Vertical Community Nexus – Battle for Digital Vertical Dominance

Vertical Community Nexus is the concept of having the right digital infrastructure and management capabilities in place to own the channels and community for a industry vertical.  The goal of the strategy is to have the best channels & content to create a gravity to draw the online/social community to your channels away from competitors or generic social media sites.  This gives your enterprise the advantage in communicating and analyzing the activities in the vertical.

What is at stake in the coming years is who can establish digital vertical dominance.   As the number of digital channels for direct to consumer channels emerge and their integration into social media conversations enterprises must compete in both the traditional and digital channels to control market share. In today’s digital world most enterprises have web properties, e-commerce, and even active social media participation on major SM properties.   The mantra of the past few years around social media has been to participate and engage at the properties where your customer are.   While this will remain true, the competitive landscape is decidedly shifting towards a strategy that will create a gravity to draw the consumer base and conversation to your enterprise channels.   The advantage here is that by cultivating the channels, content, and conversation around your domain expertise you will be the primary access point to that customer base.

This has many advantages.   If the majority of conversation, expertise, and cutting edge content/information is to be found on your channels, your brand becomes the go-to location for that community.   By investing in the best content, engaging industry experts, and participating authentically in the conversation your brand can arise as a trusted source and be viewed as the leader in both thought leadership and business aspects of the vertical.    By being at the center of all the activity it also provides the foundation to do a deeper level of analytics, investigation, community collaboration, and promotions.   This creates new products, services, and offerings to offer back to the community increasing your value proposition to the audience.

The channels, offerings  and audience create a CAAS – Channel as a Service business model.   Those assets and ability to reach the community attracts business partners in many forms.   Competitors may be willing or need to reach the audience that you control through your channels.  This could be for commerce, advertising, or analytics on the marketplace.   The community, other business, partners, and suppliers may be leading contributors to content  that, again, make your channels the premier source of industry knowledge and news.  Also, verticals rarely operate only within their own walls.   Your enterprise could also be the integration point for cross vertical offerings, commerce, partnerships, and industry conversations.

This is a direct change in online social strategies where your business relies on major social sites to have conversations and content.   It is imperative to embark on this strategy for three major reasons:

1. Relying only on the major Social Channels drives your audience to their channels, their partners, their advertising, their analytics, etc.     You want to participate on those channels, but the goal is to increase awareness of your channels and drive the conversation to those mediums.
2. If you don’t lead, you will lose the audience/community to another competitor.    Then you will reach your customer base through their channels and control process in the future.
3. Once this strategy is in place, everyday, every transaction, every conversation, every piece of content is working in your benefit.   You can’t start this strategy three years late and “catch-up.” It will be too late to grow the relationships, have the depth of content, and history of analytics to guide your next round of investments.

Now to get started.   Let’s review some of the core capabilities an enterprise needs to put in place to begin to compete in the digital ecosystem.  To be the Vertical Community Nexus you have to put both the infrastructure and management capabilities in place to not only exist, but compete in real time against competitors striving for the same community.

Core Capabilities:

1. Cloud Computing:   It is hard to imagine global competition for vertical dominance not being based on Cloud Computing architectures.   They provide the global scale, performance, redundancy and a wealth of technical services required to build the solution, but also to rapidly adapt to new advances in channels, devices, and services.   This bullet point alone could fill an entire book, but the key point is that building and managing these types of solutions takes new skills sets and capabilities within the enterprise.   These span pure technical capabilities,  new project management & testing capabilities, new funding models, new lifecycle management models, new contract and vendor negotiation capabilities, new relationship management capabilities, etc.    Integration and Security is a subset of Cloud Computing, but there will extensive amounts of architectural maturity needed to leverage integration in the cloud and between the many social media sites, advertising networks, internal systems, analytics, and managements systems that need to come together.   Security will also span this entire solution and new cloud based federated security models will be instrumental in the overall integration strategy.

RECOMMENDATION:  Don’t wait to have the perfect future architecture to start this effort.  Get started putting these in place now in your current IT projects and learn from the experience and develop your staff and processes.

2. Multi-Channel / Direct To Consumer (DTC):   These are the capabilities around being able to rapidly deliver solutions across a world of devices.  New forms of PCs, Web, Phones, Slates, Game Counsels and TVs are coming to market continuously.   You need the skills and tools in place to design and deliver optimal experiences of shared services down all of the emerging channels.  This is a core driver of the strategy because it is the very channels in which to reach the audiences.  The ability to appeal to a diversity of form factors and the richness of the user experience are key differentiators in your channels being adopted over all others.

RECOMMENDATION:  You will need this capability for both your consumer facing solutions as well as your internal and B2B solutions.  Use these internal operating applications to pilot and grow your capabilities.   Leverage vendor platforms that offer common toolsets and skill sets to develop across device from factors.

3. Enterprise Content Management (ECM):   Channels are required, but content is what draws the community to the channel.  You must put in place the personnel,  infrastructure and workflow to develop, review, inventory, archive and distribute the breadth of multi-media content that you will host over all your channels.  Today your enterprise might have some of these in place, but in many cases they are being used for point solutions on separate sites.   You need to evolve to an enterprise strategy that can manage & administer the breadth of content across all channels.

RECOMMENDATION:   There are an increasing number of content management solutions and collaboration toolsets on the market.  Buy before build.

4. Social Media Strategy & Participation:  This a concentrated investment in full time roles in planning, processes, tools, analytics, readiness, and full time participation on the channels to support the community.   This has representation both across and vertically in the enterprise.  It is real time activity monitoring and participating with the community.  Directly integrated into business, IT, and customer service.   It has its fingers on the pulse of the industry and the ear of the executive wing.

RECOMMENDATION:   This might not exist in your enterprise at all today.   It must be created with a purpose and autonomy of its own.   It is full time jobs and people with a clear focus.   This is direct contact with the community and your brands voice on the digital channels.   It is mission critical.    Start creating, training, growing, maturing it today.

5. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) & Extended Relationship Management (XRM):  XRM or Extended Relationship Management was introduced by META in 2001 as a term that went beyond basic product/service/sales/marketing efforts and expanded the scope of managing relationships to encompass a broader ecosystem of relationships around the enterprise including employees, partners and suppliers.   These capabilities need to be continually expanded into the social media realm to manage, track, and analysis the ongoing interaction with the community.  This will be the foundation to enable all the business transactions reporting, individual profiling, personalization, 1:1 marketing, advertising,  trend, polling, and sentiment monitoring, etc.   This is a critical piece of the business strategy and ability to intelligently participate in the social media strategy as well as plan future services and offerings.  It will be central to customer service processes, sales, and marketing.   The analytics and industry insights gleaned from this repository can be the premier differentiator for the vertical and for creating new offerings and services outright.

RECOMMENDATION:  Many mature solutions exist in these spaces.  Look for a vendor that offers integration of all of these core services mentioned in this blog and can unify their integration across a common platform and skill set.   All of these capabilities must integrate and have supporting analytics to form the best overall strategic reporting services.

 

Call to action:

1. Assess your current core capabilities and create a roadmap to put new roles, process, technology and readiness in place.  Use existing IT efforts to grow these capabilities for the overall enterprise.
2. Leverage expert implementation partners and vendor to accelerate the development and growth of your enterprises capabilities.
3. You don’t win by home growing this stuff over a long period of time.  You need to get this in place and then start competing for the community immediately to gain the lead on your competition.
4. Put the reporting in day one under every capability.   Without understanding the reporting and analysis requirements you’ll miss the opportunity to capture the information that is transacting everyday.  Eventually, many of these capabilities will become commodities,  everyone will have them.  The residual value is who has had the most mature capabilities for the longest time.  Thus having the analytics, audience, channels, etc.   This is law of the farm strategy.  You have to plant the crops to get to the harvest.   Time is the asset,  time in competing at the highest level wins.
5. Nothing happens without the people commitment.   This takes empowerment, roles, and strategic prioritization to make happen.   It is not a technology effort, it is a people effort.  Invest in the people, grow the people, empower the people, define relevant incentives for the people.   Focus the people, you can’t create the “next” while firefighting daily operations.   This is a strategic and innovation project.  Do you have an innovation team that spans  C-level, Business, PMO and Emerging Technology.

 

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