Enterprise Architects

Social tools can be very effective customer engagement tools for organizations operating in the professional services industry. In this blog post i will discuss the ways in which a particular professional service organization is brilliantly using the blogosphere to enhance its business. And i will also make relevant connections to value levers associated with implementing enterprise 2.0 as published by the McKinsey Global Institute in 2012.

Meet Enterprise Architects, the brilliant consulting firm known for excellence in the information technology consulting service industry. This organization provides consulting services to big firms all over the globe - with offices in the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, South Africa. It has an endless list of multi billion dollar clients such as Rio Tinto, CommonWealth Bank, ING, News Corp, Foxtel, PZ Cussons, ANZ, Telstra, BHP billiton, Virgin etc. Enterprise Architects provide consulting services to organizations in the areas of business strategy design and transformation, Human Resource recruitment for organizations and training in the Enterprise Architecture domain.

Enterprise Architects blog posts are aimed at showing knowledge and domain expertise by addressing important issues within the field of enterprise architecture. These blog posts are carefully chosen and developed so as to generate conversation between their in house experts, their customers and their potential customers. This strategy helps the organization to gain customer insights on what customers are really interested in. This new insights have led to the development of new training products and new service lines for its consulting services arm.

Also, the blogging activity of Enterprise Architects serves as a tool for creating awareness about their services and expertise in different specialized areas of its industry. Through this, Enterprise Architects has been able to build trust and reputation by providing its clients and potential clients an inside view of its knowledge and expertise. Eventually, the whole idea behind blogging is to attract new clients and increase business deals with its current clients. This helps attract new clients through online searches that are related to any one of its blog posts.

Most professional service firms use blogging as a tool to generate awareness about their expertise and try to build trust with its readers before the potential clients are been sold any professional service product. Blogging is not only used for marketing, sales and customer service, it is an excellent tool used in professional service firms for internal collaboration and sharing of knowledge between experts. This tool will remain a vital strategy for inbound marketing and customer service for years to come, and it will continue to serve as a power to for collaboration and knowledge sharing amongst professionals in the professional services industry.

Using Social Technology tools to Increase Client Base and Engage Customers

The focus of today’s blog is about how an organization has explored the use of social technology value levers to its advantage. The company studied in this blog post is a large financial institution based in Africa - Guaranty Trust Bank. The bank was founded in 1990 in Nigeria, and it has grown to be the largest and most profitable bank in Nigeria with an asset base of over US$15 Billion and an annual revenue of over US$ 1 Billion. To this day it is loved by customers because of its excellent customer service and adherence to standard global financial practices.  

In this blog post, we will highlight how Guaranty Trust bank Africa is using social technology value levers in two functional areas of their business – sales and marketing, and customer service.

Guaranty Trust Bank has been using the sales and marketing social technology value levers to gain customer insights that have led to the development of new strategies and new decisions in key business areas such as placement of ATM machines in new locations based on customer insights gained through social media platforms. These types of insights are gained by asking themselves simple but powerful questions such as ‘what do customers and prospective customers really want from their bank? ’

The bank has executed a strategy to help it generate and foster sales leads through social media platforms. To achieve its purpose the bank recently launched an application online that allows new customers to open a bank account on Facebook. The bank's management has announced recently the development of a social commerce application that allows customers to securely transfer money to other customers, pay bills and confirm their account balance through their facebook account.

Based on Guaranty Trust Bank’s commitment to maximizing the potential of social technologies to engage, communicate and interact with its customers and potential customers, it has developed some digital marketing properties such as the Ndani TV on youtube, the Ndani blog and the Ndani facebook page.

Customer service through the use of social technologies has led to quantum leaps of improvement in a lot of companies’ client relationship management. Guaranty Trust bank has used it to improve its communication with customers on enhancements and problems with its products and services. In 2012, the bank used its social media presence to handle customer complains when part of its internet functionality was down due to security upgrades.

Using these social technology levers, Guaranty Trust Bank has been able to move far ahead of its peers including big banks in Europe and North America. The bank has been able to generate so much buzz in the online social media arena with over two million ‘Likes’ on Facebook alone, making it the most liked bank in Africa. The power of social technology levers cannot be underestimated. With the fast pace of disruption in different areas of our society caused by the advent of social technologies, the potential threat it has to disrupt industries such as traditional banking cannot be compared to any other technology of its kind leading to fear in the hearts of top bankers around the world. Not until the well-established banks around the world find a way to seamlessly integrate this new technology into their everyday business, their enterprise would be at the messy of the ones that find profitable and useful ways to integrate this technology.

Reference

Social media lessons from banking insiders 

http://www.kpmg.com/AU/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Documents/social-banker-v2-social-media-lessons-banking-insiders.pdf

Successful social Media Marketing Practices

The rate of disconnect between companies advertising and consumers is ever widening. The average consumer is been bombarded with advertisement more than a thousand times per day. The pressure mounted on consumers to buy products they are not interested in as lead them to find ingenious ways to solve their buying challenges. Consumers now use peer to peer validation research strategy to make decisions on what to buy and what to avoid. One of the best peer to peer platforms is social networking. Smart companies have discovered that natural advertising is no more producing the desired results, and they have found ways to harness the new digital platforms to engage and win the hearts of customers online. In the following paragraphs, two of the most brilliant companies making a big impact in the online social realm will be featured, including the strategies that they deploy to win on the new battle field, the social media. These two companies are Zappos and WholeFoods.

Now let’s get started!

  

Zappos was started in 1999 by a teenager out of frustration of not finding the perfect shoes for himself after searching through store after store. Since then, the company has been operating in the digital realm and has been able to build its brand online grossing over one billion Dollars in revenue in less than ten years. It has continued to use digital tools to gain huge chunk of market share and it still sees big opportunities for growth and improvement in its chosen competitive market.

Zappos’s marketing strategy is regarded as one of the very best in its industry. Combining exceptional customer service with customer relationship building using digital tools such as social networking platforms.

Zappos has been successfully using social networking platforms to execute its marketing strategy since the early days of the social tools awareness. Using these social tools has played an important role in Zappos’s phenomenal growth in the last few years. Zappos is one of the top ranking companies on major brand ranking in social media and customer service.

This company uses social tools to engage its client base and also as a customer service tool for resolving customer issues. Zappos has positioned its marketing strategy on word of mouth. By this, they cultivate their relationship with current customers who help them spread the word to friends, associates and family members about the excellent customer service Zappos provides.

Zappos encourage its happy customers to share their experience with Zappos through their social network of friends. The company use words such as “Love your order? Share it”. This simple psychological language saw the number of sharing go up by seven percent.

Each social media platform has its own place in Zappos’s arsenal of social commerce strategy. For example, the company invests money on sponsored posts on Facebook. It says that,” it is a necessary evil. It is the difference between 1,000 likes versus 10 likes.” Twitter is used primarily for customer service at Zappos. While Pinterest is used to remind customers and prospective customers that the company has products in other categories aside from shoes.

One of the most important marketing strategies Zappos uses to win the word of mouth game is called the WOW! Strategy. Using the WOW! Strategy by surprising customers, Zappos automatically upgrades all purchases made by first time customers to priority shipping (next day delivery) without even mentioning the surprise upgrade to the customer at the checkout page. This single act generates a strong emotional commitment and word of mouth about the company’s services through customers.

Whole Foods is a leading natural and organic food store with about 300 outlets in America and the U.K.

This company has been building its customer relationship through online social media for over seven years, and this has helped it grow phenomenally.

Whole Foods has shown strong brand presence in all locations it has set up an outlet, whether physical or web property. The company’s ability to engage customers and get customer’s loyalty is unparalleled.

The company’s social media strategy is to be genuine and transparent in the customer engagement process by letting the conversation occur as naturally as possible. At whole Foods, the various outlets have their own social presence so as to provide customized and unique experiences to their customers.

All the departments within the company collaborate in the process of listening and learning what customers want and inventing, planning and executing solutions or campaigns. This collaboration process helps the company respond quickly to opportunities recognized through its social engagement with customers.

Whole Foods Twitter strategy is to use the tool as a customer service tool, in which individual customer questions and requests are responded to as fast as possible. The company has different Twitter accounts for specialized topics such as cheese and wine, and also individual accounts for local outlets.

In conclusion, it can be seen that both Zappos and Whole Foods have applied the principles of enterprise 2.0 (peering, ideagoras and prosuming) in executing their social media strategies.

Reference

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/zappos-on-facebook-and-social-media-2013-2

http://www.digitalsparkmarketing.com/customer-focus/customer-engagement/whole-foods-customer-engagement/

Please feel free to share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Blogging Demystified!

Blogging Demystified!

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” – Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motors

Now the big question is - How do you make sure that you are not writing blog post that nobody wants to read?

I will begin by talking about my purpose for blogging, after which I will delve into the strategies for creating useful blog posts and attracting the desired readership to the blog. Hopefully, the following paragraphs should address the big question stated above.

Now let’s get started!

Blogging has been a desire of mine for a long time but i never got to create one. Partly due to the fear of not getting my desired readership size, and partly due to the fact that it is not one of my top priorities. With that said, I am still passionate about the idea of blogging most especially in the areas of technology, marketing and entrepreneurship.

Writing a blog post with purpose helps create a strong connection and bond with the reader. The reader can feel this through your writing, and this builds trust. A purposeful blog post will convince the reader that you are convinced and passionate about the topic you are writing about. Purposeful writing can change the reader's mind about a particular topic and it can also change a visitor into a client. Let’s now explore how to write a good content that attracts the desired readership.

The first and most important factor in writing a good content is to understand your reader. Successful bloggers use a strategy called the persona. The persona is used to represent one of the readers of the blog, who has the most common characteristics of the interested visitors to the blog.

Successful bloggers can easily answer the question “who is your one fan?” Through the persona strategy they would have identified the thought processes of their readers such as, what their hopes, dreams and aspirations are? what their frustration about a particular topic is? what are they afraid of? what are they struggling with in their lives at the moment? what are their most pressing needs and wants?

Another important question to ask yourself is ‘why would my fan read my blog?’. You must be very clear about this, which should be easy if you have done a good job ahead of time, through the creation of your fans persona. With that said, you should be able to complete the sentence ‘my favourite fan reads my blog because I help him…’

Does your blog post help your fan? To be able to answer this question in the affirmative, you should have found answers to the questions stated above. What are my readers’ hopes, dreams and aspirations? What are their frustrations about a particular topic? What are they afraid of? What are they struggling with in their lives at the moment? What are their most pressing needs and wants? Finding answers to these questions will set you free from the shackles of the blogger’s quagmire.

The other important elements to work on are; your traffic getting strategy for attracting readers to your blog, Maintaining your credibility, communicating the value in every blog post that you write, making it clear that you understand them and their needs.

And lastly, you should have a long term relationship building strategy in place. Give your readers ethical bribes that will entice them to come back and read your blog. Always show empathy in your words, show that you understand them and you care about them. Show your personality in your writing style so that they can feel as if you are having a conversation with them on an individual and personal level. Inspire your readers in a way that gives them hope with regards to solving their own problems.

An awesome blogging experience can be achieved by following the few insights that i have provided above. I hope you have learnt one or more new ways of succeeding as a blogger.

And remember that, this is the best time to be alive. We live in the most blessed age in all of human history. This new age has altered the landscape of communication and interaction between people - giving individuals the opportunity to build communities online, each of which is larger than the most populous cities around the globe. The blogosphere is now woven into the fabrics of everything in our lives, and it will continue to alter the way we do things for years to come.

Reference

http://www.copyblogger.com

what would you like to discuss about the insights provided above?

Please share your comments below.