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Online Contests – Xeesm/Compete™

July 26, 2010 By


Asking your customers to share new ideas and letting all customers vote is one of the most powerful customer engagement methods. You get the most direct Ranked Feedback and create a sense of ownership for your customer base.

Xeesm/Compete is now starting Beta tests.

You create your own competition, contest or voting initiative and ask your contacts to provide suggestions or vote on already existing suggestions. For instance:

The Agile-500 Contest
This is our first project using Xeesm/Compete!
1) We created the contest and provided some description what the contest is about.
2) We invite people to provide suggestions. In this case companies they feel should be an Agile-500 company list
3) Everybody can make suggestions and vote for their own and for other suggestions.

We will see the number of votes to determine the most agile companies in accordance to the customers voice.

You can do your very own contest, just create one.

1) Click on create a competition and explain what this is about
2) Invite all your contacts to provide suggestions
3) Everybody can vote on suggestions from everybody

Now – This is still in beta. Two things we are still completing:
1) To limit the number of votes a user may have (20)
2) The embed code generator, so you can add the contest page to your own website

Of course a user has to be logged in or register in order to vote.
Multiple votes on the same suggestion is not possible.

Some examples you may consider for your business
* Ask your customers about webinar topics they may be interested in and let them vote
* Ask your customers what kind of service offerings they’d be most interested in and let all customers vote
* Ask your partners what training they are most interested in and let them vote
* Ask your customers about product features and let all vote
* Ask your partners for programs they like to see and let them all vote
* Ask your customers what they think need to be added to your service portfolio and let them all vote
* Ask about product documentation…
* Ask about ease of doing business with you…
* Ask them to share their biggest concerns…

* You can ask pretty much anything and you will get the most direct ranked feedback ever. It’s not only an opinion from an individual – but actually ranked by your ecosystem based on their collective interest. Whether this is your customer base, your partners, vendors, consultants, your media connections or your own team.

Use Xeesm/Compete! for a technology contest, an idea competition, feature requests, event venues, leadership, partnership or many other topics to gain ranked feedback – let your audience compete for what’s important to them.

How do you get onto the Beta?
You either install Compete! from the Xeesm Apps world or contact us and we are helping you to get there.

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Filed Under: General, Product News and Updates, TopStories

My tire dealer’s Social CRM

June 21, 2010 By


My tire dealer (Western Tire) and my local car dealer are using social media in an innovative way – different from what people may think and very successful.

First what they didn’t do:
- No fan page
- No online community
- They have both no blog or any major “presence”

Now what they do:
- The majority of their team mates have an account in Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace
- They asked their clients if they are in the social web and if they may connect. In order to make it easy for all parties to exchange the sites and networks they asked them to share their Xeesm (a little free tool to keep all your social sites).

- The car dealer sales people start in the morning and visit all the clients they have so far and visit their profiles to know what is going on in their client’s lives. Some chat about vacation photos or whatever is appropriate. They do that until a client enters the store and then often get back to their laptop and again meet clients in the social web. It shifts the “image” of the ugly car dealer sales guy to a much more caring person. They use our Social CRM system to visit on average 50 contacts a day. With 4 sales people that is about 4,000 customer touch points a month. Is the social car dealer a new chance for the car dealer guild? This one certainly is.

- The Tire dealer is different as they have high noon early in the morning. Once the daily dose of tire repairs is in, they start to connect with clients like the car dealer above. The tire dealer is now thinking about renting an old airfield to let customers on it and “burn their tires” literally. Simply because they found that a lot of their customers are 19 year olds who secretly burn tires on the street and share their photos on Facebook. But only if you care about your customer you know what they actually do – once in a while ;) . The guys in that tire shop are very different. The live in their cell phone and push us hard to change the app to make it better work for them. There is only one computer in the shop.

Now this started a few month ago when one of my tires blew up and we chatted about our respective business. The next step now is building a fan page – but with a specific theme, content and purpose – not to just have one.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS

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Filed Under: Best Practices, Edge, Flights, General, social crm

The Social Technology Cloud

June 17, 2010 By


The level of confusion around technology and technology definitions is increasing. The Social Media Academy together with Xeesm worked on a way to resolve confusion and help explain the major pillars of the Social Technology Cloud.


Social Networks
Social Networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Xing and many others serve a variety of purpose in business as well as private lives. They become instrumental in an engagement to create a better customer experience as it allows to meet and to listen to customers where they are. However Social Networks are not exclusive to sales and marketing teams to connect with clients.

Online Communities
While Online Communities had some ups and downs in the past, they will become a strategic play in a companies customer engagement strategy. All businesses will very soon want to provide a dedicated platform for their customers to meet and converse online – way above and beyond the classic support communities. While market leaders including Lithium, Jive and Ning will need to improve their community offering to serve a broader customer spectrum including SMB companies, online communities are an integrated part of a social business engagement.

Social Media Monitoring
A whole different type of solutions are Social Media Monitoring products. While most started out to identify sentiments in the market and learn what customers saying about their brand, Social Media Monitoring became a strategic solution in lead generation and opportunity identification. Social Media Monitoring tools help feed CRM and Social CRM systems and continue to be paramount to monitor brand attitude and brand value. Leading brands include Alterian/Techrigy, Scoutlabs (Lithium), Radian6 or Sysomos and many others. New applications in the SMM field will include influencer identification, business partner monitoring and other more granulate ways to better understand the needs of a given ecosystem.

Social CRM / Social Relationship Management
SRM and SCRM systems are again different beasts. They are built to help teams actively engage with customers, prospects and partners as well as other market constituencies. Sales Teams, Marketing Teams, Product Managers, Service Teams don’t ‘live’ in the SRM or SCRM tool but use it to quickly reach to their contacts and focus on specific objectives or goals while still socializing. SCRM and SRM tools provide the bridge between the external social web and internal systems. While a customer may never have direct access to an ERP or CRM system, they should have access to a Social CRM system. And like the traditional CRM systems also SCRM systems need to have functionality such as Forecasting, Opportunity Management and provide some work flow guidance to the sales, marketing or support teams. Market leader Xeesm.com and young companies like SocioToco or Gist try to enter this market with dedicated solutions to support business teams in their challenge to create a better customer experience.

Social CRM is a solution that supports a “Business Strategy” (not a social crm strategy) that most likely is set to create a better customer experience measured by increased advocacy for brand, products and services. Social CRM needs to interface with Social Networks, Social Media Monitoring, Branded or non branded online communities on the outside and traditional IT on the inside. Only if the actual customer has access to that Social CRM system, the attribute ‘Social’ is appropriate.

Tools
In addition to the four major pillars of the Social Technology Cloud there is a large offering of tools. Currently more than 5,000 tools support the above core systems and many of the core systems establish themselves as platforms to support and host those tools.

An industry in the making
The Social Technology Industry will be a Billion Dollar industry by end of this year. While the majority of the revenue is generated through advertising and sponsorships, many of the services and tools for professional usage is sold as subscriptions or consulting services and trainings.

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Filed Under: Edge, Flights, General, industry, Partners, SCRM, social crm, Social Media, Social PRM, Social Technology, sPRM

Press Release Xeesm SocialFinder

June 9, 2010 By


Social Business Application provider Xeesm.com finds millions of social presences from your customers and partners.

Xeesm lets you find your customers in the social web with SocialFinder and stores it into a unique ‘Social Address Book’.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Press Release) – Jun 09, 2010 – Palo Alto, CA

06.09.2010 – Xeesm Corp., a provider of social business applications with over 70,000 users in 24 countries announced today a new and unique service to help business teams understand whether their customers are actually using social media or not.The service scans through 400 Million contacts and returns results with an accuracy of 98%.

Barbara A. Daniels, CSMC http://xeesm.com/wk4coffee, Director of Programs & Communications for the Arizona Small Business Association (asba), who uses Xeesm for customer relationship management, explains the service: “Typically, an organization like ours would need to do multiple searches for each individual prospect in order to find their various profiles across the social web. Once located and identified, we could carefully make the connection and work to further develop the relationship. That process often took weeks, and if you have over 15,000 contacts like I do, it could be a very daunting task. With the release of SocialFinder, it is now actually as simple as the click of a button to get all of the relevant sites for a given prospect and even the prospect’s photo. Xeesm SocialFinder is a huge timesaver and has definitely increased our productivity.”

Antoine Houdaille, http://xeesm.com/AntoineH, entrepreneur and CIO in Sydney Australia, is using Xeesm for his contact management and especially likes the new feature to get immediate insight into his clients and partners online presence. With Xeesm I have all my contacts handy and only need an email address to find a person’s social places. And even though this is all publicly available information, it is a huge help to use SocialFinder and automatically complete the profiles I have.”

Hans Woudboer http://xeesm.com/HansGerlachWoudboer a Germany-based Business Process Modeling expert said: “I had no idea how many of my clients are actually active in social media. The “SocialFinder” showed me a lot of my clients’ presences and even uploaded their photos to my Social Address Book.”

Xeesm CEO, Axel Schultze http://xeesm.com/Axels explained the impact for businesses: “Most companies still don’t know whether their clients are engaged in social media or not. A typical sales person with 3,000 contacts may need months to search through all the networks. And only then, would they know if an engagement in social media would be meaningful. Many company leaders shy away from social engagement because they simply don’t know. For the first time business managers get an instant report for their customer’s social media engagement. The SocialFinder in conjunction with our ‘Social Address Book” provides that answer in just a few seconds. Businesses now have a very valuable tool that can help facilitate the decision on whether to engage in social media or not.”

Xeesm not only helps to find clients, but provides technology to store all the various sites for each individual person. Unlike in the traditional address book, whether it be electronic or in paper form where people usually store a name, phone number, physical address and email, the Xeesm Social Address Book stores all the various social sites each individual is presently engaging in. Xeesm currently supports over 100 social networks worldwide. The next challenge is to keep all that data up to date. The Xeesm Social Address Book is actually a social application in itself. Users update their records and all users are connected, so everybody benefits from each other’s update. While the company had only 1,000 users in January of this year, it had quickly grown to include more than 30,000 by the end of March, currently stands more than 70,000 users strong and continues to grow.

SocialFinder is available at: http://xeesm.com, and is integrated into both the free version of Xeesm as well as the Xeesm Business Edition.

In 140 Character:
SocialFinder by Xeesm.com lets you find social profiles of your customers, partners and friends – stores it into your social address book.

Xeesm.com enhances Social Relationship Manager with a new SocialFinder to enhance social address book information.

Want to know all public social media sites your clients are on? Xeesm.com SocialFinder gets you the data/adds them to Social Address book.

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Filed Under: General