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Inside this issue September/October 2012
Management Focus
essential management knowledge for today’s leaders
Management Matters
Do Millennials read books or blogs?
p. 3
An
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rvie
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Featured articleSocial CRM: the customers are in control
p. 4
Monika Wencek: Enterprise 2.0 Bringing social media inside your organization
p. 6
http://first.emeraldinsight.comManagement Focus September/October 2012 2
Editor: Debbie Hepton [email protected] http://twitter.com/#!/EmeraldEMF
Customer service: [email protected]
Tel: +44 (0) 1274 777700 Fax: +44 (0) 1274 785201
Address: Emerald Management First Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House Wagon Lane Bingley BD16 1WA United Kingdom
Welcome to Management Focus… and welcome to the September/October issue.Applications such as blogs, Youtube, Wikipedia, and Facebook have changed the traditional methods of consuming journalism, radio and video, and, in addition, these applications have created new ways to enable knowledge transfer and networking. Our latest issue of Management Matters discusses the impact of new technologies on consumer behaviour.“Clearly, social media is here to stay and using it to reinvent customer relationships will require companies to rethink their traditional CRM approach.” For most companies, though, the deployment
of a Social CRM programme is still in its early stages, execution is patchy and concerns about ROI remain. To fully exploit the power of social media to connect with customers, organizations need to move beyond isolated projects to integrated programmes that use Social CRM to reinvent the customer relationship.To gauge companies’ current Social CRM progress and their ability to provide the value customers seek in a social platform, the IBM Institute for Business Value surveyed 351 executives from functions where the responsibility for social media typically resides. Read our featured article for the key findings.Monika Wencek is Senior Customer Success Manager for Yammer in EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa). She is responsible for helping organizations to get the most out of the opportunities that Yammer provides for improving internal communications and business effectiveness.Increasingly, organizations are looking to social media as a means to engage employees, disseminate e-learning, and foster a sense of corporate community. While open social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have proven adequate for communicating brand messages, private Enterprise Social Networking sites such as Yammer offer a service more tailored to specific business requirements. Find out more in this interview with Monika.Remember, log on to our website at: http://first.emeraldinsight.com to expand on the topics highlighted in this issue of Management Focus.Best wishes, Debbie Hepton http://first.emeraldinsight.com
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http://first.emeraldinsight.comManagement Focus September/October 2012 3
Management Matters Incisive commentary on
topical business issues
Do Millennials read books or blogs?
According to Wikipedia, Generation Y, also known as the Millennials, are the demographic cohort following Generation X. There are no precise dates for when
Generation Y starts and ends, and commentators usually use birth dates ranging somewhere from the late ’70s/early ’80s to the early 2000s.
Millennial characteristics vary by region, depending on social and economic conditions. However, it is generally marked by an increased use and familiarity with communications, media, and digital technologies.
Modern life has been particularly shaped by the rise of new information and communication technologies. As the main drivers of this transformation, digitization and interconnected networks have led to services such as cellular networks and the Internet.
The most recent phenomenon in this field is the emergence of social software (i.e. social media), which has taken place in the context of Web 2.0. Social media differ fundamentally from traditional mass media. Whereas traditional media services focus on the one-to-many distribution of content created by professionals to a rather passive audience, social software establishes many-to-many networks of active users who share their own content among themselves.
These users build on active social networks and enable consumer-sided social interactions and exchanges. Thus, these networks have the potential to fundamentally change the behaviours of media users and thereby redefine the business practices of the media companies.
Social media offer a plethora of choices that empower users to create and share media in profoundly new ways. Applications such as blogs, Youtube, Wikipedia, and Facebook have changed the traditional methods of consuming journalism, radio and video. In addition, these
applications have created new ways to enable knowledge transfer and networking.
To understand the rapid transformation of the media sector and the user-driven, individualized, and participatory media use by Millennials, researchers and managers must attain more profound knowledge of the changing attitudes and related behaviours of their users.
For business practitioners, the impact of new technologies on consumer behaviour is of special importance from both a market segmentation and a market positioning point of view. For traditional media companies, results of research on Millennials are simultaneously promising and challenging. They are promising in that the Millennials still rely on traditional media to fulfil many of their needs. However, there is also a partial substitution effect among the different media, in part because of limited money and time budgets. For example, some Millennials who show low interest in social media are, at the same time, the most active book readers, whereas other clusters who use social media more actively, read books less often. Thus, media use shifts substantially, but not completely, within the Millennial generation.
Herein lies the challenge. To prevail in the market, traditional media companies have to adapt to the changing usage patterns of their consumers.
This is adapted from “Do Millennials read books or blogs? Introducing a media usage typology of the internet generation”, which originally appeared in Journal of Consumer Marketing, Volume 29 Number 2, 2012.
The authors are Thomas Kilian, Nadine Hennigs and Sascha Langner.
“Social media offer a plethora of choices that empower users to create and share media in profoundly new ways.”
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Featured article
Social CRM: the customers are in controlSocial CRM unites social media technology with customer
relationship management, and is gaining traction as a compelling approach to enhancing customer
engagement.
For most companies, though, the deployment of a Social CRM programme is still in its early stages, execution is patchy and concerns about ROI remain. To fully exploit the power of social media to connect with customers, organizations need to move beyond isolated projects to integrated programmes that use Social CRM to reinvent the customer relationship.
To gauge companies’ current Social CRM progress and their ability to provide the value customers seek in a social platform, the IBM Institute for Business Value surveyed 351 executives from functions where the responsibility for social media typically resides.
According to the survey, while the majority of companies have many elements of a social media programme, progress toward an integrated Social CRM approach is not linear, the challenges are deep and uncertainty abounds. Key findings:
• Feeling intense pressure to embrace social media, nearly two thirds of executives say it fundamentally is going to change the way they do business. As a result, their social media footprint has grown rapidly, but there is still much more companies can do to fully exploit the benefits social media offers.
• Social media initiatives have sprouted up organically across the enterprises surveyed, but the key characteristics of a Social CRM approach – executive sponsorship, integrated cross-functional governance, consolidated guidelines and policies, and sharing of customer insights to enhance innovation – exist in varying degrees.
• Social media challenges vary widely, but concern over ROI and mitigating risk top the list. Sixty per cent of companies attempt to track ROI to some degree, but there is no consensus on a standard approach. Despite fears of negative brand exposure, fewer than half monitor their brand, and only 53 per cent offer social media training to employees.
Clearly, social media is here to stay and using it to reinvent customer relationships will require companies to rethink their traditional CRM approach.
Social media challenges
The complexity of implementing a social media programme is evidenced by the wide variety of challenges executives identify as key concerns. Companies’ top challenges focus on:
• establishing ROI goals;
• monitoring employees’ social media use; and
• mitigating the risks associated with negative brand exposure.
While the fear of negative brand exposure is a top concern for many companies, the fear of missing opportunities presented by social media is greater. The gravitational pull to be “where customers are”, the constant media drumbeat about social media innovation and exploding adoption levels add fuel to the fire. With so much potential gain, companies believe they need to engage to stay relevant and competitive, and that the biggest risk is failing to ride the social media wave.
“Clearly, social media is here to stay and using it to reinvent customer relationships will require companies to rethink their traditional CRM approach.”
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Nevertheless, companies should increase their efforts to mitigate the risk of negative brand exposure. Ignoring brand monitoring is a missed opportunity on two fronts:
1. Reputation analysis software can be used defensively, giving companies early awareness of potential negative exposures so they can quickly respond to possible threats.
2. Analytics can also be employed offensively to track a digital trail. Even companies not yet using social media to actively engage customers could be listening to the social chatter to better understand the perception of their brand and determine how best to add customer value.
Regarding the challenge of effectively monitoring employees’ use of social media, there is the obvious fear of an inadvertent employee gaff or intentional viral sabotage. But companies also worry about controlling employees’ daily use of social media.
The answer is they can’t control it, any more than they can control every phone conversation or e-mail. However, one of the best ways companies can reduce the risk of misuse is to develop corporate guidelines for social media and consistently train and empower employees to make informed decisions that are in line with company values and the brand promise.
Empowering employees to be the voice of the company may require a corporate culture shift for organizations used to traditional, top-down, controlled communications. Companies can migrate to this new approach by establishing internal social media pilots. Not only does this provide a risk-free zone where employees can become fluent in social media tools, practices and expression, it also can offer the company a vehicle for capturing fresh, innovative concepts for improvements.
Recommendations and next steps
Social media programmes often have a defined mission, set of guidelines, and some degree of analytics, governance and executive endorsement. A Social CRM approach takes social media programmes a step further, moving beyond the domain of a single function, such as marketing, to implement a cross-functional network of integrated communities with customer-facing responsibilities, such as customer care and sales.
This integrated approach treats the customer holistically and facilitates sharing customer insights derived from unstructured data captured through multiple social touch points, as well as structured data from traditional channels. These insights enable companies to improve the customer experience and can result in the development of innovative new models for customer engagement.
The transition to a Social CRM approach
1. Blur the lines between marketing and customer care. Social media initiatives originating in marketing and customer care functions need to be aligned better to support the customer holistically. Whether customers engage with a company to respond to promotions or seek information and support, they expect an authenticity that delivers the brand promise.
2. Think global; act local. Build a Centre of Excellence governance model for Social CRM – a networked community with representatives from customer-facing functions. Collaboratively develop customer engagement practices and share ideas that enable individual functions to leverage proven methods with the freedom to innovate. Develop a common set of measurements, tools, policies and usage guidelines. Use your company’s business conduct guidelines and corporate values as a foundation.
3. Empower employees with training, mentorship and incentives. Employ the Centre of Excellence to develop and facilitate training for varying levels of social media expertise, but make sure all employees using social media receive training on guidelines, policies, customer communications practices, and processes for mitigating risk and escalating concerns.
4. Build virtual communities of connected employees. Make it easy for employees to connect and collaborate via social media. Internal virtual communities facilitate cross-pollination of ideas and knowledge and help break down organizational silos. These internal social media platforms also provide novices with a safe training environment and serve as fertile ground to pilot and fine-tune new initiatives before launching publicly.
5. Improve ROI and mitigate risk with customer analytics and insights. A distinguishing feature of Social CRM is the practice of continually capturing and analyzing customer data from social interactions to develop viable insights that can help reduce risk and improve all aspects of the customer relationship. From basic sentiment analysis to more sophisticated predictive modelling, companies can employ a continuous loop of Listen-Analyze-Engage-Evolve.
The shift to Social CRM is more than an adoption of new operational models or technologies; it is a philosophical, cultural shift.
Social CRM is an approach for stewardship of the customer relationship, not management. This transition is still in the early stages for many who are experiencing the growing pains of rapid change. The sooner companies embrace this fundamental precept – that the customer is now in control of the relationship – the sooner they can exploit this shift and unlock the full potential social media holds.
This is a shortened version of “From social media to Social CRM: reinventing the customer relationship”, which originally appeared in Strategy & Leadership, Volume 39 Number 6, 2011.The authors are Carolyn Heller Baird and Gautam Parasnis.
“Empowering employees to be the voice of the company may require a corporate culture shift for organizations used to traditional, top-down, controlled communications.”
“While the fear of negative brand exposure is a top concern for many companies, the fear of missing opportunities presented by social media is greater.”
http://first.emeraldinsight.comManagement Focus September/October 2012 6
Monika Wencek is Senior Customer Success Manager for Yammer in EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa). She is responsible for helping organizations to get the
most out of the opportunities that Yammer provides for improving internal communications and business effectiveness.
Previously, as a Principal Consultant at SuccessFactors, she advised medium to large organizations on all aspects of talent management practice, through the use of workforce analytics and cloud-based solutions. Monika holds a BA (Hons) degree in Business and Psychology from Kingston University.
Increasingly, organizations are looking to social media as a means to engage employees, disseminate e-learning, and foster a sense of corporate community. While open social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have proven adequate for communicating brand messages, private Enterprise Social Networking sites such as Yammer offer a service more tailored to specific business requirements.
In the days following this interview, Microsoft Corp. announced an agreement to acquire Yammer for $1.2 billion, with the intention of adding enterprise social networking to their growing portfolio of cloud services, such as Office 365.
Q Could you tell us a bit about Yammer’s journey as a company to date?
Yammer was launched in September 2008 and has experienced significant growth worldwide since then. We created the Enterprise Social Networking space and remain its leader with over 5 million users worldwide. The basic version of Yammer is free, and customers can pay to upgrade their network to receive additional administrative and security controls, priority customer service and a dedicated customer success manager. We now have offices across the US and in EMEA and Asia-Pacific, employing nearly 400 people worldwide.
We are seeing organizations of all sizes including more than 85 per cent of the Fortune 500 transforming the way they work through Yammer, from 10 person startups to corporate giants such as Shell, IKEA, Deloitte and 7-Eleven, across every single industry and 165 countries.
Yammer is enabling organizations to make transformative changes quickly by empowering employees to collaborate across departments, geographies, content and business applications. People are now connected to colleagues in real-time, have access to information and business data, creating an environment where people are getting work done collaboratively and are empowered to contribute to their organizations, irrespective of roles, locations and time.
An interview withBringing social media inside your organization
Monika Wencek: Enterprise 2.0Interview by: Gareth Bell
Featured interview
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Q What differentiates Yammer from other freely-available social networking sites?
Yammer pioneered the business model of free-to-use enterprise software; our product has been free to sign up since we first launched. Since then, we differentiated ourselves through our focus on a single solution, our speed of innovation and our commitment to partnering with customers.
Everything about the way Yammer is set up means we are able to innovate at a rate that is significantly faster than our competitors. We take developments in the market and conversations with our customers into account for the evolution of our product, which is improved incrementally every week.
We also very strongly believe in partnering with our customers to make them successful. Incorporating the capability of Enterprise Social Networking into an organization is something that goes way beyond installing a technology. We recognize this and take a stake with our customers in making them successful. Our Customer Success organization works closely with our customers to help them on their journey to social networking success. We invest significantly in this capability as we are committed to working with our customers to deliver lasting value.
Q From an L&D perspective, what benefits does a private social networking platform such as Yammer offer?
In the world of modest L&D budgets, decreasing employee engagement and increasingly empowered employees, private social networking platforms have proved to be mutually beneficial to both the employers and employees.
From an organizational standpoint, Yammer acts as a rich social learning platform free of both time and space boundaries, a third space between e-learning and classroom that can be used for cultural
integration with one’s future workplace, manager and peers, induction, ongoing job-specific and workforce development training needs.
As the 70:20:10 model ascertains that people learn 70 per cent of what they know about their jobs informally, our platform makes social learning easy, collaborative and engaging while propagating cost savings, classroom knowledge retention and dialogue throughout the organization. Yammer does it by putting the employees at the centre, enabling them to apply their capabilities freely, interact with the learning materials and have conversations about the things that matter to them and their employers after the training has finished.
Q How can Yammer, and other web 2.0 technology, be effectively utilized by Human Resources departments?
Human Resources functions can use web 2.0 social networking technologies like Yammer to revolutionize the way they deliver HR initiatives, interact with management, engage employees and collaborate effectively with external parties on HR issues.
Social collaboration platforms enable HR departments to stay connected with employees across the organization, give them a voice to ask questions, provide continuous feedback on things that matter to them and operate an open and collaborative culture for greater engagement and productivity. Leading by example, HR can actively support new ways of working, underpinned by social media, mobility and free device choice, that the Facebook generation is looking for in potential employers.
A collaborative organization enables HR departments to not only engage and communicate effectively internally, but also to transform relationships with external parties by connecting in a collaborative workspace, where Files can be easily shared and discussed on the go. These innovative ways of engaging result in shortened project life cycles, retention of specialist knowledge and development of new products, services and industries.
This is an abridged version of a longer interview, which will appear in volume 20 issue 6 of Human Resource Management: International Digest
“From an organizational standpoint, Yammer acts as a rich social learning platform free of both time and space boundaries …”
Featured interview
“We are seeing organizations of all sizes including more than 85 per cent of the Fortune 500 transforming the way they work through Yammer, from 10 person startups to corporate giants such as Shell, IKEA, Deloitte and 7-Eleven …”
Final thought ...In the long history of humankind those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
”
Charles Darwin
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