Facebook page …

I’ve been exploring Google’s Ad Planner to find an answer to some of these questions.  With Ad Planner you can:

“Identify websites your target customers are likely to visit

• Define audiences by demographics and interests
• Search for websites relevant to your target audience
• Access unique users, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries”

It’s the last bullet point above that I’ll be exploring in this post.

As a starter let’s consider some Social Media sites: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn – well that should be the majority!  The overall age distribution for these Social Network sites for the UK, and the US (for comparison) is:

Drilling down on the UK users only, and to enhance the comparison I’ve added  “Club Penguin” (Disney’s: “virtual world for children” UK users only), and “Age Concern” (soon to be called “Age UK”: “… to promote the well-being of all older people …”):



No surprises for Club Penguin with, for the UK, 50% of it’s users (“unique visitors per month”) being under 18.  And, for Age UK the majority, nearly a quarter, of its users are aged 55-65, with 55% of them being over 45 years old.

But what of the Social Media sites and UK users?  For Twitter (UK) over half are aged between 25 – 45 years old, with the majority, nearly a third, being 25-35 years old.  This is almost repeated for Facebook (UK), and LinkedIn (UK) but in the latter case over three quarters of it’s UK users are aged between 25 and 55 – which is not surprising given the use of LinkedIn.

When compared with the US, however, you’ll find that the majority users are older for all three Social Media sites.  With over a quarter of the majority of users of Twitter (US), and just under a third of the LinkedIn (US) users, being aged 35-45.  Surprisingly, the majority age range for Facebook (US) is older than Facebook (UK) with some quarter of the users being 45-55 years old – though this may be a reflection of the origins of Facebook in the US.

When the population size (“number of unique visitors per month”) is included a representation of age distribution of Social Media users for the UK and US can be derived.  From Ad Planner the number of “users” are: Twitter (UK) – 3.8 million, Twitter (US) – 21 million; Facebook (UK) – 25 million, Facebook (US) – 130 million; and LinkedIn (UK) – 2.4 million, LinkedIn (US) – 16 million.  Giving an age distribution of Social Media users by Country:

This shows a distinct bias!  The majority of Social Media users in the UK are aged 25-35 years, whereas in the US they are significantly older being 45-55 years old.  A calculation of the average ages gives; Twitter: 37 (UK) – 39 (US), Facebook: 36 (UK) – 38 (US), and LinkedIn: 40 (UK) – 45 (US).  So quite similar bias towards the older users of Twitter and Facebook in the US, but with a significantly older  user of LinkedIn in the US.

Finally, when gender is included another significant difference is apparent between the UK and the US users of Social Media sites:

For both Twitter and Facebook some 60% of the Social Media users in the US are female.  This is almost reversed for the UK with 57% of the Twitter users, and 45% of the Facebook users, being male.  For the US the bias is less obvious with an almost equal distribution of the genders accessing LinkedIn (52% female, 48% male).  Whilst the majority of UK users of LinkedIn are male at 59%.

The Google Ad Planner site also displays traffic statistics including the daily trend in visitors over a set period (1 year).  For example, below is the traffic statistics for Twitter for UK visitors for the year ending February 2010.

That all goes to show that Google knows a great deal about us! (see: “A special report on managing information: Clicking for gold“, The Economist)

What the hell is Social Media – in 2 minutes. Enjoy …

(Found this YouTube video on James Russo site – well worth a visit if your interested in CRM, Social Media, …)

The Gartner Group have published their Social Media predictions for 2010 and beyond.

Gartner analysts acknowledge that a lot has happened with social software and collaborative software in 2009, and that there’s been a growing use of Facebook and Twitter by business.  But their predictions for beyond 2010 don’t read so encouragingly.

The five predictions are:

1. By 2012 over 70% of IT department led Social Media initiatives will fail

• similarly, only 50% of business led social media initiatives will succeed
• but, even to enable these successes the Gartner analysts warn organisations that they will need new skills sets around designing and delivering Social Media solutions

2. By 2012 over 50% of organisations will be using microblogging.  But, only 5% of these will be stand-alone/single purpose enterprise microblogging applications – the rest being consumer services like Twitter

3. Post 2012 social software market growth will accelerate as will the overall impact of Social Media on business and society

4. By 2014 social media will replace email for 20% of users for business communication

• essentially, microblogging is better than email for status updates and expertise location within the organisation
• therefore, Gartner recommends organisations must develop:
  • long-term strategy for collaborative and social networking software services, and
  • policies governing the use of consumer services for business purposes

5. In terms of analytic’s, by 2015 some 25% of enterprises will utilise social-network analysis to improve performance and productivity.  Social-network analysis (and here)  is used to examine interaction patterns and information flows among people and groups within the organisation, and among business partners and customers.  The Gartner analysts claim that this is an untapped source of insight – but requires trust and buy-in, due to privacy & confidentially concerns

More information available from Gartner: “Predicts 2010: Social Software in an Enterprise Reality” – http://www.gartner.com/resid=1243515

It’s official: “Salesforce Chatter accelerates the demise of Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus” – so claim’s salesforce.com in their press release of 17th February 2010.

The SaaS leader buys time with the launch of this beta that offers real-time feeds from consumer services “Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz” (though, in a ZDNet post, this is clarified by salesforce.com: “Chatter at this time doesn’t integrate with Google Buzz.  Google Buzz was used in the press release as an example of a popular social consumer network.”)

There will be 100 companies in this private beta program, including Reed Exhibitions, Schumacher Group, and TransUnion.  Chatter should be delivered sometime in 2010.

For more on Chatter see my earlier post “You won’t be able to get too much Chatter.”

Just stumbled upon this YouTube video – essential viewing for when your preparing your strategy … enjoy!

The Economist newspaper plans to triple its number of fans on Facebook, and gain an eight-fold increase in followers on Twitter.  All within 6 months!  All with a marketing budget of “tens of thousands of pounds”.

The “core” of this strategy is to make the Economist more “social”.  Facebook will help acquire new readers, and develop “a deeper level of engagement” with existing one.  The Economist already has 180,000 fans on Facebook, and a mere 90,000 followers on Twitter – on which they plan to be “a lot more active”.

Ben Edwards, publisher of Economist.com, in which the Financial Times owns a 50% stake, stated that “people aren’t accustomed to being charged for conversations”

In the foreword to Clara Shih book The Facebook Era … (Mar 2009), Marc Benioff (Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com) states “more than ever before, the lines are blurring between the consumer and enterprise worlds … bringing together social networking and enterprise applications represents the next phase in this evolution”

Email is failing.  It was never envisaged to do what we now expect of it.  Email messages grow too long, too difficult to follow, too difficult to track, get lost, and attachments go backwards and forwards with no version control.  Should I read the email where I’m only cc’d?  Can I remember which internal group I’ve just emailed that grumble to? Why do we still use it?  Is there no alternative?

Let’s take a blank page.  Take the best of Facebook.  The best of Twitter.  The number of users of these communication tools,  after all, is growing astronomically.  Something must be right.  Merge all that functionality into one place, sprinkle in filters, user controlled groups, and let it inherit all the robust and proven user control and security of an enterprise system.  Then give it away – free!

This is what salesforce.com’s Chatter is all about.  Expect it to be disruptive.  Expect to see it cloned … every organisation is going to need it to stay competitive.  Everybody in the enterprise is going to use it – it will enable networking, it will encourage collaboration, and, be warned, it will ignore the existing hierarchy.  All you need do is Activate it, nurture it, and wait until it reaches that critical mass of users …

Salesforce.com’s User Profiles (a collection of settings and permissions that defines a user) will be extended to include the users Chatter settings – including a current photo (user controlled, of course), and status: “Working on major marketing campaign, anybody have any experience of using VerticalResponse?”.  Twitter like status updates will appear on the users home page – in real-time: “there’s a new vacancy in the London office“,  “the printer on third floor is now working“, – but also, from salesforce.com Workflow triggers, and alerts: “Major donor not been contacted for 90 days!“, and “Large donation made by Corporate Sponsor“.  The user will have full control over the feeds (however, there’s some ambiguity from what I’ve read and seen as to whether email will be included in this – it aught to be), groups (small, and large – added instantly by the user; both public and private; and even secret groups: where that discussion on the “up and coming merger” can continue with confidence), the display can be filtered to show just Object (a salesforce.com term!  Think of Record), a team, Tweets on that competitor you’re following,  …

Better still, when it’s made available in Spring 2010 to all salesforce.com editions for free, all existing applications including those developed by third parties (or, downloaded from the AppExchange), will automatically acquire all this Chatter functionality.  And, of course, it will be on your mobile.  And, of course, it will come with a Desktop app (for when your not logged in to salesforce.com).  And, of course, it comes with a full set of APIs. And, …

Oh, these are interesting times