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• 13 MORE Things from the Oracle Social Summit You Should Know

  - by Mike Stiles

  In our previous blog, we started giving those of you who couldn’t make it just a sampling of the valuable takeaways from the first annual Oracle Social Summit, held Nov 14 and 15 in Las Vegas. And while yes, 13 items is a pretty healthy sampling, we wanted to go the extra mile and give you 13 more, an indication of just how much great information came out of it.  Follow the arrow, and come on in as if you were there with us. 1. Weber Shandwick takes a 70/20/10 approach when advising clients how to allocate resources to paid social opportunities. 70% of spend should go toward paid opportunities the agency and client both know work, 20% should go toward paid social the agency knows works, and 10% should go toward experimentation. (Matt Dickman – Weber Shandwick) 2. By 2017, the technically competent CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. (Gartner Study) 3. CIOs are focused on infrastructure. As the roles of the CMO and CIO continue coming together, those CIOs have to make a very conscious decision to get CMOs what they need. 4. It’s now harder for brands to differentiate based on product. The advantage will go to the brands that are successful in garnering customer trust. 5. More and more, enterprise software is going to start looking like the software consumers are used to seeing and using. 6. You will see brands prioritizing mobile and dropping investments in www, HTML, POS systems, etc. 7. The social graph has to be added to brands’ customer data for a more holistic view. Customers will give you the information you need if the reward is appropriate. 8. Viacom did a study that showed viewers are most honest on social. Not so much on surveys or other feedback vehicles. 9. How are you determining your influencers? Influence isn’t about reach. It’s about getting people to change behavior. 10. A mix of skills is becoming critically important in a social staff. It shouldn’t be a mixture of several disciplines, not just a bunch of “social experts.” 11. If senior management isn’t engaged, the social team is forced into guessing what might be considered a “success” by the C-suite. 12. Mobile customization will be getting big investments from brands in 2013. Brands need to provide shoppers utility, not just information. 75% will use mobile this holiday season to avoid in-store madness. 13. Data becomes information, information becomes insight, and insight becomes actionable. The Oracle Social Summit brought together brands, agencies, Oracle social experts and industry thought leaders to take a serious look at where social stands today, and where it’s headed in the near future. Given the speed of social’s evolution, attending such events (or at least reading nifty summary blogs) is a good investment in making sure your enterprise isn’t falling gradually behind.

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• Is Cloud Security Holding Back Social SaaS?

  - by Mike Stiles

  The true promise of social data co-mingling with enterprise data to influence and inform social marketing (all marketing really) lives in cloud computing. The cloud brings processing power, services, speed and cost savings the likes of which few organizations could ever put into action on their own. So why wouldn’t anyone jump into SaaS (Software as a Service) with both feet? Cloud security. Being concerned about security is proper and healthy. That just means you’re a responsible operator. Whether it’s protecting your customers’ data or trying to stay off the radar of regulatory agencies, you have plenty of reasons to make sure you’re as protected from hacking, theft and loss as you can possibly be. But you also have plenty of reasons to not let security concerns freeze you in your tracks, preventing you from innovating, moving the socially-enabled enterprise forward, and keeping up with competitors who may not be as skittish regarding SaaS technology adoption. Over half of organizations are transferring sensitive or confidential data to the cloud, an increase of 10% over last year. With the roles and responsibilities of CMO’s, CIO’s and other C’s changing, the first thing you should probably determine is who should take point on analyzing cloud software options, providers, and policies. An oft-quoted Ponemon Institute study found 36% of businesses don’t have a cloud security policy at all. So that’s as good a place to start as any. What applications and data are you comfortable housing in the cloud? Do you have a classification system for data that clearly spells out where data types can go and how they can be used? Who, both internally and at the cloud provider, will function as admins? What are the different levels of admin clearance? Will your security policies and procedures sync up with those of your cloud provider? The key is verifiable trust. Trust in cloud security is actually going up. 1/3 of organizations polled say it’s the cloud provider who should be responsible for data protection. And when you look specifically at SaaS providers, that expectation goes up to 60%. 57% “strongly agree” or “agree” there’s more confidence in cloud providers’ ability to protect data. In fact, some businesses bypass the “verifiable” part of verifiable trust. Just over half have no idea what their cloud provider does to protect data. And yet, according to the “Private Cloud Vision vs. Reality” InformationWeek Report, 82% of organizations say security/data privacy are one of the main reasons they’re still holding the public cloud at arm’s length. That’s going to be a tough position to maintain, because just as social is rapidly changing the face of marketing, big data is rapidly changing the face of enterprise IT. Netflix, who’s particularly big on the benefits of the cloud, says, "We're systematically disassembling the corporate IT components." An enterprise can never realize the full power of big data, nor get the full potential value out of it, if it’s unwilling to enable the integrations and dataset connections necessary in the cloud. Because integration is called for to reduce fragmentation, a standardized platform makes a lot of sense. With multiple components crafted to work together, you’re maximizing scalability, optimization, cost effectiveness, and yes security and identity management benefits. You can see how the incentive is there for cloud companies to develop and add ever-improving security features, making cloud computing an eventual far safer bet than traditional IT. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng

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• Why I Love the Social Management Platform I Use

  - by Mike Stiles

  Not long ago, I asked the product heads for the various components of the Oracle Social Cloud’s SRM to say what they thought was coolest about their component. And while they did a fine job, it was recently pointed out to me that no one around here uses the platform in a real-world setting more than I do, as I not only blog and podcast my brains out, I also run Oracle Social’s own social properties. Of course I’m pro-Oracle Social’s product. Duh. But if you can get around immediately writing this off as a puff piece, there are real reasons beyond my employment that the Oracle SRM works for me as a community manager. If it didn’t, I could have simply written about something else, like how people love smartphones or something genius like that. Post Grid I like seeing what I want to see. I’m difficult that way. Post grid lets me see all posts for all channels, with custom columns showing me how posts are doing. I can filter the grid by social channel, published, scheduled, draft, suggested, etc. Then there’s a pullout side panel that shows me post details, including engagement analytics. From the pullout, I can preview the post, do a quick edit, a full edit, or (my favorite) copy a post so I can edit it and schedule it for other times so I don’t have to repeat from scratch. I’m not lazy, just time conscious. The Post Creation Environment Given our post volume, I need this to be as easy as it can be. I can highlight which streams I want the post to go out on, edit for the individual streams, maintain a media library that’s easy to upload to and attach from, tag posts, insert links that auto-shorten to an orac.le shortlink, schedule with a nice calendar visual, geo-target, drop photos inline into Twitter, and review each post. Watching My Channels The Engage component of the Oracle SRM brings in and drops into a grid the activity that’s happening on all my channels. I keep this open round-the-clock. Again, I get to see only what I want; social network, stream, unread messages, engagement by how I labeled them, and date range. I can bring up a post with a click, reply, label it, retweet it, assign it, delete it, archive it, etc. So don’t bother trying to be a troll on my channels. Analytics Social publishing and engaging 24/7 would be pretty unrewarding if I couldn’t see how our audience was responding. Frankly, I get more analytics than I know what to do with (I’m a content creator, not a data analyst). But I do know what numbers I care about, and they’re available by channel, date range, and campaigns. I’m seeing fan count, sources and demographics. I’m seeing engagement, what kinds of posts are getting engagement, and top engagers. I’m seeing my reach, both organic and paid. I’m seeing how individual posts performed in terms of engagement and virality, and posting time/date insight. Have I covered all the value propositions? I’ve covered pathetically few of them. It would be impossible in blog length to give shout-outs to the vast number of features and functionalities. From organizing teams and managing permissions with Workflow to the powerful ability to monitor topics (and your competition) across the web in Listen, it’s a major, and increasingly necessary, weapon in your social marketing arsenal. The life of a Community Manager is not for everybody. So if the Oracle SRM can actually make a Community Manager’s life easier, what’s not to love? I invite you to take a look at and participate in our Oracle Social Cloud social channels! Facebook Twitter YouTube Google Plus LinkedIn Daily Podcast on iHeartRadio @mikestiles @oraclesocial Photo: freeimages.com

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• In Social Relationship Management, the Spirit is Willing, but Execution is Weak

  - by Mike Stiles

  In our final talk in this series with Aberdeen’s Trip Kucera, we wanted to find out if enterprise organizations are actually doing anything about what they’re learning around the importance of communicating via social and using social listening for a deeper understanding of customers and prospects. We found out that if your brand is lagging behind, you’re not alone. Spotlight: How was Aberdeen able to find out if companies are putting their money where their mouth is when it comes to implementing social across the enterprise? Trip: One way to think about the relative challenges a business has in a given area is to look at the gap between “say” and “do.” The first of those words reveals the brand’s priorities, while the second reveals their ability to execute on those priorities. In Aberdeen’s research, we capture this by asking firms to rank the value of a set of activities from one on the low end to five on the high end. We then ask them to rank their ability to execute those same activities, again on a one to five, not effective to highly effective scale. Spotlight: And once you get their self-assessments, what is it you’re looking for? Trip: There are two things we’re looking for in this analysis. The first is we want to be able to identify the widest gaps between perception of value and execution. This suggests impediments to adoption or simply a high level of challenge, be it technical or otherwise. It may also suggest areas where we can expect future investment and innovation. Spotlight: So the biggest potential pain points surface, places where they know something is critical but also know they aren’t doing much about it. What’s the second thing you look for? Trip: The second thing we want to do is look at specific areas in which high-performing companies, the Leaders, are out-executing the Followers. This points to the business impact of these activities since Leaders are defined by a set of business performance metrics. Put another way, we’re correlating adoption of specific business competencies with performance, looking for what high-performers do differently. Spotlight: Ah ha, that tells us what steps the winners are taking that are making them winners. So what did you find out? Trip: Generally speaking, we see something of a glass curtain when it comes to the social relationship management execution gap. There isn’t a single social media activity in which more than 50% of respondents indicated effectiveness, which would be a 4 or 5 on that 1-5 scale. This despite the fact that 70% of firms indicate that generating positive social media mentions is valuable or very valuable, a 4 or 5 on our 1-5 scale. Spotlight: Well at least they get points for being honest. The verdict they’re giving themselves is that they just aren’t cutting it in these highly critical social development areas. Trip: And the widest gap is around directly engaging with customers and/or prospects on social networks, which 69% of firms rated as valuable but only 34% of companies say they are executing well. Perhaps even more interesting is that these two are interdependent since you’re most likely to generate goodwill on social through happy, engaged customers. This data also suggests that social is largely being used as a broadcast channel rather than for one-to-one engagement. As we’ve discussed previously, social is an inherently personal media. Spotlight: And if they’re still using it as a broadcast channel, that shows they still fail to understand the root of social and see it as just another outlet for their ads and push-messaging. That’s depressing. Trip: A second way to evaluate this data is by using Aberdeen’s performance benchmarking. The story is both a bit different, but consistent in its own way. The first thing we notice is that Leaders are more effective in their execution of several key social relationship management capabilities, namely generating positive mentions and engaging with “influencers” and customers. Based on the fact that Aberdeen uses a broad set of performance metrics to rank the respondents as either “Leaders” (top 35% in weighted performance) or “Followers” (bottom 65% in weighted performance), from website conversion to annual revenue growth, we can then correlated high social effectiveness with company performance. We can also connect the specific social capabilities used by Leaders with effectiveness. We spoke about a few of those key capabilities last time and also discuss them in a new report: Social Powers Activate: Engineering Social Engagement to Win the Hidden Sales Cycle. Spotlight: What all that tells me is there are rewards for making the effort and getting it right. That’s how you become a Leader. Trip: But there’s another part of the story, which is that overall effectiveness, even among Leaders, is muted. There’s just one activity in which more than a majority of Leaders cite high effectiveness, effectiveness being the generation of positive buzz. While 80% of Leaders indicate “directly engaging with customers” through social media channels is valuable, the highest rated activity among Leaders, only 42% say they’re effective. This gap even among Leaders shows the challenges still involved in effective social relationship management. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng

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• Are Chief Digital Officers the Result of CMO/CIO Refusal to Change?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Apparently CDO no longer just stands for “Collateralized Debt Obligations.”  It stands for Chief Digital Officer. And they’re the ones who are supposed to answer the bat signal CEO’s are throwing into the sky, swoop in and POW! drive the transition of the enterprise to integrated digital systems. So imagine being a CMO or a CIO at such an enterprise and realizing it’s been determined that you are not the answer that’s needed. In fact, IntelligentHQ author Ashley Friedlein points out the very rise of the CDO is an admission of C-Suite failure to become savvy enough, quickly enough in modern technology. Is that fair? Despite the repeated drumbeat that CMO’s and CIO’s must enter a new era of cooperation and collaboration to enact the social-enabled enterprise, the verdict seems to be that if it’s happening at all, it’s not happening fast enough. Therefore, someone else is needed with the authority to make things happen. So who is this relatively new beast? Gartner VP David Willis says, “The Chief Digital Officer plays in the place where the enterprise meets the customer, where the revenue is generated, and the mission accomplished.” In other words, where the rubber meets the road. They aren’t just another “C” heading up a unit. They’re the CEO’s personal SWAT team, able to call the shots necessary across all units to affect what has become job one…customer experience. And what are the CMO’s and CIO’s doing while this is going on? Playing corporate games. Accenture reports 38% of CMOs say IT deliberately keeps them out of the loop, with 35% saying marketing’s needs aren’t a very high priority. 31% of CIOs say marketers don’t understand tech and regularly go around them for solutions. Fun! Meanwhile the CEO feels the need to bring in a parental figure to pull it all together. Gartner thinks 25% of all orgs will have a CDO by 2015 as CMO’s and particularly CIO’s (Peter Hinssen points out many CDO’s are coming “from anywhere but IT”) let the opportunity to be the agent of change their company needs slip away. Perhaps most interestingly, these CDO’s seem to be entering the picture already on the fast track. One consultancy counted 7 instances of a CDO moving into the CEO role, which, as this Wired article points out, is pretty astounding since nobody ever heard of the job a few years ago. And vendors are quickly figuring out that this is the person they need to be talking to inside the brand. The position isn’t without its critics. Forrester’s Martin Gill says the reaction from executives at some traditional companies to someone being brought in to be in charge of digital might be to wash their own hands of responsibility for all things digital – a risky maneuver given the pervasiveness of digital in business. They might not even be called Chief Digital Officers. They might be the Chief Customer Officer, Chief Experience Officer, etc. You can call them Twinkletoes if you want to, but essentially anyone who has the mandate direct from the CEO to enact modern technology changes not currently being championed by the CMO or CIO can be regarded as “boss.” @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: freedigitalphotos.net

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• Augmenting your Social Efforts via Data as a Service (DaaS)

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is the 3rd in a series of posts on the value of leveraging social data across your enterprise by Oracle VP Product Development Don Springer and Oracle Cloud Data and Insight Service Sr. Director Product Management Niraj Deo. In this post, we will discuss the approach and value of integrating additional “public” data via a cloud-based Data-as-as-Service platform (or DaaS) to augment your Socially Enabled Big Data Analytics and CX Management. Let’s assume you have a functional Social-CRM platform in place. You are now successfully and continuously listening and learning from your customers and key constituents in Social Media, you are identifying relevant posts and following up with direct engagement where warranted (both 1:1, 1:community, 1:all), and you are starting to integrate signals for communication into your appropriate Customer Experience (CX) Management systems as well as insights for analysis in your business intelligence application. What is the next step? Augmenting Social Data with other Public Data for More Advanced Analytics When we say advanced analytics, we are talking about understanding causality and correlation from a wide variety, volume and velocity of data to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to achieve and optimize business value. And in some cases, to predict future performance to make appropriate course corrections and change the outcome to your advantage while you can. The data to acquire, process and analyze this is very nuanced: It can vary across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data It can span across content, profile, and communities of profiles data It is increasingly public, curated and user generated The key is not just getting the data, but making it value-added data and using it to help discover the insights to connect to and improve your KPIs. As we spend time working with our larger customers on advanced analytics, we have seen a need arise for more business applications to have the ability to ingest and use “quality” curated, social, transactional reference data and corresponding insights. The challenge for the enterprise has been getting this data inline into an easily accessible system and providing the contextual integration of the underlying data enriched with insights to be exported into the enterprise’s business applications. The following diagram shows the requirements for this next generation data and insights service or (DaaS): Some quick points on these requirements: Public Data, which in this context is about Common Business Entities, such as - Customers, Suppliers, Partners, Competitors (all are organizations) Contacts, Consumers, Employees (all are people) Products, Brands This data can be broadly categorized incrementally as - Base Utility data (address, industry classification) Public Master Reference data (trade style, hierarchy) Social/Web data (News, Feeds, Graph) Transactional Data generated by enterprise process, workflows etc. This Data has traits of high-volume, variety, velocity etc., and the technology needed to efficiently integrate this data for your needs includes - Change management of Public Reference Data across all categories Applied Big Data to extract statics as well as real-time insights Knowledge Diagnostics and Data Mining As you consider how to deploy this solution, many of our customers will be using an online “cloud” service that provides quality data and insights uniformly to all their necessary applications. In addition, they are requesting a service that is: Agile and Easy to Use: Applications integrated with the service can obtain data on-demand, quickly and simply Cost-effective: Pre-integrated into applications so customers don’t have to Has High Data Quality: Single point access to reference data for data quality and linkages to transactional, curated and social data Supports Data Governance: Becomes more manageable and cost-effective since control of data privacy and compliance can be enforced in a centralized place Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Just as the cloud has transformed and now offers a better path for how an enterprise manages its IT from their infrastructure, platform, and software (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), the next step is data (DaaS). Over the last 3 years, we have seen the market begin to offer a cloud-based data service and gain initial traction. On one side of the DaaS continuum, we see an “appliance” type of service that provides a single, reliable source of accurate business data plus social information about accounts, leads, contacts, etc. On the other side of the continuum we see more of an online market “exchange” approach where ISVs and Data Publishers can publish and sell premium datasets within the exchange, with the exchange providing a rich set of web interfaces to improve the ease of data integration. Why the difference? It depends on the provider’s philosophy on how fast the rate of commoditization of certain data types will occur. How do you decide the best approach? Our perspective, as shown in the diagram below, is that the enterprise should develop an elastic schema to support multi-domain applicability. This allows the enterprise to take the most flexible approach to harness the speed and breadth of public data to achieve value. The key tenet of the proposed approach is that an enterprise carefully federates common utility, master reference data end points, mobility considerations and content processing, so that they are pervasively available. One way you may already be familiar with this approach is in how you do Address Verification treatments for accounts, contacts etc. If you design and revise this service in such a way that it is also easily available to social analytic needs, you could extend this to launch geo-location based social use cases (marketing, sales etc.). Our fundamental belief is that value-added data achieved through enrichment with specialized algorithms, as well as applying business “know-how” to weight-factor KPIs based on innovative combinations across an ever-increasing variety, volume and velocity of data, will be where real value is achieved. Essentially, Data-as-a-Service becomes a single entry point for the ever-increasing richness and volume of public data, with enrichment and combined capabilities to extract and integrate the right data from the right sources with the right factoring at the right time for faster decision-making and action within your core business applications. As more data becomes available (and in many cases commoditized), this value-added data processing approach will provide you with ongoing competitive advantage. Let’s look at a quick example of creating a master reference relationship that could be used as an input for a variety of your already existing business applications. In phase 1, a simple master relationship is achieved between a company (e.g. General Motors) and a variety of car brands’ social insights. The reference data allows for easy sort, export and integration into a set of CRM use cases for analytics, sales and marketing CRM. In phase 2, as you create more data relationships (e.g. competitors, contacts, other brands) to have broader and deeper references (social profiles, social meta-data) for more use cases across CRM, HCM, SRM, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the amount of master reference relationships is constrained only by your imagination and the availability of quality curated data you have to work with. DaaS is just now emerging onto the marketplace as the next step in cloud transformation. For some of you, this may be the first you have heard about it. Let us know if you have questions, or perspectives. In the meantime, we will continue to share insights as we can.Photo: Erik Araujo, stock.xchng

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• Social Search: Looking for Love

  - by Mike Stiles

  For marketers and enterprise executives who have placed a higher priority on and allocated bigger budgets to search over social, it might be time to notice yet another shift that’s well underway. Social is search. Search marketing was always more of an internal slam-dunk than other digital initiatives. Even a C-suite that understood little about the new technology world knew it’s a good thing when people are able to find you. Google was the new Yellow Pages. Only with Google, you could get your listing first without naming yourself “AAAA Plumbing.” There were wizards out there who could give your business prominence in front of people who were specifically looking for what you offered. Other search giants like Bing also came along to offer such ideal matchmaking possibilities. But what if the consumer isn’t using a search engine to find what they’re looking for? And what if the search engines started altering their algorithms so that search placement manipulation was more difficult? Both of those things have started to happen. Experian Hitwise’s numbers show that visits to the major search engines in the UK dropped 100 million through August. Search engines are far from dead, or even challenged. But more and more, the public is discovering the sites and brands they need through advice they get via social, not search. You’ll find the worlds of social and search increasingly co-mingling as well. Search behemoths Google and Bing are including Facebook and Google+ into their engines. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter have done some integration of global web search into their platforms. So what makes social such a worthwhile search entity for brands? First and foremost, the consumer has demonstrated a behavior of acting on recommendations from social connections. A cry in the wilderness like, “Anybody know any good catering companies?” will usually yield a link (and an endorsement) from a friend such as “Yeah, check out Just-Cheese-Balls Catering.” There’s no such human-driven force/influence behind the big search engines. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and others call it “Friend Mining.” It is, in essence, searching for answers from friends’ experiences as opposed to faceless code. And Facebook has all of those friends’ experiences already stored as data. eMarketer says search in an $18 billion business, and investors are really into it. So no shock Facebook’s ready to leverage their social graph into relevant search. What do you do about all this as a brand? For one thing, it’s going to lead to some interesting paid marketing opportunities around the corner, including Sponsored Stories bought against certain queries, inserting deals into search results, capitalizing on social search results on mobile, etc. Apart from that, it might be time to stop mentally separating social and search in your strategic planning and budgeting. Courting your fans on social will cumulatively add up to more valuable, personally endorsed recommendations for your company when a consumer conducts a search on social. Fail to foster those relationships, fail to engage, fail to provide knock-em-dead customer service, fail to wow them with your actual products and services…and you’ll wind up with the visibility you deserve in social search results.

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• 6 Ways to Modernize Your Customer Experience

  - by Mike Stiles

  If customers have changed, if the way they research and shop have changed, if their expectations have changed, if their ability to act on dissatisfaction has changed, but your customer experience has NOT changed, what was once “good enough” may now be crippling. Well, the customer has changed, and why wouldn’t they? You’ve probably changed too in your role as consumer. There’s more info available, it’s easier to get, there’s more choice, you’re more mobile, you’re more connected, it’s easier to buy, and yes, it’s easier to switch brands if experiences don’t meet your now higher expectations. Thanks to technological advances, we as marketers can increasingly work borderline miracles. But if we’re still not adamantly adopting customer centricity, and if we aren’t making the customer experience paramount amongst business goals, the tech is wasted. A far more modern customer experience is called for. Here are 6 ways to get there: 1. Modern Marketing: Marketing data is aggregated and targeted to the right customers, who are getting personal, relevant communications. In return, you’re getting insight that finally properly attributes revenue to your marketing efforts. 2. Modern Selling: Demand is being driven across all channels with modern selling tools. Productivity is up thanks to coordinated communication and selling, and performance is ever optimized using powerful analytics. 3. Modern CPQ: You’re cross-selling and upselling more effectively since reps and channel partners have been empowered with the ability to quickly, automatically generate 100% accurate, customer-friendly quotes complete with price controls and automated approvals. 4. Modern Commerce: You’re leveraging data and delivering personalized, targeted digital experiences to everyone. You’re attracting more visitors, and you’re able to scale and keep up with the market and control the experience. 5. Modern Service: You’re better serving your customers by making it easier for them to engage with your brand, plus you’re lowering your costs by increasing agent and tech support efficiencies. 6. Modern Social: You’re getting faster, deeper, more accurate insights from social and turning content around faster, which then goes out to the right people at the right time in the right place. You’ve also gotten proactive in your service, and customers love that. For far too many brands, the buying journey of Need, Research, Select, Buy, Use, Recommend across the multiple connect points of Social, Mobile, Store, Call Center, Site, Ecommerce is a disconnected mess. Oracle’s approach to CX is to connect every interaction your customer has with your brand, avoiding the revenue losses lousy customer experiences bring. How important is the experience to customers? 94% are willing to pay more of their hard-earned money to have better ones, while a meager 1% say they get the good, consistent experiences they expect. Brands, your words aren’t as loud anymore, so your actions as they relate to customer experience are going to have to do the talking. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Julien Tromeur, freeimages.com

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• How Big Data and Social Won the Election

  - by Mike Stiles

  The story of big data’s influence on the outcome of the US Presidential election is worth a good look, because a) it’s a harbinger of things to come, and b) it’s an example of similar successes available to any enterprise seriously resourcing integrated big data, modeling, and data-driven execution on all assets, including social. Obama campaign manager Jim Messina fielded a data and analytics brain trust 5 times larger than 2008. At that time, there were numerous databases from various sources, few of them talking to each other. This time, the mission was to be metrics-centered and measure everything measurable, and in context with all the other data. Big data showed them exactly what they needed to know and told them what to do about it. It showed them women 40-49 on the west coast would donate big money if they got to eat with George Clooney. Women on the east coast would pony up to hang out with Sarah Jessica Parker. Extensive daily modeling showed them what kinds of email appeals, from who, and to whom, would prove most successful in raising cash, recruiting volunteers, and getting out the vote. Swing state voters were profiled and approached with more customized targeting that at any time in history. Ads were purchased on specific shows watched by the targets, increasing efficiency 14% over traditional media buys. For all the criticism of the candidate’s focus on appearing on comedy and entertainment shows, and local radio morning shows, that’s where the data sent them to reach the voters most likely to turn out for them. And then there was social. Again, more than in any other election, Facebook was used for virtual, highly efficient door-to-door canvasing. Facebook fans got pictures of friends in swing states and were asked to encourage them to act. Using that approach, 1 in 5 peer-to-peer appeals led to the desired action. Assumptions, gut, intuition, campaign experience, all took a backseat to strategy shifts solidly backed up by data. Zeroing in on demographics likely to back the President and tracking their mood daily literally changed the voter landscape. The Romney team watched Obama voters appear seemingly out of thin air. One Obama campaign aide said, “We ran the election 66,000 times every night.” Which brings us to your organization. If you’re starting to feel like the battle-cry of “but this is the way we’ve always done it” is starting to put you in an extremely vulnerable position, you’re right. Social has become a key communication tool of the 21st century. Failing to use it, or failing to invest in a deep understanding of who your customers and prospects are so the content you post there will achieve desired actions and results, will leave you waking up one morning wondering, “What happened?”@mikestilesPhoto stock.xchng

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• Social HCM: Is Your Team Listening?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Does integrating Social HCM into your enterprise make sense? Consider Sam and Christina. Sam is a new hire at a big company. On the job 3 weeks, a question has come up on how to properly file an expense report to get reimbursed. It was covered in the onboarding session, but shockingly enough, Sam didn’t memorize or write down every word of the session. The answer is probably in a handout, in a stack of handouts 2 inches thick. It also might be on the employee web site…somewhere. Christina is a new hire at a different big company. She has the same question. She logs into her company’s social network, goes to the “new hires” group, asks her question and gets an answer in seconds. Christina says, “Cool!” Sam says, “Grrrr.” It’s safe to say the qualified talent your company wants is accustomed to using social platforms to communicate and get quick answers. As such, Christina is comfortable at her new company, whereas Sam is wondering what he’s gotten himself into. Companies that cling to talent communication and management systems that don’t speak to talent’s needs or expectations put themselves at risk. Right from the recruiting stage, prospects can determine if a company has embraced the communications tools of the 21st century. If they don’t see it, alarm bells go off. With great talent more in demand than ever, enterprises should reconsider making “this is the way we do it, you adapt to us” their mantra. Other blogs have clearly outlined that apart from meeting top recruits’ expectations, Social HCM benefits the organization itself in terms of efficiency, talent performance & measurement. Recruiting: Jobvite shows 64% of companies hired using social. 89% of job seekers are using social in their search. Social can give employers access to relevant communities of prospects and advance the brand. Nucleus Research found general hiring software can provide over 1,000% ROI by reducing churn and improving screening. Social talent acquisition should perform at least as well. Learning & Development:Employees, learning from the company or from peers, can be kept on top of the latest needed skillsets and engage in self-paced training so as to advance within the company. Performance Management:Just as gamers are egged on by levels and achievements, talent can reach for workplace kudos, be they shout-outs from peers & managers or formally established milestones. Plus employee reviews become consistent and fair as managers have access to the cumulative feedback social offers. Workflow and Collaboration:With workforces dispersing in terms of physical location, social provides a platform that helps eliminate drawbacks that would have brought just 10 years ago. Finding and connecting with just the right colleague to get the most relevant info at any given time has never been more possible…or expected. While yes, marketing has taken the social lead inside the enterprise, HCM (with the word “human” right there in its name) is the obvious locale for the next big integration of social in business. The technology is there. At Oracle, Fusion HCM apps are deeply embedded with Social HCM…just one example of systems taking social across the enterprise. Christina’s company is communicating with her in ways she’s used to. Sam’s company may as well be trying to talk to him using signal flags. @mikestilesPhoto via stock.xchng

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• Where Twitter Stands Heading Into 2013

  - by Mike Stiles

  As Twitter continued throughout 2012 to be a stage on which global politics and culture played itself out, the company itself underwent some adjustments that give us a good indication of what users and brands can expect from the platform in 2013. The power of the network did anything but fade. Celebrities continued to use it to connect one-on-one. Even the Pope signed on this year. It continued to fuel revolutions. It played an exponentially large factor in this US Presidential election. And around the world, the freedom to speak was challenged as users were fired, sued, sometimes even jailed for their tweets. Expect more of the same in 2013, as Twitter has entrenched itself, for individuals, causes and brands, as the fastest, easiest, most efficient way to message the masses so some measure of impact can come from it. It’s changed everything, and it’s not finished. These fun facts reveal the position of strength with which Twitter enters 2013: It now generates a billion tweets every 2.5 days It has 500 million+ users The average Twitter user has tweeted 307 times 32% of everyone using the Internet uses Twitter It’s expected to bring in $540 million in ad revenue by 2014 11 new accounts are created every second High-level Executive Summary: people love it, people use it, and they’re going to keep loving and using it. Whether or not outside developers love it is a different matter. 2012 marked a shift from welcoming the third party support that played at least some role in Twitter being so warmly embraced, to discouraging anything that replicates what Twitter can do itself…or plans to do itself. It’s not the open playground it once was. Now Twitter must spend 2013 proving it can innovate in-house and keep us just as entranced. Likewise, Twitter is distancing itself from Facebook. Images from the #1 platform’s Instagram don’t work on Twitter anymore, and Twitter’s rolling out their own photo filter product. Where the two have lived in a “plenty of room for everybody” symbiosis up to now, 2013 could see the giants ramping up a full-on rivalry. Twitter is exhibiting a deliberate strategy. Updates have centered on more visually appealing search results, and making finding and sharing content easier. Deals have been cut with some media entities so their content stands out. CEO Dick Costolo has said tweets aren’t the attraction, they’re what leads you to content. Twitter aims to be a key distributor of media and info. Add the addition of former News Corp. President Peter Chernin to the board, and their hashtag landing page experience for events, and their media behemoth ambitions get pretty clear. There are challenges ahead and Costolo has also laid those out; entry into China, figuring out how to have Twitter deliver both comprehensive and relevant, targeted experiences, and the visualization of big data. What does this mean for corporations? They can expect a more media-rich evolution and growing emphases on imagery. They can expect more opportunities to create great media content and leverage Twitter for its distribution. And they can expect new ways to surface in searches. Are brands diving in? 56% of customer tweets to companies get completely and totally ignored. Ugh. A study Twitter recently conducted with Compete shows people who see tweets from retailers are more likely to buy a product. And, the more retailer tweets they see, the more likely they are to purchase on the retail site. As more of those tweets point to engaging media content from the brand, the results should get even better. Twitter appears ready for 2013. Enterprise brands have some work to do. @mikestilesPhoto Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.net

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• Let Me Show You Something: Instagram, Vine and Snapchat for Brands

  - by Mike Stiles

  While brands are well aware of how much more impactful images are than text-only posts on social channels, today you’re additionally being presented with platform after additional platform for hosting, doctoring and sharing photos and videos.  Can you play in every sandbox? And if you do, can you be brilliant on all of them? As has usually been the case, so far brands are sticking their toes into new platforms while not actually committing to them, or strategizing for them, or resourcing them. TrackMaven found of the 123 F500 companies using Instagram, only 22% of them are active on it. Likewise, research from Simply Measured found brands are indeed jumping in, with the number establishing a presence on Instagram up 55% over the past year. Users want them there…brand engagement has exploded 350%, and over 1/3 of the top brands have at least 10,000 followers. BUT…the top 10 brands are generating 33% of all posts, reaping 83% of all engagement. Things are also growing on Twitter’s Vine, the 6-second looping video app that hit 40 million users in August. The 7th Chamber says 5 tweets a second contain a Vine link. Other studies say branded Vines are 4 times more likely to be shared and seen than rank-and-file branded videos. Why? Users know that even if a video is pure junk, they won’t get robbed of too much of their valuable time. Vine is always upgrading so you can make sure your videos are worth viewers’ time. You can now edit videos, and save & work on several projects concurrently. What you can’t do is upload a finely crafted video into Vine, but you can do that with Instagram. The key to success? Same as with all other content; make it of value. Deliver a laugh or a lesson or both. How-to, behind the scenes peeks, contests, demos, all make sense in the short video format. Or follow Nash Grier’s example, which is to just have fun with and connect to your viewers, earning their trust that your next Vine will be as good as the last. Nash is only 15, has over 1.4 million followers, and adds about 100,000 a week. He broke out when one of his videos was re-Vined by some other kid with 300,000 followers. Make good stuff, get it in front of influencers, and your brand Vines could break out as well. Then there’s Snapchat, the “this photo will self destruct” platform. How can that be of use to brands besides offering coupons that really expire? The jury is out. But with an audience of over 100 million and a valuation of $800 million, media-with-a-time-limit is compelling. Now there’s “Snapchat Stories” that can last 24 hours and be shared to the public at large. You might be able to capitalize on how much more focus gets put on content when there’s a time limit on its availability. The underlying truth to all of this is, these are all tools. Very cool, feature rich tools, but tools. You can give the exact same art kit to 5 different people and you’d get back 5 very different works, ranging from worthless garbage to masterpiece. Brands are being called upon to be still and moving image artists. That’s what your customers are used to seeing, from a variety of sources. Commit to communicating with them accordingly. @mikestiles Photo: stock.xchng

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• Provocative Tweets From the Dachis Social Business Summit

  - by Mike Stiles

  On June 20, all who follow social business and how social is changing how we do business and internal business structures, gathered in London for the Dachis Social Business Summit. In addition to Oracle SVP Product Development, Reggie Bradford, brands and thought leaders posed some thought-provoking ideas and figures. Here are some of the most oft-tweeted points, and our thoughts that they provoked. Tweet: The winners will be those who use data to improve performance.Thought: Everyone is dwelling on ROI. Why isn’t everyone dwelling on the opportunity to make their product or service better (as if that doesn’t have an effect on ROI)? Big data can improve you…let it. Tweet: High performance hinges on integrated teams that interact with each other.Thought: Team members may work well with each other, but does the team as a whole “get” what other teams are doing? That’s the key to an integrated, companywide workforce. (Internal social platforms can facilitate that by the way). Tweet: Performance improvements come from making the invisible visible.Thought: Many of the factors that drive customer behavior and decisions are invisible. Through social, customers are now showing us what we couldn’t see before…if we’re paying attention. Tweet: Games have continuous feedback, which is why they’re so engaging.  Apply that to business operations.Thought: You think your employees have an obligation to be 100% passionate and engaged at all times about making you richer. Think again. Like customers, they must be motivated. Visible insight that they’re advancing on their goals helps. Tweet: Who can add value to the data?  Data will tend to migrate to where it will be most effective.Thought: Not everybody needs all the data. One team will be able to make sense of, use, and add value to data that may be irrelevant to another team. Like a strategized football play, the data has to get sent to the spot on the field where it’s needed most. Tweet: The sale isn’t the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the start of a new marketing cycle.Thought: Another reason the ROI question is fundamentally flawed. The sale is not the end of the potential return on investment. After-the-sale service and nurturing begins where the sales “victory” ends. Tweet: A dead sale is one that’s not shared.  People must be incentivized to share.Thought: Guess what, customers now know their value to you as marketers on your behalf. They’ll tell people about your product, but you’ve got to answer, “Why should I?” And you’ve got to answer it with something substantial, not lame trinkets. Tweet: Social user motivations are competition, affection, excellence and curiosity.Thought: Your followers will engage IF; they can get something for doing it, love your culture so much they want you to win, are consistently stunned at the perfection and coolness of your products, or have been stimulated enough to want to know more. Tweet: In Europe, 92% surveyed said they couldn’t care less about brands.Thought: Oh well, so much for loving you or being impressed enough with your products & service that they want you to win. We’ve got a long way to go. Tweet: A complaint is a gift.Thought: Our instinct where complaints are concerned is to a) not listen, b) dismiss the one who complains as a kook, c) make excuses, and d) reassure ourselves with internal group-think that they’re wrong and we’re right. It’s the perfect recipe for how to never, ever grow or get better. In a way, this customer cares more than you do. Tweet: 78% of consumers think peer recommendation is the best form of advertising.  Eventually, engagement is going to eat advertising.Thought: Why is peer recommendation best? Trust. If a friend tells me how great a movie was, I believe him. He has credibility with me. He’s seen it, and he could care less if I buy a ticket. He’s telling me it was awesome because he sincerely believes that it was.  That’s gold. Tweet: 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. Thought: This “how mad can we make our customers without losing them” strategy has to end. The customer experience has actual monetary value, money you’re probably leaving on the table. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng

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• Merging Social Accounts: What We Learned This Weekend

  - by Mike Stiles

  Guest Post by Erika BrookesWe learned that it’s not always as easy as you think it’s going to be. While it’s widely accepted that merging multiple owned Facebook Pages that are duplicating communities and putting out the same type of content is a best practice, actually pulling it off without rattling fans is a trickier proposition. Facebook is nice and clear about how to merge Facebook Pages. Although content is not carried over, Likes from the pages you’re merging are. So you can imagine the surprise when such fans start seeing posts in their News Feed from a page they don’t believe they ever Liked. One community member accurately likened it to having your bank come under another bank’s brand name. The Facebook Page changes to the new brand, just like your debit card, emails, signs and other communication. This weekend we did our merge. The Facebook communities of Vitrue, Involver and Collective Intellect were pulled into one community, Oracle Social. Could we have handled it better? Oh yeah. Our intent was to make sure, to the fullest extent possible, that the fans of the Vitrue, Involver, and Collective Intellect brand pages were well-informed about the pending page merges in ADVANCE of the merge. While many were aware that Oracle acquired the three companies, many were not. We learned from fan feedback that we should have sent notifications MUCH earlier to make the brand Page merge crystal clear and to answer any questions. That was our bad, our responsibility and we apologize for Oracle Social showing up in your News Feed if you were not aware that it was a result of your fandom of Vitrue, Involver or Collective Intellect. It was our job to make you aware well in advance. Some felt they had never Liked the fan Pages of Vitrue, Involver or Collective Intellect, so they were understandably upset (some cultures may call it “fit to be tied”) when they found themselves fans of Oracle Social. One thing to consider is that since 2009, brands and developers have used and enjoyed free Involver tab apps like Twitter, RSS and YouTube (1.2 million of which are currently active), which included an opt-in Liking the Involver Page. Often, when Liking happens in a manner outside of the traditional clicking of a Like button on a brand Page, it’s easy to forget a Page was indeed Liked. Lastly, a few felt that their Like of the Page had been “bought.” It was not. No fans or Likes were separately purchased. Yes, the companies and the social properties of Vitrue, Involver and Collective Intellect were acquired by Oracle. Those brands are now being coordinated into the larger Oracle brand. In social media, that means those brands are being integrated into the Oracle Social community. So what now? We apologize and apply lessons learned. We learned that you not only have to communicate thoroughly and clearly, but you have to communicate well in advance of any actionable items that will affect fans. We’re more than willing to walk straight to the woodshed when we deserve it. Going forward, the social team here is dedicated to facilitating content, discussion and sharing around social for marketers, agencies, IT stakeholders and social staffs, including community managers. We anticipate Oracle Social being the premier gathering place for true social innovators as we move into social’s exciting next phase of development. Inevitably, some will still feel they are fans of the Page in error. While we hate to see you go, you may unlike the Page if it’s not relevant or useful to you. Let’s continue to contribute, participate, foster our desire to learn, and move forward together positively and constructively - both for current fans of the community and the many fans to come.

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• Social Targeting: This One's Just for You

  - by Mike Stiles

  Think of social targeting in terms of the archery competition we just saw in the Olympics. If someone loaded up 5 arrows and shot them straight up into the air all at once, hoping some would land near the target, the world would have united in laughter. But sadly for hysterical YouTube video viewing, that’s not what happened. The archers sought to maximize every arrow by zeroing in on the spot that would bring them the most points. Marketers have always sought to do the same. But they can only work with the tools that are available. A firm grasp of the desired target does little good if the ad products aren’t there to deliver that target. On the social side, both Facebook and Twitter have taken steps to enhance targeting for marketers. And why not? As the demand to monetize only goes up, they’re quite motivated to leverage and deliver their incredible user bases in ways that make economic sense for advertisers. You could target keywords on Twitter with promoted accounts, and get promoted tweets into search. They would surface for your followers and some users that Twitter thought were like them. Now you can go beyond keywords and target Twitter users based on 350 interests in 25 categories. How does a user wind up in one of these categories? Twitter looks at that user’s tweets, they look at whom they follow, and they run data through some sort of Twitter secret sauce. The result is, you have a much clearer shot at Twitter users who are most likely to welcome and be responsive to your tweets. And beyond the 350 interests, you can also create custom segments that find users who resemble followers of whatever Twitter handle you give it. That means you can now use boring tweets to sell like a madman, right? Not quite. This ad product is still quality-based, meaning if you’re not putting out tweets that lead to interest and thus, engagement, that tweet will earn a low quality score and wind up costing you more under Twitter’s auction system to maintain. That means, as the old knight in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” cautions, “choose wisely” when targeting based on these interests and categories to make sure your interests truly do line up with theirs. On the Facebook side, they’re rolling out ad targeting that uses email addresses, phone numbers, game and app developers’ user ID’s, and eventually addresses for you bigger brands. Why? Because you marketers asked for it. Here you were with this amazing customer list but no way to reach those same customers should they be on Facebook. Now you can find and communicate with customers you gathered outside of social, and use Facebook to do it. Fair to say such users are a sensible target and will be responsive to your message since they’ve already bought something from you. And no you’re not giving your customer info to Facebook. They’ll use something called “hashing” to make sure you don’t see Facebook user data (beyond email, phone number, address, or user ID), and Facebook can’t see your customer data. The end result, social becomes far more workable and more valuable to marketers when it delivers on the promise that made it so exciting in the first place. That promise is the ability to move past casting wide nets to the masses and toward concentrating marketing dollars efficiently on the targets most likely to yield results.

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• Mobile Deals: the Consumer Wants You in Their Pocket

  - by Mike Stiles

  Mobile deals offer something we talk about a lot in social marketing, relevant content. If a consumer is already predisposed to liking your product and gets a timely deal for it that’s easy and convenient to use, not only do you score on the marketing side, it clearly generates some of that precious ROI that’s being demanded of social. First, a quick gut-check on the public’s adoption of mobile. Nielsen figures have 55.5% of US mobile owners using smartphones. If young people are indeed the future, you can count on the move to mobile exploding exponentially. Teens are the fastest growing segment of smartphone users, and 58% of them have one. But the largest demographic of smartphone users is 25-34 at 74%. That tells you a focus on mobile will yield great results now, and even better results straight ahead. So we can tell both from statistics and from all the faces around you that are buried in their smartphones this is where consumers are. But are they looking at you? Do you have a valid reason why they should? Everybody likes a good deal. BIA/Kelsey says US consumers will spend $3.6 billion this year for daily deals (the Groupons and LivingSocials of the world), up 87% from 2011. The report goes on to say over 26% of small businesses are either "very likely" or "extremely likely" to offer up a deal in the next 6 months. Retail Gazette reports 58% of consumers shop with coupons, a 40% increase in 4 years. When you consider that a deal can be the impetus for a real-world transaction, a first-time visit to a store, an online purchase, entry into a loyalty program, a social referral, a new fan or follower, etc., that 26% figure shows us there’s a lot of opportunity being left on the table by brands. The existing and emerging technologies behind mobile devices make the benefits of offering deals listed above possible. Take how mobile payment systems are being tied into deal delivery and loyalty programs. If it’s really easy to use a coupon or deal, it’ll get used. If it’s complicated, it’ll be passed over as “not worth it.” When you can pay with your mobile via technologies that connects store and user, you get the deal, you get the loyalty credit, you pay, and your receipt is uploaded, all in one easy swipe. Nothing to keep track of, nothing to lose or forget about. And the store “knows” you, so future offers will be based on your tastes. Consider the endgame. A customer who’s a fan of your belt buckle store’s Facebook Page is in one of your physical retail locations. They pull up your app, because they’ve gotten used to a loyalty deal being offered when they go to your store. Voila. A 10% discount active for the next 30 minutes. Maybe the app also surfaces social references to your brand made by friends so they can check out a buckle someone’s raving about. If they aren’t a fan of your Page or don’t have your app, perhaps they’ve opted into location-based deal services so you can still get them that 10% deal while they’re in the store. Or maybe they’ve walked in with a pre-purchased Groupon or Living Social voucher. They pay with one swipe, and you’ve learned about their buying preferences, credited their loyalty account and can encourage them to share a pic of their new buckle on social. Happy customer. Happy belt buckle company. All because the brand was willing to use the tech that’s available to meet consumers where they are, incentivize them, and show them how much they’re valued through rewards.

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• Get Fanatical About Your Followers

  - by Mike Stiles

  In the fourth of our series of discussions with Aberdeen’s Trip Kucera, we touch on what fans of your brand have come to expect in exchange for their fandom. Spotlight: Around the Oracle Social office, we live for football. So when we think of a true “fan” of a brand, something on the level of a football fan is what comes to mind. But are brands trying to invest fans on that same level? Trip: Yeah, if you’re a football fan, this is definitely your time of year. And if you’ve been to any NFL games recently, especially if you hadn’t been for a few years previously, you may have noticed that from the cup holders to in-stadium Wi-Fi, there’s an increasing emphasis being placed on “fan-focused” accommodations. That’s what they’re known as in the stadium business. Spotlight: How are brands doing in that fan-focused arena? Trip: Remember fan is short for “fanatical.” Brands can definitely learn from the way teams have become fanatical about their fans, or in the social media world, their followers. Many companies consider a segment of their addressable social audience as true fans; I’ve even heard the term “super-fans” used. So just as fans know and can tell you nearly everything about their favorite team, our research shows that there’s a lot value from getting to know your social audience—your followers—at a deeper level. Spotlight: So did your research show there’s a lot to be gained by making fandom a two-way street? Trip: Aberdeen’s new social relationship management research suggests that companies should develop capabilities to better analyze their social audience at a more granular level. Countless “ripped from the headlines” examples, from “United Breaks Guitars” to the most recent British Airways social fiasco we talked about a few weeks ago show how social can magnify the impact of a single customer voice. Spotlight: So how do the companies who are executing social most successfully do that? Trip: Leaders, which are the top-performing companies in Aberdeen’s study, are showing the value of identifying and categorizing your social audience. You should certainly treat every customer as if they have 10,000 followers, because they just might, but you can also proactively engage with high-value customer and high-value influencers. Getting back to the football analogy, it’s like how teams strive to give every guest a great experience, but they really roll out the red carpet for those season ticket and luxury box holders. Spotlight: I’m not allowed in luxury boxes, so you’ll have to tell me what that’s like. But what is the brand equivalent of rolling out the red carpet? Trip: Leaders are nearly three times more likely than Followers to have a process in place that identifies key social influencers for engagement, and more than twice as likely to identify customer advocates for social outreach. This is the kind of knowledge that gives companies the ability to better target social messaging and promotions like we talked about in our last discussion, as well as a basis for understanding how to measure the impact of their social media programs. I’ll give you an example. I hosted an event at one of my favorite restaurants recently. I had mentioned them in a Tweet several weeks before the event, and on the day of the event, they Tweeted out that they were looking forward to seeing me that evening for the event. It’s a small thing, but it had a big impact and I’d certainly go back as a result. Spotlight: So what specifically can brands use and look at to determine where their potential super-fans are? Trip: Social graph analysis, which looks at both the demographic/psychographic trends as well as the behavioral connections, can surface important brand value. Aberdeen’s PR and Brand Management research indicated that top-performing companies are more than three times more likely than Followers to both determine demographic trends through social listening (44% vs. 13%), and to identify meaningful customer segments through social (44% vs. 12%). This kind of brand-level insight can complement and enrich traditional market research. But perhaps even more importantly, it can serve as an early warning system for customer experience failures. @mikestilesPhoto: freedigitalphotos.net

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• Social Engagement: One Size Doesn't Fit Anyone

  - by Mike Stiles

  The key to achieving meaningful social engagement is to know who you’re talking to, know what they like, and consistently deliver that kind of material to them. Every magazine for women knows this. When you read the article titles promoted on their covers, there’s no mistaking for whom that magazine is intended. And yet, confusion still reigns at many brands as to exactly whom they want to talk to, what those people want to hear, and what kind of content they should be creating for them. In most instances, the root problem is brands want to be all things to all people. Their target audience…the world! Good luck with that. It’s 2012, the age of aggregation and custom content delivery. To cope with the modern day barrage of information, people have constructed technological filters so that content they regard as being “for them” is mostly what gets through. Even if your brand is for men and women, young and old, you may want to consider social properties that divide men from women, and young from old. Yes, a man might find something in a women’s magazine that interests him. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to subscribe to it, or buy even one issue. In fact he’ll probably never see the article he’d otherwise be interested in, because in his mind, “This isn’t for me.” It wasn’t packaged for him. News Flash: men and women are different. So it’s a tall order to craft your Facebook Page or Twitter handle to simultaneously exude the motivators for both. The Harris Interactive study “2012 Connecting and Communicating Online: State of Social Media” sheds light on the differing social behaviors and drivers. -65% of women (vs. 59% of men) stay glued to social because they don’t want to miss anything. -25% of women check social when they wake up, before they check email. Only 18% of men check social before e-mail. -95% of women surveyed belong to Facebook vs. 86% of men. -67% of women log in to Facebook once a day or more vs. 54% of men. -Conventional wisdom is Pinterest is mostly a woman-thing, right? That may be true for viewing, but not true for sharing. Men are actually more likely to share on Pinterest than women, 23% to 10%. -The sharing divide extends to YouTube. 68% of women use it mainly for consumption, as opposed to 52% of men. -Women are as likely to have a Twitter account as men, but they’re much less likely to check it often. 54% of women check it once a week compared to 2/3 of men. Obviously, there are some takeaways from this depending on your target. Women don’t want to miss out on anything, so serialized content might be a good idea, right? Promotional posts that lead to a big payoff could keep them hooked. Posts for women might be better served first thing in the morning. If sharing is your goal, maybe male-targeted content is more likely to get those desired shares. And maybe Twitter is a better place to aim your male-targeted content than Facebook. Some grocery stores started experimenting with male-only aisles. The results have been impressive. Why? Because while it’s true men were finding those same items in the store just fine before, now something has been created just for them. They have a place in the store where they belong. Each brand’s strategy and targets are going to differ. The point is…know who you’re talking to, know how they behave, know what they like, and deliver content using any number of social relationship management targeting tools that meets their expectations. If, however, you’re committed to a one-size-fits-all, “our content is for everybody” strategy (or even worse, a “this is what we want to put out and we expect everybody to love it” strategy), your content will miss the mark for more often than it hits. @mikestilesPhoto via stock.schng

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• 4 Ways Your Brand Can Jump From the Edge of Space

  - by Mike Stiles

  Can your brand’s social media content captivate the world and make it hold its collective breath? Can you put something on the screen that’s so compelling that your audience can’t look away? Will they want to make sure their friends see it so they can talk about it? If not, you’re probably not with Red Bull. I was impressed with Red Bull’s approach to social content even before Felix Baumgartner’s stunning skydive from the edge of space. And then they did this. According to Visible Measures, videos of the jump scored 50 million views in 4 days. 1,700 clips were generated from both official and organic sources. The live stream was the most watched YouTube Stream of all time (8 million concurrent viewers). The 2nd most watched live stream was…Felix’ first attempt Oct. 9. Are you ready to compete with that? I ask that question because some brands are still out there tying themselves up in knots about whether or not they should tweet. The public’s time and attention are scarce commodities, commodities they value greatly. The competition amongst brands for that time and attention is intense and going up like Felix’s capsule. If you still view your press releases as “content,” you won’t even be counted as being among the competition. Here are 5 lessons learned from Red Bull’s big leap: 1. They have a total understanding of their target market and audience. Not only do they have an understanding of it, they do something about it. They act on it. They fill the majority of their thoughts with what the audience wants. They hunger for wild applause from that audience. They want to do things that embrace the audience’s lifestyle and immerse in it so the target will identify the brand as “one of them.” Takeaway: BE your target market. 2. They deliver content that strikes the audience right where they emotionally live. If you want your content to have impact, you have to make your audience’s heart race, or make them tear up, or make them laugh. Label them “data points” all you want, but humans are emotional creatures. No message connects that’s not carried in on an emotion. Takeaway: You’re on the inside. If your content doesn’t make you say “wow,” it’s unlikely it will register with fans. 3. They put aside old school marketing and don’t let their content be degraded into a commercial. Their execs seem to understand the value in keeping a lid on the hard sell. So many brands just can’t bring themselves to disconnect advertising and social content. The result is, otherwise decent content gets contaminated with a desperation the viewer can smell a mile away. Think the Baumgartner skydive didn’t do Red Bull any good since he wasn’t drinking one on the way down while singing a jingle? Analysis company Taykey discovered that at the peak of the skydive buzz, about 1% of all online conversation was about the jump. Mentions of Red Bull constituted 1/3 of 1% of all Internet activity. Views of other Red Bull videos also shot up. Takeaway: Chill out with the ads. Your brand will get full credit for entertaining/informing fans in a relevant way, provided you do it. 4. They don’t hesitate to ask, “What can we do next”? Most corporate cultures are a virtual training facility for “we can’t do that.” Few are encouraged to innovate or think big, if think at all. Thinking big involves faith, and work. It means freedom and letting employees run a little wild with their ideas. There will always be the opportunity to let fear of everything that moves creep in and kill grand visions dead in their tracks. Experimenting must be allowed. Failure must be allowed. Red Bull didn’t think big. They thought mega. They tried to outdo themselves. Felix could have gone ahead and jumped halfway up, thinking, “This is still relatively high up. Good enough.” But that wouldn’t have left us breathless. Takeaway: Go for it. Jump. In putting up social properties and gathering fans of your brand, you’ve basically invited people to a party. A good host doesn’t just set out warm beer and stale chips because that’s inexpensive and easy. Be on the lookout for ways to make your guests walk away saying, “That was epic.”

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• Brazil is Hot for Social Media

  - by Mike Stiles

  Today’s guest blog is from Oracle SVP Product Development Reggie Bradford, fresh off a visit to Sao Paulo, Brazil where he spoke at the Dachis Social Business Summit and spent some time getting a personal taste for the astonishing growth of social in Brazil, both in terms of usage and engagement. I knew it was big, but I now have an all-new appreciation for why the Wall Street Journal branded Brazil the “social media capital of the universe.” Brazil has the world’s 5th largest economy, an expanding middle class, an active younger demo market, a connected & outgoing culture, and an ongoing embrace of the social media platforms. According to comScore's 2012 Brazil Digital Future in Focus report, 97% are using social media, and that’s not even taking mobile-only users into account. There were 65 million Facebook users in 2012, spending an average 535 minutes there, up 208%. It’s one of Twitter’s fastest growing markets and the 2nd biggest market for YouTube. Instagram usage has grown over 300% since last year. That by itself is exciting, but look at the opportunity for social marketing brands. 74% of Brazilian social users follow brands on Facebook, and 59% have praised a company on either Twitter or Facebook. A 2011 Oh! Panel study found 81% of social networkers there used social to research new products and 75% went there looking for discounts. B2C eCommerce sales in Brazil is projected to hit $26.9 billion by 2015. I bet I’m not the only one who sees great things ahead, and I was fortunate enough give a keynote ABRADI, an association of leading digital agencies in Brazil with 53 execs from 35 agencies attending. I was also afforded the opportunity to give my impressions of what’s going on in Brazil to Jornal Propoganda & Marketing, one of the most popular publications in Latin America for marketers. I conveyed that especially in an environment like Brazil, where social users are so willing to connect and engage brands, marketers need to back away from the heavy-handed, one-way messaging of old school advertising and move toward genuine relationships and trust-building. To aide in this, organizational and operation changes must be embraced inside the enterprise. We've talked often about the new, tighter partnership forming between the CIO and CMO. If this partnership is not encouraged, fostered and resourced, the increasing amount of time consumers spend on mobile and digital, and the efficiencies and integrations offered by cloud-based software cannot be exploited. These are the kinds of changes that can yield social data that, when combined with enterprise data, helps you come to know your social audiences intimately and predict their needs. Consumers are always connected and need your brand to be accessible at any time, be it for information or customer service. And, of course, all of this is happening quite publicly. The holistic, socially-enable enterprise connects social to customer service systems and all other customer touch points, facilitating the kind of immediate, real-time, gratifying response customers are coming to expect. Social users in Brazil are highly active and clearly willing to meet us as brands more than halfway. Empowering yourself with a social management technology platform will have you set up to maximize this booming social market…from listening & monitoring to engagement to analytics to workflow & automation to globalization & language support. Brands, it’s time to be as social as the great people of Brazil are. Obrigado! @reggiebradfordPhoto: Gualberto107, freedigitalphotos.net

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• Alert: It is No Longer 1982, So Why is CRM Still There?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Hot off the heels of Oracle’s recent LinkedIn integration announcement and Oracle Marketing Cloud Interact 2014, the Oracle Social Cloud is preparing for another big event, the CRM Evolution conference and exhibition in NYC. The role of social channels in customer engagement continues to grow, and social customer engagement will be a significant theme at the conference. According to Paul Greenberg, CRM Evolution Conference Chair, author, and Managing Principal at The 56 Group, social channels have become so pervasive that there is no longer a clear reason to make a distinction between “social CRM” and traditional CRM systems. Why not? Because social is a communication hub every bit as vital and used as the phone or email. What makes social different is that if you think of it as a phone, it’s a party line. That means customer interactions are far from secret, and social connections are listening in by the hundreds, hearing whether their friend is having a positive or negative experience with your brand. According to a Mention.com study, 76% of brand mentions are neutral, neither positive nor negative. These mentions fail to get much notice. So think what that means about the remaining 24% of mentions. They’re standing out, because a verdict, about you, is being rendered in them, usually with emotion. Suddenly, where the R of CRM has been lip service and somewhat expendable in the past, “relationship” takes on new meaning, seriousness, and urgency. Remarkably, legions of brands still approach CRM as if it were 1982. Today, brands must provide customer experiences the customer actually likes (how dare they expect such things). They must intimately know not only their customers, but each customer, because technology now makes personalized experiences possible. That’s why the Oracle Social Cloud has been so mission-oriented about seamlessly integrating social with sales, marketing and customer service interactions so the enterprise can have an actionable 360-degree view of the customer. It’s the key to that customer-centricity we hear so much about these days. If you’re attending CRM Evolution, Chris Moody, Director of Product Marketing for the Oracle Marketing Cloud, will show you how unified customer experiences and enhanced customer centricity will help you attract and keep ideal customers and brand advocates (“The Pursuit of Customer-Centricity” Aug 19 at 2:45p ET) And Meg Bear, Group Vice President for the Oracle Social Cloud, will sit on a panel talking about “terms of engagement” and the ways tech can now enhance your interactions with customers (Aug 20 at 10a ET). If you can’t be there, we’ll be doing our live-tweeting thing from the @oraclesocial handle, so make sure you’re a faithful follower. You’ll notice NOBODY is writing about the wisdom of “company-centricity.” Now is the time to bring your customer relationship management into the socially connected age. @mikestilesPhoto: Sue Pizarro, freeimages.com

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• Eloqua Experience 2013: Mystique, Modern Marketing and Masterful Engagement

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is a guest post from Erick Mott, a social business leader at Oracle Eloqua. There’s a growing gap between 20th century marketing and a modern marketing way of doing business. I can’t think of a better example of modern marketing in action than what more than 2,000 people experienced in San Francisco at #EE13; customer-obsession, multichannel content, and real-time engagement all coming together at one extraordinary event. This was my first Eloqua Experience as a new Oracle Eloqua employee. In weeks prior, I heard about the mystique but didn’t know what to expect. What I’ve come to understand with more clarity is everything we do revolves around customer success, and we operate and educate at all times with these five tenets in mind: 1. Targeting: Really Know Your Buyer 2. Engagement: Create a 1:1 Relationship 3. Conversion: Visualize Guided Thinking 4. Analysis: Learn What’s Working 5. Marketing Technology: Enable and Extend the Cloud Product News from Eloqua Experience 2013 We made some announcements that John Stetic, VP of Products, Oracle Eloqua covers in this brief ‘Modern Marketing Minute’ video recorded after Wednesday’s keynote; summarized below, too: Oracle Eloqua AdFocus: While understanding the impact of a specific marketing channel was formerly relegated to marketers’ wish lists, the channels we now focus on are digital, social, and mobile. AdFocus gives marketers a single platform to dynamically create, manage and measure display ads alongside owned and earned media. AdFocus enables marketers to target only key accounts or prospects you want to reach with display ads, as well as provide creative content or personalized ad copy based on their persona and activities. Oracle Eloqua Profiler: The details of what we now know about customers have expanded into a universal customer profile, which can be used to create highly targeted segments. Marketers now can take data that’s not even stored in Eloqua to help targeted and score prospects for a complete, multichannel view of the customer. Profiler gives sales reps one, detailed view of the prospect to extend views beyond Oracle Eloqua asset activity (emails, forms, page views) to any external assets stored in Oracle Eloqua. Marketing Resource Management: New capabilities create more secure and controlled access to marketing resources and data. New integrations provide greater insight into campaign resources and management through a central marketing calendar and simplify resource management. Integrated Sales and Marketing Funnel: An integrated sales and marketing funnel view gives marketing and sales users, cross-functional teams, and executive management a consistent and clear view of pipeline performance. It also quickly provides users with historical metrics across different time spans and conditions. Eloqua AppCloud: More than 20 new AppCloud partners have been added to the community, which now includes 100+ apps. Eloqua AppCloud now provides modern marketers with an even broader range of marketing applications that help expand and enrich sales and marketing efforts; easily accessible in the Topliners Community. Social Capabilities: Recent integration between Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) deliver a comprehensive, scalable and integrated modern marketing solution. New capabilities include better tracking of social activities for a more complete customer profile. Engage Facebook custom audiences with AdFocus to deliver ads and meaningful experiences through trusted social networks. Biggest and Best Eloqua Experience. There’s a lot of talk in the industry about the Marketing Cloud. At Oracle Eloqua, we have been on a mission of delivering the most advanced and integrated modern marketing technology on the planet. It’s not just a concept but reality with proven execution, as seen first-hand this week in San Francisco. In this video, Kevin Akeroyd, SVP of Oracle Eloqua, provides some highlights of what made this year’s Eloqua Experience, exceptional, including Steve Woods’ presentation about the journey of modern marketers and Andrea Ward’s conversation with Vince Gilligan, creator of the Breaking Bad television series. The 2013 Markie Awards The Oracle Eloqua Marketing Cloud was best exemplified for me as 19 Markies were awarded to customers for their exceptional creativity and results as modern marketers. Wow, what a night to remember with so many committed and talented people working to create an extraordinary experience! To learn more about how to become a modern marketer, check out these resources. We look forward to seeing you next year at Eloqua Experience. More on Erick: 20 years experience at Oracle, Ektron, Sitecore, Lyris, Habeas, Nokia, creatorbase, Mark Monitor, Cisco Systems, GlobalFluency, Sun Microsystems, Philips NV, Elm Products and CBS TV. Patent holder with agency, Fortune 500, media, and startup company expertise. @mikestiles

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• The Social Enterprise: Gangnam Style

  - by Mike Stiles

  Are only small and medium businesses able to put social strategies in place, generate consistent, compelling content for customers, and be nimble enough to listen and respond to the social communities they build? Or are enterprise organizations eagerly and effectively adopting social as well? It depends on whom inside the organization you ask. A study from Attensity looked at who “gets” social inside enterprise organizations. The results were unsurprising. Mostly, Generation X and Y employees who came of age with social as part of their lives and as a key communications vehicle understand it. Imagine being a 25-year-old at a company that bans employees from accessing Facebook at work. You may as well tell them they can’t use phones and must do all calculations on an abacus. To them, such policy is absent of real-world logic and signals to them the organization is destined to be the victim of an up-and-comer. After that, it’s senior management that gets social. You don’t get to be in senior management without reading a few things and paying attention. Most senior managers are well aware of the impact social has had and will have, though they may be unsure of what to do about it. The better ones will utilize those on the inside who do inherently know how to communicate and build virtual relationships using social. The very best will get the past out of the way for these social innovators, so the new communications can be enacted minus counterproductive dictums, double-clutching, meeting-creep, and all the other fading internal practices that water down content and impede change. Organizationally, the Attensity study found 81% of enterprise companies believe failing to embrace social will result in their being left behind. Yet our old friend fear still has many captive in its clutches. 79% feel overwhelmed by the volume of social data available, something a social technology partner with goal-oriented analytics expertise could go a long way toward alleviating. Then there’s the fear of social having a negative impact. This comes from a lack of belief in the product, the customer service, or both. The public uses social not to go out and slay brands. They’re using it to be honest. If the fear is that honesty will reflect badly on the brand, the brand has much bigger, broader problems than what happens on Facebook. Sadly, most enterprise organizations still see social as a megaphone, a one-way channel with which to hit people with ads. They either don’t understand social relationships, or don’t want any. The truly unenlightened manager will always say, “We help them by selling them our stuff.” “Brand affinity” is a term, it’s just not one assigned much value in enterprise organizations. Which brings us to Psy, the Korean performer whose Internet video phenom “Gangnam Style,” as of this writing, has been viewed 438,550,238 times on YouTube. It’s bigger than anything a brand will probably ever publish. Most brands would never have seen the point of making or publishing it. But a funny thing happened on the way to Internet success. The video literally doubled the stock price of Psy’s father’s software firm. NH Investment and Securities said, "The positive sentiment has attracted investors just because of the fact the company is owned by Psy's father and uncle.” The company wasn’t mentioned or seen in the video in any way, yet reaped tangible rewards just for being tangentially associated with it. Imagine your brand being visibly and directly responsible for such a smash and tell me it’s worthless. When enterprise organizations embrace the value of igniting passions, making people happier, solving their problems, informing them, helping them have fun, etc., then they will have fully embraced social, and will reap the brand affinity rewards of heightened awareness, brand loyalty and yes, sales.

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• The Social Content Conundrum

  - by Mike Stiles

  Here’s the social content conundrum: people who are not entertainers are being asked to entertain. Despite a world of skilled MBAs, marketing savants, technological innovators, analysts, social strategists and consultants, every development in social for brands keeps boomeranging right back to the same unavoidable truth. Success hinges on having content creators who know how to entertain the target audience. You can’t make this all about business-processes. You can’t make this all about technology, though data is critical and helps inform content. This is about having human beings who know the audience, know what they’d love to see, and can create the magic that will draw and hold them. Since showing up in the News Feed is critical for exposition and engagement, and since social ads primarily serve to amplify content that’s performing well, I’m comfortable saying content creators are becoming exponentially recruited and valued. They will no longer be commodities. They’ll be your stars. Social has fundamentally changed the relationship between brand and consumer. No longer can the customer be told to sit down, shut up, and listen to our ads. It’s now all about what consumers are willing to watch or read. Their patience for subjecting themselves to material they aren’t interested in is waning. Therefore, brands must now be producers of entertainment and information content, not merely placers of ads within someone else’s content. Social has given you a huge stage, with an audience sitting out there waiting to see what you’re going to do. What are you putting on that stage? For most corporate environments, entertaining is alien. It’s risky and subjective. Most operate around two foundational principles: control and fear. To entertain and inform with branded content, some control has to go. You control the product. Past that, control is being transferred into the hands of the consumer. The “fear first” culture also has to yield. If you strive to never make waves, you will move absolutely nothing. Because most corporations don’t house entertainers, they must be found then trusted. They’re usually a little weird. The ideas they’ll bring may seem “out there.” But like any business professional, they’ve gone through the training and experiences that make them uniquely good at what they do, even if you don’t quite understand them. It’s okay. It’s what the audience thinks that matters. Get it right, and you’ll be generating one ambassador after another who’s proud to be identified with the brand and will regularly consume and share your content. Entertainment entities are able to shape our culture and succeed beyond their wildest dreams by being beholden to one thing…what the public likes and wants. When brands put the same emphasis on crowd-pleasing content, they too will enjoy brand fame the likes of which they’ve never seen. The stage is yours. Now get out there and go for that applause.

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• Finalists for Community Manager of the Year Announced

  - by Mike Stiles

  For as long as brand social has been around, there’s still an amazing disparity from company to company on the role of Community Manager. At some brands, they are the lead social innovators. At others, the task has been relegated to interns who are at the company temporarily. Some have total autonomy and trust. Others must get chain-of-command permission each time they engage. So what does a premiere “worth their weight in gold” Community Manager look like? More than anyone else in the building, they have the most intimate knowledge of who the customer is. They live on the front lines and are the first to detect problems and opportunities. They are sincere, raving fans of the brand themselves and are trusted advocates for the others. They’re fun to be around. They aren’t salespeople. Give me one Community Manager who’s been at the job 6 months over 5 focus groups any day. Because not unlike in speed dating, they must immediately learn how to make a positive, lasting impression on fans so they’ll want to return and keep the relationship going. They’re informers and entertainers, with a true belief in the value of the brand’s proposition. Internally, they live at the mercy of the resources allocated toward social. Many, whose managers don’t understand the time involved in properly curating a community, are tasked with 2 or 3 too many of them. 63% of CM’s will spend over 30 hours a week on one community. They come to intuitively know the value of the relationships they’re building, even if they can’t always be shown in a bar graph to the C-suite. Many must communicate how the customer feels to executives that simply don’t seem to want to hear it. Some can get the answers fans want quickly, others are frustrated in their ability to respond within an impressive timeframe. In short, in a corporate world coping with sweeping technological changes, amidst business school doublespeak, pie charts, decks, strat sessions and data points, the role of the Community Manager is the most…human. They are the true emotional connection to the real life customer. Which is why we sought to find a way to recognize and honor who they are, what they do, and how well they have defined the position as social grows and integrates into the larger organization. Meet our 3 finalists for Community Manager of the Year. Jeff Esposito with VistaprintJeff manages and heads up content strategy for all social networks and blogs. He also crafts company-wide policies surrounding the social space. Vistaprint won the NEDMA Gold Award for Twitter Strategy in 2010 and 2011, and a Bronze in 2011 for Social Media Strategy. Prior to Vistaprint, Jeff was Media Relations Manager with the Long Island Ducks. He graduated from Seton Hall University with a BA in English and a minor in Classical Studies. Stacey Acevero with Vocus In addition to social management, Stacey blogs at Vocus on influential marketing and social media, and blogs at PRWeb on public relations and SEO. She’s been named one of the #Nifty50 Women in Tech on Twitter 2 years in a row, as well as included in the 15 up-and-coming PR pros to watch in 2012. Carly Severn with the San Francisco BalletCarly drives engagement, widens the fanbase and generates digital content for America’s oldest professional ballet company. Managed properties include Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and G+. Prior to joining the SF Ballet, Carly was Marketing & Press Coordinator at The Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, where she graduated with a degree in English. We invite you to join us at the first annual Oracle Social Media Summit November 14 and 15 at the Wynn in Las Vegas where our finalists will be featured. Over 300 top brand marketers, agency executives, and social leaders & innovators will be exploring how social is transforming business. Space is limited and the information valuable, so get more info and get registered as soon as possible at the event site.

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