Logs, Social CRM, Chess, Motivation, and Asking the Right Questions
While this Resource Friday is a little late, it’s for a good reason. Part of our “resourcing” the past two weeks has involved the refresh of the YDOP website! So, if you’re reading this on an RSS feed reader, you might want to cruise on over to ydop.com to see what all the hubbub is about. In the meantime, here’s what (else) we talked about on Friday.
Logs: They’re better than bad; they’re good
Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer
*nix based systems will record all system events in an message log, which can be viewed through a GUI or the console on a machine. These logs contain events such as starting and stopping of services, attempted and successful logins, and system errors. While many programs have error logs for detailed error reports within the program, the system error log can help decipher cryptic behavior in a server or workstation running a *nix based system.
Social CRM and you!
Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist
Social CRM presents one of the great opportunities for organizations to improve the depth of their engagement with constituents, customers, and partners. A typical CRM (customer relationship management) setup is nice. It allows your team to share what is essentially a common address book, make notes of the personal and mass communications they’ve had with people in that address book, and see connections between individuals (“Oh, Sarah and John used to be coworkers!”).
What makes social CRM, or sCRM, different from traditional CRM systems (Prophet, Salesforce, SAP CRM, ACT!, Microsoft Dynamics) is that sCRM recognizes that people are constantly updating information about themselves through social media. That means less data entry and information collecting for you. Today I gave the rest of the team a tour of the sCRM system we’re putting in place here at YDOP. When I need to call one of our clients, I look her up in our sCRM system to get her phone number. But, while I’m there, I also see her latest tweets and her current LinkedIn profile. If she has tweeted that she’ll be in California all week, I know it’s a bad idea to call her at 9 a.m. Eastern Time. If her LinkedIn profile shows me she has received a promotion, I know to congratulate her.
What’s more, we pull all that information from our sCRM into our e-mail system. So, when I’m viewing an e-mail from a client, I automatically see his photo and latest Twitter updates. I also see his phone number right there, making it easier for me to respond to the e-mail with a phone call if that’s the best thing to do.
The people we interact with every day are telling the world about what’s important to them and what’s happening in their lives, through social media. Social CRM makes it a piece of cake to stay in tune with that so we’re able to serve and communicate with them as effectively as possible.
The Right Motivation
Steve Wolgemuth, Principal
It is Wednesday and only now am I blogging about my Friday presentation to the team. It isn’t because I’m not in the right environment to be motivated, at least by the key motivators that I talked about last week: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. The reason we stopped to drill down on these is because I’m committed to helping my talented team to remain interested and enthusiastic. Even more, I want them to produce innovative work and I need to support their intrinsic motivation to be the highly creative people they are capable of being.
Our first point, autonomy, involves four areas: tasks (what we are working on), time (when we do things), team (who we work with) and technique (how we do our tasks). In order to give YDOP an autonomy score for each of these areas, I created an online survey. (Update: I’m happy to report that YDOP got a very good grade and a smiley on it’s test). The team feels that they have an overall good amount of autonomy.
As per mastery, in our regular staff “one-on-ones,” we’ll be setting goals for personal achievement, and as a group, we try to celebrate incremental success. When I think back to my former life as a dressage rider, I was completely motivated by my almost irrational drive to be the best I could be at that sport. I completely and deeply understand that drive. For me, I must employ discipline to not have it take over my life! (I am a very motivated person when mastery is involved – except for golf).
Our consideration of purpose involved a fun exercise with sticky notes: everyone wrote what the purpose was for YDOP’s existence. All of those answers centered around helping our clients feel good about their involvement in digital environments. Some because of the great hopes that a clear strategy brought to them, some because they reached goals for driving traffic to their sites, some from becoming empowered organizations in social media channels. This exercise was an interesting peek at how each employee perceived YDOP’s purpose, and the importance of ongoing vision casting from me.
All the right moves
Astrid Salim, Creative Director
I shared with the team today an interesting article from smashingmagazine.com. The article is talking about how building a website is similar to chess. Each piece in chess (pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen and king) has its own attributes and function that can translate into a strategy for building a website.
I’ll list one or two examples. The knight’s ability to move uniquely is an advantage. It can be compared to how a website should focus on its selling point to gain an advantage over its competitors. The king in chess is the most important piece and is the piece that will decide whether you win or lose. Your customer is like the king. Once you lose them, you might not be able to get them back. So make sure you know whether your customer can get the information they need on the website easily or not. Make sure that your website functions well.
Building a website is really about strategy. Chess also teaches us about how we should make all those different pieces work together nicely to win. On building a website, you should pay attention to whether all elements (like branding, design, coding, contents, goal, usability and accessibility, and so on) work together or not. It is important to plan out, make a good move, and keep improving your potential.
The 5 W’s (and 1 H): Metrics edition
Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst
I shared with the group a post from David Berkowitz’s marketing blog, Inside the Marketers Studio. Back in November, Berkowitz shared a list of 100 ways to measure social media, and later, he divided those 100 into six broad categories, which I’m quoting here, verbatim:
- WHO: Who interacted? What do you know about these consumers?
- WHAT: What was discussed? What was shared? What did consumers engage with?
- WHERE: Where were the conversations happening, whether in terms of the social channels or the geography of the consumers reached?
- WHEN: When did the results happen? When did other promotions run that could have had an impact on a social marketing program?
- WHY: Why were consumers engaging or feeling this way?
- HOW: How much of an impact did the social marketing have? How do results hold up against benchmarks? How do they translate to brand metrics? How does this add to the bottom line?
The article includes examples of metrics for each question, and states that these are just a start. So next time you’re considering the metrics for your own website and decide that there’s nothing else to measure… you may want to ask yourself a question. Or six.