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Guest Blogger How Zappos makes social media a part of its company culture By Guest Blogger on January 10, 2011 | 1412317 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fsmartblogs.com%2Fsocialmedia%2F2011%2F01%2F10%2Fhow-zappos-makes-social-media-a-part-of-its-company-culture%2FHow+Zappos+makes+social+media+a+part+of+its+company+culture2011-01-10+13%3A32%3A19Guest+Bloggerhttp%3A%2F%2Fsmartblogs.com%2Fsocialmedia%2F%3Fp%3D14123 * * Share94 * * * Email * * Share94 * * * Email This post was written by SmartBrief technology editor Susan Rush. When it comes to social media, Zappos.com just gets it. Social media is not just a business strategy, it should be part of the culture, said Zappos' Thomas Knoll during the "Social Media in Action: Philosophies, Strategies and Tactics That Consistently Win" panel discussion at the International Consumer Electronics Show on Friday. Knoll said too much emphasis is often put on the "media" part of social media, adding that he is "a much bigger fan of the social part." The goal of social media is to connect and build relationships with customers.

The same surveys that show CEOs' ideas of successful business strategies also show that they view the environment of the business, not the business itself, as the source of the greatest business risk - because it keeps changing faster and faster. As it does, customer needs and wants will inevitably do so as well, and probably faster and faster. Your business intelligence that analyzes these needs and wants must be open to the customer's indication of those changes - which often show up as information in an Other Category. And if you want to hug the customer closer, you need to ensure that the customer's changes result in the customer finding you to be an even better fit for purpose, and thus hugging you better. To do this, pick business intelligence solutions that will continue to handle the Other Categories of the future. Your customers may well hug you for it.

New Post 20 hours ago KPMG's Lord Michael Hastings: Business Must Take Note of Occupy Wall Street New Post 23 hours ago Consumers Expect CEOs to Be Held Accountable and Take Action on CSR New Post 1 day ago Why Corporations With a Social Purpose Perform Better New Post 1 week ago American Ingenuity New Post 1 week ago Sustainable Consumption Is a Myth New Post 2 weeks ago Corporate Social Purpose: It's in What You Don't Sell New Post 2 weeks ago Finally, Occupy Wall Street Puts the Blame Where It Belongs: On Us New Post 2 weeks ago Occupy Wall Street: A Powerful Demand for Something New--Like This Comment 2 weeks ago Yet another point of view Paul: http://wp.me/p1IFEp-7h on Pre-Occupied With Corporate Social Responsibility New Post 3 weeks ago Pre-Occupied With Corporate Social Responsibility New Post 3 weeks ago Starbucks' Job Creation Plan New Post 3 weeks ago Stop Being Cynical About Breast Cancer New Post 4 weeks ago How Sameer Hajee Has Shed Real Light in Africa New Post 1 month ago Taking CSR to the Next Level New Post 1 month ago How A Serial Entrepreneur Found Success By Practicing Responsible Capitalism New Post 1 month ago Making Every Dollar Count: Investing for Impact and Return New Post 1 month ago The Next Global Debt Crisis New Post 1 month ago Thriving on the Value of Vice: Stop Making Too Much of CSR Comment 1 month ago Thanks for your comment. I also makes me think of the importance of [...] on A Higher Ambition for CSR: Corporate Social Purpose New Post 1 month ago A Higher Ambition for CSR: Corporate Social Purpose   *****   6   33     45   0   0   The Forbes 400 World's Billionaires Celebrity 100 World's Leading Companies more + The Forbes 400 is the definitive list of wealth in America, profiling and ranking the country's richest citizens by their estimated net worths. View complete list » #1 Bill Gates Latest News » #14 Mark Zuckerberg Latest News » #7 George Soros Latest News » #331 Stewart Rahr Latest News »

Strapped for time and cash, small local businesses are increasingly turning to free and low-cost social media tools for their marketing efforts. Not surprisingly, the world's biggest social networking site tops of the list of preferred tools. Seventy percent of local businesses use Facebook for marketing, according to a new report from Merchant Circle, a network of U.S. local business owners. This represents a 20% increase over the previous year. The report notes that for the first time, Facebook is being used more than Google by local businesses for online marketing.

Though this study is informative and interesting, there are some serious limitations that should be taken into account if we are to generalize its results to all situations of collective action (like organizations). We may do a longer writeup some time in the future, but here are a few questions that it raises: Oh, and here is a link to the original paper: http://ow.ly/3VaS4 -----Is this a problem of the technology, or of fluency with the technology?---- "This is the danger with lean media, and is especially frustrating because it implies that if a willingness to cooperate can be effectively conveyed to other group members-perhaps an easier problem to fix than curing opportunistic intent-the problems of non-cooperation..they just did not know if they could rely on others to reciprocate." (p. 119) These conclusions suggest that fluency with a medium and the norms of communication through that medium may play a significant role in trust. In other words, if i am not good at communicating my intent to cooperate within the limitations of any medium (including face-to-face speech), i will have a hard time building trust. ----Are all digital media still as "lean" as email was in 2005?--- This study bases its concept of "media richness" on 1986 work by Daft and Lengel which suggested a continuum of media richness that contains face-to-face on the "rich" end and things like reports on the "lean" end. The assumption that social media, MMORPG's, digital collaboration platforms, etc are also at the lower end with email is very, very questionable.  ----Can we generalize the behavior of business students to all situations of collective action?---- The participants were all upper-level business students from the early 2000's, who are socialized and train to deal with colle

----Norms of anonymity may have changed since 2005---- There seems to have been an increase in people using digital technologies (especially social media) as a way to build their identity, rather than anonymize it. In fact, services have sprung up to provide people with personal landing pages (http://lifehacker.com/#!5534456/five-best-personal-landing-pages). If this is true, then there is likely a corresponding pressure to build and maintain trust in a world of digital trails and easy search.

One of the issues facing social business and social CRM strategies is the issue of whether customers want to use social media as means for getting customer support. As of now, the phone is still the most common way to provide support. But would customers be willing to engage in other ways? An infographic from customer experience analytics firm ClickFox organizes research on the subject and finds that two in three customers would be willing to use social media for customer service if they understood the tools better. The infographic also breaks down the cost per interaction of various types of engagement, and finds website visits to be the cheapest by far.

what does "social" really mean? It's become a phonetic clue that whatever follows in speech is now connected, via the Internet, to a collaborative application. If that's even close to accurate, then as marketers we're way past "social media" as a thing to do. Instead, "social media" is firmly part of markets, customer tastes, and business innovation cycles. What's more, entire organizations are governed more by consensus than individual dictum.

"Why the increasing business use of social media by business? Social media offers immense potential for marketing, image-making, advertising, public relations efforts, customer relations, investor relations and a variety of other positive, beneficial activities.  But it also carries potential risks, a caveat perfectly illustrated by the Hastings case. The risks of social media are in some, but not all respects, similar to those of print media.  But not all libel laws apply-issues of malice and negligence have not been definitively decided in the courts. Insider trading issues, however, are clear.  The transmission via social media of insider information about a publicly traded company is illegal. Using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or private blogs to transmit insider information to large numbers of people is a violation of law."

"Harvard Business Review Analytics Services has released a study on the impact of social media. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, blogs etc. offers organizations the chance to join conversation with millions of customers around the globe every day. But even though social media has great potential, many organizations do not properly integrate social media in their marketing and communication efforts, or only use it as a one-way communication channel instead of listening, analysing, and driving conversations. The survey was conducted among HBR magazine and newsletter subscribers during July 2010. The participating organizations were mainly based in the US and in Asia."

The typical ambassador ecosystem for a mid to large scale business likely consists of hundreds of employees, customers and partners which can potentially be harnessed for the benefit of the organization. Participation in thought leadership in places Google indexes such as Quora and even Slideshare can influence what shows up on sarch results. Marketing partners should be re-calibrated from focusing primarily on paid media efforts to being active in the overlaps between paid, earned and social media while tapping your companies most active advocates. Your organization has a workforce of employees active on social networks, yet most organizations remain content to have their employees "locked down" vs.being empowered for the benefit of the business.

Social media, or at least its widespread use, may be relatively new, but certain human behaviors are not. For example, David Aaker, blogging at the Harvard Business Review, points to a study by Ernest Dichter from 1966 on word-of-mouth persuasion. The report had three key findings, all of which are relevant to social business today.

If your organization fails to invest in socially responsible measures, or even if anything about your business - such as a faked viral marketing campaign - is perceived to be phony, you will be found out. You will be tweeted about, and a Facebook Causes group will be created against you. As many corporate casualties have discovered, the result of such a campaign can be catastrophic to your firm's reputation and ultimately to its bottom line. Therefore, to avoid a public relations or financial disaster, integrity needs to be part of the DNA of every organization - not just to secure a healthy business environment, but for the organization's own sustainability and competitive advantage. It's worth noting here that I believe the word "integrity" is preferable to the expression "corporate social responsibility," as the latter puts too much emphasis on the notion that corporations should do "good" in the world and be "good" citizens out of some moral or ethical imperative. Of course, that is absolutely true. But what's new - and what organizations need to focus on - is the idea of integrity, as driven by transparency. Without it you cannot build trust, and trust is essential for competitiveness in this new environment. To put it bluntly, regardless of the moral arguments, there are now some hard, bottom-line business reasons for baking integrity into every company.

Data from social networks are making social science more scientific (via @TheEconomist)

By Jeremiah Owyang with Andrew Jones, Christine Tran, and Andrew Nguyen Includes input from 63 ecosystem contributors, survey data from 144 social business program managers, and analysis of 50 social media crises

Gartner's predictions include a very interesting statement, that "by 2013, 15% of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments." What this means is that social media is starting to be integrated tightly with hard-core business intelligence functions in support of decision making. 

Location based social network Foursquare celebrated 10 million registered users yesterday but how are businesses and organizations using the platform? I wrote a year ago next month about the incredible potential offered by Foursquare accounts for organizations: following a Foursquare page as a user is like opting-in to view the world through the lens of that organization's geo-annotations. It can be awesome. (My favorites? History Channel and Eater.) Are businesses getting into it? For one perspective on that question, I extracted some data from the 128 most recent Foursquare Pages that have been created. The 128 most recent Foursquare Page holders have added 728 tips in 311 cities so far. They've amassed a total of over 8,000 Foursquare followers and they came in with some social media experience as well: those organizations already had an aggregate of over 800,000 Twitter followers.

Very useful thinking about social media ROI. In my experience with business analytics, the "last mile" tends to be the toughest--getting the stakeholders to use metrics to make actual decisions. 

IBM has a vested interest in all organizations using digital technologies to "become social," but they are also an interesting case study in using these technologies (and practices) themselves. 

It's easy for early adopters and social media enthusiasts to get caught up in the latest and greatest tool available but many companies are still seeking a basic foundation. According to Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, only 12 percent of companies surveyed felt their organizations were using social media effectively.