Social, Customer-Obsessed, and Sharing

+ Below are a few snippets that I've been reading this morning on Social, shift in models to "customer-obsessed" not just customer-centric, and results from a social sharing report.

Disruption Demands 'Customer-Obsessed' Model references a Forrester report titled, "Competitive Strategy In the Age of the Customer."

"A customer-obsessed company focuses its strategy, its energy, and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of engagement with customers, and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers. Previous sources of competitive dominance--manufacturing, distribution, even information mastery--are now just table stakes."

To be customer-obsessed, a company must pull budget dollars from brand advertising, distribution lock-up, mergers for scale and supplier relationships, and invest in four priority areas, according to the report: real-time customer intelligence; customer experience and customer service; sales channels that deliver customer intelligence; and useful content and interactive marketing.

Another study by Starcom MediaVest Group and privately held ShareThis conducted what they "termed the most comprehensive study yet on social sharing", titled "Sharing, More Than Just Friends, Fans and Followers."

Specific findings included:
•10% of Web site visits come from sharing -- half as much as from search. Sharing also accounts for 31% of referral traffic.

• Facebook is the largest sharing channel, accounting for 38% of all shares. Twitter and email are next, tied at 17%.

• Shared links are clicked on 4.9 times each, on average, across all sharing channels, so content shared by large groups of people reach a wider audience than content passed along from others.

• Instead of one person being universally influential on a wide range of topics, many people are influential on only one or two topics.

They claim that this is the first in a series.

Forrester: 5 Stages Of Social Media Growth. Forrester has outlined five stages and specific steps to accelerating the growth process. They include The Dormant Stage, Distributed Chaos, The Coordinating Stage, The Scaling and Optimizing Stage, and The Empowering Stage.

Much of the hype around social media makes it sound like if you open a Facebook page or Twitter account then you can shut down your advertising, turn off your company email, your customers and employees will then swoon, and marshmallows will fall from the sky," Corcoran explains. "In reality, social media is still very nascent, and it is a lot of work."

Most definitely this last comment is something so many companies don't get. It takes time and because publishing is so easy, it's not something that they think of. But the web doesn't sleep, so those who think they can run their social programs only from 9am-5pm, need to realize that it's not how it works (at least not successfully).