As Google goes on struggling with +1 Button, facebook has gone one step ahead on their social plugins  including Like buttons and comments to provide some nifty analytics for the users. This will go a long way for publishers using facebook  social plugins to  have clear idea on what value social plugins are bringing and will definitely be an aid for analytics hungry marketers and enterprises.As is case with any analytic framework, it will make prioritization and decision making easy for users. Users will have definite idea on what kind of content is doing well as far as social graph is concerned letting them prioritize and channelize their content.

Here is a brief primer on what all information you can get from real time analytics from Facebook.

Engagement Analytics :

Likes :-Number of people saw like buttons, number of clicks, like stories viewed on facebook, click throughs on liked stories to your facebook.

Comments:-number of times people saw Comments Boxes, left comments, saw comment stories on Facebook, and clicked to see the content on your site.

Demographic Data:

Insights allows a demographic split of interactions happening on your pages and thus lets you target your users in a better way for example site owners can see what age group, gender, language or country is most active in using these plugins on their sites not this is per interaction data and not per user data also Facebook gives aggregate data and not individual data.

Take advantage of this free tool so that you can learn more about how to best target your audience. As the old saying goes first measure than manage

Companies big and small over the years have invested in CRM solutions  in the hope of extending the breadth and depth of their customer relationships , the purported benefits of CRM are well documented some of them you can see here

Over the years as organizations struggled to make sense of the investments they made in CRM, they have been stung by another disruption the  S (Social) word, the customer which CRM as a tool would have helped them manage has gone social , and know organizations have to figure out ways , how to manage a Social Customer, Jeremiah Owyang has shown the various use cases , which summarize the SCRM challenges here.

One of the critical challenges organization face is how to create actionable  and responsive social strategy in light of so much information being thrown around on various social channels like twitter, facebook , while various social media analytic vendors like Radian6 , lithium have created social dashboards which help organizations to track their social pulse , there are not many quality tools which integrate with CRM, and produce actionable social intelligence( if i may use this word ).

The challenges are more acute for Small and medium organizations using open source CRM solutions like Sugar CRM, VTiger etc to manage their social customer relationships.

I think there is a big opportunity for some nifty startup to solve this growing problem of creating an actionable Social Module for CRM.

In my last post , i had refered to broad parameters to look at when you are planning to buy an affiliate software,today i share with you a live case study , where we helped one of our clients to make this decision, the client in consideration is an Online Marketing agency, trying to build its own affiliate software platform. The detailed case study is embedded below.

If you want to know more on how we can help you do this , mail us to at biznotek@gmail.com or ping us on twitter our twitter handle is @biznotek

Recently, a comment on one of our posts (The cost aspects of CRM for SMBs) led us to analyze a web based SaaS application WORKetc. WORKetc as the name suggests is an enterprise application which helps you manage your work flows and plus,It  follows the rule of 80-20 and takes the most used features of CRM, Project Management and Invoicing and clubs them into an easy to use application.  Lets have a look at the offerings of the service with regards to a few keypoints.

Why WORKetc : The pain points that WORKetc targets to address are :

• A lot of different softwares for different functions lead to high maintainence and training costs. WORKetc lets small businesses consolidate down to the single software.
• Customer have started with either too simple or too high level software. This has led to increased complexities and increased costs in the system.

Who will use WORKetc: WORKetc positions itself as an application that helps consolidating your work flow right from generating a sales lead to the end of project thus offering several advantages including:

• Reduction of training costs as employees get trained only in one software.
• Providing consistent look and feel to the whole workflow.
• Reduction of IT budget as you dont invest in multiple applications.

The above said positioning makes the application very lucrative for the Freelancers and small/medium businesses which can’t afford costs of multiple software apps and have resource crunch in the form of time and money to train the resources. Most of the human resources for such businesses are usually remote resources and its really impractical for them to train so many remote contractors.

What is Inside (Feature Set): WORKetc is a relatively complex application since it consolidates many single purpose applications into one but folks at WORKetc have done a great a job in figuring out the most valuable features for each use case while still maintaining the intuitive UI and a great UX. The feature set includes but not limited to:

• Web Based CRM
• Project Management Software
• Invoice & Billing Software
• Shared Software
• Helpdesk managment
• Document management
• Email Campaign Management

A more comprehensive list of features can be found out at WORKetc’s site.

How Much it costs : WORKetc comes at an affordable and genuine price tag. The plans start from as small as 29$ per month for a single user license and you can buy licenses on per user basis. You can have as many clients as like without paying for them. Only employees of your company need to have a license. A 15 days trial is available without even the need of a Credit Card. You can signup for the trial here.

What more can be done: A Few welcome additions to the application would be:

• The CRM module is quite complete but addition of marketing campaigns would be a great additional feature.

Conclusion: Although a great application, but WORKetc is currently oriented to Freelancers/companies who run most of their business online.  It would help you considerably reduce your Saas applications budget and training cost. But if you are a CRM user who works mostly offline like Export/Insurance sector SMBs, then WORKetc might not be the right solution for you.

If you are planning to set up an affiliate network and want to have a strong technology platform to support your network, you would face a fork in the road build or buy, 10 years ago this decision might have been easier with Affiliate network platforms not vastly developed, there were limited choices, but situation today is more complex, so factors that will drive decisions today will be significantly different from what were there  10 years ago.

Central theme in the whole discussion remains the same though will the solution i select be scalable, flexible and secure to cater to my business needs not only of today but next 5 years also.

In this context as part of one of our consulting assignment we helped one of our clients to take this decision, while our analysis was focused for the current client in consideration , but there are some general pointers which can help other folks who are looking to set up their own affiliate networks.

• Time to Market
• Development Costs
• Maintenance costs
• Up-gradation Costs
• Customization
• Initial Set up cost
• Customer preferences
• Availability of best industry features

In my next post I will share a case study where we used some of these pointers to evaluate buy versus build decision for an online media company.

Recently I held several discussions with a few of my friends running small companies(sub 1 million dollars). The meeting was  purposed specifically on the point of why they are not using the CRM to manage their sales team(I dont say sales force here because a sub one million dollar company can afford only a small team) and the most common myth amongst them was that CRM is an expensive software both in terms of resources(cash and people) and time.

Before going deep into this topic,  Lets analyze the expectations of a normal SMB from their sales team. Similar to other organizations, SMBs want their sales team to :

1. Manage different types of conversations that can happen between a company and a consumer and learn about their needs .
2. The team is then supposed to analyze their needs and make proper promotions to the user at strategic times in the future.

CRMs are built to handle the above two requirements. Other wide spread use of CRM is to manage support tickets and calls from the users.

Given the advantages that a CRM brings to the table, its worth a shot to analyze the costs associated with deploying a CRM for a small organization. Let me be crystal clear before we move ahead, the cost associated is not an absolute zero and if you are looking for an absolute zero kinda idea on CRM deployment, then this post might not be worth a read for you further. But one thing that i can assure is that the small cost associated with CRM deployment is really worth a shot given the boost that it can give to your sales graph. To estimate the effectiveness of the application of CRM to your business, you must take an informed decision and evaluate atleast the following factors before going all guns.

CRM Installation and infrastructure Costs: A good CRM incurs some cost to be installed at the consumer site. But here comes open source to the rescue. There are a lot of good open source CRMs(SugarCRM, vTiger etc) available these days that come with easy to use installers and the only cost that you would need to incur is the cost of hosting(shared hosting is available ranging from 3$per month to maximum of 10$ per month depending upon the choice of your host). Data storage is also so cheap these days(You can look at the amazon plans to know more about them)

Customization Costs: Its quite a possibility that the default CRM installation does not match your business requirements exactly. You might need additional functionality to get your business representation effectively on a CRM. It used to cost a lot of money during late nineties and early twenties but today a lot of CRMs come with easy to use configuration tools which have made customizations a real cake walk even for a non technical user.  Most of the customizations can be handled using the embedded configuration tools. In case you need to get some module or functionality built which can’t be handled by these configuration settings, then you can easily hire a good cheap developer to do the customizations for you(Crowd sourcing based freelance portals like odesk, elance, Rentacoder, getafreelancer etc are the key here).

CRM Training Costs: A lot of people would argue that the training costs of a CRM is too high. With open source coming into play,  a lot of users now contribute their knowledge to the  community and hence lot of knowledge base is available regarding the effective CRM usage (obviously for good CRMs like SugarCRM). With the advent of social networks and portals every good CRM software have got an end point like facebook pages, twitter account where you can reach the maintainers of the software and they will help you in the right direction for training your employees in their software.  Though there would be a bit of training cost involved initially but it wont scale linearly like the older days rather it would keep on decreasing as you build your business on top of it.

CRM Maintainence Cost: Technically it would be nothing more than the hosting cost that you would require to host the CRM plus the database and the file system costs(which have gone to dirt cheap levels with amazon’s cloud hosting leading from the front and will go cheaper in future).

With all that said, Its worth a shot to compare the cost of using a CRM with the boosts in the sales that the CRM brings to your specific business before taking the final decision of going ahead with CRM deployment(I will take up how a company can use a CRM in a seperate post). After all its all about increasing the profitability.

For years we all have witnessed the evolution of social networks for personal interactions to transform into business interactions. Traditional business marketing strategies are in a phase of accepting these new changes yet falling behind by eons when it comes to accepting social media as a game changer. My personal belief is that Future businesses will grow through medium of community sharing via Technical innovation combined with information flow among the social ecosystem. For those with a foresight, they know that social revolution is here to stay and it requires changes in business approach and its support techniques such as CRM.

So where to begin from. A great probability is your company is already in social space doing some tits and bits here and there and a CRM Strategy. But what most of such forays fail to survive a great length of time, and looses the sheen, since they fail to bring these two wheels roll in tandem as one service.

The Social CRM should be treated as a part of whole CRM Strategy. Many of the times, while concentrating on the social facet, the CRM is kept in the back drop as a standard tool. Following should help you to lay ground rules to move in this direction.

1. SWOT: First step should be analyzing your current or potential CRM service. We all know, not each and every CRM serves all the purposes and they are always a part of the organization whole strategy to manage customers. So acknowledge the strength of the CRM wrt to Social media.

2. Flexibility: Count in the factors such as flexibility to accomodate ever changing demands, business processes, long term need of the customer adaption.

3. Robustness: Social media differs from Traditional customer interaction. Where as traditional media are one way driven, social is 360 degree interaction b/w customer and the organization. The CRM should be robust enough to support these interactions real time else, it will be a discontinued customer experience if CRM can not leverage this.

4. Integration: Users can search on linkedin, leave feedback on facebook, point on twitter and the CRM  focussing the data and source, can allow to respond back seamlessly from the CRM without having to go to individual source which might be tedious and unproductive at large volumes.

5. Ease of Use: Multiple Account handling is a topping on the cake when it comes to manage customers across the networks via many to many interactions.

If your CRM miss on any of these, you need to address these issues before taking a step forward in going with Social CRM.

In our coming articles, We will continue to focus on the holistic approach of picturing out the comprehensive social CRM solution to harness the vast potential of socialCRM for your organization.

In my last post covering the application Pay with Tweet , I had alluded to the fact how social payments can evolve and how brands can use social networks to further their message, last week Brian Solis (@brian solis) along with Vocus have come out with a research paper , which fills an important cog in this wheel ” Influence”, The detailed report can be downloaded here . I am summarizing the important points covered in the report.

• Influence is different from Popularity
• Quality of network and quality of content have a defining impact on influence
• Content is king, but context is also very important
• Effective measurement is still an area where executives are divided,but still majority feel the action is the most important tool to measure effectiveness of social media.
• Executives are willing to pay for the influence .

Well in context of social payment, two important things come out , one is that now we have a clear notion of usability of influence and proxies to measure it, secondly and importantly the marketers  are ready to pay for the influence .

In my view this has huge ramifications for the social payment system and will enable  the development of tools which will help brands engage with influencer’s, and also pay them ( in cash/kind) for the value they might add. These alternate payment systems can sit parallel to or integrate with the current loyalty systems the users might be exposed to and also work as stand alone offer based systems ( like pay with tweet).
There are obviously apparent challenges for these kind of system to work, would love to hear from you guys and may be we can have a next post on that

We have been listening a lot about social payments in the last 2-3 years, with the ballistic growth of social networks and social properties , some kind of commercial activity had to set in and whenever any commercial activity sets in payments or transfer of money ( real or virtual) has to be in place,Social Gaming networks , have long experimented virtual currencies and other things, Facebook credits, Virtual credits for games are some of the interesting things happening in the space .

I recently came across a service called ‘PAY WITH TWEET’, this is an interesting use case, how social payments may evolve in future, what Pay with tweet does is it allows you access to good and services in exchange for you tweeting about that service. So in nut shell, you pay by marketing for the brand or product, the basic premise of the service is brands/services can make more money by promoting their product rather than just selling it to the user, because of inherent virality involved on various social networks.

These kind of payment method comes with all the usual baggage which all payments come with including fraud,settlement(between seller and marketer), reconciliation etc.

Pay with tweet though does not involve any money exchange currently, but i thinks this is one area they need to work on because in any payment transactions some money exchange (at certain level) should happen to make it viable and scalable .

Inspite of this it is  an interesting use case , where your network on twiiter or facebook can decide how much money you can make,sounds similar to multilevel marketing in automode . where your network decides how much you can earn, though users and brands need to be careful in designing such campaigns as social networks are integrated chain based systems , where good words and bad words spread with equal speed .

Recently, I read an article on the growth of android and how its going to beat the iOS share by 2012. The article took me back to the thoughts of the old Desktop wars when Apple and Microsoft were up against each other in a battle where the former was almost thrown out of the business by the later. This time its the smartphone market(growing year over year and expected to be much bigger than the desktop market in the times to come) and the battlefield is set for Apple but with Google this time around(Hey, you left out RIM, Nokia bla bla… Atleast I dont remember them any more … ). The battles are thought to be very similar in a lot of aspects but Apple still looks like following the same path but much more carefully this time (C’mon man, you are being too early to comment). Rest assured, I am a normal human being(no Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Eric Schmidt) and I just tried to analyze the series of events that took place in the battle of 90′s with the events that are taking place in the current battlefield:

The Beautiful Macintosh:

No doubt that Macs were and are beautiful and would remain beautiful since this is what the Apple pioneers in, The User  aesthetics. Now, looking at the battle of desktops, most of the users at the time the battle started were either business users or the educational institutes with an exception of few geeks using the desktops.  The Macs were beautiful but they required you to have a deep pocket to enjoy the beauty. A per mac difference of say some hundred dollars would make a difference of thousands of dollars to a business planning to build their inventory. Businesses rarely cared about the beauty of the machine and apple really had no response to the cost of hardware it used to build its machines.

The ongoing battle is quite different with regards to this aspect. Low call charges and low device costs have lead to a real diverse mobile user base. A huge percentage of this user base places the looks and user aesthetics on priority when it comes to their handset and iPhone really wins hands down on this aspect. Over the last one decade, Apple has also been phenomenal in reducing the cost of their hardware and bring it down to the levels of their competition(take ipod for instance) and as a result of this, you can get the beautiful iPhone at price tag almost similar to any good smart Android device.

The external influence(aka vendors, carriers, developers etc):

As Micrsoft’s OS penetrated further into the market, more number of vendors started building the MS based PCs which lead to further decrease of price of a fully built desktop and hence more problems for Apple. Vendors cut each other’s profits but MS was enjoying cash from its core competency i.e the commercial software. Similarly Developers went on to make the most robust applications for the windows platform making it even stronger and better(shall i say useful).

The challenge for Apple in the today’s era is two fold but a closer look at the challenges gives a feeling that the challenges dont carry that much weight as they did in the desktop era:

1. Apple would never let any other hardware vendor use its proprietary operating system, which is quite understandable.
2. Apple has introduced another layer of external influence i.e the carriers. Apple has bound the iPhone to AT&T network in U.S. Locking iPhone to a carrier is a big stumble block for the users but mind it that Apple is selling it unlocked as well this time, making it a hybrid strategy rather than a rigid hardware bound strategy during the desktop battle .(iPhone is unlocked in a few countries like France, Singapore and comes with two of the major carriers in India(Airtel and Vodafone)).

Last but not the least of the external influences is the developers(developing the much needed applications for the platform). The developer community in today’s world is hardly any problem (as compared to the times when the MS/Apple battle took  place (a few rare species were called as developers then). Developer community is so large in number today that every vendor would get a share of developers dedicated to their platform or building applications across the platforms. You question any feature that you would like to have in today’s smart phone it would be invariably present in almost all the good smartphones regardless of whether its a iPhone or an android or a windows phone (The statement is still much true for an iPhone but others also dont lag that much behind).

The Real Battle

Now here comes the real question. Who is actually fighting the battle? Is it Apple vs all the other hardware vendors plus the Google? No, its not. Its just Apple vs The Google Android. Google Android is an open-source platform and Google is a working on a revenue sharing model with hardware vendors as of now(after failure and withdrawl of Google Nexus One from the market) and trying to integrate their main business(Ads) to the mobile business. Every one knows that one day or the other, Android would get forked (You can say that why would i use some other fork than using the fork directly supported by Google but thats would require separate post to discuss). Now when these forks come into existence then who knows if Android will start showing the downward trend and the battle would suddenly seem like a dummy one.

All in all, Apple seems to be very careful this time and is pretty determined to win the battle as they know the game much better this time around.