Alexander Chalkidis

Tag: social

  • Will AI destroy Meta?

    Will AI destroy Meta?

    I’m not even starting on the joke of the Metaverse and the billions wasted by Meta trying to convince us that they aren’t Facebook and evil personal information thieves. We don’t use Facebook to share pictures in my clan.  Long time now.  We use Google photos.  For any trip there is a shared album.  If someone says “how was it?” I share the link to it.  Nobody else sees anything.  Google can use them all they like, Google actually provides useful stuff in return. And this should be worrying Meta a lot because more and more of us are finding other ways to share on our own terms.

    So do you use AI for marketing?  Superb! AI agents will soon take over preparing social media posts.  Maybe even other AI agents exploring social media, bringing back information, adjusting campaigns.  Fantastic! Will they be as good as a good human? No, not at first. But most companies don’t use “good humans” anyway, most corporate posts are mediocre at best.

    So the problem is that social media isn’t ready for this change.

    Already the Facebook feed is almost useless.  Between sponsored posts, ads and posts of people you don’t know that are probably also sponsored, there isn’t much of interest left.  Now imagine how much worse this will get with AI agents flooding the feed.  One way to try and handle it is like my kids do.  They are extremely careful about connecting to anyone.  Person or brand.  So a curated contact list in an application that only allows for content from your contacts.  That’s a good start. But it doesn’t leave much room for Meta to sell anything. And it is more than likely that they won’t do it on a Meta platform pretty soon.

    It’s also the death knell for mediocre social media posts from companies promoting something.  And that will include AI generated ones.

    Good content is still king.  Just in a different way. AI models are training on freely available information on the web.  So get your website up to speed.  Make sure it projects your expertise and goes in depth into your products or services.  In a convoluted way it will still eventually bring customers to your door.  But only if it is quality content with meaningful individuality.  Anything else will be competing with the bot armies in a sea of crappy mediocrity, AI generated or not.

    Companies are busy trying to get their vast swaths of data into a form that can be accessed by AI in order to milk some future advantage.  So they can discover the secret winning patterns nobody noticed all these years.  Well, while you are doing that, maybe also try and make sure you have enough original content which accurately describes what value you are adding where.  Because every other AI is trying to figure you out in order to bring the “best” result to their users.

    Those rushing to pronounce that “search is dead” haven’t really thought it through. Sure, we will run AI powered searches. And how do they learn? They LargeLanguageModel themselves silly, hoovering up data and trying to make sense of it. So if I ask “which is the best lightweight sleeping bag for hiking trips” they are scouring forums and websites and anything they can find. Well, they can’t find social media posts because Meta hides those. And when it comes to making sense and prioritising all this information the game hasn’t changed. A good product which has gained fans that talk about it a lot will still win. No matter who powers your search. It’s a long term game like it always was. And Zuckerberg is at heart a low level hacker in a hurry to make a quick buck like he always was. No innovation. No essential services for users. No trust in how he will milk our data. No real structure to all the information users have thrown on to his platforms all these years. No added value.

    AI is not Meta’s friend right now.  Because at the end of the day, really, what has Facebook ever done for us?

    (My personal Facebook account got wrongly suspended a year ago. Meta never even responded to multiple requests about it.)

  • Why TV companies should give away reputation monitoring

    The field of reputation monitoring seems to be on fire.  By all accounts a hot, hot, hot category to watch.  The reason is simple: most businesses don’t really know what is happening online and they are scared.  So they pay for a company to make sense of the millions of interactions going on globally around their brands.  They monitor products, staff, competitors, slogans, IP… in fact they let the reputation monitoring experts tell them what they should be monitoring!  This is about the same as asking your army’s general what new weapons he needs.  Expect a long, complex and detailed list of very expensive stuff.

    Don’t get me wrong.  You do need to monitor what is going on online. And with the right partner you might even learn a lot about the field.  But it is extremely important not to lose track of the real world of influence.  Which, for most businesses, is not yet completely online.   Traditional media like TV, radio and print exert massive influence.  Heck I have waged fax mailing campaigns that blow the socks of anything online!   The fact that they don’t provide metrics as easy to produce as the online stuff shouldn’t marginalise them.

    It does of course in a twisted Catch 22 scenario:  online metrics are easier, so we spend more time with them, so we disregard older media, so ad spend decreases.  The solution is pretty much what Google did with their Analytics.  TV companies should buy monitoring systems and give them away to customers!  In Greece for example there is a truly excellent company, www.qualia.gr which offers not only solid technology for speech and content recognition, but intelligence in it’s analysis.  And social media is included, so you can get an overall and balanced view.  (If I was the TV company buying Qualia I would tweak the algorythms a bit I think…)

    It is all about interface.  If I get you looking at my monitor of information I control what you think.

  • Social CRM is better than flossing

    A long time ago I helped develop what was at the time the cutting edge of CRM.  My gripe with traditional CRM systems, even the really big, fancy, expensive ones, was that they made you do double work.  Keep your contact details in one system and then remember to fill in all the details in another one.  Finish a meeting and then don’t forget to open up a different system, find the contact and write what happened.  It is too much like a visit to the dentist for me: yeah I know I should floss every day, it just never finds its way into my schedule!

    So my CRM system made sure all the inputs where automatic.  Send an email through Outlook if you want but with the press of a button it gets attached to your contact’s activity record.  Incoming emails can even be tagged automatically based on rules.  They can even autogenerate actions like being considered a lead.  Same with phone calls or any other action.  The CRM is integrated with the ERP system so all products, knowledge base items, prices and customer or company information is in one single database.  Even setting up a meeting is better as it can link to a touch screen enabled monitor at your entrance or meeting room door.  “Enter your invitation number to enter” it says to the visitor.  When you finish your meeting and get back to your desk there is an open window showing that your guest left two minutes ago (he checked out using the same touch screen) and asking what happened at the meeting.  Like everything else in this CRM you can generate next actions easily from any item.

    It was cool.  It still is cool and you can buy it as a finished product, complete with a web front end that seamlessly allows you to make any of this information available to the customers themselves as any self respecting company needs to do in 2010 in order to be transparent and online.

    Enter sCRM.  Yet another acronym, but this one makes sense as it solves many new problems in one.  What it gives you is a way to very quickly “touch” many contacts.  Open up a project and see all the people involved in the decision.  It shows you how long since you “touched” them in some way.  A “touch” is a contact, but in this day and age it doesn’t have to be an email, phone call or visit.   It could be a comment on their status on LinkedIn or a discussion in a group.  You are in “touch” and in a way that is much more meaningful than calling up out of the blue.

    In many ways, the “S”(social) in front of CRM is not necessary.  Customer Relationship Management is one acronym which will always be around as business and life itself will always be about our contacts, the people around us.  We can call it People Relationship Management or whatever else in the future but that is what it is about.  Who are my friends and what can I do for them?  So, if you haven’t tried out Flights, I thoroughly recommend it.  If there are other similar systems out there, I am not aware of them yet.  (Please tell me!)

    You can use the free version of Flights (up to 5 objectives and a few other limitations) even for personal goals.  Heck, most people have turned to professional networking tools like Xing, Plaxo, Viadeo and LinkedIn in order to find a job in this climate, they might as well be a bit more systematic about it!

  • Why on earth did you leave CRM implementation to the IT department?

    I was talking to the CEO of a market leading services company recently.  He was trying to entice me to get involved, I was trying to avoid telling him too bluntly that the cosy family-style management he had lived with all these years was about to crash completely.  We skirted about the issues.

    “With your sort of market position, it sounds like you could really do magic with a good CRM” I suggested.  “Oh yeah, we bought one of those last year…I think the IT guys are doing it.”

    Here’s what I propose:  go get some social scientists to do it instead.  Anthropologists would be great, sociologists if they are not too wishy washy.  Because focusing on the customer should no longer be the domain even of the traditional marketing department.

    Marketing has always been squashed between a sales department gung ho attitude and some magical creative juice produced on demand to impress.  Throw a CRM project their way and yes, they will do a better job than IT for sure.  But is that what we need these days?

    What sort of salary is your customer living on?  Where is she living?  How on earth do you expect to relate to someone so different unless you have developed the methodological toolset?  This does sound a lot like anthropology, because this is what you need to do.  I would willingly have one of my fingers chopped off for access to Facebook, VISA or Google customer data.  Not that I wouldn’t miss playing the guitar, but the social scientist in me would be in heaven.  It is not about finding shortcuts to selling to them.  It is about understanding how they think and how they feel.

    You can do a lot of this without losing any fingers.  Work a different position in your company.  Dress up and play a different role on any sidewalk.  Talk to strangers.  But companies need to be a bit more systematic about this effort.  And what the social sciences have learned over the past half century is an invaluable starting point.  Call him a CCO or whatever you want, but someone near the top of the organisation has to want to understand customers and to add value to their lives.  It isn’t just market research or R&D that has to come under this position, but it is a good place to start.   Any customer facing function needs to be rethought with this hat on.  And in a position to get things done about it. 

    Because the customer isn’t going to wait around for you to get it right much longer.