Social Media Revolution...next edition

If you haven't seen it already, there's a new social media revolution video available for all to see on youtube. This is a great, short clip that really drives the main point that the way we engage and interact with one another from a personal or business standpoint isn't just changing, but rather it already has changed. Kudo's to http://www.socialnomics.com/, equalman productions and Hult International Business school...

Achieving Greater Value from Meetings, Events and Incentive Travel Investments

Making an investment in a meeting, event or incentive travel program is a good idea when you want to reward performance, improve customer service, encourage innovation through enhanced collaboration, or improve customer, employee and channel partner engagement. Based upon a recent study by Oxford Economics USA, the outcomes on such investments can range from a 4:1 to nearly a 20:1 return.

If you fall anywhere within this performance range, you’re likely pleased with the returns your programs achieve. Yet, this study also identifies a broad performance disparity among organizations. While some might realize high-end performance outcomes, others are not. Where does your company fall? More importantly, how can you further improve performance?

To achieve better business performance and effectiveness breakthroughs, organizations are adopting a model built upon transparency, which includes and connects three key principles:

1. Program and Spending View: Gaining stronger visibility into overall meeting, event and incentive travel spend. Doing so creates greater value in two very distinct ways. First, broader and deeper transparency helps ensure investments are consistently aligning with business objectives. Second, organizations can tap into a much richer purchasing power position to better negotiate on more favorable costs and contract terms as well as reduce financial and legal risk exposure. Strategic Meetings Management programs can optimize this key principle, providing a centralized practice for all meeting, event and incentive travel sourcing and contracting.

2. Participant Engagement: Organizations are cutting down on overall spend and doing more with less. The face of business today continues to grow more diverse and global. A one-size-fits-all approach simply will not deliver effective performance outcomes. Engaging participants more fully in the co-creation of the meeting, event or incentive experience provides for significantly stronger appeal, attendance, participation and, most importantly, program outcomes.

3. Value Creation: Owners of meeting, event and incentive travel investments not only have accountability for every dollar that they spend, but also on identifying how each program connects with established business objectives. In the absence of either point, the value of any program cannot be effectively measured, evaluated or improved. Case in point, attracting, developing and retaining talent and customers might be a key objective of your program, as such, you’ll want to connect with and measure performance in accordance with the related business objective of your organization.

As organizations consider increasing and decreasing investments, decision outcomes will hinge on how much meeting, event and incentive travel assets support and demonstrate value. Does it always have to follow a formal or conforming ROI model? The short answer is, not necessarily – we all know how ambiguous that can be. However, there do need to be relevant, agreed upon metrics that align with overarching business objectives in order to demonstrate the value created.

Key Principles for Businesses on Effective Social Media Marketing

Ever run into a situation where you asked, “What would you do with a social media budget if you had one?” If so, it’s highly likely that you have received some blank stares or oddly contorting faces looking right back at you. Questions quickly begin to surface with regard to how it will be used and who will operate, manage and measure performance. From a business standpoint, the biggest question of all remains, “Now what do I do?”

While I don’t want you to think I’m over or under simplifying social media marketing (SMM), here are key principles to follow for businesses who want to achieve greater value out of these investments:

• Business Objectives – Whether related to sales, branding, public relations, product development, market research or to attract and nurture customer relationships, a clearly defined strategy must connect to business objectives. At the end of the day, performance is going to be based on how your efforts support and achieve organizational goals.

• Traditional vs. Social Media Management – This is a new media that can not be effectively leveraged, managed and operated by traditional marketing rules and practices. When organizations are considering an entry into SMM, initial steps need to address more on how it is treated and managed differently, not conforming to traditional practices.

• Personalized, Versioned, Relevant Interactions – From mass media to direct marketing, we target individuals in the B2C and B2B world with tailored content and campaigns to promote greater effectiveness of our investments. SMM is not all that different in this regard.

• Dialogues not Monologues - The notable difference in an SMM environment from traditional media channels is that visitors are engaging and interacting with you or other participants. One-way monologues do NOT fit the bill, so don’t talk at but rather have open, two-way discussions with your guests, hosts or other fellow bloggers.

• Social Auditing – For truly effective SMM strategies, a social media audit is conducted before, during and after to inform approaches, advise on needed adjustments as well as to evaluate effectiveness. Often described as the “Listening” phase of social media strategy, it’s healthy for any organization to conduct a broad audit on interest areas before engaging as well as on active discussions they may have currently in motion.

Sounds like a lot to do. I hear it all the time, “we’re doing more with less” or “I don’t have time to commit to this.” There are two things to consider when you begin receiving or making excuses of why not to invest in an SMM strategy that follows these key principles: 1.) Lost Opportunity; 2.) COI (Cost of Inaction).

Increase Motivational Value with Family Friendly Incentive Travel Programs

American culture and the work place have experienced dramatic changes, especially over this past year. Today dual income families are the norm. Unemployment is up. So is the average work week. The corporate demand to do more with less has had a significant impact on incentive program participants … and their families. The result is a significant increase on the stress levels of the family.

Incentive travel programs have long been a key way to motivate performance by providing experiences that embody attributes such as camaraderie, credibility, respect, fairness and pride – all key attributes associated with the 100 Best Companies from the Great Place to Work Institute. So how does the family play into this?

Incentive travel programs aren’t just an opportunity to recognize and reward the employee, channel partner or customer for their commitment and achievement; but, a chance to recognize the sacrifices and support the family made as a whole. Including the family in the program can greatly boost participant engagement and performance.

Leading organizations are turning toward the adoption of more family friendly program elements. The main reason, it’s a significant motivational factor that provides families the opportunity to share in striving for and achieving incentive goals, as well as in the reward and recognition. After all, participants with families look to their spouse and children for support and want to have an opportunity to reward them as well.

5 Ways to Increase Campaign Response Rates and Avoid Relationship Penalties

Consumers have had enough! A continued exposure to a steadily increasing number of marketing messages, campaigns, advertisements, offers and the like are suffocating relationships. Think about it, messages exist everywhere from traditional magazine, newspaper, television and radio to blogs, emails, web pages and the list goes on and on and on; okay, you get the idea. To quantify this trend, in Accenture’s 2001 Insight Driven Marketing Report, a typical consumer went from an average of 650 messages they were exposed to a day in 1985 to over 3,000 in 2001; share of mind has definitely become a competitive field for businesses.

The unfortunate effects on the attitudes and behaviors of the consumer as a result of undifferentiated, overly abundant and brimful frequency of messages necessitate action by which companies communicate to their existing and future customers. The following five steps will assist in getting a lift out of response rates and increase in overall campaign performance.

1. Integrated Media Channels
Even with the most appealing offer that is strategically appropriate and tailored for specific individuals, response rates are not guaranteed. The main hurdle that remains is that of effectively connecting and communicating with your audience. Determine what channels are most preferred by your targeted audience and create a media plan that integrates direct marketing efforts into a connected stream of touch point activities.

2. Targeted Messaging.
Regardless of the communications channel(s) used, a degree of customization – whether personalization, versioning or targeted offering based upon what is known of the customer – will greatly assist with response rates. At the end of the day, effective campaign performance is about relevance – promoting and communicating directly to me what I may want, when I might need it and from who I might buy it.

3. Don’t Beat Around the Bush, Be a Straight Shooter
Although it’s important to capture the immediate attention of the customer in the headline, do so with brevity and clarity. Another pitfall of campaign efforts is that while a creative message begins with a lead-in, it quickly strays away from what originally captured interest. Often referred to as somewhat of a bait-and-switch, this tactic quickly diminishes the credibility of the promoter in the mind of the consumer. As such, relationships can be damaged and future opportunities can be hindered.

4. Consumers Like it Simple
Hypothetically, if a communications piece went out and it had all of the necessary components such as being targeted, was straight to the point and even involved integrated communications channels, response rates can still be ineffective if the consumer isn’t lent a simplified means to respond. Often enough, campaigns become disenchanting for the consumer due to a clear call to action being missed, an overly complicated process to respond or demands that are too high from a time perspective to complete the transaction.

5. Don’t Over Communicate
Email is one of the largest culprits to consumers being bombarded and overloaded with offers, representing instances where they are receiving hundreds of emails each week. As a result, this channel continues to dwindle in its effectiveness. While new channels have emerged from texting, RSS feeds, PURL’s, Social Media and the like, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to be everywhere, all of the time, hounding (if not annoying) customers and potential customers. Consumers are simply overworked and, for the most part, getting more and more turned-off. Think of your touch point activities as currencies and spend wisely. Awareness isn’t always a good thing, especially if perceptions are not all that flattering.

These guidelines are pertinent to any sector or market situation. Following any number of them provides improved results, but incorporating all of them into communications planning yields a synergistic effect that turbo-charges the effective connectivity with the customer.

In good times and in bad, Incentive Travel is POWERFUL

Published in Return on Performance Magazine - 2nd Quarter 2009

It’s no secret the incentive travel industry has been under tremendous pressure over the past several months. As the economy began its unfortunate and downward spiral, the virtual vise became tighter and tighter for companies that had to justify every dollar spent. With the advent of the American government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a series of unfortunate events created a seemingly perfect storm on the use and benefits associated with incentive travel programs. A massive level of negative, and often precarious, media attention generated an ominous surge of public and government outcry.

None of us seeks to validate lavish and ludicrous expenses racked up by out-of-control executives. But it’s important to note the magnitude at which the hospitality and travel industry has been affected by this uproar. The U.S. Labor Department reported a loss of nearly 200,000 travel-related jobs in 2008 and predicts an additional loss of 247,000 jobs in 2009. During the first two months of 2009 alone, the U.S. lodging industry lost more than $1 billion in revenue from the cancellation of corporate meetings and events. Travel incentives clearly have merit in our society at large, and at our companies, too.

Organizations -- especially publicly held companies -- are now being held accountable as never before to share how their incentive travel program decisions are made. Not only that, executives must demonstrate the values these programs deliver against associated expenses.

While determining hard ROI figures can be difficult, the established merits of incentive travel are easy to recite. From driving sales, strengthening channel relationships, improving employee morale and loyalty, rewarding and recognizing performance excellence and a variety of other targeted objectives, incentive travel programs provide substantial value to companies. A variety of studies have been done to support these statements; the Incentive Travel Council recommends the following key resources:

• The U.S. Travel Association http://www.ustravel.org/
• Incentive Marketing Association http://www.ropmagazine.com/
• Incentive Research Foundation http://www.theirf.org/
• SITE http://www.siteglobal.com/
• The Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement http://www.performanceforum.org/

In cases where the values of Incentive Travel programs aren’t necessarily in question but rather the spend itself, think about how you'll continue to strive towards achieving organizational goals during a down economy - it's already challenging in and of itself. Consider your participants' perspectives. Should public or shareholder perception be of concern, think long term. Reducing or taking away an incentive travel program from your employees, channel partners or customers can have negative consequences against the very objectives originally targeted. At the end of the year, the gap created through the incentive travel program’s absence will show itself in the worst possible place - your bottom line.

So, at the end of the day, in good times as well as in bad, when every penny counts and you want to ensure you’re getting the most value out of your spend dollars, think about how that can be done. Few alternatives provide the same degree of motivational power to drive performance and lend the levels of incremental value and sustained benefits as Incentive Travel programs.

The ROI of CRM - Customer Data, Check; Now What?

Okay, so you have the technological foundation laid for CRM, but what’s next? This is a common question corporate executives are left with after spending millions of dollars of development costs associated with the architecture of data bases to bank customer data. No, it’s not as easy as you were probably lead to believe, there’s no green button that puts everything into motion, simply terabytes of data electronically warehoused that are providing no business benefit in their standalone state. So, where do you go from here?

While some organizations have gone with a shoot then aim approach with only results that have shaken the needle, success has been wreaked from those following a disciplined strategy; mining, analyzing and synthesizing the data they hold. Analytics has become the enabling ingredient of CRM solutions. Considering the profile of today’s customer is quite different from just 10 years ago, understanding their differences, likes, dislikes, drivers and other characteristics has become paramount in developing solid business strategies to grow relationships. Why is this important?

-Brand loyalties are weakening and not nearly as strong as they once were

-Consumers are better educated. The advent of the internet provided the perfect outlet for consumers to source from in making their purchase decision(s)

-Promotions have desensitized customers to the point of being numb

-Consumers are more price conscious and demanding value in what they pay, the service they receive and the level of convenience experienced

-Consumers are not as easily put into a segmented class. There are far more segments today than ever

Been caught with your CRM pants down? Still not clear on what all the technology and customer data you’ve successfully centralized provides to your organization? Share your thoughts on how you recommend moving to the next level.