CRM - November 2007 - (Page 13)

Insight which wanted to reach older consumers, was tapping into the wrong population. The video also provided no direct incentive to forward. The company would likely have done a better job of reaching those parents by, say, emailing recipes to them—93 percent of audiences age 45 and over use email at least monthly, a 10 percent higher rate than among those between 18 and 24, according to the report. And audiences between ages 45 and 54 were more than three times more likely to forward messages to their friends than were those between 18 and 24. While video is attractive, as made evident by the overwhelming popularity of Google’s YouTube, it’s not the only means to promote viral activity. “Viral marketing is [just] a motivation for marketing. It describes what kind of result you want [from marketing],” Riley says. “You can use any medium you want to get it to happen.” Well, not any medium: Riley’s report notes that, within the next year, 47 percent of viral marketers will start blogs and 41 percent will drive traffic to microsites—“risking failure in the process.” Instead, the report says, “viral marketers must use tactics (e.g., social tools such as widgets, video) that bring their message to existing centers of communication.” Despite the challenges of viral marketing, it is undoubtedly an effective tool. Riley confirms that consumer interest in a product is most influenced by referrals from friends. Therefore, she suggests marketers should avoid presenting themselves as “cool” to the younger audience and instead target their best audience. “Viral marketing really should be looked at more practically and less as a trend,” Riley says. The objective of viral is to get people talking about the brand, but at the end of the day, marketers should still be focused on quality rather than quantity. “A lot of viral marketing is testing, hitor-miss, uncertain,” Riley says. “The best thing you can do is to consider viral marketing as a long-term process, where you get better over time.” —Jessica Tsai www.destinationCRM.com The Mother of Enterprise Information A new way of thinking about data and information generated across all lines of business erhaps lost amid all the buzz surrounding services-oriented architecture (SOA) is the most far-reaching potential result of all: a Star Trek–like era in which any and all enterprise information, regardless of format, will be made almost instantly available to all employees. Industry research firm Gartner has taken to referring to the emerging concept as enterprise information management (EIM), and considers SOA as the necessary steppingstone on the path to information nirvana. At the Gartner MDM Summit in September, David Newman, a research vice president at the firm, made the connection—and the importance—very clear: “SOA requires EIM, and EIM requires SOA. Both get to the heart of being able to break down those information silos and making information the number-one asset of the enterprise.” According to Newman, EIM is defined by Gartner as an integrated end-to-end discipline for handling information assets regardless of technology “to improve operational efficiency, promote transparency, and enable business insight.”“EIM is about enterprises putting their money where their mouth is,” Newman said at the Summit. “If information is such an impor“EIM is about tant asset to the enterprise, then why not [have] a single discipline enterprises putting surrounding it?” EIM regards all information within a business as its greatest their money where asset, whether as raw data from enterprise applications such as their mouth is.” CRM or ERP systems, or information stored in content, knowledge, and document management systems. “It’s taking all that data, whether it’s structured or unstructured, and making it available to all segments of the enterprise via ubiquitous connectivity,” Newman said. Newman admits, however, that EIM can seem “overwhelming,” and that, as a new and emerging concept, it’s “a lot for anybody to swallow.” But new technologies, such as SOA and XML, will make EIM a reality one day, Newman said. When that day comes, EIM will help businesses reduce operational complexity, improve enterprise performance and agility, meet compliance requirements, and discover more quickly new market opportunities and customer trends and behaviors. What’s more, EIM will allow upper management to gain a complete and accurate overview of the organization. For now, though, only a handful of leading organizations are beginning to study and implement EIM projects—often resorting to custom-built applications, because only a few vendors have begun to address EIM from the technological side. “This is still very new, and no, we’re not just coining another threeletter acronym,” Newman said, addressing attendees’ fears that Gartner was creating a new term for a concept or technology that doesn’t yet exist. “As SOA becomes mainstream, the concept of EIM is slowly emerging, and will become the future of information management within the enterprise.” —Colin Beasty CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | NOVEMBER 2007 P 13 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - November 2007

CRM - November 2007 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity Have You Caught It? The Mother of Enterprise Information Market Focus: Technology: The Simple Truth about Complex Manufacturing Q&A: Gianforte Talks CRM Required Reading Predicting Profitability Checking the Pulse of the Contact Center Cast a Narrow Net Modern Times, Modern Methods Primos Hunting Calls Snares Efficiency Nailing It Down Moving in on Mortgage Delinquencies RDS Delivery Delivers on Service Secret of My Success Re:Tooling The Tipping Point Pint of View

CRM - November 2007

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