Middle Management’s Role in Business Software Purchases

January 31, 2011 at 3:22 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, middle managers

Here is an interesting report. In December 2010, inlevel conducted a research on “Middle Management as Business Software Influencer.”  They start with an interesting point. Software tended to be sold to senior business management and CIOs. However, because of increased access to the Web, greater use of cloud applications and simpler applications, a growing number of software purchases do not require senior level support nor need to involve IT.  So this study looked at the current role of middle managers in software purchases. They gathered responses from 210 middle managers across a variety of industries in the US.

The research found that 42% of middle managers surveyed said they are actively engaged in the enterprise software selection process and 41% said no one a cared about their views.  They want to talk with vendors about their offerings.  Asked to list obstacles to their involvement, 24% expect that IT people will be against their software ideas, 23% expect senior management to oppose them, 22% said they need a sold business case and 14% said it is hard find information about the software. Only 21% did not see any obstacles and expect that their software suggestions will be accepted.

Their advice to vendors is enhance the role that middle managers play in the selection process by providing clear descriptions of the functions of their products, more training materials directed at business professional and make the relationship the software and their more explicit.

How do they get information on software now? The respondents said that 24% comes from industry news, 20% from their IT department, 12% from friends, 2% from social media. They largest category of responses came from the 38% who said they did not have such information.

In a related but different question, when asked about where they go to get software information, 52% said they search on the Web, 33% said they talk to their IT department, 16% said they talk directly to vendors, and 21% said they were not interested.

In another related question about their preferred ways to gather information from vendors, the largest category was the 38% who said they do not bother because they do not have purchasing authority. The next in line at about 20% each was phone, email and reading web sites. Only 4% said that never ask vendors because they do not trust them.

This tells me that that middle mangers are somewhat involved in software decisions.  Without a baseline from prior years, it is hard to tell if this role is increasing due to the changing market factors.  I do know that many enterprise 2.0 software firms are trying the “seed and expand” strategy. They make a very low entry point and then hope to grow the numbers. A future study would benefit from also looking at the price of software purchases as a variable.  I do think they are asking an interesting question and would like to see more work here.

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Is ‘Social CRM’ Too Good to be True?

January 30, 2011 at 5:36 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, FASTforward'09, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0

Is ‘Social CRM’ (customer relationship management) too good to be true?

Houston Neal, who runs an advisory service for software buyers, has been watching the growing hype around “Social CRM,” and asks: is it for real?

The answer is, he opines, not yet, but organizations sure could use it.  The problem is, he says, nobody has a good definition for Social CRM yet, and this is creating confusion in the market.

As I mentioned in a previous post here at FastForward, “Social CRM” has a redundant ring to it. Think of the phrases “round circle” or “free gift” or “digital computer.”  The bottom line is that if a company has a non-social, closed-off CRM system, it really isn’t doing CRM at all, is it?

Any CRM implementation worth its salt these days need to blend social media data into the system. Otherwise, it’s a system that is completely missing an important and growing channel that involves many highly engaged customers. The key is to make all your CRM efforts “Social” CRM efforts.

Houston points to another issue that may hamper putting more social into CRM — a highly fragmented market. “The debate over Social CRM has been drawn out over the past couple of years and analysts are still at odds over how to define it. Depending on who you ask, social CRM will mean something different.”

For example, he points out, the social CRM landscape is comprised of several evolving software categories — including the following:

• CRM packages
• Social media monitoring
• Social platforms
• Social analytics

Each category has about 20 to 150 vendors, Houston says. The challenge is deciding which category of software to pursue. He offers the following advice for sorting out a Social CRM strategy:

Don’t look to buy ‘Social CRM’ solutions: “Instead, you need to decide what you are trying to accomplish and which categories [mentioned above]  are most likely to make a meaningful contribution to your strategy.”

Define your goals for a Social CRM strategy: “If you just want to track what customers are saying about your brand on the Web, then a social media monitoring application will suffice. But if you want to analyze that data, identify influencers, or spot trends, you should explore social analytics. Finally, if owning the community is strategically important, you will need a platform to build out that environment for your constituents.”

Look to traditional CRM vendors for enhanced enterprise functionality: “Social CRM vendors don’t offer the same level of sales, service and marketing functionality that traditional CRM vendors offer. So if you need capabilities like sales lead management, lead nurturing and a few social features on the side, then you should really be looking at CRM software.

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Social Media – Can you perform Inception on yourself?

January 30, 2011 at 8:29 am · Filed under Adoption, Andy Carvin, Culture

As large organizations struggle to come to grips with whether to use Social Media and then how to use it – the world watches its power in the Arab world and America’s political system gets ready to deploy it in full force in the 2012 election.

This is how important Social Media is to the regime in Egypt. They shut it down knowing its power. We don’t know how events will unfold, but there is no doubt that the autocrats that run most of the Middle East are in grave peril and that both the spark and then the fire that has been unleashed has been carried by Social Media. The real power has been given to the people.

Now think of your organization. Just as the power in a nation has now been given to the people, the real power of your Brand has also been given to the people. If you are not listening to the people who use Social Media and then interacting with them, you are in the same kind of peril. If you think that you can fool the people about the quality of your offering, you are in peril.

The new era is here for organizations and for all of us. You can’t hide anymore. Your life and work is now public. If your life or work don’t fit, then you will be exposed.

Think that this is just a Middle East issue? Well our politicians don’t.

The 2012 election will be the Social Media Election. Why? Because, the politicians know that they will not get a second chance – they know that they will have to be in the stream. Proof? Who is the most popular man in Washington right now? Twitter’s Rep on the Hill.

This is only a start. The election coverage will be dominated by the web.

The New Hampshire primary is over a year away, and the first major candidate has yet to formally declare. Just don’t tell that to outlets like Politico, Talking Points Memo and RealClearPolitics, which are already planning to smother the 2012 campaign trail in a way they could never have imagined four years ago when they had far smaller staffs of bloggers and shoestring budgets.

With an eye toward earning greater respectability, this crop of political Web sites is hoping for more than just page views and traffic-driving links from the Drudge Report. They want to establish themselves as the Blogs on the Bus.

“We were a garage band in 2008, riffing on the fly,” said Jim VandeHei, Politico’s executive editor and co-founder. “Now we’re a 200-person production, with a precise feel and plan.”

Politico will host, with NBC News and Telemundo, the first debate of the campaign season on May 2, getting a head start on a season of face-offs that is already remarkably busy. (Politico edged ahead of Fox News, which scheduled a debate for May 5.)

This is how the new news organizations will do it but now even a citizen can do as good a job – have a look here at how one person, Andy Carvin, covered the Tuscon events while looking after his 2 children that Saturday

You will see that one well connected person can use their network and a few tools to offer up an insight to rival any offered by even the New York Times.

So in this context, where does your organization stand. I am sure that you are doing something now. But what is the relative importance that you have put on becoming expert at this? When I say expert I don’t mean by having a Twitter or Facebook strategy to simply push out your message. I mean this:

• Have you been able to accept what all of this means to your culture – that you can no longer control the message or your brand or that you can hide problems?
• That your number 1 job is to “Listen in Real Time” to what people are saying and oing abut things that matter to you. Research is transformed by this into a need for “Intelligence”. Think now like a General at war. You can and must know minute by minute what is going on.
• Your second job is to interact in a human way with both your allies out there and with those that have problems with you. No more Corporate Speak – No more “Your call is important to us”. You have to be authentic at the SM interface – in fact you have to lose that language and approach in every part of your external interaction
• The hardest job of all is that you have to make the new relationship with those outside your organization the same as the one that you have inside. And here is where the challenge lies.

Getting good at using Social Media is not about using the tools. They are easy to use as tools. They are cheap to install. They are the cheapest tools you have ever deployed.

But to use them well demands a revolution in organizational culture and this is not hard – it is very very very very hard to pull off.

It is as hard as any real life change such as eating in an entirely different way that is based on a new lifestyle. Or not marrying a clone of your first failed partner.

Using Social Media is all about giving up your old identity of control. The old you has to die, before you can do this well.

So there can be no cookie cutter – 5 best steps – template – Best Practice approach. There can’t be for giving up alcohol either.

But there is an approach to making great life changes that does have a high success rate. It is based in these steps:

• You – the CEO – have to “know” in your gut that it is a life or death decision. That your organization will never amount to anything now unless you can make this life change. If you don’t feel this – you are not serious.
• You have to know that you cannot demand this of your self or of anyone else. You cannot part the Red Sea with your command. if you still think you can “Drive Change” – you are not serious.
• You have to make the change in relationship and how you use power yourself. How you are will be the virus. If you don’t understand that this is all about you how you are  - you are not serious
• It helps to have a someone close to you who has done this – in AA it is a sponsor – in late 16th Century Europe it may have been your Jesuit confessor – someone close who will not judge you – who has shared all you doubts – who will never reveal to anyone what they have learned from you – someone you can call at any time. A true friend who cares about YOU. If you don’t understand that this is the model of the relationships that you will have to make your own with others – you are not serious.
• It helps to start small – for all will learn by creating new habits. Our work creates new habits and new habits create a new “Normal”  and our new Normal is the new culture. If you want to start big, you don’t understand yet.
• Small experiments also create other evangelists in your organization and so give you the network power top spread the change – again – not because you have commanded it but because – you planted the seed in your own persona – you have been your own “Inception”. If you don’t understand how much you need willing partners – you have missed it all!

There is now work that is more difficult than this. But what choice do you have?

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Social Media Usage in the Inc. 500 Continues to Rise

January 24, 2011 at 3:32 am · Filed under Inc 500, Social Media

Recently, I looked at the most latest in the very useful series of longitudinal studies on social media use by The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth led by Nora Barnes.  This one covered Social Media Usage in the Inc. 500. In contrast here is their most recent one on Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500.  In this case, there was a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc. 500 list. All interviews took place in October and November of 2010 and obtained 34% participation.

Of course, this sample represents a moving target as the companies included continue to shift and this may effect the data.  In 2010 there were more government services and financial services firms than the years before. Since companies in these two areas under use social media compared to others, this shift has the effect on reducing growth numbers.

We can see this effect of shifting market niches in the numbers reported in the study. In 2010 83% of the Inc. 500 reporting using at least one of the social media tools studied (see below).  However, government services companies make up 12% of the 2010 Inc. 500, but 27% of those not using social media tools. Energy companies comprise 3% of the 2010 Inc. 500 but 17% of the non-users.  Financial services companies make up 5% of the Inc. 500, but they comprise 10% of the companies who have not yet adopted social media.

The study appears to be focused on market facing uses of social media but then this is the Center for Marketing Research.  It looked at blogs, online video, message boards, podcasting, and the specific social networking tools:  Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, and Foursquare.  Two of the biggest gainers in 2010 are Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is used by 59% of the Inc. 500 use it for business purposes, up from 52%.  Twitter is perceived as a useful tool as 81% of users consider it a success. Facebook growth was higher with 71% using it for business up from 61% in 2009 and it had a 85% success rating.

Next in percent of usage were blogs. Looking back over the past three years there was a steady increase in company blogs with a rise from 38% in 2008 to 45% in 2009 to 50% in 2010.  In addition to the growth in usage the report noted that firms are using them more effectively, “There is a strong propensity to engage consumers through accepting and replying to comments and providing a vehicle for subscriptions.”  Company blogging was also considered successful by 86% of adopters. In addition, 34% percent have developed policies to govern blogging by their employees. In the Fortune 500 only 20% report such policies.  Both numbers are too low.  The Fortune 500 also are less likely to use blogs with only 23% reporting have a company blog in 2010, a one percent increase over 2009.

Within the Inc. 500 the majority (56%) feel social media is important for their success online.  They also look at what others are saying about them through social media. Seventy percent report they actively monitor, up slightly from 68% last year, 60% in 2008 and 50% in 2007.  In addition to using social media to communicate to their markets, there is a rise in use for communication with partners, vendors, and suppliers. Blog use in this category rose form 18% in 2009 to 22% in 2010.  Facebook is used by 31% of respondents and Twitter is used by 27%.

I have only addressed some of the highlights. The complete executive summary is available at the Center for Marketing Research site.

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Remembering Marshall McLuhan

January 18, 2011 at 3:54 am · Filed under Culture, Marhsall McLuhan, Social Media

Here is another book about one of the more innovative thinkers in the last century, Marshall McLuhan.  David Carr reviews Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” by Douglas Coupland in the New York Times. Thanks to Chris Coleman, EVP of Marketing at Yakabod, for pointing out the review.

I had the pleasure of attending some of McLuhan’s seminars while I was doing my graduate school work at the University of Toronto in the early 1970s. These were exciting experiences with rapid fire pronouncements from McLuhan.  He was full of ideas and quickly moved from one to another. Marshall did not like to take questions because, as he said, he was three or four ideas further down the road when a question was asked. Carr notes a similar trait when he writes, “He (McLuhan) loved teaching but was oblique in the extreme and had little use for the thoughts of others unless they were written down at length and subjected to rigorous analysis.” He might not have liked Twitter given the 140 character limit but I am sure he would something to say about it.

David Carr writes that Coupland’s book is full of unconventional angles, ricochets and resonances, just like McLuhan. He notes that Coupland writes that it was “McLuhan’s ability to anticipate the homogenizing and dehumanizing effect of mass media when the phenomenon was in its infancy that made him remarkable.”  McLuhan felt that the fact that the medium is the message was a bad thing. He did not like the triumph of context over content. He was not a fan of Mad Men.

What was especially impressive was that McLuhan offered these conclusions before there was any genuine understanding of how human beings process mediated information. He was ahead of most of the cognitive psychologists of his day. As Carr quotes Coupland: “One must remember that Marshall arrived at these conclusions not by hanging around, say, NASA or I.B.M., but rather by studying arcane 16th-century Reformation pamphleteers, the writings of James Joyce, and Renaissance perspective drawings. He was a master of pattern recognition, the man who bangs a drum so large that it’s only beaten once every hundred years.”

I was at the University of Toronto indirectly because of McLuhan. I had developed an interest in the effects of media on cognition through looking at how young children did art. David Olson, a psychologist at U of T, was looking at this issue. He had initially been motivated to look at the concept by McLuhan’s work.  So I choose to go to Toronto to study with David Olson. I have seen a lot of research that indicates that the communication channels we use help shape our messages and how we receive them. I did some myself.

This was a new concept in cognitive psychology, as well as in the general dialogue.  Coupland quotes McLuhan, “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” and Carr notes that was “describing a television and telecommunications revolution, but he was also setting out the implications of the consumer Web four decades before it blossomed.”

This impact of the Web on our thoughts, relationships, and business continues to interest me. It is ironic that it grew from an interest in the 1970s in the cognitive thought processes that children use as they create art and was indirectly influenced by someone studying Renaissance art and literature mostly prior to the 20th century.  I looked at visual versus verbal thought but the same general concepts hold. Media does help shape cognition. I am pleased to see this new work. It both brings back memories and covers the still relevant work of a creative and complex thinker.

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