Integrated Channel Strategy - Niti Vaish of Slalom Consulting

Highlights from the discussion

• Multi-channel must be integrated, holistic & actionable. 
  • This means, the strategist must look at the dependencies between mobile, social and digital channels.
  • Need a 360 degree view of the consumer
• Clients who ask "Can you build me an iphone application?" are missing the point
• "Let's start a twitter account & a fb page." are free steps that can be taken, but don't deliver any value.
• It's easy to understand why they want to be in this space
  • 130 million iDevices
  • 300,000 iphone apps (in last year??)
  • > 10 billion downloads from app store
  • In terms of market share, iPhone is far beyond Android and Blackberry
  • Nielsen projects smartphone = 50% penetration
  • 650 million facebook users
  • 200 million twitter users

Nevertheless, creating an iPhone app without understanding an integrated strategy, with clear objectives is a waste.

IMC Strategy

• Mobile channel
  • 2008 didn't bring year of mobile
  • 2009 brought online site to mobile, without leveraging device level info
  • Most companies simply took online presence and transferred to the mobile presence.
• Social Channel
  • Brands look at the channels in isolation without looking at the dependencies between the channels
• Digital channel 
  • BI & Web Analytics
    • Organizations must define the objectives of the channel
    • Must have processes in place to handle feedback
    • Else, they will miss out on the ROI for focusing on these channels
  • Extracting Insights
    • To do this, they must understand their customers. Who are they? What segments do they fall into?
    • Most of this data sits in a database, but in the social channel, it is unstructured - twitter feed, comments, etc. how do you leverage this for product innovation or process improvement?
  • Information Architecture & Search
    • Is the site well defined? Is IA well defined with easy to find information?
    • Are users pulled out of context?
    • Do you provide filter and sort functionality to drill down to the most important nuggets?
    • Keep user experience consistent with popups, hover data. This all goes back to design. How well is it defined?
  • Content Management
    • How well is your CMS integrated with your website?
    • Your content should created once and re-purposed across all your channels.
    • You do not want your content for the mobile site created specifically for that channel.
    • You want to re-purpose content and business rules, and the biggest bang for the buck.

Developing a Multi-Channel Strategy

• • Listen to and engage with my customers
    • HD did a fantastic job with the goal of building a community around a cause of natural disaster
    • not pushing product, but showing another face
    • JetBlue is just promoting distressed inventory on twitter
    • Best Buy's customer service supports through a whole network
  • Start to leverage that unstructured data in order to draw insights in order to make product improvements and process enhancements?
    • The conversation is happening - you might as well get involved
    • Be honest and take negativity head on
    • Forrester's has coined a term of "multi-dimensional customer engagement" as this integrated multi-channel strategy. the "customer journey".
Firms must a cultural shift to adopt social media and goals to be well defined
• Aligning these goals within the organization and human resources against those goals is key.
  • One big problem is that these teams are split.
  • What's under IT, marketing, or product facing? Social is typically under PR? Digital is under PR.
  • Important to align the cross functional teams. But it needs to be staffed by people who understand dependencies across the groups.
  • Channel strategist should be a cross-functional role