[Appendix for Section 6.3]

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[5] Pre-sale Consulting Services – or “I want to be a 2.0 Brand. What are the right goals and decisions for me to get there and how can Solution 2.0/2.0 help?”

Helping customers understand their requirements and needs — A brand still in the 1.0 stages of customer engagement comes to 2.0/2.0 Consulting and says, “I know I should be using Social Networking tools better in my overall strategy. I need to get my brand represented on Twitter and Facebook. Can you help me?” 2.0/2.0 Consulting is put in an challenging position because most companies haven't found the secret recipe yet for moving from 1.0 to 2.0. This is because SNS strategies don't follow traditional marketing or product development rules -- nor are there any "proven strategies" -- because they are not passive entities. Rather, SNS strategies and campaigns require special and new types engagement between the enterprise and the customer -- goals of the relationship have to be clear, internal company stakeholders have to buy in to the idea that SNS strategies can provide real value, key members in existing teams have to be actively involved in evangelizing the effort, and relationships and communities have to be groomed, managed, and measured.

With this in mind, a core component of Solution 2.0/2.0 must be to help 1.0 Brands discover the right uses of SNS in their existing business models and future goals. 2.0/2.0 Consulting could offer a “one-size-fits-all” solution – but this would not guarantee long-term success as brands that deploys SNS strategies that did not fit their company goals would soon find the 2.0/2.0 Solution to be merely pixy dust. The 2.0/2.0 Solution must help brands seeking to “put the customer at the center” or deploy SNS strategies to ask the right questions to deploy the right solutions. In particular, 2.0/2.0 Consulting will aid in helping brands understand what parts of their business will change (if and when), then help deploy Solution 2.0/2.0. At the very least, brands will have to

• develop and manage appropriate internal IT systems and processes -- search engines and VRM tools that will help aggregate and monitor communities;
• develop appropriate legal competencies to write and safeguard privacy policies of its internal and external SNS communities;
• monitor and manage instantaneous, transparent back-and-forth communications and responding with relevant interactions on the fly;
• following new user trends and conceptualizing new methods of value creation; and
• understand why and how to best incorporate aggregated community data into their existing processes to make sense of all the noise for the enterprise.

If 2.0/2.0 Consulting doesn’t fully manage the expectations of the brands they work with, Solution 2.0/2.0 will fail.

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[6] Post-Sales Support: Great, You've Sold it to Me...  Now What? 

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After 2.0/2.0 Consulting begins working with a customer and launches a campaign, the data will need to be analyzed and interpreted.  The CPUs in the servers (and to some extent, on the 2.0/2.0 Consulting’s employees’ desktops/laptops) will do most of the data crunching.  However, making meaningful inferences and drawing conclusions from it will be an important, technological skill set to manage.  These people will need to have a strong background in statistics, as well as writing and presentation skills.  These people should also be creative, as one of the next steps in the process is to be actionable with the results.

This analysis, writing, and presenting can be facilitated to some degree through the creation of standard forms and business processes.  As more and more campaigns are conducted, it will become obvious that certain, similar inferences can be drawn from a similar set of data.  Classifying and loosely codifying this into pre-defined templates (e.g., documents, presentations, talk tracks, briefings, storyboards, pre-defined surveys and questionnaires for particular kinds of social networking implementations, etc.) will assist in the transformation from raw data to information to knowledge.  This needn’t be too rigid, since individual people working on individual projects will have different approaches.  What should be kept in mind is that subtle changes and augmentations to the ‘standard’ practices should be monitored and incorporated into the standard offering, if indeed they better the process.  As we’ve seen with successful companies, the practitioners of the tools often know better how to use them than the management who dictates their use.  The collection of these tools will be in a central content management system inside 2.0/2.0 Consulting.  They, too, will be surrounded by a social media network, and will have rich metadata associated with each piece of content (e.g., ratings, who used what last, trail/auditing, feedback loop from customer, etc.).

All of this will aid in successful delivery to the customer.  From here, though, the challenge increases.  Implementing these kinds of ideas requires a sea-change in management commitment and culture.  2.0/2.0 Consulting will offer change agents to assist in the implementation.  Not assisting with the implementation is akin to knowing that a customer is cold, identifying that their house needs heat, delivering a furnace to the front steps, but not installing it.  Since 2.0/2.0 Consulting staff will have been working alongside a customer from the inception, 2.0/2.0 Consulting staff will have obtained a good understanding of the culture, and have a sense of how to implement the suggested changes.  The technological streams relating to this portion of 2.0/2.0 Consulting’s business include strong organizational behavior skills, an understanding of the technology (for interfacing with personnel in an IT group), and strong communication skills. The people in this implementation role should also have deep expertise in social networking and social media.

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