'Net Features : sdl

SDL Lends Customers an Ear

Amberly Dressler — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 18:35:00 GMT

Monitoring customer conversations from multiple sources is a challenge for businesses of any size. But with SDL Social Intelligence's August 2012 update to SM2, a business intelligence product, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) can leverage enterprise-power social media monitoring capabilities.

“We think SMBs and departments deserve more than cheap, stripped-down listening tools and ‘light’ versions of enterprise platforms,” said Warren Sukernek, Vice President; SDL Social Intelligence Division. “They should have access to the entire social Web and the analytics to make sense of it.”

With this in mind, all sized businesses can now take advantage of SDL SM2's features, such as sentiment analysis, word clouds, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the ability to monitor more than 60 million conversations each day from 250 million distinct sources.

Belgacom, Belgium’s primary telecoms company, is one enterprise that turned to SDL. Belgacom's Product and Services Specialist, E-Business division, explains an issue many Web professionals can relate to.

“In the early days, we could easily manage the process of dealing with customers’ issues, but with the explosion in social channels it soon became much harder to find the individuals and topics we needed to react to,” said Bram Leunis. “We needed a new tool to search the entire social environment and automate the way we dealt with the customer queries we found.”

The SM2 platform enabled Belgacom to engage its clients across several social media channels, ensuring that every customer was heard and responded to in an efficient manner. With SM2, Belgacom built upon its already successful use of Eva (the company’s virtual character) to engage with customers online and turn potential negative issues into positive experiences, while for marketing intelligence; SM2 expanded Belgacom’s view on what people are saying about the company.

“In the past, we used individual, standalone tools but this approach was rather limited and disjointed, as one piece of software would search across Twitter, one would search forums, etc.,” said Leunis. “But with SDL SM2 we now have the ability to monitor every type of source in one place, including blogs, news sites, forums, message boards and this was one of main drivers behind choosing SDL.”

Results

• Belgacom can proactively search and respond to customer queries across all social media channels in one platform, saving time and ensuring full customer service coverage.

• SDL SM2 enables Belgacom to listen for and engage customers in their own language across all social media channels, allowing for a more customized and relevant customer experience.

• Intelligence on customer perceptions feeds into the overall marketing process.

“Our proactive approach to finding customers with issues and engaging with them in social channels creates a real ‘wow’ affect which is greatly appreciated,” said Leunis. “SDL SM2’s search results are also the first customer reactions we receive when the company launches a new product or service, so they are invaluable in helping decide how to communicate with customers going forward. In the long-term, being able to create internal awareness of how Belgacom’s actions are influencing customer perceptions is of major strategic importance.”

Get a live demo of SDL SM2 here.

Content Marketing from a CMS Perspective

Administrator — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 16:30:00 GMT

If any industry vertical stands to gain from the current content marketing and content development craze, it is the providers of content management software and solutions.

Content marketing has dramatically changed the digital marketing department yet many enterprises simply aren't prepared.

Website Magazine interviewed Ian Truscott, VP of Product Marketing at SDL Content Technologies Division, on the popularity of content marketing among brands, how content helps these brands build trust with consumers, and how marketers can add some sizzle and splash to their digital content strategy.

WM: Why has content marketing become so popular among brands? Haven't digital marketers been using content to drive website traffic and conversions since the 'Net's inception?

IT: I agree, but I think as we see our use of the Internet mature as a business platform and move away from a technical, task based function, we are seeing distinct business disciplines and best practices being defined. Web Governance, Content Strategy and Content Marketing are all examples of things that people have been doing that are now coalescing into these new professions.

WM: What is it about content that helps build trust with a brand? Is there any direct evidence that content marketing results in increased revenue?

IT: That’s an interesting question after your point that “digital marketers been using content to drive website traffic and conversions since the 'Net's inception?” The answer to your question about revenue is a very firm yes – it’s just we haven’t always called in Content Marketing.

I recently read a very nicely written blog post by Theresa Regli at the Real Story Group where she suggested that content sets the scene and the expectations for the brand before people experience it. She writes very eloquently about how she had an expectation about Provence, the sights and the smells, well before she travelled there. This is the role content marketing plays in projecting who you are, and the quality of your service and products.

The fact that we are now recognizing Content Marketing as a business discipline (and have far more tools and data available) means we are also measuring our content marketing success – not just through revenue uplift or website clicks – but through brand sentiment and brand metrics that the big data of social enables us to tap into and are essential as we engage with our consumers across multiple channels.

WM: How should a brand approach content marketing? What should be the primary objective and what's the best way to measure success or failure?

IT: I am a big fan of Robert Rose who writes on the subject of Content Marketing and I strongly recommend his book. I follow his view that the primary approach is to define and then tell your distinct and differentiated story or stories. When doing this, organizations need to take an outside-in approach and put their audience at the center of that story. You then need to figure out the best way to get that story across, based on where your audience is - on a Facebook page, Twitter, your website, an email or a combination of these.

The objective and measurement metric should be no different to whatever reason you are doing any digital marketing – content marketing is not separated from that, it’s a defined tactic that is part of the overall marketing mix. One thing I would say on that though is that those metrics should be considered very carefully as they can be divisive and drive skewed behavior not in-line with the broader business objectives. If for example you measure website hits, then why not just publish a video of a cat playing the piano on your homepage? Because that’s not necessarily going to drive sales of widgets or raise brand awareness of you being a serious law firm.

WM: How does a marketer create "sizzle, flash, and the occasional splash?" in the content marketing efforts? Any best practice guidance you could share from your own or your clients experience?

IT: HA! I like that “sizzle, flash and the occasional splash” - sounds like a great title for a blog post. If I can turn your question around slightly, I think perhaps you need to ask whether your audience wants “sizzle and flash.”

In our own experience we sell Enterprise software through a B2B channel to two primary IT and marketing buyer audiences. The influencers in our market are looking for different qualities in us like dependability, trust and a level of thought leadership that results in a business partnership with us that will remain contemporary and relevant to their challenges in engaging their audience.

Therefore the primary tactic for an organization such as ours is to establish credibility. And we do this through recognition by industry analysts and trade publications; by building commercial credibility with customer case studies/references and technical credibility and by building a community that makes developing on our software becomes an aspiration. And then sharing these stories.

WM: Tell Website Magazine readers about how SDL supports brand's content marketing initiative.

IT: SDL has a range of products that touch the customer journey at various points that we describe as Global Customer Experience Management; from managing and publishing content through our SDL Tridion product, to content translation through our translations services and technology, to our FredHopper content recommendation engine, to gaining insight through social intelligence technology (SM2) and managing the whole campaign and analytics.

SDL Offers a New Method of Product Documentation

Linc Wonham — Mon, 30 May 2011 01:00:00 GMT

SDL, a leading provider of Web content management, e-commerce, structured content and language technologies, has announced the release of SDL LiveContent 2011, a software application that transforms the online experience for anyone who needs product-related information.

SDL LiveContent strives to make product content interactive, context-aware, compelling and available on multiple devices and via multiple channels. Able to respond to customers' interests and needs with targeted product information, SDL LiveContent brings technical information to life and heralds the death of the traditional technical manual.

With SDL LiveContent, companies can improve customer experience, divert calls from support centers to self-service, and provide new revenue and upselling opportunities. Designed as an extension to SDL’s popular suite of structured content technology software, this new release offers a number of new capabilities, including the following:

•    The ability to “roundtrip” comments from SDL LiveContent to authors of the content so organizations can improve content and respond quickly to information gaps
•    A reporting dashboard for “content utilization,” showing the precise ways in which information is consumed so that an organization can improve the usefulness of the information it is producing
•    Out-of-the-box support for DITA 1.2, the latest version of the XML standard for technical information

“Over the next five years, we expect a broad sea change in how corporations engage with their customers through product documentation and other educational or reference materials written for an increasingly savvy consumer,” says Kevin Duffy, CEO of SDL Structured Content Technologies division. “This change is just beginning and SDL LiveContent makes it possible for companies to be on the leading edge of this exciting transformation to dynamic, interactive, targeted content delivery.”

For additional information, visit SDL LiveContent 2011.