I was at Cloudforce in NYC this Wednesday, November 30th, 2011 for most of the day, networking and really, taking in a lot of information. Basically, I haven’t really been all that clear on all of Salesforce’s offerings, the various Clouds they are running, new acquisitions, products and company financials; all of that got taken care of Wednesday, though, and now I have a pretty good idea of what Salesforce offers.

I didn’t bother to take an pictures or even do a tweeting because I knew there were plenty of others taking care of that for me, and would rather focus on the content, which I did. As it was, the first 2.5 hours I was packed in a huge hall with 5000+ other attendees (the admission was free) listening to various presentations, including Marc Benioff. The Radian6 announcement with the Marketing Hub came late and I left just near the end to get a drink and avoid a massive crowd pouring out of the hall. The notes from RWW are fairly complete, there is no need for me to add much to it though I fully listened and felt I understood all of it even though it was filtered via Salesforce’s point of view (esp towards Oracle and Microsoft – not that I disagreed). And then there was the Salesforce/Radian6 Social Hub which was announced at Cloudforce (see video

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Here’s a quote from the RWW that I most keyed into:

‘….Keynote has definitely gone into fast-forward mode to get subject points finished. “We see marketing itself transforming. Marketing is the ability to really listen to customers.” Social marketing technology around Radian6, with social engagements and social hubs. Mention of Gatorade social media command center, which was the subject of a video at Dreamforce. Reintroduces Kraig. Radian6 can pull back every conversation that’s had on social media about a subject, including about TD Ameritrade. Can drill down into the classes of customers who are talking right now about a product. So much for needing to convene focus groups. “Social hub” technology can define automated rules for how cases are handled within an organization. So all the conversations about a product that meet specific criteria, such as needing a response, can be routed to campaign managers within an organization who can provide offers. Drill-down into customer social profile can show where she is and what she’s doing (she’s at the bank, she’s applying for a mortgage right now, can communicate offers right now). Can present offers back to the customer through iPhone or other mobile device.

My immediate thought was “nice going”, though I had questions, based on my own experiences with social listening (as detailed in my book) weather the data stream is clean enough to make the effort of the Social Hub worthwhile for most conversations.

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That’s my caveat. If the data were good, clean, relevant (which has as much to do with how Radian6 was setup, in the first place, which I think it is rarely, based on what I’ve seen and done, myself) then, yes, this automation engine can be very helpful. My biggest beef is that the governance process in most organizations, including the one’s I’ve worked for in the past, are so poorly understood, so poorly set up and so poorly maintained and funded, I’ve got to wonder if the automation engine, improperly configured, or not well thought out, would create more problems for the organizations that use it, then it solves.

As I need a Salesforce account along with my influencer account, I really can’t test this Marketing Hub out, and as each organization is different, and the topic profiles are maintained by whomever, the result of weather this new offering is going to help you or not, is up to how satisfied you are the data you get our of Radian6 now is what you wanted, how well it is categorized in the keyword groups you have, and how good you are at writing business rules in Salesforce to route the information back to whatever group is going to be getting the messaging.

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I can tell you right now, it’s hard enough for poorly paid and over worked social analysts and PR people to read through thousands of messages now (which don’t scale), what do you think a Trader, Banker or Investor is going to think when they get that same spaghetti with a bunch of Salesforce tickets to close out – they will scream! I know, I’ve worked in places that had trouble tickets to close out – so my answer to this is …. as it is to many things …. it all depends on how well your organization is set up and how well your governance to topic profiles is set up.

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If your happy with the the data you are getting and the profiles are reasonably clean (most of the mentions in the River of News are what you expected them to be, rather than full of porn, etc) then fine – if not, then stop, clean up your River of News first, and then write your business rules. And on the subject of business rules and routing – be careful that you have an organization that is large enough to justify the effort here. But having said all of that – I think this Business Marketing hub is a good thing, esp if you can get 2 years of data for your topic profile thrown in – and should the data from OpenAmplify, OpenCalasis, Klout and other, unannounced Insights partners be added to rules that can be filtered on, I can see a lot of benefit for certain types of organizations that have done the governance work and cleaned up their profiles sufficiently well. Some of the newer Insights partners may have data that would, indeed, be very interesting to write business rules against.

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But, as I identified myself as Analyst/Press when I registered, was invited to a press briefing immediately afterwards, so ended up in a press room with perhaps 75 or 80 others, including Marc Benioff, Marcel Lebrun and most of the senior Salesforce team, listening to questions being answered (I did not offer any of my own). I was surprised at the breadth of questions including financials and while this might not be that unusual for Marc Benioff to be challenged on Salesforce financials and projects (and how they are reported to Wall Street) it’s certainly the first time I sat in on such a briefing and I learned a lot more than I ever knew or expected about Salesforce and the companies they acquired, and how they did it / go about acquisitions.

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As luck had it, while leaving the news briefing, I bumped into Steve Gillmore, who works for Salesforce and ended up, by that very chance happenstance, being invited to an Analysts lunch where I had a chance to network with more top Salesforce execs and discuss, as well as discuss a project that has been ongoing, but which I can’t speak to yet (perhaps early next year, I will be able to do so).

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Web Journal Do you know how much Blogs influence purchasing decisions online? It would seem, according to the article in Emarketer, the more professional bloggers are, the less likely they are to have a bad relationship with the brands they are reporting on, which makes sense. Why would you want to tick off the brands that feed you? It’s an issue I often think about, though I don’t see myself as a professional blogger, but I am in this sense, an Industry blogger. Not sure what other conclusions you’d draw from this study.

McKinsey released a report that says companies are still struggling to measure the financial impact and capture customer data, not surprising. According the the McKinsey report:

….. few (companies) are taking the structural steps required to benefit from selling online or engaging consumers through new technologies such as social media. Indeed, most respondents indicate that companies are still trying to figure out how digital media can meaningfully improve their bottom lines. …… “Respondents also say they lack the internal leadership and resources to develop better analytical capabilities and, as a result, better information and insights about customers”. …… “Even looking solely at revenues from online sales, which should be straightforward to measure, 18 percent of marketing executives say they don’t know what share those sales were of total revenues last year; another two-thirds say such sales accounted for 10 percent or less of their companies’ annual revenues.”

That goes with my earlier rant about the Salesforce/Radian6 Marketing Hub – if your organization hasn’t done a lot of the basic work to prepare the data, what good is marketing automation they will provide? And lets face it, most of the issue with ROI tracking has more to do, not so much with the tools and platforms, which are quickly maturing, but the nature of the organizations and what maturity level they are at (as covered in Friday’s 7DEE webinar, see link below).

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Think about it. A friend of mine has an uncle that has an old apartment in Clinton Hill / Brooklyn that is falling apart and hasn’t had the walls painted in over 50 years. Sure, it might take two days to paint the apartment, but it might first take 3 weeks and 50,000 – 100,000 of preparation work to fix the structural problems with the walls and ceilings, much less the electrical outlets, before you’d even want to bother painting it! Too much of the tools and technologies unleashed by vendors are going to companies whose structural integrity and Social Maturity (as I covered in my 7DEE presentation Friday at Internet Evolution) are not ready for these tools -and lets face it, the platforms, themselves, are too immature, as of yet, to benefit the companies who want to use them (who probably aren’t sure what the business rules ought to be, and would not know how to write them in the first place). Message being, we need to get the fundamentals right before building anything much upon them – shaky foundation – no happy ending!!!!

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So, my sense of Cloudforce was optimism tempered with reality – I know the promise of these platforms and tools, and I also know the corporate and Marcom culture all too well, and realize the lack of support and understandings, therein. I know it’s all a moving target and at one point in the future, perhaps by 2015, the tools and technology will finally intersect with corporate cultures ready to receive and utilize it fully, but that day, for most, is not here yet – sorry to say.

Hey, maybe it’s good for me though – as I have a lot of people who want to talk to me lately about my insights – and that’s a good thing.

Interesting post on conversion rates and what drives traffic near the end of 2011 by IBM Coremetrics.

Social media drives limited direct traffic and sales but converts well

Looking at these figures, I think you’d agree with this statement, indeed Twitter has actually declined:

• Facebook 0.8% of visits 2011, 0.73% 2010
• Twitter 0.02% of visits, 0.07% 2010

Of course you need to use attribution models to understand the full path to purchase. This does beg the question – are we investing too much time/money in social media marketing compared to other channels?However the role of social media in generating awareness through amplification isn’t taken into account here and we are seeing a higher proportion of social media visits do convert:

• 9.2 percent of consumers that visited a retail site from a social media site made a purchase.
• This compares to 5.5 percent of all direct online shopping last year.
• Facebook accounts for 77 percent of all traffic from social networks.

This goes back to the ground we need to prepare before we can measure anything well. I just don’t think we do that enough to make social media ROI measurements accurate. The maturity of social media platforms is one thing, the maturity of organizations to capture and use that data, and RESPECT ANALYSTS AND ANALYTICS, is quite another thing. It’s the whole DNA thing, and Marcom, most of all, has totally failed at it -and will continually fail in the future. I wrote about it in my book and I stand by it.

Other links:

Note: I had a bunch of links at the end of this post but for some reason, WordPress ate them, so I’ll leave it for the next post.