CD Blog Reviews

News hit this Monday that Powered has acquired three social media agencies: crayon , Drillteam and StepChange . I just had a skype video conversation with Aaron Strout and Joseph Jaffe to learn more, here’s my take.  You can read crayon founder Joseph’s take and Aaron Strout the CMO of Powered and a quick mention in NYT . A Solution Set of Services Bolsters a Marketing Platform I’ve heard of crayon, and have many conversations and even podcasts with founder Joseph Jaffe, I’ve also spent time with the Powered executive team last year.  Stepchange is a 13 person team out of Portland focused on Facebook Apps and mobile, and Drillteam, from NY, has been around for 10 years and focuses on experitntial and advocacy marketing, such as connecting events to online like street teams, guerrilla, and ambassador programs. Powered isn’t just a community platform, I learned they have other marketing features that really intent to provide a suite of offerings. Natural Evolution Of A Growing Market: Consolidation happens in downturned markets. As the recession starts to show signs of it lifting, now’s a great time for companies to come together and create a greater value.  We saw this type of acquisition behavior from agencies during the first boom, and we should expect similar patterns here. Acquisition provides key services software platforms can’t fill. It makes sense for Powered platform to partner up with a service(s) teams that have already been successful for some time, this improves the time to market to deployment.  In addition to coming with a book of business, they can quickly deploy the Powered platform, expanding the software footprint.  Joseph Jaffe has strong thought leadership, an existing marketing brand, and reach needed to the group. Yet, brings risk for Powered and new partners. First of all, there are some big names coming together,  the real stress will be can these cultures, and their strong willed leaders, be able to jive together.  Secondly, it’ll be interseting to see if Crayon and services teams forces stragies on their clients that involve the Powered platform.  I asked if there are any layoffs coming from consolidation, they haven’t made any plans, but when you have 4 companies coming together expect redundancy. Impacts To Customers, Partners and Competitors: Social Agencies should rekindle and bolster relationships . This impacts other social agencies like Stage 2, Social Media Today, AdHoc, Ant’s Eye View, ForumOne, Community Roundtable, Shift Communications, Dachis, FutureWorks who may be at medium and small tier, they should quickly partner up with other firms to increase their value. Customers of crayon, Drillteam, and Stepchange should request agnostic recommendations. Any client of these three agencies should make sure that the strategy they are being offered includes other vendors and platforms –not just the Powered platform and Facebook platform.  Remember, first find out where your customers are online before choosing the tools to use. This is competition for larger agencies –yet savvy agencies will partner. This is a threat to large agencies like Organic, Razorfish, Ogilvy, and Edelman.  Yet the smart agencies won’t get defensive, they should partner with this team, and figure out what offerings they can offer that they don’t have in their portfolio. Congrats to the Powered, crayon, Drilldteam and Stepchange team for this merger, I’m excited to see the industry emerge from small disparate startups to a larger entity going forward.

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Quicktake: Powered, A Social Marketing Suite, Acquires Crayon and Social Media Agencies

The recession has been great for social marketing , in fact, I feel it’s spurred the industry on. With overall reduced marketing budgets, companies must innovate, and find new channels that are more efficient than the ‘carpet-bombing’ techniques of traditional marketing. There are a handful of goals that companies can have with social technologies, from learning, dialog, support, and innovation ( see Charlene’s deck, starting at slide 8 to learn more ), I want to drill down in the following matrix to focus on the goal of spreading, and word of mouth, and viral. I call this “Advocacy”. Marketers, who strive to find efficient ways of reaching customers at lower cost, seek ‘ force-multipliers ‘ or a method where using a small degree of energy (or the energy of another force) to your advantage. Do remember, there is a downside to any action, and with ‘advocacy’ there’s reduced control over message and therefore more risk. With that said, many marketers know the benefits of content spreading are worth the risks. Matrix: Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing Sophistication and Description Investments and Returns Strengths: Weaknesses: Great For: Sharing Tools Baseline effort. Tools like Sharethis , AddThis , Gigya , and some features in Pluck , and Kickapps . High. Low investment as it can easily be deployed on CMS templates. Continual returns of content spreading with no additional overhead or cost. Easy to deploy, yet transactional Do not build deep relationship with customers Getting started, a baseline activity. Viral Marketing A basic technique. Word of mouth campaigns on Facebook apps, YouTube (see popular) , or Twitter (see moonfruit example) Low. Being able to hit the right elements of the content people want, timing, and other factors are difficult. Chances are, most campaigns that intend to be viral never are Easy for media and interactive agencies to create and deploy. Dime a dozen. Short term and cheap. Not conducive to building long term relationships. Traditional agencies and transactional marketers that are trying to learn social Social Network Connections An intermediate technique. Facebook, Twitter Connect. Easy to comment systems on blogs, to sophisicated Huffington Post social recommendations , see Buddy Media . Moderate to High. Allowing customers to login to your site with existing connections increase value of social sharing and chance to serve up contextual data. However there are considerable costs in creating contextual content and systems that are not yet mature. Encourages people to quickly login, share, and find others who have interests Challenges in collecting email leads as customers now ‘login’ using social connections. Static websites who need to inject social interactions. Advocacy Programs An advanced technique. Longer term programs with customer advocates like Microsoft MVP or Walmart’s 11 Mom’s High return but high cost. Companies can benefit from an unpaid army that will market, defend, and support customers, but this requires significant resources to launch, grow, and maintain. Builds long term deep relationships with a customer group that will defend brand. Requires full resources for program, takes time to build Companies that can’t scale their marketing in a high touch customer experience. Companies Should Embrace Advocacy Programs Organizations are already deploying these word of mouth tools, but often without a plan or strategy, get started now by: Deploy simple sharing features now. These cheap and easy to insert embeds should be on every content type where companies want the content to spread. From press releases, to blog posts, companies need to make it easy for their market to share with others. Reduce risks by providing proper support and resources . Organizations should first understand the costs, downsides and risks for each type of marketing program, with greater returns (Advocacy program) comes greater commitment of resources, and greater risk, so to reduce those risks, put the right resources behind it. Develop new measurement techniques. Measuring the spread of information is more difficult, as often companies won’t have web analytics installed on third party websites. Instead use a variety of mention and url tracking with brand monitoring software to track how far information spreads over time.

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Matrix: Breakdown of Advocacy Marketing

Pay per click which is normally known as PPC, is no more a new word in the industry. Any field that is related to internet marketing is sensitive to this expression. Those people, who are new to it, pay per click or PPC can be expressed …

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choose the finest Pay Per Click Company to get the best results at …

Long term friend and former colleague Robert Scoble (who’s now with Rackspace ) came by to interview the Altimeter Group. Although Deborah Schultz and Charlene Li were off traveling the globe, Ray Wang (who covers enterprise strategy) and myself were able to sit down with Robert and discuss the trends we see happening in the industry. Big wave to Rocky who’s the show producer, and also a former colleague.

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(Video) 2010 Trends: More Speed and Integration, 27 min

For a few years ago, I’ve created what I call Industry Index lists to track companies in any particular vertical. Yesterday’s post on Social CRM vendors walking the talk raised the appropriate awareness of this nascent space. I expect this space to rapidly increase in size as social channels will be bolted onto CRM vendors, and many brand monitoring and community platforms are adding workflow, triage, capabilities. The purpose of this list is to quickly capture the vendors participating in this space, and to acknowledge those that were not on yesterday’s review, I expect there to be many more vendors who leave a comment, which we can quickly add to this list. We prefer Paul Greenberg’s definition of Social CRM , which he summarizes as: “CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.” (read his 2009 review of this space ) List of Companies Providing Social CRM Offerings Traditional CRM Vendors offering Social CRM Microsoft Dynamics: Partnered with Neighborhood America Oracle Siebel Social CRM: Promises the ability to provide insights based on the buying behaviors of similar customers, as well as shared content to be used between sales teams. RightNow CRM: Offers several feature s in their suite such as Support Communities, Innovation Communities, Cloud Monitoring, and Social Experience Design Salesforce: Offers acces to Social Networking like Facebook and Twitter . Salesforce, like SAP is importing the Twitter “firehose” feed, and has offered social features like Q&A, and social networking like Chatter, and has lightweight LinkedIn integration . SAP CRM: Imports the Twitter firehose feed, and Sugar CRM: Offers “SugarCRM Cloud Connectors connect via Web Services to leading third-party data service providers such as Hoover’s, JigSaw and LinkedIn” Community Platforms Offering Social CRM Jive Software: Community Engagement , offers data integration from Radian6, encouraging management of the discussion. Lithium Technologies offers the Social CRM Suite . Neighborhood America: Has had a partnership with Microsoft Dynamics, read press release , and commentary from Paul Greenberg on ZDNet . Brand Monitoring Offering Social CRM Radian 6: Offers brand monitoring tools that allow tools to discuss (Conversation Sidebar), triage, and manage disparate conversations, see Dave Fleet’s write up . Social Media Clients CoTweet: Offers a variety of features that allow teams to monitor, manage, and triage conversations in Twitter, see features page . Hootsuite: Provides workflow, analytics , for teams to manage multiple Twitter accounts. Sales 2.0 InsideView: Offers some unique offerings that mine a business social graph to provide alerts as a plugin to traditional CRM systems, Watch this lengthy demo . Social Network Connections Appirio: Offer s the ability for companies to create applications on Facebook which then marry data back to Salesforce, called Cloud Connectors. Not on this list? Leave a comment, with a link, I’ll take a look and add to it. Sal

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List of Companies Providing Social CRM Offerings

Leading Affiliate Marketing Blog – Industry News, Tips and More.

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Merry Xmas from Google – Affiliates get Adwords Bans – 5 Star …

Leading Affiliate Marketing Blog – Industry News, Tips and More. See the original post here: Merry Xmas from Google – …

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Merry Xmas from Google – Affiliates get Adwords Bans – 5 Star …