Safely Unleashing the Power of Social Media 521294

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WHITE PAPERHelping Marketing to Securely Leverage Social Media | August 2012

Jürgen SchulzeChris WraightCA Technologies, Security Management

safely unleashing the power of social media

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Helping Marketing to Securely Leverage Social Media

table of contents

executive summary 3

SECTION 1: Challenge 4 Safely converting social media users

SECTION 2: Opportunity 7 Working with marketing, not against them

SECTION 3: Benefits 8 Single sign-on and federation enables the conversion

SECTION 4: 11 Conclusions

SECTION 5: 12 About the authors

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ChallengeThe explosion of social media in recent years means that there are millions of users or ‘fans’ to reach and attempt to convert to paying customers. The issue is that information about these fans resides with the social media sites, preventing your marketing department from efficiently and effectively marketing to them. Organizations want to safely and securely convert these fans to their systems and have a better opportunity to convert them to their own customers.

OpportunityYour marketing department wants to leverage social media fans as a means to grow your organization’s revenue. In order to do so they will be purchasing technology to facilitate this. Yet there is risk that they may not be aware of, in the form of regulations such as those that relate to data privacy. This white paper will help you understand marketing’s challenge and put you in a position to proactively support marketing’s desire to convert their social media fans to your own systems and transform them into customers.

BenefitsBy being proactive and working with the marketing department to enable them to securely and easily register social media users in their system, you will potentially be in a position to positively influence revenue growth. In addition, you will help IT turn around marketing’s traditional perception of IT as a naysayer. And, this will be accomplished with the ability to meet your objectives, such as conforming to data privacy laws.

executive summary

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Section 1: Challenge

Safely converting social media usersWhat is a car?

•4 wheels

•An engine

•Gets a person from A to B

•With dry head and feet

•Everything else is emotion

•Status

Emotions and a feeling of status don’t come overnight. The process to reach out to consumers, to emotionalize them and to convert emotions into something that can be measured (such as a purchase decision) has reached both new heights as well as a new degree of complexity thanks to the advent of social media. Social media represents a new way of doing business, and requires methods unthought-of in the old analog times.

Just one year ago, “Because everyone else is doing it” was probably the worst of all answers to the question “Why do you do social media?” Today, this answer is spot on. The question is not “whether or not”; it is “when?” and “how?” With Facebook sitting on a cash reserve of nearly $US8b after the largest IPO in years, there is a lot of noise in this space to be expected in the near future. Facebook will be increasing their marketing activities to grow their user base (currently at nearly 1 billion users). Organizations need be in a position to leverage Facebook’s (and other social media sites’) user growth.

Also, in short order the younger generation, which has been indoctrinated to spend their life in the social Web, will reach an age where companies have to build brand awareness with them. The social Web is now an important part of a mix of communication/interaction channels that has to be maintained in order to keep present and future consumers close.

Your marketing department wants to leverage social media fans as a means to grow your organization’s revenue. Yet there is risk that they may not be aware of, in the form of regulations such as those that relate to data privacy. This white paper will help you understand the forces driving marketing’s initiative and put you in a position to proactively support marketing’s desire to convert their social media fans to your own systems and convert them to customers.

Marketing Wants to Own Social Media CustomersTo socialize future clients with a brand, load them with emotions in daily life and be with them beyond the sale was unthinkable only ten years ago. Now, your organization may have millions of social media fans. While an impressive accomplishment, the fact is that information about those fans does not belong to your organization. Instead, this information is the property of a third party and this makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for your marketing department to efficiently reach them and conduct its own custom marketing. Thus, your marketing department wants to bring those fans from the third-party social media system to their own.

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The following diagram outlines the business process:

Figure A.The marketing social media cycle.

1. Social Web. Based upon the initial social media analysis, a presence will be built in selected (social) networks in order to create a relevant base of fans. These fans will ‘Like’ your company/product and help to spread the word.

However, your organization’s access to these fans’ personal information will be controlled by the social media host where they reside; your marketing department won’t be able to access and use the information. Other than distributing generic information, e.g. about a new product, the ability to market to these fans on a personal level is non-existent.

2. Own Ecosystem. By moving the fans into your own ecosystem (i.e. a CRM system) your marketing department can now build a more targeted and meaningful relationship with your fans. However, you are now responsible for safeguarding their personal data. And, this conversion must be easy for the fans, or else they will abandon you.

3. Marketing Automation. For example, marketing could create a campaign supporting the launch of a new product; by finding fans in your system that meet a certain demographic (e.g. income, geographic area, have ‘liked’ a product), they could specifically target a set of fans that they believe would be the most likely to purchase.

4. $. Greater control of the fans’ information allows the creation and execution of more effective marketing programs, which in turn leads to revenue growth.

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Several years of Web marketing has taught marketing departments to recognize the importance of making the online user experience as easy as possible. Especially in social media, user experience is crucial to eliminate dropout rates and improve user experience. Your organization’s marketing department will probably know that as they attempt to convert their fans from the third party social media site to their own, they cannot force them to login multiple times, or fill out several forms with the same information. If they do, those fans will probably stop their efforts and then your organization will not have their information. And this inconvenience cannot be present if they do successfully register with your organization; it needs to continue should they become a paying customer and frequently return.

Figure B.Customers don’t want to fill out information repeatedly

Seamless conversion

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Section 2: Opportunity

Working with marketing, not against them

Figure C.Marketing controls the budget for over a third of marketing technology

Gartner, Inc., “Maverick Research: Marketing Is the New IT Buying Powerhouse”Laura McLellan, 7 October 2011

It is likely that your organization’s marketing department might obtain software on their own that would facilitate the conversion of their fans to their own marketing system. In fact, as seen by the chart in Figure C, marketing controls the budget for over a third of marketing technology. However, it is also very likely that they would do this on their own, without IT involvement, and this has the potential for catastrophe. There are limitations that were unthinkable ten years ago. Regulations, advertising rules, various data privacy acts, cookie laws, just to name a few. Security solutions should not prevent this process, but rather, enable it.

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The reason that marketing chooses to work on their own is their negative perception of IT. As seen in Figure D, to marketing, IT is an “Expense”, “Moves Slowly”, “Says No”, and “Prefers Stability”. In contrast, marketing is driven by “Revenue”, “Moves Fast”, and “Says Yes” while “Embracing Change”.

Figure D.Example of marketing’s perception of it and marketing functions

Gartner, Inc., “Maverick Research: Marketing Is the New IT Buying Powerhouse”Laura McLellan, 7 October 2011

This is an area where IT has an outstanding opportunity to be seen as a ‘hero’ by proactively assisting marketing, supporting their business objectives, and helping grow revenue by bringing a proven solution to the table. And this can be accomplished while meeting its security needs (i.e. protecting consumer data).

Section 3: Benefits

Single sign-on and federation enables the conversion Securely converting existing fans from a social media platform to your organization’s marketing system delivers extra value and at the same time prevents dropout rates in a business workflow. Software to do this has been around for several years, referred to as “single sign-on” (SSO) software. However, as user needs expanded to include securely interacting w/ partners, applications, and a desire to utilize social media user identities on other sites, the need for federation software also arose.

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There are multiple open standards that social identity providers and applications are using. From social identity providers, OpenID and OAuth are the most dominant standards. And OpenID Connect is a potential future-looking standard in the same space. From the application side, it is usually, SAML, sometimes WS-Fed, but in many cases the application development teams just like to trust HTTP headers and cookies.

Because there are so many options, different implementations, different development environments, and different providers, this is a complex problem to solve and you should look for a reliable, secure middleware product that can shield you from all the complexity of open standards and help you deliver to your marketing department and business owners easy access to what they need. This includes personal information about the fans, regardless if they register to the site directly, or use their Google ID or Facebook ID.

Putting It to Work:As an example a car vendor can use SSO features for a fan’s secure use of their Facebook login credential to register directly with the car vendor and provide additional critical demographic information. With that information in hand, the car vendor can put a marketing program together to support the launch of a new model.

They first might want to look through their database of millions of fans and create a target profile for a certain geographic area: Suppose they are looking for potential customers with household income of greater than €/$150,000, no children, age greater than 45, and has ‘Liked’ early news stories about the new model. They can then conduct a test drive marketing campaign directly to those users that meet the ideal profile.

For example, they might email out an offer that consists of” “Dear Ms. Smith, I see you have liked our new model during its announcement. I am pleased to inform you that it is now available in dealer showrooms. Would you like to schedule a test drive at the dealer Forward, Inc.? They are only ten kilometers/miles from you. Please click here to set up your time.”

If the fans are interested they come to the car vendor’s site and login with their social media credentials, i.e. Facebook. By using SSO and federation software, they will be able to securely link to partner sites such as a marketing company that is managing the registrations for the test drive, link to their nearest dealer, and further along the buying process, to an online configurator, and perhaps even a financing company if they decided to purchase the car.

In all cases the user will not be presented with an extra login screen to interact. If there is a stored SSO cookie saved on the user’s application, the user will be able to login the next time without having to fill in their username and password again. It should not make a difference which social media platform the user uses, instead, a solution like CA SiteMinder® and CA SiteMinder® Federation that supports open standards is capable of coping with multiple domains in the same logon ticket. If your organization is using a different application for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data and the fan orders a test drive, say on the marketing company’s website, CA SiteMinder will protect all connected Web resources and through SSO you would be able to display different datasets to the user’s browser or mobile application.

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Now, having your business processes in place, the CRM system will provide the user’s data set to the registrant’s and dealer’s application. The dealer can react immediately on the user’s request in a relevant way and this application can post a confirmation of the test ride to Facebook. Additionally, all this activity is updated in the marketing department’s system profile of the user.

And it doesn’t stop there. Once they become a customer, they can continue to use their social media credentials to make service appointments and other types of business. It is this type of complex interaction that CA SiteMinder has the ability to support in an easy-to-use fashion for both the end user as well as the IT administrator.

In addition, CA SiteMinder helps you to meet your security requirements and comply w/ regulations like data privacy laws and helps prevent outright theft of user information. Its centralized management and built-in logging and reporting make it easy to generate proof of compliance.

Other security needs:Data privacy laws are not the only regulations you must comply with. PCI, ISO 27002, and Sarbanes Oxley are also applicable and require your compliance. In addition to SSO, you should also consider the use of advanced authentication to verify the users are who they say they are which will help to avoid data breaches. Due to the fact that consumers are accessing the Web from mobile devices and any location, there may be a need to verify their identity. CA AuthMinder™ and CA RiskMinder™ are two solutions that address this need. Integration between CA RiskMinder and CA SiteMinder exists that passes a risk score from CA RiskMinder to CA SiteMinder.

Figure E.Use the appropriate consumer identity credentials

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Regulations also exist to ensure that privileged users don’t gain unauthorized access to private consumer data. Typically, these users are difficult to control as they need unfettered access to do their job. However, CA ControlMinder™ excels at controlling these privileged users, while allowing them the access they need to execute their tasks.

Access and usage of the data itself must also be controlled. CA DataMinder™ can do this, by classifying the type of data, and then determining who has access, and what they are allowed to do with the data.

Section 4:

Conclusions By understanding the need to securely convert social media fans to your organization’s systems, you can proactively reach out to marketing and suggest a secure SSO solution to accomplish this.

This support of marketing will help to dispel marketing’s negative perception of IT, as an obstacle. Instead, IT will be viewed as a ‘hero’, a partner, for helping meet marketing’s business objectives.

You avoid marketing implementing rogue technology that could jeopardize your organization’s compliance with data privacy laws and other regulations.

You should seek a solution that can implement complex open standards for allowing the use of social media identity providers and maintain compatibility while shielding your staff from the need to understand the technical details of these open standards. This can then help speed application development and deployment as well as make ongoing maintenance less onerous.

For more information about CA SiteMinder and CA SiteMinder Federation as well as other CA Technologies security solutions please visit ca.com/security

http://www.ca.com/security


Copyright © 2012 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document “as is” without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages. CA does not provide legal advice. Neither this document nor any software product referenced herein serves as a substitute for your compliance with any laws (including but not limited to any act, statute, regulation, rule, directive, standard, policy, administrative order, executive order, and so on (collectively, “Laws”)) referenced herein or any contract obligations with any third parties. You should consult with competent legal counsel regarding any such Laws or contract obligations. CS2779_0812

CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) provides IT management solutions that help customers manage and secure complex IT environments to support agile business services. Organizations leverage CA Technologies software and SaaS solutions to accelerate innovation, transform infrastructure and secure data and identities, from the data center to the cloud. Learn more about CA Technologies at www.ca.com.

Section 5:

About the authors Jürgen Schulze has spent 28 years in the information technology world in various international management positions in channel marketing, product marketing, business development and strategic sales; during the last ten years with a strong focus on IT security. In the past four years, he has dedicated significant efforts to all aspects of social media in the business space, with a strong focus on use cases, monetization, information security and privacy protection. At CA Technologies, he’s a Director for Security Solution Sales, EMEA.

Chris Wraight has spent 30 years in the technology world in various positions of product management, product marketing, channel marketing, and sales. At CA Technologies, his roles have included CA threat product marketing, sales enablement best practices, and CA Access Control product marketing. He is currently responsible for CA SiteMinder in the Security Solutions CSU. Chris has a B.S. in Management with Computer Applications from WPI.

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Safely Unleashing the Power of Social Media 521294