General Mills launches new business Gluten Freely

General Mills launched a new business & brand called Gluten Freely on March 2, 2011.  This is a new offering for consumer dealing with Celiac disease either personally or with in their family.   The offering provides a wide variety of services including education, recipes, medical information, and integration to your social network.   It provides a one stop shop for both information and products to assist one in sustaining a Gluten Free lifestyle.   The online store offers food and products not only from General Mills, but a wealth of providers and online coupons for some of the most competitive pricing around.

The new business platform is all cloud based.  It integrates together core business capabilities of eCommerce, CRM, order management and B2B integration for fulfillment.   Extensive XRM/CRM management capabilities allow for increased 1:1 marketing potential.  It is capable of delivering content to a multi-channel consumer bases through web, phone, slate formats and is extensible to emerging channels platforms for TV and gaming console applications.   This new platform gives General Mills the ability to rapidly innovate, test, and scale new business like never before.

Check out www.glutenfreely.com and stay tuned for new innovations from General Mills.

www.tomorrowfromtoday.com

 

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.