In which Jill reveals her secret. (Okay, one of her secrets.)
There are some things that only a few good friends know about me. For instance, I like running on the beach. I watch Animal Planet religiously. I enjoy napping in the back of the station wagon, even when it’s parked in the garage. And—I’m not proud of this, but here it goes—on occasion I eat my own poop. The secret is this: I’m really a dog. And I have 800 Twitter followers.
Don’t go looking for these factoids at www.twitter.com/jilldyche. That’s someone else. Or IS it?
You see, when I started using Twitter I had to reconcile different areas of my life. I like to tweet about professional stuff, including customer relationship management (CRM), social media, and information as a strategic enabler. I also like to chat and share info with my non-work friends, many of whom are hiking buddies, dog rescue advocates, or fellow charity volunteers. Sometimes my work tweeps aren’t necessarily aligned with all my goodwill activities, nor do they always care about my doggie sagas. (Amy is blind, Lu is 14 with vestibular disease, and Colby has epilepsy.) Likewise my non-work buddies think MDM is simply the acronym for the new slogan, “Mutt Dogs Matter!”
Since Colby comes the closest of my three dogs to having opposable thumbs, I set her up on Twitter. And thus I adopted a new social persona that lets me communicate with a subset of my friends in a more meaningful way, without bothering the rest with humdrum observations or irrelevant news.
[Hiking and dog buddies: go ahead and skip the following paragraph.]
Sound familiar? The definition of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the ability to differentiate customers in order to distinguish their treatment. That applies to our sales force, our customer service reps, and yes, to marketing. Why e-mail a customer a discount code for a product he already has? Why ship a catalog aimed at newly-marrieds to a single grandmother? Why pitch cat food to… You get the idea.
Your social persona means more than just having the answer to “Which Superhero are you?” or “Which Barbie are you?” (No, I’m not kidding.) It represents a circumscribed collection of behaviors and preferences, not necessarily your entire set of behaviors and preferences. Social personas—alright work friends, personae—encompass similar attributes and are more narrowly defined. Our social personas help us refine our networks, participate in new on-line communities, and invite fresh collaborations. Social personas essentially allow customers to segment themselves. And they’ll segment themselves in a far more accurate and nuanced way than a marketing department ever could. The implications on sales uplift and return on marketing investment could be staggering.
Indeed some savvy companies have discovered Colby, and are pitching her products according to who she is and what she, er, says. Colby buys bully sticks from Value Pet Supplies (@valuepet); attends fundraisers on behalf of Best Friends Animal Sanctuary (@BFAS); browses the aisles of Red Barn (@redbarnfeed); and has even been known to watch Vet TV (@veterinarytelevision). Colby is a Coonhound, but she’s also a consumer. Those with a stake in the $45 billion pet care industry are cultivating relationships with her.
[Hikers and dog friends: go straight to the end.]
This adds a new wrinkle to social CRM, especially to the already challenging practice of customer segmentation. Most companies still struggle to transcend the well-worn practice of demographic segmentation, seeking to enrich and integrate their customer data to enable more sophisticated behavioral, preference, and usage-based segmentation and with them more intelligent ways to engage and interact with customers and prospects. Persona-based segmentation should be next on their lists.
The hard part of social personas, of course, is establishing the connections between social identities. The very hard part is collecting and structuring that data, then integrating it with the rest of the customer’s profile in a sustainable way. One could argue that companies have yet to accomplish this successfully with their on-premise structured data, never mind social media data. But the time to start planning is now.
Among Colby’s followers are @BuckBasset, @Otis_the_Pug, @WinterKitten, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger (@Schwarzenegger). You can follow Colby on Twitter at www.twitter.com/Colby_the_Dog. She’ll follow you back just as soon as she finishes her bully stick.
Great post, Jill.
This part really resonated with me:
The very hard part is collecting and structuring that data, then integrating it with the rest of the customer’s profile in a sustainable way. One could argue that companies have yet to accomplish this successfully with their on-premise structured data, never mind social media data. But the time to start planning is now.
I agree that many organizations cannot walk and a bit of what you’re describing might sound like sprinting to them. I’m with you, though. You need to have a long-term goal about how to eventually do this. Social CRM (or whatever you want to call it) has to be predicated on proper apps, systems, data models, people, etc. If you don’t have a plan to get there, then you probably never will.
Creative solution to a problem facing many of us – where and how can/should we draw that line between work and personal lives? How do you pick and choose who to interact with in each realm?
Great post. And thanks for sharing Colby with us.
Great post Jill, some really valid points.
I think most sales and marketing teams are in the dark ages when it comes to social media demographic analysis, all the “soft squishy stuff” we write about that holds the real nuggets is completely ignored in my experience.
Case in point, the DQ salesperson who left a voicemail asking to visit my office and discuss “my project” last week.
“My project” consists mostly of consuming lashings of tea and biscuits whilst praying for some creative data quality writing mojo, a two minute tour of twitter would have “qualified me” instantly as a worthless prospect.
Waiting for the free USB memory stick and mouse mat to arrive in the post any day now…
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.
Great post Jill and as usual you are spot on! The challenge ahead for companies to integrate and assimilate our online persona’s is going to cause many executives to howl at the moon and chase their tales. The value however is clear and the companies that figure out how and the vendors who get the solutions to market first will get extra nap time in the station wagon. Those who continue to ignore Social CRM and Social data will be left to eat their own….
Every once in awhile I think I am a good writer. Then I read your stuff and learn otherwise! In addition to be funny, this post looks forward 5 years into one of the, if not the, most vexing problems in identity resolution. How do we identify multiple social personae as non-unique?
My first intuition would be IP address, but that won’t even work all the time.
Nice one, Jill. Now I’ll be sitting up thinking about this for the rest of the night!
My Dad is a little crosseyed when it comes to ‘social media’. He doesn’t really understand it very well. He mostly tosses out quotes on Twitter, but throws in a few commercial plugs. I told him not to do the commercial plugs, cuz no one would buy anything from a Pug anyway, but he doesn’t listen.
His Mom died of Breast Cancer in ’99 so he wants to start a support site for that. (BreastCancerAid on Twitter now, but wants to open a real site with a blog and forum for support.)
And he knows a doctor in San Diego that has a great protocol for bad spines, which he needs as he had a bad car accident 2 years ago and cannot work as He is in constant pain. (The doc also has great protocols for type 2 diabetes and hypothyroidism. But he lives 3,000 miles away, so getting there is tough).
He is trying to make enough money to live on thru the internet (He doesn’t want to live off ‘the public dime’), but that seems to be taking a while.
Anyway, most of your post is over his head, but he does like dogs (has 3 of them… all rescue dogs). Only trouble is since the accident he is home all day and has this strange idea that he is leader of this pack. I have been trying to set him staight, but it is difficult as I am blind in one eye, can hardly see out the other and I also have a bad back with a pinched nerve that I am on meds for, but I keep trying to explain that I am the leader, not him. Wish me luck and good luck with your seperation of personas.
~Otis The Pug
(PS- The website is a non-profit Breast Cancer support organization in New England his Dad set up in Daddy’s Mom’s name. He doesn’t like to put commercial links in other people’s blog posts. Even though he is a Flint River Ranch dog & cat food distributor, which has the best food I have ever eaten!… except for dried pig’s ears.
~Otis)