Michael Fauscette

American Express: the Fight for the Local Deals Market Heats Up

A bit of news you might have missed last week, considering all of the high profile (and very sad) headlines out there, was a partner / program announcement from American Express. I've watched the battle for "local" rage on for the last couple of years with location based apps, review sites, local deals and more all vying for some piece of the potentially lucrative market. Context, particularly location although other data is useful as well, is one of the most powerful tools in helping local businesses market more effectively. That's why I've always been a fan of FourSquare, even if they haven't yet really capitalized on the opportunity. Social data is the rest of the equation though, so adding another deep source of social data into the offering is a compelling concept. Deals businesses like Groupon and LivingSocial, as well as Google, are interesting and have gained some serious traction and interest from local businesses as well.

American Express is no stranger to the local business market as well. They have provided small business services through their business credit cards for many years that include many services ranging from merchant services to travel benefits. Amex is even embracing and using social to add business value including building brand equity, prospecting and building ongoing brand loyalty for local businesses through its Open Forum small business community. Recently American Express partnered with Facebook to allow businesses to use Amex Rewards points to purchase (or I guess the word is actually trade) Facebook ads. My point is that Amex is no stranger to the local businesses and in fact, has a great deal of data on them that it could leverage to penetrate the market even deeper addressing one of the issues that new entrants have struggled with, "how do you build relationships with such a high number of businesses"? This is Yelps advantage, it was early to this market and invested in building relationships with the local businesses, something that makes it hard to unseat and one of the reasons that Google tried to buy it a few years ago.

So now Amex is getting into the local deals market and in a very compelling way. As I mentioned above, context / location could be an interesting part of cracking the local market and FourSquare has a solid user base that could be leveraged. What it doesn't have though, is deep relationships with local businesses and to get that would require big investments of both time and money and in this race for mind share, time is money. The first partnership Amex orchestrated, announced a few weeks ago between Amex and FourSquare, provides both sides with a compelling value proposition by allowing Amex card members to link their cards to their FourSquare account. The combined offering also gives the partnership some uniqueness that the other leaders in the local deals market don't have and couldn't easily get. Groupon, for example, has invested a great deal in a sales force to reach local merchants, but it doesn't have the long term and broad business relationship that Amex does, it doesn't have the long term and broad cardholder base nor does it have a location based mobile component to add more context and relevance to its deals. Sure you get deals each day based on your general location, but it only general context, not specific and continuously relevant to you. On the other hand, the Amex / FourSquare partnership could provide you with a flow of deals that are specific to both location and context. For example if you checked in on FourSquare at the Mall around 11:30am the deals engine could offer you a discount on lunch with reasonable expectation that the subject would be relevant to you. Or if you check-in to retailer H&M, one of the initial merchant partners of the new offering, the FourSquare app could offer you a deal in the store in real time. As you can see, this combination of real time, mobile, context and deep backend data is compelling.

What was missing from the offering though, is a deeper set of social data and a broader social platform. Last weeks announcement of the Link, Like, Love app in Facebook carries the Amex move into local deals to a new level. The app takes the Amex deals and adds in your social graph to increase context and relevance. Consumers simply go to the Amex Facebook page and link their card to the app to gain access to the deals. From a business perspective the new offering gives merchants an easy way to get a deeper presence and connection on the largest social platform, something that goes beyond a Facebook fan page and creates much more relevant connection. The other thing it does though, is simplify the process for the merchants (and also for the consumers). And don't underestimate simplification, it is extremely important to these small businesses as the deals landscape has become crowed and complicated while the merchants have more economic pressure to get social, and get some local deals or be out maneuvered by the competition. Amex is in a great position to unify and simplify for these merchants and it already has a trusted status relationship with many of the businesses. In addition the merchants get access to the deals data on a dashboard (on the Go Social platform) up front, not days after the fact like most of the current deals offerings. Amex is rumored to be in talks with other social sites as well, in a move that could leave it as the backend platform for much of the new digital commerce (and outmaneuvering PayPal in the process).

From a consumer perspective, at least for the Amex cardholders (~44M in the US alone), this is all goodness as well. It does provide simplification, and for consumers it's all about the experience. Amex can now deliver to consumers deals, content and experiences based on their Facebook likes and interests, as well as the likes and interests of their friends. It can also tie in Facebook Places for location based offers. The deals can be shared across your social graph, adding in a viral component as well. Lastly payment is simple for card members and you get the benefit of complete tracking on your monthly statement.

It will be interesting to see if Amex can pull off adding additional platforms to its offering in the coming months, but I'd say the current offering is very compelling for both business owners and consumers.

Tags: amex, american express, facebook, foursquare, groupon, livingsocial, socbiz, social business, digital commerce, consumer

Mobile Customer Loyalty, Building High Value Customer Relationships (Presentation)

I recently participated in a mobile marketing summit sponsored by BrightTalk. The presentation on mobile loyalty programs is recorded here:

Tags: mobile, marketing, loyalty, SCRM, social, customer

Social Business Maturity

Companies are adopting social technologies across a broad range of enterprise  activities from new ways for employees and partners to collaborate to more effective methods to engage customers and prospects. In a recent IDC social business survey we found that 41% of the respondent companies had some type of social project underway. Companies that are consciously applying social business approaches and tools are getting value from that use. For example, in the same social business survey, respondents reported that using social tools internally made them 11-30% more productive.

While 41% is a solid number of companies engaged in social activities, what it doesn't show is the level and maturity distribution in that population. More companies are formally embracing social business initiatives but this is a recent development. Many initiatives begin as grassroots efforts from well meaning employees operating independently, and spread over time and as the initiative demonstrated some measure of success. Social business initiatives tend to be viral and often, at least in early stages, go around established IT guidelines. At some stage of adoption projects seem to move into a more formal approach driven by departmental objectives and eventually tied to company strategy. The diversity of projects and the continuum of adoption can create some confusion and difficulty in assessing a companies current level of adoption and ability to use that to support strategic planning for future social initiatives.

Based on our research in social business over the last three years, a team made up of me, Erin Traudt and Mary Wardley built and published a maturity model for use in assessing a companies level of maturity across a continuum of social business activities. The IDC document, published last week, is available here (warning, subscription or purchase required to access the complete report). The report outlines 5 stages of maturity in detail and provides criteria for assessing a companies current level and guidance to help companies plan for future stages. The five stages are:

 

The model is built as a continuum from early isolated pilots and experimentation through strategic cross enterprise initiatives and measures maturity across these dimensions:

• Culture
• Organization
• Technology
• Barriers

In addition the model is designed to work on the common social business use cases including external, customer facing initiatives, internal employee focused initiatives, and external projects engaging partners and suppliers. Change, particularly culture change can be challenging and must be tied to clear benefits and returns to be successful. Social business initiatives are demonstrating good returns and can offer significant competitive advantage. Alignment with overall company strategy is key for long term adoption and to maximize the overall benefit from the initiatives. Using a maturity model can be very useful as a framework for understanding a companies progress in implementing social technologies and the accompanying culture shift required to underpin adoption and use.

Tags: socbiz, social enterprise, maturity model, culture, technology, adoption

Content-centric Networking: Enabling the People-centric Enterprise

Considering the ongoing impact of hyper-connectivity and the pervasive nature of the Internet it messes with your head a little to think that what we view as such a modern entity grew out of point-to-point connectivity of mainframe computers in the 1950's and 1960's. The Internet Protocol Suite or TCP/IP was standardized in 1982 making way for the Internet as we now know it. Conceptually the network was designed to provide point-to-point connectivity between two relatively fixed end points. In fact, the network mimics the older telephony style of connectivity in much the same way that email is simply an electronic version of snail mail. The Internet that we use today is essentially a telephone system, from one host you "dial up" the other and communicate, the "work" happens at the end points.

The problem is that both the purpose of the network and the end points have drastically changed from the original design. What was host-to-host communication is now one to many or many to many information dissemination. And as for hosts, they're in our pockets and our computer backpacks instead of / as well as on a desk somewhere. The network itself isn't aware of the information or content, not even the content type, it simply answers a request for the content. Now this is okay when one person requests to view a YouTube video stream, but what happens when 10,000 people simultaneously ask to view that same video? The host acts as designed and answers each request individually, there's no efficiency or ability to optimize for the video stream, the hosts is just answering the "phone". As I said, the work, all of it, happens at the end point...or in this case call it the choke point. The new Internet is about huge scale activities, facebook has 750M members, Google processes more than 1,000,000,000 search queries per day (as of March 2011), 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and there are over 2 billion views per day (March 2011)...I could keep going but you get the point. Companies like Google and facebook have massive compute power oriented datacenters scattered about the globe to do the heavy lifting of your "communication" request, it's resource intensive and horribly inefficient. The Internet today is about connecting people to each other and to relevant content yet the network is unaware of the content or even the nature of your request to the host...it's a telephone line, completely unaware of the nature of the traffic / packets. The network is transmitting from place to place yet in this context, location is irrelevant, it's really about the content. From a security perspective the only approach is to try and provide security at the channel level, not at the content / data level. For example a secure email server, as long as it has network access, will send spam because the network has no idea what is traveling on the channel, the security protocols have been met.

Now add to the network design problems by factoring in the explosive growth of content / data. IDC estimates that the amount of data created in the world doubles every two years and that there was approximately 1.2 zettabytes in 2010, growing to 1.8 zettabytes this year. Now to put that in perspective that would be the equivalent of every person in the US tweeting three tweets per minute non-stop for ~27,000 years or ~200 billion 2 hour high def movies, which would take about 47 million years to watch end to end! Okay, let's just say a bunch of data is created every minute.

So what's the solution to this nasty and growing problem? Well, according to the folks at Zerox PARC, who by the way brought you Ethernet, the mouse, the laser printer and a lot of other useful stuff, it's to make the content the focus of the network. In other words instead of communicating with location specific hosts to "get" content, the network would be built of self-aware content. The focus is on the data, not on the physical location of the data so the network disseminates content instead of holding an abstract conversation between two location specific nodes. Changing to a context-aware, content-centric network allows content to move to where ever it's needed, when it's needed. The "smart" content can be anywhere so location doesn't matter and any device that hears a request for content can respond using whatever means available. Content-centric networks (CCN) use the existing plumbing but change the way the plumbing is managed and content distributed. There are already some solutions that have started to bridge this gap between the old node based network to that of smart content like Bittorrent and Akamai Content Delivery Networks that demonstrate the concept.   

According to the PARC research CCN's are self-organizing and provide a much higher level of security by securing at the content / data level instead of at the channel. Think of the flow like this, you're on the train to Boston using your iPad and need a blog post on CCN, so instead of having to manually connect to the hot spot on the train, bounce around on a bunch of servers until you get to the TypePad server for my blog, find the post and retrieve it you would simply bounce off of the smartphone of the person sitting in front of you and retrieve the post (yes, I probably oversimplified that a bit much, but hopefully you get the point). CCN is location flexible or mobile, automated and uses local protocols, so instead of being in or out of network, you're always connected, even in low connectivity areas. It's like being able to receive a package anywhere you are, not just at the shipping address you specify. CCN is the enabler for what I've referred to as people-centric networks. They're a part of the new organic business network that I believe is the future architecture of business. Here's some more research on CCN's.

CCN is real with actual networks under development and should be available in the next 18 months. PARC has set up an open source project called CCNX to distribute the software and promote the standard. CCN's promise content caching to reduce network congestion and greatly decrease delivery of content, greater security and a much simpler network design.

Tags: network, Zerox, PARC, socbiz, organic network, people-centric, CCN

Google+, Does it have Potential for Business Use?

I admit I'm pretty intrigued by Google+ and have been spending quite a bit of time checking it out over the last few days. It is quite the geekdom at present, and frankly that's just fine with me for now. I guess that's really the plan at first, get us in playing with it and writing / talking about it...hmm, guess it worked. Most of what I've read so far is focused on how and why individuals should be on plus and again, that makes sense, it is clearly focused on individual users. Still, I've started thinking about how businesses might benefit from it, since it's probably only a matter of time before people experiment with it as a business tool.

The first big question for me though, was where does it fit into my personal workflow? I like to segment my online activities into categories and usually look at content creation, content consumption, content curation / sharing, building / maintaining relationships (networks), and broadcasting. Most of the tools I'm using today are well established in my daily activities with two exceptions, Tumblr and G+. Tumblr won't replace my blogs for sure, but I do like it but am still trying to figure out exactly how it fits in. G+ is very new of course and is already proving very useful. I'm now not so sure if I would keep both Tumblr and G+, but maybe. Here's how I primarily use my current networks and social media tools with the addition of G+:

Content Creation:

• My blogs
• Tumblr (sometimes)
• Quora (although I've been using it less and less)

Content Consumption:

• RSS
• Tumblr
• G+
• Quora (although infrequently)

Content Curation (sharing):

• Google+
• Twitter
• facebook
• LinkedIn
• Tumblr

Relationships / Networks:

• facebook
• LinkedIn

Broadcasting:

• Twitter

At least that's how I see it for now. There's a lot I like about G+ and a few things that could be better. Here are a few thoughts:

• The user experience and interface is very clean and easy to understand. It's one of the best UI's I've seen in quite a while.
• The "Circles" feature for creating friends lists is very powerful and its much easier to use and more effective than facebook and Twitter lists. Circles give you very granular control over sharing and an excellent way to segment content.
• Hangouts might just be the killer feature, ad hoc video conferencing for up to 10 people with auto switching. Collaboration in general on G+ is well integrated and includes Hangouts, gchat, and group mobile messaging with the ability to put friends or co-workers / colleagues into Circles to manage it all.
• The Android app is very well done which hopefully bodes well for the iPhone / iPad app that is awaiting approval. The web-based mobile app actually works fine as well.
• G+ is integrated across most of Google properties. With Picasa you gain unlimited photo storage when combined with G+, Flickr look out.
• Because it is integrated to your existing Google profile set up is easy the the "About" information is robust.
• The photo sharing feature is very clean, making G+ a contender as a well rounded media platform.

On the negative side:

• My biggest complaint so far is the lack of ways to take noise out of the full stream. You can mute a post but that's it, no way to collapse long comment strings and posts pop to the top whenever there is a new comment. 
• There are no vanity username / URL's yet (Google has stated that the feature is coming soon) so you're stuck with a long string of numbers, not very elegant in your email signature. There is a workaround though, you can see my profile by using gplus.to/mfauscette.
• A lack of search functionality (I have to believe that Google will fix that shortly)
• I'd like to see a better broad direct message capability like the Twitter DM. So far there's point to point capabilities through IM (if the person is on IM) otherwise you're defaulting to email (and who wants more email?).
• Google Voice isn't integrated yet. There is an opportunity to tie SMS into the collaboration tool mix.
• A glaring lack of Google Apps integration. This is by far the biggest omission on my part, but again I have to believe that this is coming soon. This integration is key for G+ if it wants business adoption.

Anyway, that's not the real point of this post. As I've used G+ over the last few days I started thinking about what, if anything G+ might offer to businesses. As I've already pointed out, it's early and I've only used G+ for a few days, but I do think there are some features that give it potential as a business tool. Here are a few possibilities:

• Collaboration - I mentioned this above in the positives list but I'll reinforce it again. The feature set that includes Hangouts for ad hoc meetings, gchat, email, and group mobile messaging with access that is easy to manage through Circles would be very useful in a team / group setting. I would think this alone makes it a contender for small / med businesses...and yes, the video conferencing feature set is better than Skype IMHO.
• If Google rolls out deep integration with Google Apps then the collaboration story gets even stronger. Group / team workflow inside docs or spreadsheets would be even more useful than it is today. The addition of video to that mix adds to that. The addition of support for presentations could facilitate webinars, group presentation development and group sharing of content. With presentations integrated G+ would perform much like Slideshare.
• G+ could become an interesting marketing platform with it's built in media capabilities. If Google decided to have it influence page rank in some way that story gets stronger.
• On the opposite ad targeting should improve as Google gathers more social data from G+, that's a benefit to advertisers, particularly on the local side. The addition of more location data from the increased use of GPS enabled mobile devices strengthens this even more and we all know Google is looking for a better angle on local advertising. Perhaps integrating Places and Pages to G+ would entice local businesses as well, there's an unconfirmed story that Google is already planning on offering businesses an option to create a profile page.

That's it so far, I'm sure we'll all learn a lot more about G+ as use increases. It will also be interesting to see if an ecosystem starts to develop around G+ once the API is available (and supposedly it is in development). If you're using G+ what do you think, does it have business potential?

Tags: Google+, Google, collaboration, sharing, social, socbiz, Twitter, facebook

Engaging and Servicing B2B Customers, an e2.0 Conference Panel

I had the pleasure of moderating a panel in Sameer Patel's Sales and Marketing track at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. Joining me for the discussion was Mark Wallace, VP of Digital and Social Media at Environmental Data Resources, Inc and Laurie Buczek, Social Computing Program Manager at Intel. Both companies are doing some leading edge social activities and having great success engaging their customers so as you might imagine the conversation, including the audience was lively,

Many of the highest profile examples of the use of social tools for customer initiatives have been in the B2C world but B2B companies are also making use of social tools for engaging customers. In many B2B environments the ongoing relationship with the customer is an important element of the companies business model. Because of this need to maintain a relationship social approaches, particularly online communities, can provide an interesting method for facilitating ongoing interaction. While B2B communities are different from B2C, but in the end, business is about individuals and connecting individuals is still effective in B2B. Building and maintaining online B2B communities can be challenging but also very rewarding.

Out of the panel discussion I've culled a few ideas for using communities in a B2B setting:

• Remember the "what's in it for me" rule applies in B2B communities as well. Drawing people (and businesses) into the community will only happen if there's a clear reason to engage in the community and a clear benefit from that engagement. The "WITFM" answer could be anything from "I get answers to important questions there" to "I've found business opportunities there".
• To garner internal support for the effort and expense of maintaining a community you need to work out the WITFM answer from a company perspective as well. What are your measures of success? Once established make sure you publicize success as well. Change can be very challenging and you need to build off of your success to get and keep internal support for your efforts.
• Tie the community goals to business objectives to make the community relevant for executives and get their support.
• Content is still "king", provide regular, relevant content to engage community members.
• B2B community members expect some level of marketing and will accept it as long as they are getting something for their participation.
• Two of the most compelling reasons to participate in a B2B community are getting information about products and services prior to purchase and getting support for products after the sale.
• Remember that community members want to engage individuals, not companies. You need to have a personal touch.
• Reward members for participation. Recognition rewards are often very effective.
• Using public social networking tools can help draw people into the community and build awareness but they are not a substitute for the community itself.
• Be as open and transparent as possible, this rule holds true no matter the audience. Expect and plan on dealing with negative sentiment when they arise.
• Community analytics are critical for community success. Plan and use reports on key community metrics.
• Because B2B communities usually target specific roles and member types you need to lay out a recruitment strategy to ensure you draw in the members you need to be successful.
• B2B communities can be either public or provate depending on the goals of the community.
• Learning to balance transparency with the need to protect some business information is an important part of running an effective B2B community. Executives must feel comfortable that key competitive information and IP is protected or you will not get the support you need to make the community successful.
• What are your community goals:
  • To raise customer satisfaction?
  • Provide a place for and facilitate peer to peer support?
  • To raise brand awareness?
  • To gain insight into market trends and customer needs?
  • To attract new customers?
  • To network and uncover partner opportunities?
  • Provide a vehicle for co-innovation?
  • To build new supplier relationships or deepend current relationships?
  • ...I'm sure there are plenty of others.

These are just a few of the insights from the panel discussion, thanks to the panelists and to the audience for making this a very productive session!

Tags: social, e2.0, socbiz, b2b, community