MetzMash

89% of Your Customers Don't Blog

Far be it from me to be a pessimist; I think I'm more of a glass-half full kind of strategist, or at least that I have idealist/humanist leanings. That said, I can say that after checking out Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li's Harnessing The Power of Social Applications from the Sloan Review, that I need to give some of my readers a swift reality check. I'm in the midst of writing a social media strategy for four fairly well-known consumer packaged goods brand, and while I don't want to scare the shit out of them, I want them to leave my workshop equipped with solid tools, solid strategy and a realistic mindframe to execute from.

So, based on the aggregation of the Forrester studies from 2007, based on the United States, here are the key take-aways that I have, about our social media use, on average:

• 75% of your customers don't read blogs
• 89% of your customers don't write a blog, either
• 71% of your customers don't watch user-generated content
• 75% of your customers don't visit social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook)
• 82% of your customers don't participate in discussion forums
• 75% of your customers don't read online ratings or reviews
• 89% of your customers don't post online ratings or reviews
• 92% of your customers don't use RSS

 

These percentages are based on a metric of one-monthly usage. Keep in mind that these are broad-stroke averages, and I'm not attempting to belittle the importance of social media here. I'm just trying to set a realistic baseline, so that my clients and readers know who they're trying to engage with, when working with social media tools. So, for example, I'm working with a tea company that has about 500,000 unique customers in any given year, they can assume that the amount of current/prospective customers they'll be engaging with, in social media, will be about 100,000, give or take a bit.

And that's still a shitload of people. Better take 'em seriously.

I'll be at the Social Network Applications Platform Summit 2.0 tomorrow as well; if you'd like to record a podcast for Metzmash or LaunchSquad's Exclamation blog, come up and talk to me.

InsideView Helps Salesforce and SugarCRM push the Envelope with Social Media

Disclosure: InsideView is a LaunchSquad client, and I work for LaunchSquad

When I hear about terms like Sales 2.0 and Marketing 2.0, I'm always a little skeptical. Obviously, the umbrella term Enterprise 2.0 (or Enterprise social software) doesn't cover a lot of small and medium businesses and most of what I've seen in this space is intranet-focused, aiming at developing internal company initiatives and culture. It seems to me that a lot of the sales and marketing divisions of medium and large companies were practically skipped over by the social media boom. At best, social media in organizations of this size is thought of as a marketing tool, but not a modus operandi for sales. I mean, c'mon: poking someone on Facebook to deliver a pitch doesn't count as "social media".

InsideView's seeking to change all that. Their new product, SalesView is an on-demand application that will be useful to enterprise and SMB sales and marketing folks alike. I doubt this was modeled after 37Signals pricing (always offering some tier of the product for free), but it's pretty darn cool that there's a semi-functional free version of the tool available.

"By offering SalesView in a freemium model, we are enabling all sales and marketing organizations to take advantage of our unique offering," said Rand Schulman, InsideView's CMO.

That makes sense to me.The product comes as a CRM mash-up, and works in the SugarCRM or Salesforce environment.

Here's how it works: SalesView aggregates meaningful social graph data composed of the salesperson (and target's) social graph information as well as further "soft information," and combines it with all of the typical "hard facts" that have been previously delivered by sales software (mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, expansions, etc.)

InsideView has been really into this term, Socialprise, a portmanteau of "social" and "enterprise". When it all comes down it, busy sales professionals are crying for a way to integrate their social media lives (Facebook, Plaxo, et al) with their sales lives. There's a pretty rad whitepaper on this on the InsideView website. They're billing it as the "natural convergence" of enterprise apps and the CRM stew. This really makes me wonder if all of the non-SaaS CRM brands are going to strive to become InsideView partners. (Do you hear me, Sage?)

The customer list is pretty legit, too: Symantec, Webex and Ariba are among them. If you'd like to take SalesView for a spin, check out the InsideView site.