How to work like a network: For the marketing leader

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR MARKETING

How to Work Like a Network: For the Marketing LeaderYour Guide to Owning the Customer Experience with Enterprise Social


Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

IntroductionPart One: The Customer Takes Center Stage

Part Two: The Art and Science of Marketing

Part Three:Get Equipped with the Best Tools

Table of Contents

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Enterprise Social describes a new way of working that taps into the power of human networks. It’s an approach that brings the essence of consumer social networks—connecting with others, rapid information sharing, and easy discovery—to the enterprise. By connecting individuals to a dynamic network of people and information, Enterprise Social enables employees to respond faster, accomplish more, and keep your business moving forward together.

The Microsoft vision for Enterprise Social is to empower organizations to work like a network by delivering seamless social experiences across familiar applications people already use, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Yammer, SharePoint Online, Lync, and virtually any other application or service that matters to your company.


Your role as a modern marketer is shifting under your feet. Marketers were once in a support role, channeling customers quickly on to sales to build the customer relationships. But now marketers are standing firmly on their own, having direct impact on customers for a longer stretch of the buyer’s journey. Marketers must be prepared to facilitate a broad and dynamic customer experience and work in concert with sales to build the business.

Harley Manning, vice president of customer experience at tech giant Forrester Research, says, “In this age, the only source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology-fueled disruption: an obsession with customer experience.”

That obsession is a must, as today’s customers are savvier than ever. They use social media and mobile devices to find information about products long before the point of purchase. Consumers use an average of four devices per day. They expect more from companies now: relevant and personal experiences, faster.

Marketers need to set the pace. But how do you adapt to this customer-centric business landscape, with deeper understanding and a longer engagement timeline? While there is a big world out there of ever-increasing data, the approach for marketers comes down to a few simple steps.

Marketers should better understand their customers; streamline marketing operations and increase efficiency; and deliver better experiences that help grow and maintain brand awareness.

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This e-book’s objective is to guide you in uncovering customer insights, improving collaboration, and delivering more creative and innovative customer experiences using Enterprise Social technologies. First it defines Enterprise Social and shows the value of these solutions for marketing professionals. Second, it presents three ways that Enterprise Social can help you and your marketing.

Finally, it shows you how to get started on working like a network.

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The Customer Takes Center StagePart One:


The Value of Enterprise Social for Marketing Enterprise Social adds value to every department across your business, but there are unique ways that it can help your marketing team in particular.

Many other companies have already picked up on this. According to the Microsoft.com website, 72 percent of companies are deploying at least one social software tool. Enterprise Social will help you to:

• Gain better insight into customer wants and needs.• Get new products and campaigns to market faster

with better social collaboration. • Unleash creativity to help marketing teams deliver

high-impact customer experiences.

“As a marketer, your customer and who you’re talking to is the most important thing,” says Jess Brown, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft.

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With Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies, you can:

• Listen to conversations within your company on Yammer.

• Gain insight on sentiment outside your company with Microsoft Social Listening.

• Adapt to employee and customer needs quickly by collaborating and by using Office 365 productivity tools.

• Find valuable internal information and make connections with Office Delve.

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“Using Enterprise Social technology helps us day to day, uncovering insights and getting information more quickly. Especially in today’s media-saturated environment, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But the breadth of tools within the Enterprise Social solution gets us to the information that really matters.”

—Jess Brown, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft

The Art and Science of MarketingPart Two:


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The new era of marketing is focused on the customer experience, with marketers at the front line, crafting and nurturing the conversation. But how do you best curate that experience? You have to be both a scientist conducting meticulous research and an artist honing your craft.

Enterprise Social gives you solutions that combine the art of marketing with the scientific tools that allow you to measure your results. As chemistry teacher Walter White said in the television series Breaking Bad, “Chemistry is technically the study of matter. But I prefer to see it as the study of change.”

You’ve probably done your own in-house study of this constant change. A scientific approach allows marketers an unprecedented opportunity to watch, and


benefit from, the way technology is revolutionizing marketing possibilities. You can better align marketing and sales and determine the marketing ROI. You can listen to customers like never before; enhance collaboration and even make it playful; and further galvanize your brand. When all of that is done well, it’s a thing of beauty.

Enterprise Social hands you both the paintbrush and the microscope—and here’s how to make it work for you.

Listen to Customers to Gain InsightsSocial media apps are ubiquitous in most of our daily lives. According to the Pew Research Institute, 74 percent of online adults use social networking sites. It is now possible to take advantage of the comfort and level of engagement that we already have with social technologies to delight your customers in business.

Today’s smart marketers know how important it is to be where their customers are and to connect with them on their terms. But this doesn’t just mean listening when customers are dissatisfied and clambering to be heard. A marketer’s understanding has to happen sooner, before a low rumble becomes a roar.

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This means knowing exactly what makes your customers tick. Ask yourself:

• What problems are my customers trying to solve? • What are their pain points? • What are their aspirations?

You don’t want just big data, but the right data, presented in a usable, comprehensible way. Enterprise Social can help you zoom in and turn information into insights. You can monitor external social media channels to track customer sentiment and identify emerging trends with Microsoft Social Listening. Strategically listen for keywords related to your company, industry, and competitors to unveil your customers’ wants and needs.

And it’s not only on social media where your customers are talking. Employees within your company interact with your customers every day, in the field, over the phone, and behind the counter. With an active Yammer culture, your colleagues can collect and share customer feedback directly from the source, in the moment, using the Yammer mobile app.

These insights are catalysts for growth, helping you make data-driven decisions to deliver qualified leads to sales, provide actionable feedback to product teams, and design excellent customer experiences, ultimately benefitting your business.

“Retail is a very dynamic environment. Keeping up with changes and staying on trend is essential, and Yammer helps us do that. It allows people to share best practices, even across functions and geographies.”

—Andy Hedges, Director, Shopping Center Management,

Westfield Australia

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Ways Enterprise Social Can Help Your Marketing Team Uncover Customer Insights3

Keep an Ear to the Ground

Use Microsoft Social Listening to track social sentiment on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can find out what’s top of mind for customers and what’s trending among prospects.

Get Front-Row Seats

Channel customer feedback via front-line workers, from restaurant servers to retail associates and field reps, and easily share what’s happening on the ground. The Yammer mobile app connects remote employees straight to corporate headquarters through an Enterprise Social network.

Two Heads Are Better Than One

You can analyze and interpret customer feedback and trends with your team’s collective brainpower and together determine next steps. Yammer is integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, enabling employees to start social conversations directly in Microsoft Dynamics CRM when they spot an opportunity or identify a new trend.

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Adapt and Respond Faster Through Social Collaboration

Collecting and sharing insights isn’t the only way today’s marketers can put Enterprise Social to use. To respond to changing customer needs and create stellar experiences, you must move fast and work together. With Enterprise Social technologies, you and your team can collaborate more efficiently—both internally and externally—to roll out new campaigns and products quicker than ever.

Imagine your company is sponsoring a large event, and you want to get customers and employees talking, and attract new customers. Or you are launching a new product and need to catch glitches early on. You need to use insights from management, employees, and partners.

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37%

Enterprise Social users report a 37 percent increase in project collaboration.

—Inside Communication


Inside your organization, Yammer fosters convenient communication and easy collaboration. With a familiar social networking interface, you can send instant messages to colleagues, post questions and comments to the entire company, and share files with your team. You can track conversations and stay abreast of project progress with a quick scroll through the Yammer feed. “I can get through my messages a lot quicker with Yammer. I find that a lot of times important emails get buried in my inbox. Having tools like Yammer and Microsoft OneDrive for Business to share files makes it a lot easier,” says Jess Brown.

Group ItMarketing teams can streamline collaboration by creating a Yammer Group, which designates a workspace for a campaign, a project, or an area of marketing operations. Yammer Groups enable open conversation and collaboration around anything—from an advertising campaign to a specific function like demand generation, creative services, or public relations.

Find What You NeedIncrease marketing productivity by finding the information you need, as soon as you need it. Information can come to you with Delve, which helps employees discover what others are working on and easily find relevant information and documents based on user activity.

Edit TogetherEmployees in different locations can use Office Online to collaborate on documents—from budget proposals to marketing plans—and to deliver better work through continuous review and discussion. They can also discuss real-time changes and updates in side-by-side Yammer Document Conversations.

Stay in the Loop Help employees to stay in the know and be productive—even when they’re on the go. With the Yammer mobile app, remote employees can engage in important conversations and access documents on a device running Windows, iOS, or Android.

Break Down WallsRemove barriers to external collaboration with advertising and creative agencies, vendors, and partners. Create a Yammer External Network for communicating with external collaborators and use OneDrive for Business to store and share project files, budget proposals, and more.

Ways to Boost Marketing Collaboration with Enterprise Social

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Fast-food chain Red Robin Gourmet Burgers was able to collaborate, adapt, and improve business practices in an innovative way with Yammer. With 450 locations, the company wanted to improve communication among employees, inspire stronger engagement, and promote ideation to drive business transformation. Red Robin asked its employees for cost-saving solution ideas, and Yammer provided a way for employees on every level to come together to solve the problem—which they did, in record time.

But how can your team coordinate optimally if you can’t find all the information you need quickly? Let the information you need find you with the Office Delve app in Office 365. Through Office Graph, Delve is automatically populated with conversations and files based on the activities you already do every day, such as the documents you share, the people you meet with, and the documents you read. You get speed and collaboration, in one easy interface.

And what about the people you work with who aren’t part of your team? You can easily collaborate with creative agencies, vendors, and partners through a Yammer External Network. Conversations and design versions can be housed in one easy-to-use and easy-to-manage thread, and confirmation of message or document receipt is communicated with a simple thumbs-up icon.

“If you engage staff in a way that shows their opinion is important, it’s extraordinary what you learn—and the excitement you generate. That’s what working social does for an organization.”

—Steve Carley, CEO, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers

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Grow Brand AwarenessPart of curating a positive and distinct perception of your brand is delivering high-impact experiences. With customers’ opinions largely influenced by your company’s online presence long before they reach out for personal attention, it’s more important than ever to make sure your brand is strong so you stand out from competitors. This is where your inner marketing artist gets to shine.

Painter Vincent Van Gogh said, “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” For your brand to be great, you must ensure consistency across touch points. Make sure all employees are on the same page, as these brand ambassadors will soon turn their messaging outward. Brown says, “We use Yammer and Lync internally to give other team members a heads-up on the latest and greatest of our campaigns. Then if they want to help us promote externally, they already know what they should be saying.”

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“Leveraging an Enterprise Social network helps us grow our business by enabling our staff—who are innately good—to perform even better.”

—Shekhar Ramamurthy, Joint President, United Breweries


For your brand to be memorable, tap in to your company’s creativity by engaging employees in your marketing efforts. Give your colleagues a chance to be imaginative and prolific with casual, “anything goes” requests on Yammer. You can also initiate brand documents and mood boards that others can contribute to. In other words—crowdsource!

Jess Brown describes an internal campaign where company-wide responses were solicited. They received a mountain of creative and invaluable replies within hours. “With this particular campaign, using Yammer really helped us share ideas and think out loud. That’s a really great way to brainstorm ideas and figure things out in the initial phases of the project,” said Brown.

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CrowdsourceThink outside the box. Marketing teams can use Yammer to crowdsource ideas for marketing campaigns and creative concepts. Gather ideas from across your whole organization by posting a question in All Company to brainstorm and discuss ideas together.

Create Visual BrainstormsQuickly save screen captures to OneNote to create a visual notebook of ideas; store notes and sync them to OneDrive for Business for easy sharing with team members; create mood boards for creative inspiration; and collect market research on competitors for reference in a single, shareable location.

Generate BuzzGet employees excited about marketing campaigns, recruit brand ambassadors with an internal launch event, and encourage them to share tips and guidelines via Office Online documents. Use Lync online meetings to announce campaign launches to employees—no matter where they are located.

Share Resources Create a folder in OneDrive for storing and sharing your latest brand resources such as brand books, style guidelines, messaging frameworks, and design assets. Share those resources to drive brand consistency across all of your customer touch points—advertising, digital, social, PR, events. Yammer Document Conversations let employees comment on a file as they’re viewing it so brand managers can address questions as soon as they come up.

Keys to Growing Brand Awareness with Enterprise Social

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Get Equipped with the Best ToolsPart Three:


Customers have new tools at their fingertips that they’ve never had before. Luckily, marketers do too.

With Enterprise Social, you now have the means to dig in to data while harnessing the creativity of your network to craft the meaningful customer experiences that grow your business. Work like a network to listen and gain insights from customers, speed up and improve collaboration, and creatively strengthen brand awareness.

Microsoft has adapted to the changing marketing landscape by weaving Enterprise Social into the following core applications: Office 365 (including SharePoint Online); Microsoft Dynamics CRM, integrated with Yammer Enterprise; SharePoint 2013 Service Pack 1; OneDrive for Business, and Lync (also available with Office 365 as Lync Online).

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Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies enable companies to engage, inform, and connect their employees, partners, and suppliers in new ways. A longtime and trusted partner for both business and IT leaders, Microsoft was positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. There are three primary reasons that more than 400,000 organizations have chosen Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies to improve their business:

• Enterprise-grade technology built for business – Microsoft offers companies the experience, global footprint, security, and reliability they expect from enterprise cloud solutions.

• A comprehensive and connected platform – Microsoft offers a comprehensive and deeply connected platform for delivering seamless social experiences across many familiar applications as well as customers’ data centers, service providers, and the Microsoft public cloud.

• Familiar and intuitive user experience and applications – Microsoft provides consistent, familiar, and intuitive applications across its cloud solutions to drive faster, lower-cost implementation and high user adoption, which lead to improved productivity and better business results.

To work like a network and learn about tools that help you gain customer insights, collaborate, and drive brand awareness, visit www.enterprisesocial.com.

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www.enterprisesocial.com

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