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Better Junk Mail – Quick Analysis from the Enterprise 2.0 World

New Liver

With Enterprise 2.0 this week (where I’ll be for an afternoon and a few evenings), there’s plenty of social networking integration for business buzz going around. Essentially, over the past year there’s been a (relative) slew of offerings that allow companies to integrate with social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, and often seek to lace in social networking aspects into other offers.

Social CRM

The Altimeter Group has a nice paper, and category, touching on much of this: Social CRM:

[C]ompanies need an organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web – giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.

Social CRM does not replace existing CRM efforts – instead it adds more value. In fact, Social CRM augments social networking to serve as a new channel within existing end-to-end CRM processes and investments. Social CRM enhances the relationship aspect of CRM and builds on improving the relationships with more meaningful interactions. As the “Godfather of CRM,” Paul Greenberg notes, “We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction – or the data associated with it… Social CRM focuses on engaging the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s (i.e. Social CRM is) the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

Self-service Sales Funnels

Google Moble Ads keep getting weird

The interest in Social CRM is a lot more, well, CRM-oriented than the data-mining aspects I’m interested in, but it’s different faces of the same opportunity. In these things, I tend to play a seemingly Debbie Downer role with my line that “all roads lead to better junk mail.” I’m not actually one of the Adbuster faithful here, but I do think it’s important for people to realize what sites like Facebook &co. are enabling businesses to do and the free, self-service sales funnel labor “consumers” are doing for large companies.

In whatever this space is called (it’s definitely something in the “Enterprise 2.0” orbit), the ability to connect to existing social networks and web sites is spreading more virally than SharePoint. Merely “connecting” to sites isn’t the main thing: bi-directional integration and sucking out customer/user data is the real cream in the chocolate egg.

There’s really no end of vendor offerings in this space. Offerings like the “coming soon” Salesforce Chatter kind of shoe-horn here as well as things like Jive’s “New Agenda for Social Business”. While folks like Eloqua, Loopfuse, and even traditional web analytics folks like Adobe Omniture are (or should be) all circling around this like hungry vultures. There’s plenty of companies I’m leaving off, check out the Social CRM paper for a metric butt-ton of them.

Why Now

"Bluedouche"

There’s several things going on here to enable this:

  1. A good saturation of consumers and customers in sites like Twitter, Facebook, and other places – these are people who are spending money with companies that are the potential customers for vendors in this area.
  2. All of the demographic data (location, background, affinities), photos, and relationship tagging is creating the best junk-mail targeting cloud ever know and companies want to mine the crap out of that data to sell more to their customers
  3. The wide spread use of open APIs and data standards (de facto and otherwise) are enabling technology companies to wire together their software with these online sites, making it technologically and economically feasible for folks like Jive to suck in all that social data.
  4. Finally, the most speculative thing: there’s just something about Apple’s iPhone and iPad innovations that makes people believe that IT can actually help grow their business now-a-days. This a is huge shift from the “IT is a black-pit of budget send and I have a 500 meg email quote to-boot” attitude that’s existing for a decade or more.

Throw in the slight opening of budget coffers in 2010, and it’s a good time for the better junk-mail segment of Enterprise 2.0.

Internal Uses Too

And this is just a take on companies using social business software like this for external social network use, to profit from their customers. There’s a whole slew of other things they could do with their own employees, business partners, and competition.

The negative side is Big Brother monitoring. It goes way beyond finding people who goof off during work hours: the classic “I hate my job/boss” firing, tracking “inappropriate” behavior (we can’t have our employees posting pictures of themselves getting wasted), detecting when people are job hunting (when they update their LinkedIn profiles), when personal matters may effect work (getting married, pregnant, all those “evil” things), hunting down casual industrial espionage (your Intel employee is a little too buddy-buddy with AMD people)…and so on.

The positive side is more along the lines of companies realizing the smarts they have in their employees heads and the horizontal connections – and then, of course, re-orienting work to take advantage of them and (we’d hope) figure out compensating employees beyond the org. tree. HR departments has a real chance to shine here as something way beyond “the people we pay a lot to hand out our vacation calendar.” And, for secured, SaaS offerings like Yammer, it’s just a brain-dead cheap way to increase knowledge sharing and collaboration, vague-yet-important as those two areas are.

Many of the evolving, Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms like Salesfore Chatter, MindTouch, some Lotus offerings, etc.) fit here.

Turning expensive information into free information

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
Stewart Brand’s full “information wants to be free” quote, 1984

Back to the external social business mechanics: the main point is that many companies are realizing that the self-service demography and categorization people people do in social networking sites is a gold-mine for doing excellent junk mail: selling more stuff to customers, keeping existing customers happy, getting new customers, and gathering the intelligence needed to keep doing all of those.

The fantastic (or depressing part if you’re from the throw a brick through the McDonald’s window, No Logo crew) is that your customers provide the most expensive, valuable, and difficult to attain types of information for free. Users of social network sites are self-segment and declare their interests to merchants, micro-targeted down to the individual, all for free.

Put another way, you’re just data.

(The above is massaged and blended from a reply to Katherine Noyes for her piece on Jive.)

Disclosure: Salesforce, MindTouch, IBM, and Microsoft are customers. See the RedMonk client list for other relevant clients.

Categories: Collaborative, Enterprise Software, Marketing, Quick Analysis, The New Thing.

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Comment Feed

16 Responses

  1. The most worrisome aspect of all this is how few people actually grok that "better junk mail" is a bad thing!

  2. Yeah, that topic was such a vast rabbit hole I didn't want to get too deep into it.

  3. From a tactical perspective it is paradigm the individual gets equiped with the equivalent tools and infrastructure as the corporate. This in order to ensure the individual full access control over his personal data.
    And only then can we have the conversation and/or a level playing field.

    luk vervenneJune 15, 2010 @ 2:14 am
  4. Split right down the middle on this one.

    1. Agree social will help drive better spam. Social can be a great new source of insights used for targeting.

    2. Believe the days of email for awareness and trial are nearing an end. For retention, or activation, sure, but no longer for the 1st touch.

    Agree?

  5. I’m split right down the middle on the idea of better junk mail.

    On one hand, I totally agree, that social is starting to break into disciplines, not just one overarching strategy (and I don’t think it will look like the Altimeter list from a marketers perspective), and that one of those is going to be intelligence driven. Extracting insights from social is what will drive improved targeting for spamming.

    With that said, however, I also think emails use as an awareness, trial tool is coming to a rapid close. For retention and activation, sure, but not for spam.

    Do you agree? What is the future of email?

    – Tewks
    Themarketingmojo.com

Continuing the Discussion

  1. […] associated with tracking customer’s every move (file under “privacy is dead” and “better junk mail”) and integrating that into your sales and account management […]

  2. […] analytics associated with tracking customer’s every move (file under “privacy is dead” and “better junk mail”) and integrating that into your sales and account management […]

  3. […] dominance on the web and mobile. Google, on the other hand, can use its piles of cash from selling better junk mail (online ads) to fund almost anything without having to worry about revenue […]

  4. […] dominance on the web and mobile. Google, on the other hand, can use its piles of cash from selling better junk mail (online ads) to fund almost anything without having to worry about revenue […]

  5. […] to image what others could do with similar data sets. Most will just use it for Better Junk Mail (http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2010…), but even that is a good market.Riptano, also pointed out by Michelle Greer – they're the […]

  6. […] data, and start to image what others could do with similar data sets. Most will just use it for Better Junk Mail, but even that is a good market. See my fellow RedMonker Stephen O’Grady’s take as […]

  7. […] data, and start to image what others could do with similar data sets. Most will just use it for Better Junk Mail, but even that is a good market. See my fellow RedMonker Stephen O’Grady’s take as […]

  8. […] The point (business use) of these Big Data & Analytics projects is easy to gloss over, esp. when the technology is overly fetishized (and why not? it’s damn impressive stuff). The nut is that data processing previously only available to spies, scientists, and weatherman is now affordable to “everyone” (at least, mid-tier and full-on enterprise shops). The main thing missing from much of this talk are examples of what having that kind of computational power means, from interesting to boring. IBM’s Smart Planet stuff is largely about Big Data – applying it and how IT & business can/should change in response to more analytics. But, other than that the examples get fuzzy – except for the stuff Facebook potentially does with highly targeted ads, which I stick in the bucket of Better Junk Mail. […]

  9. […] offers, community driven procurement & brand management (think Amazon reviews, BazaarVoice, and social media as better junk mail) and other “program the consumer” efforts to separate the sucker from their dollar more […]

  10. […] bought already and keep them from leaving you) and/or sell them more stuff. I call the idea “better junk mail”, but that’s a pretty cynical take on it. Getting a more intimate relationship with your […]