[UPDATED] The big omni-channel trap awaits digital executives who make huge technology, process and people investments to create new “experiences” for “connected customers” but neglect social technologies’ ability to engage people emotionally. Few business executives have spent enough quality time in digital social venues to appreciate how personally and deeply people collaborate online; rather, it is normal for CDOs, CMOs and CIOs to primarily think of “digital” as mechanizing technologies like Web transaction systems (ecommerce), mobile and big data. That’s the preconception baits the big omni-channel trap. The Big Omni-Channel Trap is second in CSRA’s retail & omni-channel series, and it will show you how to avoid the trap.
More and more customers and other stakeholders are collaborating online and getting accustomed to being individually treated like people, not demographics of consumers or customers. They like it. People can’t resist places in which they, and others around them, are listened to and responded to meaningfully. People respond to each other’s emotions. Organizations that don’t appreciate this development will invest heavily and receive lackluster returns, weakening themselves at […]
[UPDATED] Connected customers have the Internet in their pockets and use mobile and other devices in all stages of conceptualizing, considering, evaluating, buying and using purchased products and services. These customers want to interact with firms and brands in a seamless experience that features single sign-on as an entry point; they want the firm to respond using their individual data when that makes interacting more valuable. Omni-channel commerce refers to a collection of technologies, practices and strategies firms use to provide the personal individualized experience that connected customers expect.
Chief digital officers and transformation will go hand in hand as the position and its competencies take shape over the next few years. Historically, commercial, government and nonprofit enterprises, when faced with profound business change or technology disruption, respond by elevating new types of leader to the “C” level. Chief Knowledge Officer, Chief Process Officer, Chief Ecommerce Officer and the like become de rigeur for a few years and fade, either because the new disruption proved less sustainable than anticipated or because the competency became subsumed by a more core function.
[UPDATED] Social business strategy use cases represent scenarios in which most organizations find themselves, and they reflect some of the choices of which CDOs, CMOs and CEOs may use as they plan to evolve their enterprises in order to either improve returns or simply remain relevant in volatile markets.![Transform the Enterprise [Social Business Team Building] case5](http://rollyson.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/sbtb5.png)
Transform the Enterprise is almost always initiated by the CEO’s office, the CDO, the board of directors or other strategic body. Its defining characteristic is enterprise transformation, using social business as a key enabler. Some of its common business contexts are: the hiring of a (new) CDO (Chief Digital Officer), which is itself a commitment to use social business for transformation; a merger, major acquisition or sale whose focus is to redefine the enterprise; “pervasive social business” that results when several of the enterprise’s brands have had some social business success that the executive team wants to scale; scaling enterprise 2.0 social collaboration technologies; self-disruption to create a new level of competitiveness.
Anonymity, Marketing and Predicting the Future shows that, although each culture has its own concepts of “anonymity” and “marketing,” anonymity will prove to have been a temporary phenomenon in most human cultures because communications technologies are counteracting it. Moreover, based on my studies of and experience with sociology, evolutionary psychology and technology, I observe that 20th century marketing is grounded in anonymity, so we can predict the future of marketing by exploring anonymity and its relationship to marketing.![Catch Social Media Leaders [Social Business Team Building] case3](http://rollyson.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/sbtb3.png)
[UPDATED] Catch Social Media Leaders applies to organizations with very conservative cultures—banks, insurers, healthcare, governments, B2B firms, and professional services to name a few—that have sat on the sidelines and now feel nervous because they are so far behind. In 2013, digital marketing and firm executives are thinking about building their internal teams to provide more continuity and scale, so here I’ll show how firms can use strategy and best practices to outperform rivals across the social business life cycle.
Advisory & Services Firm Social Business Adoption 2012 is a research survey that looks at social business advisory/consulting firms in a new way. Using quantitative methods, I compared consultancies according to the needs of clients who want to transform their organizations with social business. The twelve metrics measure firms’ performance in business impact, sociality, and transformation areas, and they rank firms within firm categories and overall.
Pureplays address social business as transformation by definition because they have been launched to address emerging market needs that established players either do not yet understand or have yet to organize to address. Moreover, Pureplays are not adding social business to their existing services; they have been formed to practice social business. They are a small cohort in this research survey because they were constrained to social business and transformation as were advisory firms in other categories.
[UPDATED] The Big Four accountancies have been rebuilding their advisory practices for the past several years, and social business transformation fits with their core competencies in important ways. Like Strategy firms, they have been watching adoption and producing thought leadership on various aspects of social technologies’ relevance to business. Their approach also resembles that of strategy firms in that they have relatively low evidence of social business practice.