This week, Forrester CEO George Colony introduced an idea that resonated with me and that idea was Social Sigma. I’ve never really understood 6 Sigma- it just made me want to get a 7 Sigma, but this idea made sense. In a nutshell, Colony said that he frequently hears other CEOs asking “How can we use social to make money?” There are three elements to his Social Sigma concept:
Listening: More and more companies are adopting the “@ComcastCares” approach to using social technologies as a means of listening to customers and resolving complaints. The problem is that these interactions don’t translate to actionable information and “valuable Social Sigma data ends up on the cutting room floor before it ever reaches product managers or R&D staff that could use it.”
Soliciting feedback: This is taking the concept one step further and actually explicitly asking for input through social channels.
Marketing: Closing the loop and making sure everyone knows the company is listening to feedback and adapting accordingly.
Colony goes on to say that since you’re initiating a continuous, real-time, rapid exchange with hundreds or perhaps thousands of customers, CEOs need to have the guts guts to pursue this social strategy and stick to it.
George’s Social Sigma concept aligns nicely with Sucharita Mulpuru’s recent report on Social Commerce where she calls out social recommendations as one of the top social marketing strategies being pursued. Why? Because it is easy to draw a straight line to the bottom line.
Back to SocialSigma and some of the underlying drivers. We’ve heard from several analysts, customers and prospects that “going social” is largely driven by expectations created by their personal interactions with social media, even for B2B. Scary! Without adding teams of communicators, there have to be other ways that companies can innovate and become more adaptive. We think that Baynote’s technology is one of those ways. It turns your website into a real-time “listening” device. And because it adapts the search, navigation and recommendation experience in real time, it also accomplishes some degrees of feedback solicitation. It can create the specific website or email experience that people want to experience.
Why do you care? Because this social technology makes you money by selling more. It makes you money instead of your competitors because they find good stuff on your site or save you money because they find answers on your site and don’t tie up your call center.
Powered by Compendium Blogware
Comments for How Can we Use Social to Make Money?