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Social Business – Raising the Bar
Social Business means replacing numbers with people. Social Business means turning the data into stories. Every customer has a story to tell. It’s the businesses that help customers tell their story, engage them in dialogue and then make these insights count that will win in the next decade.
Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple are all gearing their operations towards Social Business – breaking down the walls, immersing themselves in customer communities, throwing out traditional marketing and research techniques and canning the creative agency.
These 4 software companies are also raising the bar. By launching their own handsets replete with payment and app ecoystems, becoming a Social Business will not just be a nice “fuzzy” area of business to dress the annual report or farm out to your social media agency but about survival.
Social Business = Customers Telling Their Story
Dylan holds out his shiny new iPhone 4S. It still has the plastic film protecting the screen.
“I don’t wanna scratch it and get messed up,” he enthuses as he tries reflecting the ceiling lights from the screen across the room.
“I have an iPod touch,” he says patting his back jeans pocket, “so I have some Jailbreak apps to carry across. Plus I’m familiar with the layout.”
We’re on the East Coast of the US talking teenagers about their mobile phone behavior. Dylan is sitting at the breakfast bar of his house with Tom and Jimmy, two friends from high school. They’re engrossed in Dylan’s display. We haven’t even got to the iPhone’s FaceTime yet. After the interviews we debrief with our client – a senior manager from a mobile company.
She sips her drink slowly and turns to us saying, “I never thought teens would be the main buyers of iPhones. How can they afford them? That just totally blew me away.”
When you want to understand what teenagers want, you have to do it in the environment where they make key decisions – surrounded by friends, at home, in malls. In-situ dialogue, in the real world context of teenage lives, provides powerful insights not afforded to traditional market research techniques. We’ve been careful to avoid the mistakes so many brands have made in this space – focus groups and market research communities. Simply taking focus groups online (as is the fad with market research communities) removes all the decision making and social dynamics that shape youth behavior.
500 million teenagers own a mobile phone according to our research. That’s a market worth nearly $100 billion annually.
Because this generation of Optimizers contributes less than 15% of industry revenues, mobile companies are apt to ignore their real value. SMS, Facebook, MP3s, BBM – all brought to you by teens. Mark Zuckerberg, 19. Shawn Fanning, 19. Your daughter who spends all evening messaging her friends through BBM, 13.
Social Media is not Social Business
Embracing their individual stories isn’t about adopting social media. It’s not about any choices in media, but choices in mindset. Getting onto social media is a start but nothing more – it’s a means to achieve a bigger end.
The perennial challenge of “engaging teens” cannot be solved by getting onto Facebook, Twitter and so on, it needs to be addressed by an internal attitude and adoption of Social Business strategies. Judging by many of the creative agency offerings over the last 2 years, it’s quite possible that using social media can turn you into an Anti-Social Business.
The current challenge lies in ingrained habits. Creative agencies are built on Anti-Social Business models (telling the brand story, controlling the conversation). Mobile companies have traditionally been driven by widening market shares over deepening of relationships with individual customers. It’s only when new entrants (such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook) enter the market with established Beachheads that the challenge becomes a real problem. Mobile companies are ill-prepared to deal with these companies.
Mobile companies have 3 years to transform their practises from Anti-Social to Social Business. By 2015, Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook will have it sewn up.
The Change Agents
For the mobile industry’s next generation of customers – today’s teenagers - Social Business will be a pre-requisite of success. Not only will Social Business create the needed Earned Media for recommendation, it will also help identify and reduce the causes of churn and provide a conduit to this generation’s innovative capacity.
Incumbent mobile players have key positions of strength to play from. Apple has the Teenage Pirates. Nokia once had this market and is struggling to recover it. Blackberry has the ear of teenage girls and the Disruptive Divas. SonyEricsson, HTC and Samsung are making inroads. But, to capitalize on these key strengths these companies need to make a commitment to Social Business now.
78% of teens prefer to use SMS to cover all their communication needs. In the mobileYouth report 2012 we identify the mobile as having 5 distinct social functions for teenagers. Interestingly, these functions almost always start with teens and percolate into the older markets within 5 years. That means you can pre-empty what your high-end users will be doing tomorrow by looking at what teens are doing today. ooVoo, TinyChat, oMegle are just a few examples of trends bubbling under that will manifest in some form or another in the adult market in months to come. If Blackberry et al are going to identify the next BBM or mobile email they need to start looking at what teens are doing today. It won’t come from within the industry or from the design agency.
Partnering with Teenage Pirates is key to the Social Business transformation. Succeeding in this market will not only require a Social Business strategy (as outlined in the mobileYouth report section 3 on Customer Experience) but also help mobile companies refine it.
Ford has successfully employed a Social Business strategy to capture the young college student market – it’s a business case success story in the making that will become the content of MBA courses in years to come: “How to reinvent a brand without advertising.”
Dylan’s Story
Anti-Social Business builds walls, relies on creative agencies for direction and reduces contact with the real world. That’s why you get mobile executives saying “teenagers are bored of the iPhone.” They say that because they’ve never been out to the real world. I’m not talking about talking to teenagers online or in focus groups but out there – the 3Hs as we say in our research – Home, Hangouts and Hideouts.
“My older brother had one,” Dylan explains when asked who influenced him to buy the phone.
“So I saved all summer to get it. My parents didn’t want me to have it, saying I could use his [brother's] old iPhone but it was only 2nd generation. I wanted the video. Plus it looks way cooler.”
Dylan’s friends nod approvingly. Jimmy fumbles with his Samsung phone in his hand, glancing across at Dylan’s phone with coveting looks before turning to Dylan and asking
“Maybe I could have your brother’s one?”
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