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Stop Making Friends And Start Making Money
What if you could reward the customers with the greatest social graph (the most Friends and Followers)? Do you think you could score each customer to his or her overall value to your brand? Could you categorize your customers: Influencers, Heavy Spenders, Early Adopters or Casual Users? Why not?
What if you could provide incentives to customers to entice their social graph to visit the location (receive 10 cents on your loyalty/gift card for each of your friends who checks in)? Laugh if you will, but I believe the restaurant industry will see multi-level marketing become a large part of its business in the next three to five years.
My point is that retailers are about to be faced with mountains and mountains of data that will provide insights into their customers in ways we haven’t even yet began to imagine. (Who would have thought Blippy would be a real site just two years ago?)
The key to success in this new world is organizing and managing all this data. Social CRM is the foundation platform that will maintain it. I think great companies will leverage their BI infrastructure to round out the social business picture.
Companies that figure out how to harness (structure) and use this data will have an incredible advantage over those that don’t. I can’t stress how big of a gap I feel this differentiation is going to create. The “haves” will have an ever-increasing intimacy with their customers, while the “have nots” will still just be shouting at the crowd.
What are you more likely to do: Try that new chicken sandwich you saw fly by as you fast-forwarded through the commercials during CSI or try that burger Mike keeps raving about, the one he’s already eaten twice this week?
Term Of The Week: “Tibbing,” which is short for “Technical Fibbing.” Tibbing occurs when an IT person is unable to further simplify complex technology to a user’s level of comprehension and must say something that is technically inaccurate but communicates the appropriate concept.
What do you think? Leave a comment or E-mail me at Todd.Michaud@FranchiseIT.org. You can also follow me on Twitter: @todd_michaud.
Physical therapy reveals that a 19-year-old injury is still causing me pain today. Someday I’ll be able to run without pain. Read more at www.irongeek.me.
-Marc
August 26th, 2010 at 6:43 am
Point well made Todd. Companies should quickly move to next level by implememting social crm and start creating new business model through social hubs.
August 26th, 2010 at 8:25 am
Crooks rejoice, you can now rob the “Mayor” of the local Firkin pub while he is at the bar! Now that’s progress! The privacy implications of that application run deep. Being impersonated and burglarized because of one’s careless social media exposure doesn’t just happen to other people. Companies beware: just because an app/platform lets (or encourages you to) share personal data, doesn’t mean you should put your users through this.
August 27th, 2010 at 7:59 am
The data location based services are collecting on bricks and mortar locations is so valuable – equivalent to web analytics – that brands will figure out a way to leverage them in a way that makes sense for the consumer and the brand. I believe that this will be through white label services integrated into the retailers mobile web/app offering.
If I’m a brand, why do I want to advertise Foursquare’s brand? Why do I want them to collect data on my locations and customers simply to have them sell it to my competition? Why do I want to direct my users to an application like Foursquare that is going to attempt to lure me to the location down the street with a better deal?
Mobile and location based services represent an amazing opportunity to engage and influence the consumer like never before. I believe once brands understand the data they are giving up and the ability to leverage their customers ‘fan base’, they will start to add this functionality to their own mobile presence in addition to leveraging these service.