Dot Now blog

Happy New Year 2012!

Nabeel Adeni — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:16:52 +0000

Dear Friends,

As we look back on a year filled with surprises, adventures, major developments, unexpected challenges, and enormous gratifications, we are keenly aware we wouldn’t be here without you, our clients, proteges, well wishers, partners, supporters and friends.

Thank you for helping us learn and grow.

Here’s looking forward to a wonderful and joyous 2012 together!

“Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.”
~Hal Borlan”

Cheers from all of us at Dot Now Social

Saturday Learning Session- Deep Listening

Nabeel Adeni — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 12:13:44 +0000

Deep Listening was the topic for the in-house Learning session held at office, last Saturday. We went about deconstructing it and arrived at some very interesting inferences.

First, we shared each other’s individual experiences when it came to deep listening and observed what difference it had made in that particular context. It’s sincere application made a positive impact while its non-application tended to made things worse.

When we have one-on-one conversations with our peers, family members and others, we often are put into situations where we have to do the listening part or to put it in simpler words- hear out somebody’s story. At this point of time, we often find ourselves getting distracted due to some random reason or unable to pay concentration to what the other person has to say. Deep Listening is the approach we’ve gotta take!

We further discussed on the topic and here are the inferences from the same.

For Deep Listening to be successful, we’ve got to ask questions to get clarifications and get more info.
We’ve got to pay utmost attention to Facts in the story, Feelings at every level and the Intent of the speaker in that context.
There is also a need to give feedback/acknowledgement, the most critical element of effective communication, so that the other person feels ‘being listening to’. This gives him/her the ability to proceed further with their story in an uncomplicated manner
Deep listening more often than not results in progress/positive change or shift from the previous state.
We need to listen to the other person without any preconceived notions and an empty mind. This will help us to analyze the other person’s situation better.
While deep listening, we’ve also got to make sure that we are non-judgmental and don’t come to any conclusions during the conversation.
At no point of time should the speaker be sympathized with, the listener’s job is to empathize with them.
Also, we should remember that deep listening is really about understanding the context of the speaker’s story and not about coming to an agreement with it.
And lastly, deep listening is all about patience and willingness to hold in the heart.

Post the deep listening phase comes action time, when we need to reply to the speaker and express what we feel about the whole thing.

Rephrase the account and narrate it to the speaker
Name that feeling
State the Intention

“The choice to Listen, is the choice to Love!” – Kiran Gulrajani

Social CRM in Hospitality industry (SCE series)

Nabeel Adeni — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 04:30:04 +0000

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

Listen to what people are talking about your brand.
Understand the social graph of your customers and see where they’re coming from.
Try to identify your most frequent/best customers from the graph and see if they’re active on Social media.
Set your goals and objectives from the above steps.
Establish processes and requirements to meet those objectives.
Put together a Social media plan based on your requirements and processes.
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

Social CRM in the Fashion Industry (SCE Series)

Nabeel Adeni — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 06:59:29 +0000

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.

Social CRM in Airlines … -(SCE Series)

Nabeel Adeni — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 10:42:48 +0000

In our endeavor to explore all possible avenues where Social CRM could be applied in this series of blog posts, we start off with Social CRM in the Airlines industry’.

So, how’d it help the Airlines if they joined the Social Media bandwagon?

Well, following the basic principles of Social Media which consists of communities and conversations, we can state that there are status updates, tweets, etc from passengers, doing the rounds that they are in a certain airline on the way to a certain destination, on so-and-so airways. They simply air feedback on social media platforms, describing their journeys, be it good or bad on that air carrier and the kind of service meted out to them and so on and so forth.

It is here that the airlines need to tap in and see how the customer experience has been. There are various tools on the internet to keep a track of all this chatter. Airlines need to get a team in place and monitor/listen to those conversations and make a note of all that. And also respond to queries and solve passenger grievances.

But, not every airline on the planet can do it right. It just takes some amount of effort and dedication from the airline.

In US, the twitter feed of Delta Airlines(@Delta) is very active as well as responsive. It asks it’s passengers to send in their Flight numbers to check if the Flight is on time/delayed and answers to queries along with offering apologies to unhappy passengers and more.

In India, Facebook and Twitter are being used pretty decently by Jet Airways(@jetairways) & Kingfisher Airlines (flykingfisher). They are doing their bit to get onto the bandwagon and explore other avenues with Social Media. I’m afraid the same cannot be said about the national carrier- Indian Airlines.

A couple of weeks back, severe snow and ice storms had hit the San Francisco,CA region and the customer care phone lines of United, Southwest and Delta Airlines observed a severe congestion. Travellers had to resort to Social Media platforms to know about their flight reservations and rebookings.

In late 2010, the Netherlands’ national carriers- KLM launched the KLM Surprise. It made use of Foursquare app. As soon the passengers checked-in using Foursquare, at the Amsterdam Airport, the KLM staff set out to gather their info from social media platforms. They chose a unique gift for the passenger, located him/her in the terminal and delivered the surprise gift to them. This info was also shared on the Facebook page and Twitter accounts of KML.

Talk about Customer experience!

Remember, Business is all about forming and sustaining relationships. And, Social Media provides a fantastic platform to build these relationships.

Dot Now to come out with a series of blog posts on Social CRM

Nabeel Adeni — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 11:04:47 +0000

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

Social CRM – Consumerization of the Enterprise

Nabeel Adeni — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 12:17:30 +0000

At Dot Now Social, we regard ‘Business’ as a Social activity. This clearly implies that to drive a Business, it’s very important to engage with the Community and develop various channels of communication with that community. It may well be in the form of Conversations and it’s ultimately about building relationships with your customers.

With the advent of the ‘Web’, the world has shrunken into a small community in itself and that has made an enormous difference to Businesses, both service oriented and product development firms. We’re living in the era of the ‘Customer’/Consumer or rather the ‘Social Customer’. With such extensive use of Social media– Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MouthShut, Hotpot, Yelp, Blogs, etc. the voice of the customer is amplified. Here, the customers give opinions and share their experiences with their purchased products or catered services. Potential customers get to have a glimpse of prior user experiences of the Vendor’s offerings (products and services) and get to rethink or retract their decisions. Customer reviews can either make or break sales. Customer feedback can easily push a Business to its zenith of glory or nadir of ignominy.

CRM has many definitions but the one that covers all aspects of CRM is given by our good old Wikipedia, which defines Customer relationship management (CRM) as a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.

In Social CRM, as in traditional CRM, the focus is completely on the Customer and there are tremendous efforts undertaken by the Vendor to please the customer and build a relationship with him.

The first step of CRM is to Acquire the customer. This can be done either through proper Contact, i.e. – Ads, referrals or word-of-mouth.

The second step is Servicing/Enhancement. Here the customer is literally treated like a God by the Vendors. This is also the most critical step in the CRM Process. The ultimate objective is offer convenience to the customer. If the Vendor fails to please or falls short of delivering the promised service, he is sure to have a furious customer.(And, seriously there is nothing worse for vendor than having an irate customer posting his feedback or ‘bad experience all over social media). It attracts negative publicity and can even damage the reputation of the Vendor. Nothing travels faster than negative stories on Social Media. This is also the reason why some brands have restricted themselves from entering the Social Media realm.

Lastly, the final step of CRM process is ‘Retaining’. Here the customer is rewarded for his loyalty & faithfulness in the Vendor and his brand. This could be in the form of special offers, discounts, or various promotional deals.

The biggest challenge here is to see how Social Media can make CRM happen and at the same time help the brand to build/further strengthen the relationships with its customers. The key is to Engage with the customers. Engagement simply refers to healthy Interaction and good reception. This will contribute in creating an optimistic brand perception, enhance brand recall and eventually promote loyalty towards the brand, thereby resulting in sales.

Social Media Experts feel the need for B2B models to tread with an ultra-cautious approach on social media. The experts advise an intense market research and to weigh the pros and cons, for this is truly the Consumerization of the Enterprise.

So, if the Vendors see good returns, in terms of sales, brand awareness, etc they should definitely go for it and leverage the power of Social Media to benefit their Business. Your time is Now!

The advent of Social Commerce

Nabeel Adeni — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 07:11:48 +0000

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!

the ‘social’ in the movie business

mallik.bhat — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:04:38 +0000

At Dot Now social we are very interested in finding evidence that links impact of social media on any business. Our search took us to George Washington Uinversity. Researchers at GWU constructed a model that links impact of online user reviews on movie sales and tested it with real time data from Yahoo movie reviews, BoxofficeMojo and one more site. Although the model uses a quantitative approach to modeling the impact, the findings are very interesting.

Does it mean if you are a movie maker should you be worried about social media?

The researchers in order to answer this question built a study that tries to isolate the user reviews from other factors such as critics ratings, movie marketing effort, story and actors. Given all things being same does word of mouth on social networks has any substantial impact on box office opening sales?

Online social networks make ‘Word of mouth’ so effective due to the temporal factor. You would almost instantly come to know of the reviews as soon as the movie show gets over. This poses both opportunities and challenges for movie makers. It is obvious that each of us do depend on what our friends and acquaintances say about a movie, before and after its release. We are also influenced by what our news paper or popular critic on a website might say about the movie. But we also tend to make a impulse purchase, meaning we some time just go with the flow at the ticket counter. There are multitude of factors that influence box office collections, I am intrigued by what the study is offering and most importantly how it was structured.

The study establishes three important variables – count of reviews online and the extent of reviews. Extent here refers to how much positively one feels after the watching the movie. There is a clearly identifiable link between box office sales and user reviews but one feeds another. The users of these sites although give importance to volume of reviews online, but they give limited importance to rating itself, because the ratings are mixed. In such cases they go by content. So the question is if you as a movie maker, generate enough content and conversation with user reviews would you be able to influence the box office sales?

Miracle called Deep Red Ink

Sashank — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:58:18 +0000

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.