Since the days when blogs were new, MySpace was cool and “You” were Time Magazine’s person of the year, marketers debated the validity of measuring the ROI of social media. The argument was that social media was a conversation and not something to be measured like a direct response campaign.
Author and blogger Shel Holtz once commented that there was no reason to measure ROI, he said “after all, is it necessary to measure the ROI of your pants?”
The point was that social media is a conversation that is essential for good business and to apply traditional marketing measurements to it does not recognize all it has to offer. The fact is that social media is what you make it. It is a communication’s tool that can be used by almost every function within an organization to be more receptive, responsive and efficient. Even though groups like customer service, PR, HR, consumer affairs and market research use it with different communication goals, they are participating in the conversation that is occurring around the brand and building strong relationships. The benefit of participation can certainly have a financial impact, but measuring a precise ROI is not a primary goal.
The goal for marketers can be different. Social media and word of mouth are more influential than any type of advertising and there is a lot a marketer can do to activate discussion about the company’s products. There are very specific practices to accomplish this and the results can be measured accurately. If you approach a social media word of mouth initiative with a direct marketing mindset, you can capture the right data to determine its impact on sales. So when people argue that social media cannot be measured, or that the ROI of social media is zero, they are looking at it the wrong way.
Although many of our clients are still struggling to come up with a social media strategy, let alone analyze those conversations and turn them into ROI position.
Recently, over 2,100 companies completed a survey sponsored by SAS Institute Inc. which found that: 75 % of companies didn’t know where their most valuable customers were talking about them, and only 23 per cent use social media analytic tools.
At the SAS Premier Business Leadership Series, the company announced that SAS Conversation Center, which is designed to help companies capture tweets in real time and identify those that are significant to the company, brand or product, based on sentiment and influence of the tweeter, will be available in January 2011. Tweets can then be routed to customer-service reps.
Earlier this year SAS also announced its Social Media Analytics tool, which brings together unstructured data such as RSS news feed, blogs and Facebook, and looks at sentiment over time.
Monster.ca is one company that sees value in analyzing this unstructured data. The company spent six years building up its business intelligence strategy in Canada, and now the Canadian model is being used in its subsidiaries across the globe. It’s using Base SAS, Enterprise Miner and SAS Stat for sales, marketing campaigns and customer service. So far, it’s increased customer retention by 15 per cent through its job posting optimizer, which was rolled out in 2007 to provide customers with value-added statistics.
But the impact of a bad customer service experience is even worse these days with social media, where a negative comment can be viewed by millions of people, said Jean-Paul Isson, vice-president of global BI and predictive analytics with Monster Worldwide Inc., based in Montreal. So his team is exploring social media analytics and putting together a project plan. For example, before they’d launch a new product, they’d include that analysis in their strategy.
“To survive, any forward-looking company should have a social media metric strategy in their business,” said Isson. Otherwise, they’ll “miss the bus.”
His team is also looking to analyze voice to text, in order to provide insight to the customer service organization. “It’s really about unstructured data,” said Isson. This includes text, voice and social media, but the challenge lies in differences between language and culture, even generational differences. For a Gen-Xer, saying “that’s sick” typically refers to something as disgusting, while a Millennial means that as a compliment.
But Isson says there’s still a lot of room to grow with structured data. Monster, which now operates in more than 55 countries, launched a subsidiary last month in Brazil and another this month in South Africa. While the company has a global framework for analysis, he says emerging economies are still at early stages of analytics, and they have to learn to ride a bike before driving a car.
Online travel reservation Web site Expedia Inc. is also exploring the concept o Sentiment Analysis and starting to apply it. In any given month, the company gets some 80,000 reviews. “We can diagram sentences, suck out sarcasm, and apply those same disciplines to what we see coming in on Twitter and our Facebook fan page,” said Joe Megibow, vice-president of global analytics and optimization with Expedia. “So if someone has an issue and posts some nasty comment, that we are in fact founded by the devil, we will respond privately to every one of those [types of comments].”
Clothing retailer Gap, for example, recently introduced a new logo and got “creamed” by customers, said Jim Davis, senior vice-president and chief marketing officer with SAS. Two years ago, Gap would have gone to a PR agency, launched the new logo and conducted a study over six to eight months — and by then it would have been too late. With social media, they found out immediately that customers hated the new logo and made an immediate adjustment.
But, Davis said, the social media feed is just another data source. Right now, there are many companies that offer views into sentiment, but he believes this phase will be short-lived and move toward something more actionable to try to move that sentiment needle.
Tom Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics and a professor at Babson College, agrees that social media analytics is just another channel. “As we do with our other channels, we have to evaluate what we do with it,” he said. “Social media is pretty good for customer service, but it’s not very good yet for selling anything. But even for customer service it’s not easy to analyze.” Sentiment analysis, for example, has to take into account sarcasm, language and cultural factors.
“So you better make sure you care about that feedback,” said Davenport. Comcast, a provider of cable services, is getting wonderful feedback for responding to tweets, he said, but they don’t have great customer service in other channels. “I call you up and I talk to you and you don’t respond to me — should I hang up and tweet about it?” he said, adding that anyone can tweet, whether or not they happen to be a Comcast customer. “You’ve got to give it the amount of attention that it really deserves.”
Research Reference Sources:
Vawn Himmelsbach On: 31 Oct 2010 For: ComputerWorld Canada
Showing posts with label Innovation Culture Measurement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Innovation Culture Measurement. Show all posts
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Monday, October 6, 2008
Innovation and Culture - Getting a Baseline is Key to Your Innovation Strategy Execution
Introduction
Every organization has a unique culture that supports an organization's capacity to execute. Cultural capacity from one organization to another vaires in its: form, degree, depth, speed, and self- learning mechanisms. An organization's culture is not always unified but an institutional culture is the “collective personality” of your organization. An organization’s culture consists of deeply imbedded values, beliefs, philosophies, attitudes, and operating norms, artifacts, symbols, essentially boils down to “how things are done around here - that are more often than not captured in stories.”
One of the initial steps any organizational leader that wants to tap into developing an innovative culture to improve their current state. Having a position on currrent state innovation health will be a key success factor. Below is an extract of some of Helix's Innovation and Culture assessment web enabled tools to help provide the leadership forum participatns with a snapshot self assessment that can provide some quidance on how innovation is working in the context of your organizational boundaries. I like this as managers can also use this to have a conversation with their team(s) and facilitate increased awareness of strengths or gaps in working teams.
The most important factor in getting underway is simply to start with a learning orientation and having a conversation. Love to hear how this goes if you use some of these questions, if you want more information on more robust toolkits to measure innovation, just ping me atcindy@helixcommerce.com.
Innovation Culture Assessment
1. Do employees have a clear understanding of what innovation simply means? Does your organization’s vision, mission, and key strategies align to innovation capacity development? How would you describe the current innovation culture of your organization?What would you change to make it stronger to support innovation development?
2. How supportive is your culture to these behaviors: a) risk-taking, b) continual ambiguity, c) responsive implementation of ideas? d.)tolerance for failure e.)curiousity and experimentation? f.) complexity and non linear thinking? g.)openness and transparency? h.) knowledge sharing i.) Tolerance for reflection and holding still vs rushing everywhere? j.) enabling high performance teams and empowerment...
3.What are the real motivating factors that your organization uses to recognize individual and team activities? What effect(s) do they have on employees being more creative and proactive? Do you have any visible innovation awards?
4.What are your organizations' policies, rules, procedures, norms, methods, and leadership behaviors that inhibit innovation? How can they be eliminated, minimized, or modified?
5.What factors or types of “successes” determine how front-line employees, managers, and executives are recognized, rewarded, and promoted?What are your people penalized for? How does or has this impacted your on-going innovative efforts?
6.How does your organization view: a) daring (even far-fetched) ideas, b) ultra-visionary concepts, c) calculated risk-taking, and d) unavoidable mistakes from creative endeavors that didn’t pan out? Is failure generally seen as a learning or a (career) limiting experience?
7.How does your organization deal with frequent change? Historically, what’s been the resulting consequences and impact? What causes change and who typically drives it?How is change planned and executed?
8.What is the ratio between your employees focusing on problem-solving (“fighting fires”) or ("continuous improvement') vs opportunity-seeking (exploring for breakthroughh or disruptive, major changes and new opportunities) for your organization?
9. Do employees feel appreciated for their ideas and recommendations? Do they perceive their personal benefits to be aligned with your vision for innovation capacity/skills development? What causes employees to stop their flow of ideas and drop out from actively pursuing innovation?
10. Does your organization have a structured innovative process that’s regularly used to generate ideas (from mild to wild) and implement them effectively and efficiently? How do your track your ideation process and is this an accessible process to all employees, and managed, measured effectively? How much flexibility do people have in going outside of their normal job descriptions? (Note Helix has ideation capture sw that is world class).
11. Who typically comes up with ideas? How are they usually created--by individuals or teams, in formal brainstorming sessions, or informally and spontaneously? What percentage of ideas are implemented and how long does it generally take? How are potentially blockbuster ideas evaluated?
12. How would you describe the overall communication climate in your organization? To what extent is it open, honest, frank, positive, and supportive versus closed, adversarial, or chain-of-command driven, for example? How does communication affect the way people react to ideas and work together to approve, and implement them?
13. To what extent does your organization invest in sufficient employee training for: a) creative problem-solving, b) imaginative thinking, c) innovation concepts and application, and d) synergistic team-building techniques? Are employees given adequate resources (materials, time, funds, etc.) to pursue steady innovation?
14.Are team operating standards and individual performance criteria specific and clear enough to guide creative activity? Are they periodically reviewed and modified?
15. Is your organization more forward-looking than dwelling on previous successes and doing the same, even with diminishing returns? Does your culture permit a carefully tuned balance between short-term returns (tactical mode) and investments of time and energy for long-term gains (strategic mode)?
Summary
Culture is a major determinant of an organization’s ability and desire to innovate. Understanding what your culture is now, and how it needs to evolve, will help map out a way to produce even higher octane levels of performance in your organization, whatever its size and makeup may be. So, how do you rate your organization’s culture as it relates to innovation?
Every organization has a unique culture that supports an organization's capacity to execute. Cultural capacity from one organization to another vaires in its: form, degree, depth, speed, and self- learning mechanisms. An organization's culture is not always unified but an institutional culture is the “collective personality” of your organization. An organization’s culture consists of deeply imbedded values, beliefs, philosophies, attitudes, and operating norms, artifacts, symbols, essentially boils down to “how things are done around here - that are more often than not captured in stories.”
One of the initial steps any organizational leader that wants to tap into developing an innovative culture to improve their current state. Having a position on currrent state innovation health will be a key success factor. Below is an extract of some of Helix's Innovation and Culture assessment web enabled tools to help provide the leadership forum participatns with a snapshot self assessment that can provide some quidance on how innovation is working in the context of your organizational boundaries. I like this as managers can also use this to have a conversation with their team(s) and facilitate increased awareness of strengths or gaps in working teams.
The most important factor in getting underway is simply to start with a learning orientation and having a conversation. Love to hear how this goes if you use some of these questions, if you want more information on more robust toolkits to measure innovation, just ping me atcindy@helixcommerce.com.
Innovation Culture Assessment
1. Do employees have a clear understanding of what innovation simply means? Does your organization’s vision, mission, and key strategies align to innovation capacity development? How would you describe the current innovation culture of your organization?What would you change to make it stronger to support innovation development?
2. How supportive is your culture to these behaviors: a) risk-taking, b) continual ambiguity, c) responsive implementation of ideas? d.)tolerance for failure e.)curiousity and experimentation? f.) complexity and non linear thinking? g.)openness and transparency? h.) knowledge sharing i.) Tolerance for reflection and holding still vs rushing everywhere? j.) enabling high performance teams and empowerment...
3.What are the real motivating factors that your organization uses to recognize individual and team activities? What effect(s) do they have on employees being more creative and proactive? Do you have any visible innovation awards?
4.What are your organizations' policies, rules, procedures, norms, methods, and leadership behaviors that inhibit innovation? How can they be eliminated, minimized, or modified?
5.What factors or types of “successes” determine how front-line employees, managers, and executives are recognized, rewarded, and promoted?What are your people penalized for? How does or has this impacted your on-going innovative efforts?
6.How does your organization view: a) daring (even far-fetched) ideas, b) ultra-visionary concepts, c) calculated risk-taking, and d) unavoidable mistakes from creative endeavors that didn’t pan out? Is failure generally seen as a learning or a (career) limiting experience?
7.How does your organization deal with frequent change? Historically, what’s been the resulting consequences and impact? What causes change and who typically drives it?How is change planned and executed?
8.What is the ratio between your employees focusing on problem-solving (“fighting fires”) or ("continuous improvement') vs opportunity-seeking (exploring for breakthroughh or disruptive, major changes and new opportunities) for your organization?
9. Do employees feel appreciated for their ideas and recommendations? Do they perceive their personal benefits to be aligned with your vision for innovation capacity/skills development? What causes employees to stop their flow of ideas and drop out from actively pursuing innovation?
10. Does your organization have a structured innovative process that’s regularly used to generate ideas (from mild to wild) and implement them effectively and efficiently? How do your track your ideation process and is this an accessible process to all employees, and managed, measured effectively? How much flexibility do people have in going outside of their normal job descriptions? (Note Helix has ideation capture sw that is world class).
11. Who typically comes up with ideas? How are they usually created--by individuals or teams, in formal brainstorming sessions, or informally and spontaneously? What percentage of ideas are implemented and how long does it generally take? How are potentially blockbuster ideas evaluated?
12. How would you describe the overall communication climate in your organization? To what extent is it open, honest, frank, positive, and supportive versus closed, adversarial, or chain-of-command driven, for example? How does communication affect the way people react to ideas and work together to approve, and implement them?
13. To what extent does your organization invest in sufficient employee training for: a) creative problem-solving, b) imaginative thinking, c) innovation concepts and application, and d) synergistic team-building techniques? Are employees given adequate resources (materials, time, funds, etc.) to pursue steady innovation?
14.Are team operating standards and individual performance criteria specific and clear enough to guide creative activity? Are they periodically reviewed and modified?
15. Is your organization more forward-looking than dwelling on previous successes and doing the same, even with diminishing returns? Does your culture permit a carefully tuned balance between short-term returns (tactical mode) and investments of time and energy for long-term gains (strategic mode)?
Summary
Culture is a major determinant of an organization’s ability and desire to innovate. Understanding what your culture is now, and how it needs to evolve, will help map out a way to produce even higher octane levels of performance in your organization, whatever its size and makeup may be. So, how do you rate your organization’s culture as it relates to innovation?
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