By Francis Moran
Although many companies have embraced social media tools, especially for internal collaboration and customer interaction, their adoption by business has yet to cross the chasm into mainstream acceptance, according to a study by research firm IDC that was presented at this morning Social Media Breakfast in Ottawa. Similarly, IDC senior analyst Krista Napier said, “as much we hear about (social media tools) … it’s important to remember not everybody is on them yet.”
IDC’s numbers came from a recent survey of 200 business and IT leaders, most of whom could identify Facebook and Twitter as social media tools but many of whom could not see any business value in deploying them. When IDC asked the question, “What words come to mind when you think of social media?”, the most frequent answer was “Facebook” followed by “Twitter.” “Consumer” was the third most frequently stated answer, clearly indicating that businesses do not see social media as an effective business tool. This lack of enthusiasm was further reinforced by the next three most frequently cited answers, “distracting,” “waste of time” and “no business value.”
Still, the IDC study did find some companies were using such tools, although at insufficient rates to be considered mainstream. Using Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the chasm” model of technology adoption, IDC pegged all social media tools as still being in the early adopter phase or having just moved across the chasm towards mainstream market adoption. Leading the way were wikis, with 25% of respondents reporting their use, followed by blogs at 21.5%. Podcasts were being used by 17% of respondents while microblogging, which includes Twitter, was at a dismal 10.9%.
Pointedly, use of social networking analytics was at just 13.1%, which may explain management’s poor appetite for a tool that has yet to generally submit to rigorous measurement.
Respondents said security concerns were the biggest hurdle to greater adoption, followed by a lack of senior buy-in and decreased productivity. Those companies that were using the tools were using them most for departmental collaboration (37.5%), improved customer interactions (34.5%) and improved employee morale (30%).
A further set of numbers suggested that the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon. Noting that use of social media by corporations is often lawless and ungoverned, often resembling “the wild west,” Krista said companies should develop social media policies. However, her research found that only 24% of respondents had done so while another 25% said they “planned to” in the next 12 months. Fully 40% said they had no such plans while the balance either didn’t know if they would or didn’t know what a social media policy would be.
The sobering reality that many consumers themselves have yet to embrace many of these emerging tools may also explain corporate reticence. In a similar study of consumer habits, IDC found that 64% of respondents said they used Facebook. The next most widely used social media tool, YouTube, was well down the adoption curve at only 14%, while Twitter was even lower.
Social media enthusiast Kelly Rusk tweeted me during Krista’s presentation to suggest that these numbers mean “there’s still opportunity for leadership in the space,” and I don’t disagree. The risk, however, is that marketers extolling the virtues of social media will find themselves too far out in front of both their corporate leadership and their markets.
By Francis Moran
For the first time in practically the decade-long lifespan of this technology-focused PR agency, I did not attend any part of the Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit held last week at the Chateau Laurier. Actually, that’s not quite true; I went to a packed StartUp Drinks in the Byward Market on Wednesday night and from there popped briefly into the thinly-attended Young Venture Capitalists OVTS networking event that was happening just a few doors away. But the point is, I didn’t see any of the company presentations, hear any of the speeches or, most importantly, glom onto any of the corridor scuttlebutt that is usually the most interesting aspect of these things.
In the days since, I have heard various reports from attendees from across the investor-entrepreneur spectrum and I have read what little reportage made the public record. Very little of what I’ve heard or read left me terribly hopeful that a new crop of exciting Ottawa technology ventures was about to get funded any time soon. The most consistent sentiment seemed to be contained in the comment VG Partners managing general partner Pat DiPietro made in an Ottawa Business Journal story on the fact that the OVTS and a similar event in Banff had a scheduling overlap. “But on the other hand there are no VCs investing, so it doesn’t really matter right now,” DiPietro said.
This caused me to wonder if venture fairs have passed their sell-by date. Can anyone remember the last company that could claim to have met at one of these things the connection that led to successful funding?
Then my pal James Smith weighed in on his newish blog, Startup Great White North. Unlike me, James not only attended the Ottawa venture fair, he also winged out west to the Banff shindig. Despite the fact he there witnessed “institutional investors focused principally on shaking off modest Thursday night hangovers and cradling Blackberrys and iPhones like long-lost friends” rather than paying attention to the entrepreneurs’ pitches, he decided in the end that investors don’t regard those pitching companies “with the attention my mini-van driving wife might give to passing picked-over roadkill on the road to our cottage.”
I’m not sure I’m as persuaded as James but he does go on to provide a solid list of techniques that serious venture-seeking entrepreneurs can deploy to improve their outcomes from such an event.
While we’re on the question of the utility of VC fairs, we might as well start asking questions about the utility of the VC model itself. We have begun work on a series of articles about this very question. We will look at who is actually funding startups in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. We’ll ask experts which pieces of the model work and which don’t. And most importantly, we’ll examine the state of the ecosystem beyond VCs that needs to be in place to help companies, especially those that will never be VC-fundable, bring their technology to market. We’ll look at the proliferation of new government funding here in Canada and compare it with what’s in place in other markets. If you believe you have a perspective on this, we’d love to hear from you. You can email me at fmoran (at) inmedia.com.
By Francis Moran
I write an awful lot on this blog about customer service, mainly lousy customer service. Like most consumers, I run into my share of companies whose customer-service posture screams at me that they just don’t give a damn about keeping me as a customer. Having a blog gives me a soapbox from which to rant about them but given that this is supposed to be a blog about marketing, merely ranting would not meet our editorial mandate.
So my preoccupation with customer service is based on what I have come to call my first law of competitive differentiation, the proposition that, in an age when almost any technological or cost advantage will rapidly and inevitably be eroded, the only sustainable competitive differentiation for most companies is to treat their customers like the centre of the universe that they actually are.
Sadly, far too many companies pay only lip service to this.
Last night, my wife and I had an experience that showed us the other side of the equation.
It was our ninth wedding anniversary on Wednesday but my wife was in Houston at a trade show so we planned a belated celebratory dinner for last night. We chose to go to Play Food and Wine, an Ottawa eatery we had heard a lot about, whose chef and founder we liked, but that we had not yet managed to try. Reservations were made, nice clothes were donned and off we went.
The first bit of unusual customer service should never have been noteworthy at all. We were greeted immediately upon arrival — a rare enough occurrence at restaurants these days — and they offered to take our coats! I know, that used to be standard operating procedure at restaurants but, upon reflection, I had trouble remembering the last time that had happened to me.
Upstairs we went, drinks were ordered and we looked over an imaginative menu of tempting dishes fitting Play’s tapas-style approach of small plates designed to be shared. We made a few selections, and our waiter brought out the first two, reserving the third one until we had finished off the first two.
Unfortunately, my wife, who had risen at 4am and had been spent much of the day traveling home on bumpy little planes, unexpectedly developed a wonky tummy just as our first courses were being served. She bravely tried to eat a bit but I ended up clearing off both plates as she waited in vain for her stomach to settle. Since it was clear she wasn’t going to be feeling better any time soon, we explained the situation to our waiter and asked him to hold off on our third plate if he had not already ordered it. Clearly thinking that I still deserved to have dinner, he said he could get it on our table within five minutes but I declined, saying it really would be best if we just grabbed our bill.
He was solicitous and attentive at every stage, occupied solely with our well-being, and so he should have been, given the consummately service-oriented business in which he worked. But then he went above and beyond, and here’s why I must sing the praises of Jordan, our waiter last night at Play.
He brought our bill, telling us that he had not charged for the glass of bubbly my wife had barely touched. Very nice gesture.
But wait, there was more.
When he brought back my credit card and slip to sign, he also brought me a small sampler of the hanger steak I had been very much looking forward to having as our third dish. Just enough for me to relish the dish; not so much that my wife had to wait more than a few minutes for me to finish it off.
With a few small gestures, Jordan raised our experience at Play, disappointingly foreshortened though it might have been, from the merely satisfactory to the extraordinary. As soon as I publish this post, I intend to call Play and bring all this to their attention. Meanwhile, my wife has made us a fresh reservation for Saturday night, when I hope we get Jordan again. Although, given the generally fine service we received from everyone else at the restaurant plus the fact that Jordan was empowered — that’s the key word, by the way, when it comes to superior customer service — to go the extra mile for us, I’m sure that whomever is our waiter at Play will deliver the same exemplary customer service.
By Francis Moran
I went to Ottawa’s Social Media Breakfast this morning and an intelligent session on strategic customer engagement broke out.
The above paragraph is the calmest of the leads that came to mind as I drove home from the breakfast; the others were far more excitable, reflecting the deep personal enthusiasm I felt after hearing a presentation on social media tools that put them in common-sense perspective. This is a sharp departure from past SMBOttawa speakers who have presented social media as the salvation of all things.
I knew right from the opening slide, “Your social media strategy won’t save you,” that this morning’s speaker, author, entrepreneur and self-confessed Twitter addict Tara Hunt (@missrogue), was going to be something quite different. What I didn’t know was that she was not only going to dynamite the worst of all the social-media-as-brave-new-world myths I have become so tired of hearing, but that she was also going to put the customer back at the centre of the whole value chain.
I live-tweeted a few of her better lines, as did others at the session, and you can see her whole presentation here. In a nutshell, however, Tara told us:
- Social media is a tool, not a strategy.
- Social media has not changed the world, it has not changed how we connect with other human beings, and it most certainly has not changed how we decide to buy, or not to buy, something.
- The customer must be at the centre of every effective business strategy; if it doesn’t make the customer happy, don’t do it.
- Social media has a role, potentially an incredibly potent role, to play in influencing each stage of the purchasing-decision process.
- And she finished with very practical advice on exactly how social media tools can be deployed as part of a customer-centric campaign.
In one tidy presentation, then, Tara managed to hit on what seems to be my two most frequently raised topics these days:
- Social media is not a brave new world; the fundamentals still apply.
- Customer satisfaction is the only sustainable competitive differentiator.
Thanks for not drowning in the Kool Aid, Tara.
One fascinating side note: Early on in her presentation, Tara used Comcast as an example of a company that seems to be doing great outreach via Twitter but still letting down their customers and creating all kinds of lousy customer-service issues. Practically no sooner had she referenced Frank Eliason, who tweets as @comcastcares, than Frank himself was weighing in via Twitter, insisting that customer satisfaction was up 9% at the U.S. cable giant and offering to join a debate with Tara!
By Francis Moran
A weekend-long, competitive startup boot camp in October that will see the winning team take away $5,000 in seed funding was the most interesting piece of a coherent new programming line up announced last night by The Ottawa Network, the city’s grassroots networking club for the technology sector.
The startup camp, which will be repeated in the spring, was the second of four “program pillars” revealed by TON president Rick O’Connor. The first pillar, Network, will see TON continue to hold business networking and educational events, although at two a month, these will happen only half as frequently as last year’s somewhat over-ambitious weekly schedule. The third pillar, Finance, will feature a repeat of last year’s popular Founders and Funders dinners that saw angels and venture capitalists rub shoulders for an evening with entrepreneurs looking for funding. Details of the final pillar, Grow, will come later.
TON will also start charging a membership fee for the first time since it was founded in 2001 by a cohort of down-sized refugees of the telecom crash who gathered together to commiserate and help each other found new ventures and find new jobs. General membership will cost $25 per year in a move O’Connor said the organization hopes will lead to a more committed, targeted and involved membership.
The first startup boot camp is scheduled for October 23 to 25, and TON hopes to attract up to 75 participants who will self-categorize themselves into the various functions a new company needs, such as development, marketing and so on. On the Friday evening, as many as a dozen of the participants will pitch their ideas for a startup and teams will be formed based on who else wants to join them to work on that pitch for the weekend. On Sunday evening, each team will make its pitch, with the winner coming away with $5,000 if it incorporates as a fresh start-up.
TON’s new programming line up is a welcome evolution for an organization that significantly revitalized itself last year after a couple of years of fairly moribund existence. We’ve been big supporters of the network almost from the beginning, and I saw several instances last year where exciting new ventures got a solid helping hand as a result of a TON initiative.
Even better, in my view, is the introduction of a membership fee. As Shopify founder Toby Lutka said at a different event a few months ago, “Twenty four dollars is a slightly more annoying version of free.” His point, which I thoroughly endorse, is that if you have created something of real value, people ought to be willing to pay you something to use it. Not incidentally, in the process of charging for something, you also find committed customers, rather than just tire kickers. Those who can’t afford the fee — TON has always been attractive to those looking for work or operating ventures on a shoestring — can still attend up to three events a year without paying anything.
I’ll be a regular at TON events both for its inherent value to my own business and so that I can continue to bring its news to readers of this blog.
