How can you scale social media? How do you personalize your message to each audience and platform? What the heck is a Social Navigator?
Find the answers to all these questions and more in this blog post. But let me start at the beginning...
Jeremy and I met in a blog comment of my blog “How to Prevent Social Media Overload”. His comment read:
When we started to email, Jeremy also told me that Sprinklr had profiled me as an influencer. Now he had my full attention. Yes, flattery works well with me, but I also immediately saw the win-win in talking with Jeremy in more detail.
Jeremy would be able to share some of his social media know how with me and teach me more about Sprinklr - something that I’d be able to blog about (I am always looking for solid content), use in my consulting practice, and in turn, give him and Sprinklr some exposure as an “influencer”.
Let's Hangout
I asked Jeremy if he would be willing to answer a few questions on Google Hangout to add insights to my initial blog post; something we subsequently attempted multiple times.
For some reason, we ran into tons of technical difficulties but in the end, we got a video with actual sound but also without the sound of a contractor drilling a hole in a garage door (full disclosure, that was at my end).
Due to this experience, I can tell you that Jeremy is a very nice and patient person who is passionate about his role and company, and a pleasantly humble VP of Marketing.
The video answers the following two questions:
- How to deal with social media overload?
- How to personalize your message to each audience on each platform?
As I had a lot more questions and we – at least tried – to keep the video short, here a blog post that summarizes a longer Q&A with Jeremy.
Interview Transcript
Interview with Jeremy Epstein, VP Marketing & Social Navigator at Sprinklr
Natascha:
Jeremy, as the VP of Marketing at Sprinklr, you are part of a busy and competitive marketplace. From my clients, I hear that social media overload is one of their main marketing challenges. Recently, Adobe even hosted a Tweetchat on the topic #DigitalDistress. How does Sprinklr help with social media overload?
Jeremy:
As brands become more and more social, the volume of social messages, profiles, and enterprise users grows as well. Each of these require a unique set of capabilities to prevent overload.
For messages—brands can’t manage all of them manually. It’s just not possible. So, for example, we have a native Natural Language Processor with multiple layers of analysis.
In this way, every message can be scored for things like sentiment, spam, influence, among others. Otherwise, how do you know which messages deserve attention now, tomorrow, or never?
In addition, automated workflows that filter and route messages based on profiles (e.g. product advocate or detractor) or keywords (e.g. lawsuit) to the right team or division within the enterprise, no matter where they sit.
These are just some of the examples, but when you’re operating at scale, these capabilities are non-negotiable, since you can’t afford to use “overload” as an excuse. Not every message requires a response, but every message has to be processed.
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Natascha:
How is Sprinklr different from, say a Hootsuite or Spredfast?
Jeremy:
Enterprise focus, architecture, and experience. We don’t have 7 million customers. We didn’t start off as a tool for Twitter or as an agency.
From the beginning, our vision has been that enterprises have a unique set of needs that transcend one department (e.g. marketing); that security/federated social governance is paramount; and that we need to be able to natively support multiple social channels via a unified message model to create a unified profile of the social customer. We don’t believe that our competitors share this vision.
If you look at Microsoft’s experience deploying Sprinklr to over 1000 users and listen to their own words (after having reviewed 14 different companies), you’ll see that not only the technology, but the competency in terms of global deployments is not just about adding more servers.
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Natascha:
At the core of all social media marketing is a deep knowledge of your target audience? Do you agree?
Jeremy:
Absolutely!! That’s core to marketing. This is precisely why marketers require things like a unified social profile that combines information and interaction history from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube etc.
Marketers need a full conversation history, so they know what was discussed with the person, regardless of which channel, team, or function had the previous engagement.
For example, if a customer is responding to a promotion, a marketer would want to know that the customer had either a positive or negative experience with the Customer Service team the week before, right?
Finally, marketers need the capability to profile their social customers, using the same taxonomy as their CRM platforms. Who are your VIPs? Your customers with high LTVs? Your advocates? People who live in San Jose? If you KNOW all of this about your target audience, you can engage and activate in far more relevant ways.
Natascha:
How does Sprinklr help marketers send the right message to each audience on each social platform? Personally, I believe that FB, LI, and Twitter, for example, each need a message targeted to that particular "forum".
Jeremy:
I think you are right in your assessment. There are a number of ways we do this, with analytics/reporting being a huge component, but let me talk about
Social Asset Management.
- Most technologies offer a content repository—here are all of the images, for example, that are available for a given campaign. Choose the one you like. What Social Asset Management tells you is how each piece of content has performed historically - by channel (among other metrics).
- It tells you which picture generated the most likes, tweets, shares, etc., so future campaign managers can search and discover the content (and not just an image) that has performed best historically; thus making the enterprise smarter over time.
- The best content gets used. The worst content gets dismissed.
With the amount of money that brands spend on content each year, this is something that our clients have found to be particularly valuable in ensuring the right message gets deployed on the right channel.
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Natascha:
Do you integrate mobile platforms into your product? What about local targeting?
Jeremy:
- Mobile is obviously critical and we have apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. As one of only a handful of technology companies with established partnerships with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, we work closely with these companies to deliver brands the capabilities they need.
- Local targeting is one of them. What’s more, through governance, ensuring that only the right people are able to post to a specific region.
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Natascha:
· Does Sprinklr provide actionable intelligence? If yes, what type and how can it help a business?
Jeremy:
Yes. In a number of ways. I will focus just on a few use cases.
- Profile Tagging - let’s say you are a Community Manager. In front of you is a stream of messages coming through. At a glance, via a small icon that shows up next to the name of the social customer, you know if the sender is a customer, a prospect, an influencer, an analyst, or a member of the press.
- This all shows up via customizable profile properties set by the brand…and knowing this makes it easier for the CM to act upon the message in an intelligent way.
- Operational Reporting - Having social metrics about likes, retweets, etc. is nice, but companies need to understand the business impact of social. One of those is in determining how social is driving the business forward.
- They want to know “are we hitting our SLA’s for Response Time?” or “where in the response process is the biggest lag? Legal? PR?” Once they identify this, they can work to improve it…Citi did exactly that, cutting response time by 20%.
- Social Asset Management - I touched on this above, but it bears repeating. Campaign managers benefit greatly when they can execute based upon the past experience of the organization. If you know that a PDF works best on Twitter and a video works best on Facebook (because others in a different region have already proved that out), you’re one step ahead of the game.
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Natascha:
- Last, Jeremy, what do you see as one of the key challenges in digital marketing today? Do you have a solution approach or a vision? Where does Sprinklr see the digital market world going?
Jeremy:
In our view, the challenge for marketers is to break down the silos and work effectively with every other function in the organization. They need to do this to maintain a unified view of the customer and deliver a great customer experience.
If marketing doesn’t have visibility into how a customer has engaged with a brand, regardless of channel or department, the experience is going to be sub-optimal.
Our vision today is the same as it has been since the beginning.
- Brands need a Social Relationship Infrastructure that connects with existing Line of Business Systems and which serves as the common foundation for all departments. The social customer necessitates an unparalleled level of collaboration within the enterprise.
We see that some brands will thrive. Some won’t survive.
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Natascha:
Anything you'd like to add?
Jeremy:
Yes. I don’t have all the answers to everything, so I would encourage people to contact me via Twitter, LinkedIn, or email (or any other channel) and give me an earful!
Read more at MarketingXLerator.com.
