Doing Business in 2017 - Some Expected Digital Shifts to Think About Now
Mike Wise outlines ten digital shifts organizations need by 2017: customer-first culture, mobile-first design, replacing email with collaborative platforms, and video-centric marketing. He stresses culture over strategy and the need for executive buy-in to make these changes stick.
Chapters
Greetings everyone. Welcome to the Wednesday, January 7th, 2015 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Internet Consulting where we work with businesses and organizations and help them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweroftheweb.com. powered by WSI.com. With me this week kicking off the new year is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.
Greetings everyone. This is Jeff Simpkins and I'm with Community Bank Consulting, Inc. And you can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting online at www.communitybankconsulting.com. Excellent.
Happy New Year, Jeffrey. I know, happy New Year. I know we exchanged text messages.
Yeah, I understand you're up north in the deep freeze.
Yeah, it is nice and chilly up here, although we do have some of the white stuff. And if you live in Michigan and it's the wintertime, Darn it, you better have white stuff. We didn't have it for Christmas, but it showed up just after New Year's, and I think it's going to be around for a while. Although I did catch a picture of yours on social media sitting on your deck with your bare feet overlooking the lake. Wouldn't be doing that here, your toes would be purple.
It stopped raining long enough, and it was in the 60s on Sunday, so I couldn't resist going out on the deck for an hour or so. But your frigid weather is headed our way. It's supposed to get down to 12 degrees tonight and the high tomorrow in the upper 20s.
Oh boy, fun, fun, fun. So yeah, let's get rolling. Yeah, I just want to give a disclaimer here, and I'm going to be battling this for the entire year, I think, but for some reason my fingers don't want to type 2015, they always type 2105. So if anybody out there has any good ideas of ways to retrain my brain so I type 2015 instead of 2105, let me know, because I have a feeling there's going to be more than one document and email that I send that has this freaking typo on it, and it drives me nuts every time I catch it. So if there's any OCD people in the audience that are listening to the webinar and going to say, I need to tell Eric that he typed the date incorrectly, I know it, and I will get it fixed. But if you've got any advice, let me know. It drives me nuts. But before we get started, with that disclaimer out of the way, as a reminder, Free Webinar Wednesdays is recorded, and we put them on freewebinarwednesdays.com. So after today's session, we'll get that up over the next day or so, and you can check it out, watch it again, share it with friends and colleagues. And we also like it when we're interactive, so those of you that are listening live, Please feel free to use the chat box. And as our guest walks through some of his 10 items to think about over the next couple of years, the digital shifts, if you will, we'd love to hear from you. And Jeff and I will keep an eye on the chat log, and we'll ask your question when we get started. So with those out of the way, it is my good pleasure to welcome Mike Wise to the show. And Mike, I'll scroll down a little bit so you can see his pretty face. Mike and I actually met a couple years ago. There's a gentleman by the name of Scott Kozlowski. His name is a little difficult to spell and pronounce, but he's a pretty smart guy. And he has kind of developed a whole process around social technology. And Mike and I actually attended a boot camp of his. I think it was in Chicago if I'm not mistaken. And went through a couple of days and just a ton of awesome information that Scott shared just about digital transformation in the business. This world and how technology is changing the way we're doing things, not just from social media but everything technology related. Mike and I have stayed in contact through LinkedIn and all the other social networks, and I'm really excited Mike's going to take some time and kick off 2015 or 2105 depending on the year you'd like to think about and talk about the digital shifts that are taking place and things to think about. So we've got a little timer that we're going to use, and Mike has said we're going to go through each bullet in 5-minute chunks. And so we're going to keep an eye on this little timer up here just to, to kind of see when we're at the end, and I'll make a beeping noise and we'll move on to the next one. So So with that long-winded introduction, I'll shut up and let Mike talk. And Mike, welcome to the Free Webinar Wednesday show. We appreciate you joining us.
Yeah, yeah, thanks. I really appreciate it. It's so great to be here. Yeah, I remember that, that boot camp that we were at in Chicago with Scott Klososky. And a shout out to Scott Klososky would be great too. S-K-L-O-S-O-S-K-Y. Scott Klososky. On Twitter. He is absolutely brilliant with social, does a lot of work in doing strategy for clients. He also does High Beam Leadership and Digital Plumbing and Adaptive Culture and a whole bunch of stuff at Future Point of View.
Yeah, so he's got an awesome video set out on YouTube as well of some of his snippets from his presentations. He's been a keynote for us at WSI at least a couple of times. And always makes you kind of walk away going, wow, the world is just amazing.
Never thought about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So definitely check out YouTube.
He's the one where I first heard the thing that I use every day practically, which is the whole 6 degrees of separation, Eric. You know that whole 6 degrees of separation? Kevin Bacon and all that.
Yeah, right.
Well, because of social, that's now 4.5.
4.5.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I also have to think that it's as low as it is because Kevin's last name happens to be Bacon, and everybody loves bacon. So that's my take on it.
If it wasn't for bacon, we wouldn't even know what a water chestnut is.
All right? Amen.
Okay, so anyway, yeah, so, so, so, and I'm glad this post on LinkedIn Pulse caught your attention. It was a pretty popular post, I think 350 or so views right out of the gate. That was my first post on LinkedIn Pulse, and so I'm going to be doing more on this, on these 10 must-dos by 2017 in the next quarter. Expanding on these things, and they might even turn into a book. I don't know, I need to write a book and I'm struggling with that. So, but the hashtag is #DigitalBiz17. That's our hashtag for this webinar right now. No one else is using that, so if anybody's listening, please feel free to tweet some of this content on that and maybe even have some of your own comments. Other links, etc., on the hashtag #DigitalBiz17, @EricCook, @MikeWise07.
So while we're getting ready— and also we didn't put Jeff on there, but we do have @JeffSimpkins, so don't forget Jeff.
I neglected—
I didn't— I'm sorry.
J-E-F-F-S-I-M-P-K-I-N-S. Simpkins.
Okay.
Yep. Maybe Jeff, maybe Jeff, you could Yeah, maybe Jeff you could do a tweet right now that says, welcome to the webinar, or something like that, and use the hashtag and those 3 signs, yours and our 2.
Great.
All right, yeah, so I'm doing social tech consulting for insurance companies as you said. So I do strategy consulting for them and walk them through the 12-step process of implementing social tech. It's a holistic process that includes, you know, things like technology, rivers of information for employees using social security, governance, marketing, sales, all of that stuff. It's a really well thought out and extensive process that we go through. And so a lot of the comments that I'm using relate to my experiences with executives and leadership teams in walking them through the 6-month implementation process of social technologies. And, you know, I kind of say social tech is a lot like digital business. They're kind of interchangeable the way things are evolving. Social, you know, first it was social media, then social tech, and then digital media, digital marketing, digital business, social business. And so it's all kind of evolving. It's all to me under the same banner. So that's why we have Digital Biz 17. So let's go to number 1, the first piece, if you will.
Okay, you want me to start the timer now? You tell me when to start the timer. We've not done the timer before on Free Webinar Wednesdays, so you tell me when to start.
Yeah, start.
Alright, let's go. You got 5 minutes.
Well, I'm only going to take a couple minutes, and then, because I want to hear your perspective as well, and then we can back and forth a little bit. Sort of like PTI, you know, pardon the interruption on ESPN with those 2 guys, I forget their names. So, customer first, and I put really there because there's a lot of clichés around there. You know, we're going to serve the customer, and you know, all of that type of stuff. And really, there's very few companies out there that really, really put the customer first. And if that's not your culture of doing that, then it's really not going to happen, because as we know, culture always trumps strategy. You can, you can talk a lot about it But what are you really doing as far as putting the customer first? How are you measuring the sentiment? How is that sentiment data that you, you know, customer sentiment, you know, positive and negative mentions across the social spectrum— Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube comments, Glassdoor, You know, how are those sentiments getting reported and distributed among your company? Because if you're not doing things like that, then you're really not doing very much relative to putting the customer first. So are you doing things like asking the customer what changes they want to make to the products? Are you asking the customers? You know, if you look at the customer experience, and we're going to mention this a couple different times. So from from from a prospect to a consideration set to actually signing up to getting their product delivered to using their product and to. Getting their product serviced, that whole— and maybe even to leaving the product, that whole continuum. How are you measuring the customer experience through that, and how are you measuring the sentiment? That's really what it means by putting the customer first. So, so for example, There's so many ways that we can connect with customers now. You know, we can, we can have a blog on our website. So, you know, I can't tell you how many insurance companies I've seen that have blogs on their websites that don't have the comments enabled. Well, what kind of sense does that make? Because now you're speaking, but you're not giving the customer any way of talking with you. I can't tell you how many insurance companies I've seen that even on their Facebook pages, they are blocking comments or they've disabled the recent posts by others. All of these things, YouTube videos, they block things. That's not putting the customer first. So how are you really doing that? I put down here continuously survey. So there's so many different ways that you can survey your customers and ask for their opinions on various things. How are you really listening to them? How are you adapting what they're saying to your business processes and so forth? You know, we had that classic example last year of Progressive Insurance, where somebody had a complaint on Twitter and it became this viral tweet situation where they, they constantly replied to every tweet with the exact same text. And so that just fanned the flames of the fire. That's not good. So those are some thoughts on, on putting the customer first. So what do you think, Eric?
Apparently Flo wasn't managing the Twitter handle for Progressive, that's all I got to say.
No, no, she wasn't. In fact, during that process, Flo said something on Facebook that was in the normal run of their marketing process that also fanned the flames. So they didn't even adapt their Facebook strategy to this viral negative situation that was happening.
Crazy.
Yeah, you got 5 seconds, Jeff. You want to put anything else in here real quick?
Um, I'm gonna pass.
All right, so we are going to Go to number 2. Number 2, are we ready to start the countdown?
Yes.
All right, here we go.
So number 2, I didn't make a buzzer noise.
Yeah, bing!
Executive education. This is another big thing that I'm a big fan of because there's so much misinformation at the executive level about especially these new technologies. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've heard an executive say this exact quote: Wow, Mike, why would I want to use Twitter? What do I care what Charlie Sheen had for breakfast? Right? And so I don't know why they always pick on Charlie Sheen and why breakfast, but that's the same thing, you know, that they, they that they say. And so what I'm thinking is, is that they're hearing these through the leadership network, through their own network of fellow executives. And I completely understand that, that makes total sense. The problem is, is that has nothing to do with why you want to use Twitter. And so if you rely on your peers for thought leadership, you really have to make sure what they're saying has a lot of credibility. And so I like to say, you know, you really need to bring in a subject matter expert on your industry and on this new technology to give you the real deal, especially in an environment where all of you can talk to each other. I love boot camps where we are talking with a leadership team of an enterprise, because you can have back and forth conversations across the table, and then I can, or whoever is facilitating the session, can give the real deal. You know, I can point you right to Google and tell you what search string to look at to see, to validate your assumptions. So in my mind, you know, leaders, it's critically important that they know how to do this stuff. They know what crowdsourcing is. They know enough about big data to set the right strategy. You know, I'm not saying anything cutting edge with this. It's pretty basic block and tackling of leadership and organizational leadership. So, you know, you can't throw out digital business and social technologies, like a lot of leaders are doing, without really understanding what's happening. I have on here this concept of rivers of information, and this is a subset of education. And what this is about is it's about leveraging social to feed your brain. So it's— if you think about it, it's not about pushing information out from you to the world, whatever that may be. It's about tapping into the information that others out there are talking about that can feed your brain about whatever it is, whatever subject matter you want. So I'll say crowdsourcing, which is the next really big thing Scott Kozlowski says that crowdsourcing is going to make outsourcing look small, but it's leveraging crowds of people to get work done, to get ideas done. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. If you go to Twitter right now and search on the hashtag crowdsourcing, you're going to get all sorts of information that's going to feed your brain about crowdsourcing. If you further narrow that search to #crowdsourcing #insurance, you're going to get all sorts of information just about that little niche of information. So that's how you build a really powerful rivers of information process within your organization, and it applies to every single category of job within your organization. So I know we're running down on time. Let me turn it over to you guys.
Eric? Whoops, sorry about that.
I had you on mute. Jeff, you want to go first? Go for it.
No, go ahead.
Well, the concept of executive education I think is a very important element, because we all know without executives on board it's very difficult for any organization to do anything productive. But a lot of the executives maybe don't fully understand really the correct perception of what social technology does. And I've heard the Charlie Sheen thing a number of times. So bringing everybody to the same starting point, I think, is an important component of this. And the rivers of information, a lot of people think social media is just about pushing information out there, but I use it more for gathering information. And I like the feed your brain. Somebody hashtag feed your brain along with #digitalbiz17. I see we've got a few people that are tweeting. But, you know, I like that. Jeffrey, anything?
Jeff, are you on mute?
I am here. I agree with both of you. Using social media as a source of learning as opposed to pushing information out is a great use of it.
Yeah, really is. So shout out to Penny Gray and M.E. Patton, and I think that's it right now on Twitter. Good work, nice.
Sweet, good deal.
Alright, alright, next.
Number 3, here we go.
Okay, so mobile. This is one that Eric actually suggested, and in fact if you looked at My original overview on this, number 3, was all about having the executives use these technologies themselves. And while that's very true, mobile has to be part of this strategy and has to be a top 10 item. And so, you know, there's a lot of things that need to be accounted for when it comes to mobile. In fact, I just sent out a tweet on the hashtag about— from Search Engine Watch that talks about what's happening relative to stats on mobile. And, you know, the stats are now the mobile emails— email opens on mobile is now up to about 50%. So of all the emails that are sent out, 50% of them are opened on mobile. You got to remember that that includes your marketing messages. If you send out a marketing message and it's got a call to action, click here to enroll or click here to get a quote or click here to do anything and it's going to obviously a webpage, then that webpage has to be mobile optimized because 50% of those emails are going to be opened on the mobile. If it's not mobile optimized and you're forcing people to pinch and squeeze, that's a killer. That's actually going to be the death of that sale. They may not even come back to that email later on the desktop. It's going to go into their read messages and that's it, you're done. I also saw that something like 70% of Facebook traffic is on mobile. If you're doing any kind of Facebook marketing or Facebook branding or whatever you're doing on Facebook, you've got to remember 70% of that is on mobile. You have to have, again, if your call to action is going to a website or anything like that, it's got to be mobile optimized. I've got— there's a bunch of statistics from my clients I've seen in looking at their web analytics that show that most of— a lot of their traffic— well, their number one source of traffic is always Google, but the tying for number 2 is oftentimes Facebook or Twitter. LinkedIn and so forth. And again, a high percentage of that is coming on mobile devices, so you can see that right in the analytics pieces. So, and then so many people haven't done any of this yet, so it has to be done. These trends are only going to be magnified in 2015 and '16, and so by 2017, if you haven't done this yet, you're just not going to be able to have a seat at any table the customer wants to sit at. We know that this is time-consuming work too, to reinvent your website so it's got a responsive design, to take a look at your customer experience and make apps for all of your customer experience. A lot of people now in the insurance business are A lot of companies are starting to have claims be over mobile, and people are able to show— when they get pulled over by the police, they're able to show their insurance, proof of insurance on mobile. So whatever the customer needs— and again, this goes back to customers and putting the customer first— whatever they need, that should be in an app for them to download, because don't forget, that gives you access to their device as well. So it works both ways. And certainly, like I said, the social network marketing. So turn it back over to Eric. What comments do you have?
Your app comment is very timely because next week we're actually going to be welcoming a guest that has developed a rather innovative conference app We've all been to conferences and conventions, and technology is changing the way networking goes on at those events. So we're going to talk specifically about that next week.
Nice.
And I've been preaching the importance of a mobile responsive. I did a blog post that got some pretty nice traction just on mobile and Google's algorithm changes that got some good feedback. Yes, mobile is huge.
Jeff? Yeah, I agree. Companies that are not moving in the direction of mobile are missing the boat. You know, the emerging buyers are absolutely linked to their mobile devices. They want to do everything on mobile. They want to buy, they want to pay, they want to read their email, they want to look at social media. Absolutely, this one is critical.
Yeah, got to be in there. Thanks for catching that, Eric. I really appreciate that. Next, number 4, ending internal email. I don't know how much we really need to say about this because I think it's pretty universally accepted that email is one big nightmare right now. You know, it's funny, email hasn't changed. If you think about the core utility of email since it was first rolled out in what, '98 or something like that, I think that was when I first got my first email address from AOL. It hasn't changed. Can you tell me who is— do you have metrics associated with who your number one person is that you get email from? I mean, a lot of people can say, oh well, it's my boss. But do you have the metrics associated with that? No, there's no metrics associated with that. Do you know how often your email is opened or clicked through or anything like that? There's so little change happening on that. The whole concept of sharing documents and having documents getting out of sequence and then somebody coming into an email thread in the middle and not reading you know, the history and saying something stupid or, you know, emails getting distributed to people that shouldn't be seeing it. I can't tell you how many times I get emails for another guy in Cleveland that's named Mike Wise. You know, so it's just nuts what email is. On the flip side, with internal collaborative networks, also known as internal social networks or proprietary social networks, like Jive software, when you move away from email, the productivity gains are phenomenal. There's a whole bunch of really high-profile, well-known insurance companies that use— I'll just say Jive as an example. Without naming any names, I'll tell you one quick story. one of them wanted to use this new collaborative network to replace email. And so they, they had a pilot line of business, so test case, say, okay, we're going to use this new tool for the next 6 months. And the line of business leader, the 2 of them, one was the marketing guy, one was the actuary, they both agreed to not use email at all for the term of the pilot. Now I'm talking about internal email, right? Internal, not external, but internal. And their pilot was so successful, their productivity gains were so great, their improvement of communication clarity and quality so good, their reduction in meetings was so good, that they are never going to use internal email again at that insurance company. Seriously, never going to use it again. So I just tweeted this report from McKinsey. In fact, Jive commissioned McKinsey, paid millions of dollars for this study on productivity associated with social and and email and meetings and so forth. They said if you can get off of internal email, you'll see something like a 23% gain in productivity. 23%! Just imagine the numbers associated with that. Another free tool, by the way, is Wiggio. W-I-G-G-I-O. That's a great collaborative type of tool that people can use that's free to get started.
Eric?
I'm going to be quiet and let Jeff go because I've taken the first 3 and only left him with a couple of seconds. So I have thoughts.
Jeff. It's no problem. I would be very interested in seeing the studies that you talked about. I agree, email is a huge time suck. What I'm intrigued by is how other tools are used to prevent them from going in that same direction. Yeah.
I think we got a question in the chat box, what specifically is replacing internal email? I'm just going to use an example, Basecamp. It's a project management platform. There are a lot of different ones out there, Wrike, Trilio, Podio. But instead of sending an email to my development staff, what I do is I go into Basecamp and I post an update. It also sends an email notification because I think email still is important because that's where we look for notifications, but the conversation technically is taking place directly in Basecamp. We have an internal social networking platform that we use here at WSI called K2 which gives us the ability to share information and post updates and share content and register for things. That is starting to drive activity away from email, but I think there's still a requirement for a blended solution in that email needs to be able to deliver that to somebody just so if I need to get a Basecamp update, I can read it and quickly respond to it that way. But the nuts and bolts of it really go into Basecamp and that's where the whole conversation thread is. So if I need to know what somebody said, I go into Basecamp. I don't search my inbox and try to look for all of that. It's all in one spot and that I think is the panacea of where we're trying to go.
Exactly, exactly. Remember that millennials, if you ask any millennial how often they check email, you know what they'll say?
I'm curious.
Hey Joe college graduate that's 25 years old, how often do you check your email? First of all, you'll get a look of disgust and then you'll get, I don't know, once a week. Why? Yes, we have grown up with email, us baby boomers and Gen Xers, but they haven't and they hate it.
Yeah.
When it comes to relevance, if you want to stay relevant, if you want to keep recruiting people, you've got to You've got to keep up with the game and that's one of the things.
An important point to consider in many of these things that we're discussing is in the business world, we have to take a blended approach. It's not realistic for us in the business world to say we're going to get rid of email today because we're interacting with— most of us are interacting with clients from Possibly under 18 years old to possibly 70 to 80-some years old.
Yeah.
I like the fact that you set up this presentation as looking towards 2017 because there's got to be a phase-in and we've got to have the ability to communicate and use various tools as we're targeting various age groups.
Good point. Yep, absolutely.
Cool.
Yep.
All right, move on to the next one, number 5, employee advocacy. Countdown has begun.
This is one of the biggest untapped opportunities I'm seeing out there. People just, you know, instead of— when it comes to digital and social, instead of encouraging employees to use social, they're talking to them about all the things they shouldn't be doing on social. I can't tell you how many insurance companies— this is starting to change very, very timely— but they block things like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube on their internal networks. Well, if you do that, you're obviously not going to get any of your employees engaging in any of your content on Facebook. So if you have 20,000 employees and you put a piece of really powerful piece of content on your Facebook page, why wouldn't you want your employees to go to the Facebook page and say, this is why I love my company, share. You know, how is that a bad thing to do? On the flip side, do you see all the potential unbelievable good that can come from that? You're getting an endorsement, you're getting free marketing, you're getting eyes on a piece of content, you're getting 20,000 potential shares, which if people have 500 connections on Facebook, that's 20,000 times 500, I don't even know what is that, 100 million or 10 million or something like that.
Yeah.
And so it's just ridiculous how powerful that could be, and who better to be advocating for you than your employees? You know, Tony Hsieh, the former CEO of Zappos before he sold it for $1.4 billion, said he had a policy there where he would pay employees $3,000, I think, to leave the company. So his culture there was, if you don't like working here, please leave. We only want people here who really like working here. And if you don't like working here, tell us why so we can fix it. You know, I know a lot of people are saying to themselves, wow, you know, gee, we have issues. We don't want our employees talking about our issues. Well, I'm sorry, but the answer is fix them. I have I have Work Out Loud there, W-O-L. That's an awesome thing. There's a— in fact, I tweeted John Stepper, who is just a great person, and he runs the social network, the internal collaborative network for Deutsche Bank. He'll say that right on his blog, so I'm not saying anything that's not public information. He's got a great book called Work Out Loud. Awesome, and I followed his blog. He wrote the book through the blog, so I've already read the book. And he let's see another company that's really successful at this is HubSpot, one of the most successful new companies in America. HubSpot, they absolutely position their employees as subject matter experts. They have them write blogs. They have them write ebooks. They have them write regular books. They have them speak, and the culture there is so hot and so energizing. So this just helps improve morale, connectedness, impact, influence, change. It's awesome. And by the way, if somebody wants to leave you because they outgrow your company, well, here's a— here's an idea. Don't let them just leave. Spin them off, because chances are they're probably going to be doing something that's related to your company. So why not make an investment in them and have them spin off a tangential type of enterprise? Be your own little incubator. So that's all I have on number 5.
I would say that the only type of company that blocks Facebook and other social media more than insurance companies is banks. I would say it is the exception and not the rule for me to work with a bank client that doesn't have social media blocked. And if you were to ask them why, most of them would say because of concerns over compliance. But you're absolutely correct in saying when you set up your employees— and I love the way you ended this slide by giving some examples of how companies can become incubators or How the disgruntled employee— it's a great opportunity to figure out what's wrong with your workplace so you can fix it. And you can certainly get information from employees about what they're unhappy with much more cost-effectively than you can pay outside consultants to do big studies and things like that. So I really like this slide. Eric?
Next slide.
Yeah.
The concept of enabling social capabilities with staff, again, I did a blog post about how that was very similar to when I was at the bank introducing email. And when email came around, oh, we can't let everybody have email because what if somebody forwards a joke or downloads a virus or does something inappropriate. And now email, even though we are picking on it as being not the chosen tool for internal communication moving forward, But I think it's pretty well accepted that email is everywhere, and everybody in an organization, in a bank perspective, from the teller all the way to the CEO, has an email account. And it's just— we're seeing technology come along to help filter for viruses and spam and monitor activity, and we're seeing those things now start to happen in the social arena. I think we're still very new in its infancy, but as tools help us monitor for things like compliance and risk, in social media, it's going to legitimize that as a communication tool. And I've been saying for a number of years, turn your employees into a social army and let them go out and speak on your behalf. Because one person in the marketing department trying to do everything— you don't have one individual in a business be part of Rotary and that's it. You've got people that are part of Rotary, Exchange Club, volunteering at church events and nonprofits and United Way. Everybody's everywhere, and that's what we need to think about is this from an advocacy perspective. And I was excited that you mentioned HubSpot because just last year WSI announced a partnership with HubSpot, and we recognize their advantage, they recognize our advantage, and very proud to have them as one of our new corporate partners.
Nice.
So it kind of gave me goosebumps to have you mention them, so that was pretty cool.
Yeah, and they are awesome.
Yeah, they are so awesome. I love HubSpot. I love their technology and their culture. So, oh dang, right, number 6, crowdsourcing.
You gotta do a better job.
I'm a bad dinger.
All right, we've reset.
Crowdsourcing.
This is kind of fun. Yeah, see, and you basically just talked a little bit about crowdsourcing in terms of your public relations vignette that you just talked about with Rotary and churches and so forth. You're crowdsourcing your public involvement across your employees. So crowdsourcing is a great new topic. It's, you know, the reason why it's so vital Is because we are trying to do more with less right now. And this has been happening for the last, what, 15, 10 years at least, if not longer, where people are downsizing their companies and asking people to do more things. People are wearing more hats, all of that whole equation. And so now we're loading on social and there's even more stuff to do now. You have to figure out how to get more done and crowdsourcing is the answer. There's all sorts of ways to handle crowdsourcing, but I'll just mention these ones that I have on the slide. We have crowdsourcing content. For example, if you want to figure out a marketing campaign and you want to have some pictures of your product, that are in action? Well, go to your Facebook page and ask your customers to take a picture of your product in action and post it to your Facebook page. So you immediately crowdsource scads of media across your crowd of customers. That's a crowd. Coding. There's a website called Topcoder. I know we all know the dreaded IT project priority list.
Oh!
If you're on the lower third of that list, you know your project ain't going to happen. If it does happen, it's going to be given— you're going to get Chris, who's the worst programmer, and the last time he did one of your projects, it was totally screwed up. You know, but he's the worst programmer, so he gets, you know, the project, and so it's a nightmare. Well, TopCoder, let's take Chris and make him, instead of a coder, a crowdsourcing code expert. Now there's an idea, because he can just manage the process of all of those low-priority projects through a website like TopCoder, and you get things done better, faster, cheaper. It really is the holy grail. A lot of insurance companies, well, you know, the one thing about social, you know, we're just not very creative. You know, insurance is a boring business, and, you know, we're just not very creative. Well, go to Kaortix. That's a website just for a crowdsourcing site just for innovation, and pay a few dollars and get an incredibly good idea. Same thing with testing, any kind of testing that you want to do, there's all sorts of ways you can crowdsource that. You can crowdsource things across your employee base, across your alumni base, across your customer base, your Facebook likes, Your YouTube subscribers, your LinkedIn followers, those are all crowds that you can use. You could even— I have one client that wants to do a video campaign, and so they sent an email out to all of their insurance agents that said, do any of your kids have the capability to produce iMovie videos? Well, guess what? They got back 10 or 11 really good videographers that are high school students, that are children of the insurance agents. And now they have a crowd that they can say, okay, here's our next video, here's what we want to accomplish, here's the sort of the executive overview of the video, here's the media assets on Google Drive, go for it, see what you get back. And they can pick among those 10 the best video and that's the video. How awesome is that? It's free and it's being done by your tribe. So it's definitely going to be a favorite with them anyway. So that's all I have to say about that.
I'm going to pass on this one because we are going to run out of time. We've got about 10 minutes left.
Ding!
I just realized why I've not dung is usually I'm talking when the dinger goes off.
Aha. Well, do you want to just blast through the last 3?
Yeah, let's do that.
Yep.
Okay, last 4. Okay, so becoming a video machine, what, you know, there's no question about it that video is the most popular form of marketing, of instruction. It's got better retention. In fact, if you go to my YouTube channel, I should have tweeted this before, if you go to my YouTube channel, I did a YouTube video on, I think, the top 10 reasons why video is the It trumps everything else in terms of anything relative to marketing, sales, education, whatever. It's got great recall. It's just definitely the way to go. And so, you know, you can use video for marketing, whether it's B2C or B2B. Same with sales, B2C, B2B. All your business units can use video. Your customer experience can be video-driven. So if you're trying to communicate how to use your product or whatever, you know, you can send out a product even if it's a widget and have a little QR code on your— on a Post-it note, and they scan it and it goes to a video that talks about the product, and that will get listened to. And that'll get watched. And by the way, that might even get shared. So, wow, I love my company. I just bought this new product, this new speaker or whatever, or this new, you know, whatever. And they sent me a video of how to use it and I love it. And here's the video. It's a funny video too. So, and certainly putting leaders on video is a good idea. People resonate with faces and names and voices and so forth. So Rather than just doing a blog, do a vlog. That's what John— having a mental blank— the guy that runs Cisco, you know, he started doing a video blog called a vlog or whatever you want to call it, but it's a great way to send out small, short bits of information to your target audience. Okay, let's go to the next one.
Yep, just as an FYI, I did post into the chat log for everybody the URL to Kaortix, which is that crowdsourced innovation platform. It's spelled a little funky, but it's out there in the chat, so check it out.
Number 8.
Number 8, so we're talking about data and analytics. So this is a really hot topic. The companies that are going to win in the future are going to be the ones that are leveraging their data on their employees. There's this whole concept of as we as individuals are moving through our lives, we're creating data everywhere we go. Whatever, you know, our mobile devices are creating data, our tweets, our Facebook likes, comments, and shares. All of our behaviors all day long are creating data. And so as a bank or as an insurance company, whatever you're doing, you're capturing— yeah, you're just capturing the core pieces of information that you need to do your business with your customers, but that data can be appended by all sorts of— Experian has a massive database, Facebook has a massive database, you can actually get your customers to give you more information if you do it the right way. Then how do you use that data to cross-sell, upsell, build relationship, get referrals, whatever you want to do? That's going to be the big differentiator in the future is how to leverage data and analytics. So that's a pretty intuitive thing. I would say a lot of people need to reinvent their data warehouses, their databases, and, and so forth, and there's all sorts of tools available to help you do that. It's a top priority.
Eric? Yep. Okay.
No, going back and thinking of HubSpot, that's one of the great parts about their platform is it takes visitor information, combines it, and gives you the ability to know based on prior activity and interaction if they are a customer, if they are a prospect, but then also appending other data to that that makes that, I guess, that profile More valuable to you, so you know not just the basics but the context around it and other opportunities. Ding! Other opportunities that that may be presented around that. So exactly.
Yeah. Yep.
Yep.
Exactly.
HubSpot is a spot on example, and that's one of the reasons why they're so so successful.
Yep. Cool. All right.
Number 9, measuring. Measuring everything. A lot of people, this has been a struggle with business time immemorial. I counsel people that you have to take time out to do this. You can't gloss this over. You can't just say, oh yeah, it was successful. We got a lot of new business out of it. How much did you get and why? You know, what were the contributing factors? You have to do this. If you don't do this, you're going to run the risk of at some point breaking down. And if you do do this, you're going to have a much better case for making decisions in the future, and better decisions lead to competitive advantage and a greater chance of sustainability. It's one of Scott Kozlowski's terms that I really like too. You know, that's one of the interesting things about living in Cleveland is you see the remnants of all sorts of prior era industries all over you, from, from, you know, the Erie Canal and, you know, all of those canals to motors to steelworks and all of those things. And, you know, sustainability is a big issue, just, just, you know, Blockbuster Borders, what happened to them? Well, I'll tell you what happened to them. They weren't paying attention to the data and they lost, and now they're G-O-N-E, gone. So, Eric, Jeff, Jeff, go.
Unless you want to skip. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna let us go to the next slide. Perfect.
So strategy and leadership, last slide. You know, what I'm finding is, is that the, the, you have to put together a strategy on this. You can't just wing it. You have to sit down and really think through with a team of either experts or high-profile people in your organization that are influencers and influential and go through this process of identifying what you're gonna do and why and who and when and how and how much. This is a big, huge change. You know, somebody said to me recently that this is like a 6th wave of computers. You had the mainframe computers, then you had the client-server computers, then you had Let's see, what else was there? I forget, but you had the internet, and now you have social, mobile, data analytics, and cloud. And so you have to think through this stuff. You can't just wing it, can't take it lightly. And it's important to have somebody that's really the guy that's the champion for all of this in your organization that has The authority, the budget, the responsibility for implementing all of these things. They report to the CEO. They're not part of the marketing department or anything like that. That was sort of like, that's all ancient history now. This is a real deal thing, and they have a seat at the table. Digital business. So I'll just end by saying let's do a few more tweets on #digitalbiz17, and I'm happy to answer any questions or follow up with people directly. You have my Twitter, you can follow me, I'll follow you back, and we'll direct message each other if you need any more information. But thanks for having me on the podcast.
Cool. Jeff, closing thoughts.
Thank you very much, Mike. Provided some really good information to consider for planning and growth for the future. Using—
and a couple of observations that I've got that I just want to share. One, I like the fact that— I can't believe we've been doing this for 5 years and we haven't really reinforced the hashtag. So I think that's something, Jeff, you and I might want to have a little conversation about, because while the chat box is good, there are opportunities for people to have some conversations with one another, which I think is kind of cool. And along those lines, TweetReach is a service that I've mentioned before that for free you can actually go out and run a report on a term or a hashtag or a Twitter handle. So I've taken #DigitalBiz17, which is today's event hashtag, and just within the hour we've generated 15,272 reaches to accounts with over 30,000 impressions.
Ding!
30,000 impressions. And a service like this gives you the ability to data mine, and it plays off of all the things that you talked about, Mike. It looks at Measuring, you look at big data, we are crowdsourcing the intelligence here to see what actually took place. This can be used for education of our executives to say, look, Mike tweeted 5 times and got over 14,000 impressions, and Jeff and Eric, the number of— you got the whole thread of what we talked about today.
I love it. Yep, it's amazing. So, Ray, tweet that.
Yeah, so tweet reach. So yeah, I think 2015 is going to be an interesting year for Free Webinar Wednesdays, you know, to kind of take our game to the next level and using some of these things. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted you to help kick off the year, because I think everybody is well served to think about more of the cultural. We did a session last year that talked more about the digital marketing things related, but I think this one goes even deeper into an organizational structure beyond just the marketing things that I shared during that session. So yeah, I'm pretty excited.
Yeah.
So Jeff, I don't know, when you look at this tweet reach, if you've got any insight or thoughts, but Basically, we've got 5 people that just reached over 30,000 impressions in an hour to get the word out.
Really cool.
Good job, Free Webinar Wednesdayers.
Absolutely. Penny and Mark, you guys rock. Thanks for tweeting. Yeah, by the way, At the end of HubSpot Inbound 2014 in Boston last summer, I did a tweet binder, same thing as TweetReach. They had 1.4 billion impressions on #Inbound14. 1.4 billion for free.
Cool.
Well, they hosted the conference, but they made money on the conference. I mean, it's just sick what they're doing. That's how powerful it is.
Incredible. Good, good.
Well, Mike, I don't want to speak for Jeff, but I have a feeling that he'll be okay with me doing so right now. I want to thank you for joining us, but also extend the offer as the year progresses and other things happen. Maybe we can even get our mutual buddy Scott to join us for a deeper conversation in some of the other areas. But I think as you scratch the surface on some of these things and continue your blogging efforts By all means, I'll be paying attention through social media, but I'm happy to allow you to leverage Free Webinar Wednesdays as a crowdsourcing platform to get the word out. So just let us know.
Okay, cool.
And we'd be happy to have you on as a repeat.
So thanks, I really appreciate it. It's great. I'm excited about the content for next week.
Good deal.
So, okay, well, that concludes just a little bit over time, but I don't think anybody minded. We always deliver more than what you pay for here at Free Webinar Wednesdays. You get your money's worth. So visit us at freewebinarwednesdays.com. We will get this recording out very shortly. Connect with us on Facebook. And yeah, until then, have a great week, and we will see you next week for our conference and networking session. And we will continue the excitement, and 2015 is going to be a great year.
Thanks again.
We'll talk to you later, everybody. Bye.
