article How social media is an interruption to the traditional consumer decision making journey in Applications Services Blog

How social media is an interruption to the traditional consumer decision making journey

micaela.raimondi — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:00:51 GMT

Social media channels enable the brand to extend its personality to engage with consumers on their terms, when they want, at work and play, through their chosen channels. From a brand engagement perspective, applications or content meant to entertain, inform, or educate, can be designed to connect with consumers wherever they are, whenever they want -fish where the fish are :)

They can be used throughout the customer cycle—to make people aware of the brand, to encourage them to buy, or to help manage service issues and dissatisfaction. They can be used over the product cycle, to help design new products, to increase their speed to market, to understand the functions and features that customers most like. They can also be used to optimize the costs of sales, marketing, and service incurred by engaging customers and managing transactions, by providing new communication channels to replace traditional media or to make them more effective.

Learn how seeing the "unseen" qualities of your customers can affect their experience with your business

Evangelists see the “social revolution“ as putting customers at the heart of business—customer centricity on steroids if you like. They argue, convincingly, that we can listen to, understand, and engage with customers in ways that were previously impossible.

Social intelligence is the knowledge of customers that arises from combining insights into customers’ social media behavior with the classic customer intelligence arising from conventional marketing and customer relationship management. It allows us to manage real time, or near real-time conversations with customers, listen to their points of view, and deliver contextual, relevant, and engaging communications—not just “interruptions“ to a customer’s day. And these communications can be delivered increasingly through mobile devices that provide content exactly when people need it. However, to do this, companies have to deal with new data sources and combinations, new technologies, new ways of working, new talent, new ways to measure, and a new way of thinking—and this comes at a cost.

Read this white paper to learn more about how HP is helping its clients build their Social Business Strategy: Social Intelligence approaches to support four core customer scenarios

Join us for an interactive conversation to discuss the unique challenges and opportunities companies are experience because of social media, only on Twitter using hashtag #HPESchat on Tuesday, April 24th from 12-1 p.m. CT. See you there!

Re: How social media is an interruption to the traditional consumer decision making journey

Bill Graham — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:57:52 GMT

Great article to start off another week! It certainly is timely. I had a few questions that have been answered at least in part.

Web 2.0 democratized the Internet by creating interactive applications that allowed people to engage with one another and change their web experience in a way that expressed their points of view. It allowed ordinary people with no coding skills to publish their thoughts freely.

I've recently read that Web 3.0 is on the way, with a highly individualized web experience that's based on personal data. The Internet will become a huge personal assistant. I giant version of Siri, if you will.

What hardware devices or components, if any, does HP forecast for taking advantage of Web 3.0 and protecting the privacy concerns that will certainly arise from the "Do-Not-Track" legislation we're going to see and the W3C policies being drafted now? Does HP envision a day when hardware itself will be part of the security solution? Finally, how will BI and metadata work with future HP devices and components to enhance and drive Web 3.0?

I've read about such ideas in the past. Is this a ridiculous question, or does it have some validity? Just curious. :)

Re: How social media is an interruption to the traditional consumer decision making journey

micaela.raimondi — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:03:37 GMT

Thank you Bill for your comment. Well Web 3.0 represents the next generation of information infrastructure and will enable an unparalleled level of intelligence performing complex tasks-such as understanding and reasoning- at enormous scale and efficiency.

Organizations are using this new infrastructure to provide a variety of innovative capabilities, including faster access to and discovery of information through powerfully intelligent decision-making applications.

The Facebook open graph is a great example of Web 3.0’s simple scalability. Open graph includes a format for marking up Web pages based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Semantic Web data model, so that anyone with a website can incorporate Facebook’s markup to define what the site is about. This goes beyond basic metadata because the descriptions enable Web users to find and connect with their friends who have similar interests.

A more relevant search results is another key benefits of Web 3.0. As applied to Web commerce, this means that businesses can now put additional information into product descriptions and online ads to make them easier for search engines to find. Best Buy, for example is at the forefront of using this technology to leverage its e-commerce efforts. It is using RDF markup to produce more targeted search results, to examine product attributes more closely and make more granular product comparisons.

It is clear that in this new contest the future of data security is very important (both for end-users and organizations!). When you have a world where everything that you do is being marked up (in one form or another), the ability to protect this feed will be crucial. But on this point I invite you to follow our blogs to know what HP is doing. thanks