Part 2 of 2 ( go to href="http://www.thetibcoblog.com/2012/03/21/how-big-brands-keep-falling-behind-and-losing-market-share/">part

1)

How do brands navigate the

treacherous, democratized, new customer relations landscape to

provide a genuine representation of their experience? The answer

is part organizational mindset and part technological

enablement.

Part Operational

Mindset

First, an organization must

be highly aware internally with active internal communication.

Making this more difficult, modern business has become truly

global with major growth markets in Asia, Latin America, Eastern

Europe, and Africa, as well as in mainstays like the U.S. and

Western Europe. Town hall meetings simply will not cut it

anymore. Employees need frequency and

clarity of communication, but more importantly depth, richness,

variety, and access anywhere. Facebook and Twitter have been high

impact, easy to use and low burden in the consumer sphere, but

nobody (except perhaps Mr. Greg Smith, late of Goldman Sachs)

would use them as a vehicle for communicating confidential

company matters. Regulations in many industries also mean that

those platforms certainly wouldn't make the cut for

corporate use. The good news is that the tools are already here

to bring together global knowledge teams and all the supporting

systems data to make clear, concise, rich, global communication a

reality.

Part Technological

Enablement

Large organizations

and small are now aware that their clients (and others) are

talking about them online, and it may not be all good. This dull

white noise of Internet chatter is tough to identify, harder to

understand, with sources impossible to pinpoint. The volume and

variety of updates, posts, tweets, and blog posts mixed with the

unstructured, opaque nature of the content and contributors'

anonymity don't match the need for hard metrics by corporate

environments reliant on SQL statements looking for a

match.

However, the advent of href="http://www.tibco.com/products/soa/in-memory-computing/default.jsp"

target="_blank">in-memory tools and newer href="http://www.tibco.com/products/business-optimization/pattern-matching/default.jsp"

target="_blank">pattern-matching capabilities (like

a child's innate ability to learn language rather than the

multiple imprecisions of 1990s-era "fuzzy logic") mean real

comprehension of Internet chatter is within our reach. The latest

visual analytics tools, akin to a self-service, Google

Maps-style, tactile navigation through large data sets, only make

this process more intuitive and rapid.

Knowing

what goes on outside the firewall is good, but how do you

translate this to actual business use? The ability to respond,

after you've captured the salient information, is in

its infancy for most organizations. Business culture and

technology optimized for fixed office hours to give the data

plenty of time to rest between work cycles has become more than

antiquated. New approaches in organizational and technological

terms are starting to be given their voice. Live "playbooks,"

accessible from any desktop or mobile device can now solely

address more clear-cut situations, and the escalation path for

tougher calls. Rather than heavily leaning on IT to analyze each

data set and develop reports for business users, new business

processes and playbooks can be implemented at the speed of a

refresh over the network. Product management, sales, corporate

communications, and legal can collaborate securely, with full

audit capability on data analyzed through mobile analytic

dashboards and shared on a global, mobile network. This dynamic

network can collaborate before a response goes out, and it can go

out simultaneously through all channels to all media outlets,

whether old, new, or social.

An

Effective 21st Century Customer Relations

Approach

This isn't

science fiction; these are real capabilities that my colleagues

and I have had the chance to experience with our clients, on a

regular basis. Progress in this field, was at one time hampered

because organizations didn't realize these boundaries

can and should be pushed. Nowadays, it isn't that these

solutions aren't implemented because they can't be done

(either with href="http://www.tibco.com/company/default.jsp"

target="_blank">our platform, or a collection of

other tools), but mainly because people don't realize it can be

done fast and efficiently. Hopefully, we can start to turn that

tide.

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