Social Media Adoption @ Fortune 500 Companies- @Wal-Mart Labs, Social Genome

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer and the second largest company in terms of revenue according to the Fortune 500 2012. “Through the innovative fusion of retail, social and mobile, @WalmartLabs is redefining Commerce for the largest retailer worldwide”,according to the introduction on @WalmartLabs. Wal-Mart is developing tools and technologies that will help it analyze the relevant information hidden in the hundreds of millions of social media conversations occurring online every day and use it to understand consumer trends so that they can plan their product assortments, including new products to introduce and supply to secure. Wal-Mart acquired Kosmix, the company behind real-time Twitter filter site TweetBeat, medical search engine RightHealth, and topic-specific engine Kosmix for US$ 300 million and transformed the company into @WalmartLabs with an objective to create technologies and businesses around social and mobile commerce.

According to Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, the company focused on developing a social genome platform that captures the connections between people, places, topics, products and events as expressed through social media — be it a feed, a tweet or a post. WalmartLabs defines the "Social Genome" as "a giant knowledge base that captures entities and relationships of the social world." Wal-Mart has been building their own in-house Social Genome since past few years with both public and private data from social media, tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts, You Tubes, it’s all streaming into Wal-Mart. Streaming in so fast, that WalmartLabs created something they call Muppet, a solution for processing Fast Data, using large clusters of machines. The Labs describes the Social Genome as their "crown jewel." Wal-Mart is essentially looking to combine data on purchase history with data from social networks with actual transaction history.

Wal-Mart is looking to transform itself into a social media retail mega player and it is investing millions of dollars into @WalmartLabs to develop new tools, applications and technologies and also acquire companies who are actively developing mobile and social media applications. Post Kosmix and its transformation into @WalmartLabs, the company acquired mobile point-of-sale app maker Grapple, location-aware mobile ad company OneRiot and a mobile app company called Small Society known for writing apps for clients like the Democratic National Committee and Starbucks. According to recent Wal-Mart press release the @WalmartLabs team continues to evolve Polaris a semantic search engine for browsing products and ease of shopping. In the past year, the group has created Shopycat, a social gift finder; Classrooms by Wal-Mart, a program to make back-to-school shopping easer; Get on the Shelf, a crowdsourcing contest to unearth new products for Wal-Mart; and Social Media Analytics, tools that use social chatter to select items to be carried by Wal-Mart. @WalmartLabs goal is to have Wal-Mart create the next great shopping experience by melding physical stores with online search and social media input.

Social Media adoption @ Fortune 500 companies – Exxon Mobil Perspective Blog, etc.

Exxon Mobil is the largest refiner and marketer of petroleum products in the world and was formed by the merger of Exxon and Mobil in 1999. The company is also the world's largest company by revenue and largest publicly traded international Oil and Gas Company according to Fortune 500 2012. Exxon Mobil adopted various social media channels to be in touch with its customers and various other stakeholders. Since April 2006, Exxon Mobil has been active on YouTube and the channel has more than 1200 subscribers and close to 700,000 views. The official channel of the company has videos highlighting the real time updates of the company, employee videos, advertisement campaigns, and videos from the top management and leadership discussing various issues regarding the company and its products, environment issues, challenges and the company efforts.

Another major effort of Exxon Mobil is its Perspectives blog which is run by Ken Cohen, ExxonMobil's vice president of public and government affairs. The blog talks about company's views on the issues, policies, technologies and trends that are shaping the energy industry and Ken Cohen talks about ideas and actions from industry, governments, researchers and many others that affect the world of energy. The blog was started in November 2011 and it is widely followed and read by many people online. Exxon Mobil also has an official twitter account with close to 26,000 followers and more than 1000 tweets and the company only provides news about the company and various activities of the company in different locations. For further discussions, people are directed to Perspectives blog.

Exxon Mobil does not have an official Facebook page but there are many pages on Facebook that is filled with lot of negative criticism. The company does not seem to be interested in a Facebook page but is very active with a blog, Twitter account and YouTube channel. Exxon Mobil uses Facebook to aggressively market its flagship brand Mobil 1 — the world's leading synthetic motor oil. Mobil 1 Facebook page was launched in March 2008 and has close to 60,000 likes. With a focus on making new friends and market its brand along with a Facebook page, a dedicated channel on YouTube and an online game was launched enabling players to take part in a virtual race against Lewis Hamilton, awareness of the brand is going from strength to strength – the game alone has been played over five million times worldwide.

Exxon Mobil has also launched Apple iPad, iPhone and Android applications for their customers. The ExxonMobil application for iPad provides immediate access to ExxonMobil’s Perspectives Blog, a vital source of energy news and analysis, continually refreshed and relevant, and includes access to ExxonMobil’s library of publications, stock information, news, videos and more. Exxon and Esso Mobile Fuel Finder apps provide real-time maps, driving directions and station information for nearly 10,000 Exxon and Mobil retail locations across the continental United States and Europe. Overall Exxon Mobil is active on those social media platforms which it feels relevant for its engagement strategy with customers and other stakeholders. 

Social CRM market will grow in 2012 – Measurable ROI & M&A surge since 2011

Most of the business organizations across the world have been able to some sort of social media presence as demanded by their customers and some of the businesses are trying to actively use social media in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Since the usage is at an early stage businesses are finding it difficult to tie with measurable business outcomes. Gartner analysts expect the worldwide market for social CRM software licenses and subscriptions to reach $2.1 billion in 2012, up from $850 million in 2011, and social CRM revenue will represent 10% of the overall CRM market. Social CRM grew 30% in 2011 in revenue terms and is 7% of total CRM spending globally as of 2011. Despite rapid rise in adoption of social applications by sales, marketing and customer service departments, Gartner believes that by this year end, only 50% of Fortune 1000 companies are expected to receive a worthwhile return on investment (ROI) from their social CRM initiatives. Another prediction by Gartner is that by this year end three-quarters of new social CRM initiatives that receive funding will have a business case incorporating measurable ROI. This highlights the fact that both vendors and customers are looking at ways to measure effectively the return of investment (ROI) that Social CRM efforts will generate. In fact the success of social CRM in next couple of years will depend on how well businesses and social CRM technology providers can tie Social CRM investment to clear and measurable business objectives rather than make social CRM projects just social objectives.

Social CRM is no longer a concern of marketing, but it penetrated into most of other marketing functions, sales, customer service and support and its importance is already evident in lead generation, cross-selling and up-selling capabilities, and other major successful sales & marketing functions. Social CRM applications help in capturing and sharing of data between users including the customers and other relevant stakeholders and involve them in developing and improving the products and services through their constant feedback. Social CRM applications can have both internal and external company users, communities both public & private and customers, marketing and service organizations use apps to create brand awareness, gather information, build trust, evaluate decisions, sell and aid post purchase activities. Social CRM adoption has been mostly among business-to-consumer (B2C) type organizations and business to business (B2B) companies are seeking to aggressively invest in social and by end of 2013, B2B organizations using social CRM applications will represent 25 % of all projects worldwide. Gartner expects business-to-business applications for sales use will have the fastest growth and will account for 30% of social CRM spending by 2015, up from 5% in 2011. According to a report from Gartner’s Ed Thompson titled “What’s “Hot” in CRM Application 2012,” Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery of CRM applications represented 34% of worldwide CRM application spending in 2011. More than 50% of all Sales Force Automation (SFA) spending is on the SaaS platform.

Early part of 2012 and the year 2011 saw a flurry of Mergers & Acquisitions in the Social CRM space with large CRM players like Oracle & SAP aggressively buying smaller players in this space. Oracle has continued its social media CRM spending spree with the acquisition of Collective Intellect whose cloud-based applications for social media monitoring would be combined with Oracle’s social relationship platform and earlier Oracle acquired Vitrue for $339 million, a cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform that enables marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Salesforce recently announced that it has won a bid to acquire BuddyMedia for $689 million and also recently added Radian6, while Adobe bought up Efficient Frontier last year to push its own social CRM offerings. These acquisitions highlight the need for companies and Social CRM technology vendors to dynamically engage the customers on the various social media fronts and the Social CRM technology must simplify and make the two way communication effective. There is pressure on social CRM technology vendors to differentiate their offerings from their competitors in terms of functions, analytics, ease of use and superior experience delivered through professional services and this need is driving the M&A deals in this segment. According to Gartner Research Director Adam Sarner, “Vendors that can assemble a full set of social CRM functions and make progress in two or more areas, such as marketing and customer service or sales and marketing, will be best-positioned for success.”

Despite all the positive forecasts for Social CRM there is another angle that is highlighted by Gartner, that 50% of Fortune 1000 organizations that are not determining, or even measuring, ROI, will face failed projects. Among the companies who will not see a worthwhile return, only 20% will even have the data to evaluate where their social strategy is falling short. These organizations will be unable to justify future funding according to Adam Sarner. Another critical factor is social CRM works only with user communities participating which they will do only if they perceive value from engagement and Social CRM applications therefore must be more customer-centric than traditional CRM applications and they should allow the customer to manage the relationship and organizations should allow this rather than they trying to manage the customer relationships. Another important fact that business organizations need to keep in mind is that media is constantly evolving and new uses are frequently being discovered, the organization Social CRM strategy should be refined on an ongoing basis. Nucleus has found that early adopters of social CRM have recognized clear benefits, such as increased visibility and productivity. The 11.8% productivity gain is high, and Nucleus expects adoption of social CRM, particularly by salespeople, to grow not just in real numbers, but also in frequency of activity as users become more aware of the technology’s capabilities and as vendors’ offerings mature. And Gartner believes Social CRM technology vendors have to show quantified business cases and, more importantly, deliver repeatable social CRM processes that are not yet broadly available.

Few private Indian Banks have presence on Social Media

Some of the Indian Banks are effectively using social networking sites to listen and engage with customers that will help them in improving their marketing focus & target customers effectively, capturing consumer perceptions, brand building & increased product research. According to Facebook, its India user base has more than doubled in a year to 51 million at the end of March 2012 and Twitter has around 15 million users in India. Most of the social media users in India are younger generation in the age group of 18-34 years, predominantly male and are mostly inclined to use social media for doing banking transactions. Private Banks are the most active in using the social media with IDBI Bank (637K Likes), Axis Bank (545K likes), ICICI Bank (475K Likes) and HDFC Bank (109K Likes) as of May 2012. Public sector banks like SBI, etc are yet to start actively using the social media platforms but they still have presence.

In January 2012, ICICI Bank, India's largest private bank, launched its Your Bank Account Facebook application, which allows users to check their account balances, apply for debit cards, and other tasks like request statements and cheque books without leaving Facebook. ICICI assures its Facebook users that the app is hosted on separate ICICI bank servers and no data is transferred to Facebook as many of the social network users are concerned about privacy and data security which is hindering the active usage of banking applications on the social networking sites. HDFC Bank, one of the early adopter and with an active presence on social media space, runs the Money Matters section on its Facebook page. The bank through its Facebook page engages visitors by putting up interesting news articles, small puzzles and games to educate users about various banking tools and even posting latest offers on cards and loans at the bank. HDFC Bank even lets its customers voice their grievances on the bank’s Facebook page and responds to them within 24 hours.

Axis Bank has an active presence with highest number of likes, has interactive apps & promotional offers that allow the bank to communicate with its target audience. Brand campaign apps like Meri Zindagi ka Safar and Meri Zindagi ki Picture both have seen more than 20,000 monthly active users and bank is promoting its platinum credit cards on Facebook by integrating a movie ticket-booking transaction engine. IDBI Bank is the largest socially networked bank in the country in terms of official presence on four platforms namely Google+, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with the largest number of fans/followers/subscribers/circles across these platforms as compared to any other peer bank in India. IDBI social media success formula is because of their approach which is an interesting mix of informative content, product awareness and grievance redressal. Social Media Platforms are an active part of IDBI marketing strategy.

Despite the fact that many Global banks are still apprehensive about offering their services and allowing customers do banking transactions using social networking applications due to data security and privacy concerns, Indian Banks majorly private banks are actively using the social media platforms to engage with customers and allow transactions through the applications. Apart from offering a low cost, effective customer engagement & marketing platform, Social Media usage through the mobile devices is also on tremendous rise as more people use their phones or mobile devices to make payments or other banking transactions through social networking sites.