There are only 18 days left to submit your thought-provoking session idea for Webtrends’ Engage 2010!

November 16, 2009 is the last day to send us your fresh ideas on getting the most out of enterprise customer intelligence. We’re especially excited to receive strategies, case studies, and notable trends related to the following areas:

• Social media
• Site optimization
• Mobile data
• Offline integration of data

Got a clever idea in mind? Want to share your ingenious new view on the old ways of doing? Great! We can’t wait to see it! But there’s one more thing to consider: Webtrends’ Engage 2010 offers three days packed with interactive sessions, so you’ll need to choose from the following types of presentation delivery formats:

• Sprints: Ignite-style presentations (5 minute PowerPoint presentations with a total of 20 slides that rotate automatically after 15 seconds)
• Breakout Sessions: Hour-long, timely, relevant, and intriguing presentations
• Workshops: Hands-on and interactive sessions with no PowerPoint and no agenda
• Flex Sessions: Small round-table discussions guided by industry leaders

You can read more about the session types on Webtrends’ Engage 2010 blog. The video at right is an example of the Ignite presentation style.

Webtrends’ Engage 2010 is three days of interesting forward-thinking and interactive discussions on enterprise customer intelligence. As an unconventional conference, it’s designed to encourage the sharing of ideas and solutions between attendees and presenters.

Held this year Februrary 1-4, 2010  in beautiful New Orleans, LA, Engage 2010 is a chance to both learn and teach the latest in best practices for digital marketing. In addition to having an opportunity to show off your ideas and knowledge, valuable networking opportunities with industry leaders and experts abound!

Keep in mind, if you are submitting a topic, sales pitches and product plugs will not be accepted. Session presenters chosen will be notified by November 30, 2009. The clock is ticking! Send us your presentation idea and type of format, and present at Engage 2010!

Big Fish, Small Fish: Who will rule the pond in the UK?

A recent survey of office workers in the UK suggests they cost the country’s economy roughly £1.38 billion each year because they spend time on the clock surfing social media networking sites such as Twitter. A consultant for the company that commissioned the report said, “When it comes to an office environment the use of these sites is clearly becoming a productivity black hole.”

Sound familiar? Maybe reminiscent of the fears people had about email in the work place in 1994? It also sounds eerily like the concern that Internet access in the workplace gave rise to Cyberslacking in 1996. These days, it’s hard to imagine a day at the office without either email or Internet. Yet the fear of new communication technology in the Enterprise has surfaced again in the UK around Twitter. But why?

It certainly is not because of a lack of broadband Internet access. Data published at Internet World Stats shows that a high percentage of both US and UK citizens enjoy Internet connectivity (74.1% and 79.8%, respectively). So, with broadband Internet and tasty low-cost social media marketing dangling within reach, why aren’t UK businesses hungry for the bait?

One contributing factor could be that European businesses are slower to utilize social media applications such as Twitter to promote their companies than US businesses. According to Forrester Research’s Consumer Profile Tool, 82% of US citizens use social networks, compared to 63% of their UK brothers and sisters across the pond. US participants are more actively participating on social networks at every rung in Forrester’s ladder of participation.

Maybe less experience contributed to why a study conducted by Webtrends found that the rate of adopting low-cost social media marketing strategies, specifically Twitter, by Enterprise businesses in the UK was only 2%. These companies know about Twitter, but they might not know what to make of it.  “Many are simply not sure how to use it, and even if they could they wouldn’t be sure of what to say, and who exactly they would be saying it to,” said Webtrends’ marketing director Colette Wade.

The same cannot be said for the small fish competing with the big fish Enterprises. O2 recently did a study that found 17% of small businesses were utilizing Twitter. As bizreport.com put it “Cost-cutting was cited as the biggest benefit of tweeting by two-thirds of those surveyed, with 16% claiming they had saved up to £5,000 (US$7,300) since signing up.”

The 15% gap between Enterprise businesses and small businesses in the UK in their adoption of Twitter to market their companies is substantial! Enterprise “big fish” companies who are slow to see the benefits of social media might find themselves “Amazoned” when their “small fish” competition out-positions them in the marketplace by embracing social media marketing before they do.

It may be the same old pond, but the ecosystem is different. Will the small fish dominate the UK food chain with new media marketing strategies?

Read an interesting article in the Chicago Tribune today: Younger employees help senior executives unlock social media mystery. It struck a chord for me because I have worked with executives on the development of their social media presence for a few years now. I started off helping Sam Lawrence build his presence while he was the CMO at Jive Software. From there I went to Voce Communications where I worked with a number of execs employed by our clients. Now that I’m at Webtrends, I recently launched an executive social media support initiative designed to help our busy leadership build their presence online.

Over the past few years I’ve learned a few things about the reverse mentoring process.

Young people have an edge on how the technology works from having used it during developmental years. There is a good opportunity for reverse mentoring on the use of the tools.
Older generations have more clout to leverage social media and more important contacts in their networks. I found that posts generated more exposure, traffic, and engagement when they came from VPs and C-level execs, especially thought leadership material.
The way Gen Y used social media as teens will change as they mature. In high school and college, we’re in the midst of developing our identity; and that impacts what we share, how we receive feedback, and how we align ourselves with the group’s reactions. As we mature, the rules of social engagement evolve too.
Social wisdom from generations past applies more than ever today, yet the etiquette is disappearing. This is a good opportunity for our elders to make sure we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Using social media for business value is not the same thing as connecting with friends. They share similarities, but they are not synonymous activities.

I share my lessons because I’ve read several articles about Gen Y and their (maybe our) social media capabilities. I’ve seen a number of interactions in the work place where senior managers give younger counterparts more credit than their capabilities deserve.

I think it makes sense to acknowledge the reverse mentoring trend, but we have to be careful not to put twentysomethings on a pedestal. We are at a unique inflection point in history—we’re becoming a connected culture faster than our ability to mature with it. As a result, there are no elders to provide a model for how to behave in social media. So, mentoring is happening in both directions of the age timeline. A primary reason for this is that young people have been the strongest adopters. But, while they may have technical experience, they don’t have enough life experience to temper it. Older generations understand social etiquette and politics better, but few have dealt with the unique challenges of navigating a connected social ecosystem.

In this messy, entangled time of social development, all generations hold pieces to the puzzle. I’d like to see more leadership from our elders on applications of social media. The technology hurdle is a tiresome excuse for not seeing more in the way of Netizenship, social media etiquette, etc. from the ones with the life experience to provide the direction.

As I wander the endless corridors of this behemoth of a hotel (2000 rooms!) I find myself using google maps just to get from my room to the lobby every wrong turn takes me on a voyage of discovery, huddled groups of knowledge workers discuss how, why and when they use data.

Change hangs heavy in the air in Washington DC just ask Barack Obama, and to quote common (he is a poet and rapper if you don’t know) “change is inevitable, you can’t stop it, change is happening in everyone’s life, change is like a furious hurricane that you can’t stop.” the amount of discussions around data integration, cloud computing, solid state technologies, geospatical and in-database analytics indicates that change is massively on the agenda here at Teradata , one guy told me that they have released more product in the last 13 months than they did in 30 years!

An important factor is forcing this change and it isn’t the technology companies, its the consumers, their demands of being “always on” are dictating that companies must get smarter with data.

I finish with a quote from Stephen Brobst the CTO of Teradata “IT must relinquish control of data, instead It must power the knowledge workers”

A few years ago Rohit Bhargava started a meme about Social Media Optimization. He described it as:

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

While it inspired dozens and dozens of trackback stories, including a write up by the high-profile SEO guru Danny Sulllivan; the meme essentially died. It died because the practice wasn’t based on reverse engineering an algorithm. It was fuzzy concepts on social engineering to behave in such a way as to attract links. Social link baiting, if you will.

Flash forward to present day and Bing announces Twitter search capabilities. Shortly after the news spikes, Google says “Me too!” But, then a quiet trump card emerges when Google softly announces a more comprehensive search effort for all of social media.

Ah, now there’s an algorithm! And it’s search. Assuming Google’s search experiment pans out, we’ll see a new generation of algo crackers building up the best practices for Social Search Optimization. One major difference between SEO and SSO will be the social ecosystem that the content lives in. It will be interesting to see the reaction to the SSO practices, especially the critiques.

This past week I joined a panel of retail experts at the ExactTarget Connections ’09: Success is By Design and spoke on behalf of our mutual customer Motorcycles USA (MUSA), ranked #223 in the Internet Retailer’s Top 500. They’re a pure-play ecommerce business selling motorcycle gear, apparel and accessories here in Oregon.  In order to successfully continue to grow their revenue year over year during a down market in the motorcycle industry and our overall tough economic conditions, MUSA has focused on dedicated customer relationship management, including exclusive promotions and highly focused email campaigns which is their leading customer touch point. As a customer of both Webtrends Analytics and ExactTarget SBS, MUSA was eager to produce highly targeted product recommendations for specific website visitor segments.

MUSA’s initial work focused on scrubbing their list and doing a lot of A/B Testing. Using ExactTarget’s deliverability and email open rate reporting, together with Webtrends’ conversion reporting, they saw double the open rates and triple the click-through rates.

To take another step forward in the evolution of this behavioral retargeting initiative, customer project sponsor Erick Barney, VP of Marketing, worked closely with both Webtrends and partner ExactTarget as well as solutions integrator ACR Analytics to integrate ExactTarget and Webtrends Analytics.  MUSA studied detailed email subscriber click behavior via ExactTarget and onsite conversion behavior using Webtrends’ campaign and conversion reporting.

Recent behavorial retargeting campaigns focused on segmenting the subscriber list by products viewed during website visits, and products that were placed into the shopping process but abandoned. Using that datastream, customer segments received dynamically generated relevant offers in a special “Your Picks” section. Conversion rates were greatly improved – for example, within the group that received offers on products they’d abandoned – the email conversion rate over doubled the normal rate. Additional significant improvements were seen by looking at the merchandising space effectiveness. These two statistics are relevant to email marketers in all types of businesses, not strictly ecommerce companies. And what’s great is this was done with Webtrends Analytics and ExactTarget – products that MUSA was already running. Additional products were not required like some other marketplace analytics solutions would.

MUSA will continue to maximize their use of email and analytics via the Webtrends-ExactTarget integration to drive three levels of retargeting: static remarketing emails based on website visitor data, dynamic remarketing campaigns with varied offers by visitor, and at the deepest level, move to 1:1 product merchandising efforts such as this one based on interest, shopping behavior and related recommendations. For this third category, leveraging Webtrends Warehouse and integrating yet a third datastream of CRM information together with website activity and campaign response data, other segmentation options can be taken into consideration such as products owned and geography.

Learn more about behavioral retargeting for email and banner campaigns on our Open Exchange site. Do you have a story, question or comment? Please let us know!

Straight from the successful Webtrends Engage London, I find myself in Washington DC for the Teradata Partners (#tdpug) conference and Teradata Cares. It’ll be quite the week – I’m also speaking the eMetrics on Wednesday. Will be posting some recaps of the shows here and as they happen on Twitter.

I started my last presentation at Engage with the strains of “Hip To Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the news an ironic doth of the cap at the perceived geekiness of the practice of using data, something that the 2500 practitioners here in DC would be acutely aware of.

That being said, I chatted over breakfast with some guys from the NFL players association all ex pros from the sixties and seventies, that’s the beauty of these giant conference centres separate societies homogenized into one  (I think one was called Ed “Too Tall” Jones apparently he is famous. But what would I know – in the UK we have REAL football) .

They asked what I did and the discussion of data came up, obviously as sports professionals they also live by data and statistics and were extremely interested by the fact that thousands of people got together to speak about it, In fact they thought it was COOL.

One guy who was wearing a ring similar to one I saw Dan Marino wear in Ace Ventura – Pet Detective said ” We all live by numbers in some way”  To quote Huey for the final time; “Take it from me, its hip to be square” 

Social media is one of several options for communicating with other people. In an informal survey around the office, I was asking people how much time they spent talking with people they don’t know on the phone. I also asked how much time they spent on social media talking with people they don’t know. I don’t want to taint results, so I’ll just ask all of you the same question.

Social media usage

Phone usage

“Most businesses are still sticking their toe in the water of social media and as a result have seriously under invested in the space. Large Fortune 1000 companies are gripping about spending $30K on software and handing it over to super small teams–sometimes a single person. Can you imagine if they tried to answer their phone lines with a 3 person team? Or a single intern?!! How can they expect to evaluate performance when the team is so under water that they can’t even think?”

— Scaling social media

Ok, so if businesses are under investing in social media, what does a proper investment look like? Let’s look at 3 areas: Staffing, Business Processes, and Infrastructure.

Staffing

Staffing is really two pieces: roles and training. Not only do you need the people organized into roles, but you also need to make sure they are trained. Let’s take a look at some of the publicly available numbers for the top brands:

Starbucks (source)

6 people

11 channels

---

Dell (source and source)

22+ people

11 channels

---

SAP (source)

35 people

10 channels

---

Best Buy (source and source)

1,400+ people

9+ channels

---

Above are some examples of what the top brands are doing. These are some of the most significant staffing investments in social media and they will look paltry compared to where social media is heading. Staff is a big investment.

Business Processes

A layer below staffing are the business processes that staff are executing. These are the guts of a social media marketing program. Business processes provide governance and structure that enables a team to execute. The following are the list of processes that a multi-channel social media program needs to function:

• Monitoring
• Publishing
• Moderation
• Response
• Measurement
• Promotion
• Networking
• Supervising
• Maintenance

Infrastructure

If business processes are the guts, then the infrastructure are the bones. Technology provides the means to publish, monitor, measure, delegate, supervise and more. When technology is used right, it can improve efficiency allowing your people to maximize their output, especially if that tech is integrated.

Increasing output is the name of the social media marketing game. A recent study from the Altimeter Group and Wetpaint revealed the first financial correlation between social media and financial performance. The bottom line formula for success according to that report was: Channels X Activity = Financial Performance.

There are tons of social media technologies out there. Hundreds of monitoring choices, URL shortners, avatar managers, aggregators, etc. Below is a configuration of core technologies used to manage an Enterprise B2B social media marketing program:

What are your experiences with the operations side of social media?

What have you seen on investments and configurations of staffing, business processes, and infrastructure to power social media programs? How do you think businesses will approach increasing their investments? Do you think they will? What do you see the future landscape looking like?