Entries Tagged 'Business' ↓

As we all know, Social CRM is the primary tool for organizations to engage with customers. There are some industries that need Social CRM more than others. One such industry is Hospitality.

In this blog post, you can expect answers to the following queries:

• What is the big deal with Social CRM in the Hospitality industry?
• Is Social CRM really effective and efficient?
• Who is doing it right?
• What kind of problems you might be facing when it comes to Social CRM?
• How to implement a Social CRM strategy in 7 steps?

The Hospitality industry offers a huge potential for Social CRM. The Hospitality industry thrives on two basic factors- Segmentation & Uniqueness. Apart from the regular promises of customer satisfaction, it is the Identity or rather the personality of the hotel that really matters. And not to forget the Stand-out factor, that every hotel has on offering, as compared to its competitors. All these factors contribute towards the building of trust and customer loyalty, and eventually prolonged profitability.

Most hotels spend heavily towards enhancing customer experiences through various marketing ploys. They offer loyalty programs and other exclusive benefits to capture the customer’s attention. But, these promotions tend to become heavy on their pockets. Hence, including Social CRM mechanism in their framework will see a significant cut-down in their costs and also lessen the outreach efforts thanks to social media’s targeted reach resulting in a win-win situation.

Taking a cue from other verticals, social media is slowly but steadily being employed by players from the Hospitality industry. The InterContinental Group of Hotels was one of the first players in this field, to have successfully adopted social media to boost sales. Hotel Westin Mindspace, Hyderabad has also started really well. But, by far the best that I’ve seen is Hotel Royal Plaza on Scotts, Singapore. It seems to be doing everything right.

As we know, the Hospitality industry is heavily dependent on Word-of-Mouth. It can benefit immensely from Social CRM which is nothing but an electronic version of Word-of-Mouth. Any amount of negative feedback from customers can act as a dampener and affect sales, and the brand itself.

Another area of concern in this industry is the lack of qualified social media personnel with Hotel management background. As per a recent research, some hotels have already started including knowledge of social media as a requirement into entry-level job roles, while most hotels have simply engaged a social media agency to carry out the task and rely on them to implement effective social media marketing strategies and Social CRM to manage guest reviews, measure results, engage and communicate effectively with potential customers through social media platforms and blogs.

Also, its important to understand that Social CRM is an extension of the traditional CRM concept of an organization

I’m also listing down a couple of steps to implement Social CRM

1. Listen to what people are talking about your brand.
2. Understand the social graph of your customers and see where they’re coming from.
3. Try to identify your most frequent/best customers from the graph and see if they’re active on Social media.
4. Set your goals and objectives from the above steps.
5. Establish processes and requirements to meet those objectives.
6. Put together a Social media plan based on your requirements and processes.
7. Review and execute. Repeat these steps time and again.

The key is really to listen to your customers and see how best you can use Social CRM in your setup.

Do share with us your experiences with respect to Social CRM & Social Media in this industry. Thanks

References:

• · Towards Social CRM in Travel & Hospitality, Congnizant 20-20 Insights, 2011
• 10 Steps to start implementing Social CRM, Hotel Marketing Argentina, 2011
• Airlines, Travel And Hospitality, Overtone

Fashion has been THE entity that has been consistently reinventing itself from time to time, region to region, person to person and so on…

People of every era or region have got their own signature fashion statement and it may be in the form of clothing, accessories or footwear.

It so happens in the Fashion industry worldwide that the fabric is manufactured in some country (for cost effectiveness), designed in another country and eventually sold in another country. The fashion industry has long been one of the largest employers globally, especially in the United States.

When it comes to the ‘Big Players’ in the Fashion industry, it’s not much of a problem to lure their audience to stores. But for small time retailers and local designers, its really an uphill task to reach out to their audience. There is no clear marketing channel for their success. For some, it may be the location of their boutiques and for some its simply word-of-mouth.

This is where Social Media can play a stellar role! Be it haute couture patrons or bargain shoppers, social media can cater to both.

The Social CRM factor, when plugged-in to this boutique work-flow can make life much easier for the local designers. It brings in the element of ‘Engagement’ into the picture, where consumers-old and new can voice their opinions, discuss the latest trends, share their feedback(good/bad) and general experiences with the store and it’s offerings on social media platforms. Listening to these interactions can help the designers work better to suit their customer’s requirements.

The retailers can take to Blogging and put up their latest range on display (with a restricted login ofcourse, so that their designs remain intact!). Facebook page and a Twitter account can be used to divert traffic to this blog. Have conversations over that and give out tips to their followers. This art of creating a tribe and facilitating a continuous flow of conversation is going to make a huge difference to these boutiques.

Special deals, promotional sales may also be promoted on social media platforms. The designers wouldn’t have to shell out big bucks for announcing their latest range to the world. All they need is a smart strategy to get the sales moving.

Fashion retailers with a youth oriented target audience are currently leading the social media show globally. In UK, TopShop is one of the leading contenders in this race. In India however, the trend is yet to catch up.

eDigitalResearch states that Facebook remains the most trusted site for fashion vendors to engage with their customers.

The Social CRM factor can thus accomplish the main objective of every Fashion Retailer/Designer, i.e to convert buyers into evangelists.

In continuance with our previous post, here we’d like to widen the scope of Social Media with respect to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which Businesses these days term as Consumer Generated Media (CGM) or simply- User Generated Content (UGC).

In the coming weeks, the Dot Now Social team will come up with a series of blog posts highlighting how Social CRM can be effectively applied in some Domains/Verticals, keeping in mind the basics of Social Media (i.e- Listening, Engagement, Alignment, Integration, Measurement) and CRM (i.e-Acquiring, Servicing, Retaining) and we’ll also try to bring the SME/SMB perspective into the picture.

This series of blog posts has been named as the Social CRM-Consumerization of the Enterprise(SCE) series

We’re back with another post! This time on Social Commerce.

Social commerce is simply the use of Social Media in an E-Commerce environment.

As we all know, with the increasing amount of users on Social Networks (especially Facebook and Twitter) every day, the scope for carrying out Business on them has grown enormously.

Almost all the Sellers/Vendors have forayed into Social Media and made a significant presence there, in terms of their brand recognition and fan following. Thanks to Social Media, all of them have been able to build their own respective communities and narrowed down on their buyers to a great extent. Social Media is a great channel to reach out to your customers. Be it the arrival of the latest range of products or promotional deals or sales, the followers are up-to-date with everything.

As per a comScore Report, 23% of Twitter users follow businesses to find special deals, promotions, or sales, while 14% of Twitter users reported taking to the stream to find and share product reviews and opinions. According to another study by Chadwick Martin Bailey, it was observed that 25% of consumers connected to brands on Facebook did so to receive discounts. Another interesting fact that comScore found was- Facebook and Twitter visitors spend 1.5x more online than average Internet users. Therefore, with growing number of users on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, the tendency to spend online also augments.

Social Commerce now has under its fold a variety of social media tools and content used in the context of e-commerce. A few of them are:

• Customer ratings
• Customer reviews
• User recommendations
• Social Shopping tools
• Dedicated platforms (Forums and communities)
• SEO
• Social Advertising

More and more companies are coming up with strategies to capitalize on Social Commerce. Facebook came out with a new strategy wherein its members who use the company’s location-based ‘Places’ feature will be alerted to special deals and discounts offered by retailers in their vicinity. The users can take advantage of this feature by showing their phones at participating stores. Facebook said that this action would be posted on users’ news feed so that their friends might also utilize the special offers. Amazon is charting out its strategy as well.

Few of the most popular Social Commerce players are Amazon, Best Buy, Starbucks, Dell and Hallmark.

Here are a list of Social Commerce sites

• ShopSocially
• Kactoos
• Groupon
• BuyWithMe

So, what more do the Sellers need now, they’ve got dedicated Communities with active Conversations happening and now even the Commerce factor comes in to play. Your time is Now!

Deep Red Ink, as I think about the name it reminds me of the explanation behind the name which ran into number of pages. Well today I will consider it as an accomplishment as CEO of Dot Now Social. But when I accepted the invitation of Santhan and Deepti to be part of the ecology it was an easy, obvious and humbling choice.

DRI is an ecology formed to support great ideas. DRI is not any other business, not one that can be defined by the boundaries of capacity and limitation of bandwidth. DRI is a “concept business” which is all about supporting great ideas driven by passionate entrepreneurs. Though it may appear that DRI is about providing great content, the fundamentals of how the content is generated is the true crux of the business.

While enough has been said about the importance of content in the internet age and on social media, one thing that gets usually ignored is understanding what kind of content goes viral. Many schools of content strategy have spoken of different things, some like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki have sighted it as mere chance. DRI has a fundamentally different approach rooted in the “spiritual” foundation of the founding team. Well, I cannot call myself an expert on the subject but I can say that it is a unique approach and as someone who is building a business on social media I can say it is working. A content strategy based on passion of the entrepreneur, authenticity in communication and “spirit” level approaches may not directly appeal to the ad hoc ”internet age” youngster who claims to be a Social Media expert. But as a student of marketing, the success of the content produced at DRI is a close certainty.

DRI is a concept business also because their interactions with the client are never merely to accomplish the details of a brief. DRI is an evolved business because it strives to connect with the deepest sense of purpose of the client, which is the most amazing form of building customer relationship. DRI is a concept business because profit doesnt drive the reason it chooses a client. The joy derived by working with the client is the only parameter of gauging whom to work with.

This is my favorite part. DRI is a concept business because of the way it is structured. DRI is an ecology of 6 partners. Santhan, Deepti, Anil, Netrix, Quick Silver & Dot Now Social. The structure of the partnership is that all revenues are divided between the 6 partners equally irrespective of who participates in a particular project in what capacity. I’ve been enamored by entrepreneurship and enterprises for over 4 years, and have studied business models with the vigor of a geek, but DRI beats them all. To common sense it does not appeal, nor does it sound totally logical, even remotely viable. But it is perhaps the most interesting journey of my entrepreneurial journey to see DRI evolve as a sustainable, profitable and growing business.

Dot Now Social is proud to be part of this successful experiment as takes this opportunity thank all members of Deep Red Ink ecology and all the clients of Deep Red Ink. I’m very keenly observing how DRI is shaping up and giving meaning to a key learning of last year that Ecologies are the new Business Ethic. As Social Media partners at DRI, we have received amazing work, from amazing clients with the most interesting challenges. We are looking forward to more.

You must have come across the word- Social Recruiting in recent times. How many times have you googled it? Did you get the right answer? Here, we’ll deconstruct this process for better understanding and gradual implementation.

To start off with, what does it really mean, well Social Recruiting is nothing but the new-age process adopted by companies and recruiters to source and recruit candidates for employment, using social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

As per a survey carried out by a leading firm in the year 2009, more than 70% of the hires were made through Internet. Print has lost its relevancy and currently accounts for only 15% of all hires, followed by Employment agencies and others. With more than 2/3rd of the world’s internet population visiting social networking sites every day, it makes it one of the most popular online activities (even ahead of Email!). And with the exponential growth of ‘social networkers’ on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, et cetera, recruiting via social media is a great option.

Accenture was in the news recently, it has plans to recruit 50,000 people this year, with 40% sourced through social media and websites such as Twitter and LinkedIn. Another big player- Deloitte(in the Netherlands) is using social media to improve its recruitment process and websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, all have parts to play.

Lets talk about Recruiters or Headhunters first. Their prime task is to ‘attract’ the candidates with the help of these social platforms. Gone are the days when a company solely depended on their website and other job boards. Biggies like Google, Microsoft may be a little relaxed when it comes to social recruiting but for SMEs and the Not-so-Biggies, Social media is the perfect channel for hiring. Recruiters need to have a complete social footprint to ensure job seekers find them. They should also integrate social media into their websites and use these social networks as traffic drivers to them.

The next step involves the screening of the candidates and a background check. Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter can be used extensively to attract the best of talent and screen them. On Facebook, the employers can extend their recruitment brand as well as have two-way conversations. Coming to LinkedIn, the companies can set up a corporate profile page and use an RSS feed to list the vacancies. Vacancies can also be posted in User groups. The use of Hash tags and lists in Twitter make it another possible option for Employers. YouTube is a difficult option but if done right, the employers can get masses to their doorstep. It can help immensely towards Brand building and job offering.

We recommend the following tools to Recruiters- LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Jobvite, Jobmagic, HirePlug, Work for Us, Zubed Jobs and a few more that can help recruiters track down the best of talent.

The recruiters need to remember that social media will eventually become intrinsically linked to their hiring strategy as well as their brand.

Now, coming to Jobseekers; Companies are increasingly using Social Recruiting in their hiring process and it pays well to get a good understanding of that process which can be used to the advantage of the Job seekers. The job seekers can position themselves better to be discovered by companies this way. They need to make sure they don’t post any inappropriate content on social networking portals. Bitching about your peers, Boss, co-workers, your organization can have a perilous impact on your social as well as professional life. In recent times, cricketers Kevin Pietersen, Dmitri Mascarenhas, Phil Hughes were severely reprimanded for their untimely outbursts on Twitter.

Bickering on social networks can even lead to loss of jobs as in some cases. At the same time, it may also affect your future prospects. So, one needs to be extra careful with what he posts on these sites.

To increase your chance of ‘being seen’ on social networks, you need to Position yourself well by posting relevant, informative content through blogs, content sharing and discussions. Always look to make new and useful contacts who’ll be helpful in your future undertakings. Initiate and participate in conversations to enhance your knowledge and establish a healthy relationship with your co-networkers.

We recommend the following social platforms that can help job seekers in their quest-  LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, Viadeo, Twitter, Ning and Koda

And now to close it off, I’d like to say that Social media is just a new means for recruiters, but the fundamental process of effective communication and building relationships with the candidates remains the same.