Posts Tagged ‘Social CRM’

Social CRM and the Value to Organizations

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

News Alert: Customers are beginning to use social networks to communicate between themselves and with you.  The conversations are happening with or without you.  Whatever you want your brand to be known as or the language you want to be associated to your brand is no longer up to you.

How do companies deal with this?  When the customer’s voice, in many cases, is louder than your own and when customer issues are put to public trial before you even know you’ve been charged with anything.  Let’s call this defense (yes I’m excited that America’s favorite past-time has started this weekend).  What about offense? 

     1.  Now you can begin to understand who might be in the market for your product. 

     2.  You might know when a customer is having issues with their product before they come to you (assuming they give you a chance to fix it). 

     3.  Can you fix a produt flaw as customers begin to first talk about it

 There are many other ways to take advantage of customers talking in online venues (see attached diagram from Altimeter Group’s research on SCRM released in March).  Everyone from the industry can tell you that Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) will help companies figure all this out.   The interesting part (as Jacob Morgan points out) is that companies don’t know to ask for a SCRM solution.  In fact, even if you could buy a SCRM solution if probably would not matter all that much.  SCRM is about much more than some piece of technology implementation.  The keys to being effective with your CRM, whether social or not, lie in a company’s ability to capitalize on information as they get it.  To be able to course correct in the midst of a product launch when it was not in the plans.  That seems to be what SCRM is about.  It’s the ability for companies to adapt to their customers rather than adapting to their internal technology paths.  It’s the ability to re-think how data is captured, stored and analyzed to produce better information than what your overpriced sales dudes can provide for you.

These are the opportunities that SCRM make available for companies.  Much like “getting a website” was to marketing in the mid 90′s, SCRM is a virtually untapped opportunity to differntiate your company…in your customer’s eyes.  So we know the value that SCRM can bring, now what are you supposed to do?  Unfortunately, there is not one answer that fits every situation.  There are some guidelines to follow and there are even enough examples out there to begin to model successful efforts if you are able to find them.   To help develop some better models and open us up to some expanded thinking on the topic is one of Altimeter Group’s famous business analysts/strategists, R “Ray” Wang.  Ray brings well earned, highly respected insight to this discusssion on creating value in organizations through Social CRM.  The title and questions are as follows: 

Topic:  SCRM and the Value to Organizations

Q1: What are the basic tenents of SCRM?

Q2: How can you begin to tie social into existing CRM?

Q3: Build a list of useful SCRM use cases. 

This week’s event will take place Tuesday 9/7 at noon eastern.  To participate simply follow #sm76 from any Twitter client or follow along from our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com

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Posted in SocialCRM, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Weaving Social Throughout Your Organization

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Companies are challenged to grow in uncertain times and to do more with fewer resources. There is a continuous need to explore new systems and methodologies to help your employees work smarter internally and engage external resources who will advocate more often with less incentive. As a result, organizations are turning to the promise of new web based technologies.  As our moderator, Adam Cohen puts it:

“Social media is changing the game, providing new touchpoints, technologies and techniques for businesses to build, maintain and encourage relationships with customers.  But social media tactics and tools alone will be limited in their business impact.  When combining social media with other interactive marketing practices, the results can magnify both.  In other words, social media integrated with other forms of marketing is greater than the sum of the parts.”

So what are the parts and how does the sum equal more than the parts themselves? 

Social media should not stand alone and “being social” does not change your objectives.  Being social merely changes your approach to achieve those goals whether internal or external focused.  When used as part of your digital ecosystem, the results can be significantly more valuable.  Consider the following areas:

  • CRM + Social – although we discuss it quite a bit, the market is still not at a point general adoption.  Social CRM provides an opportunity to know more about your customer’s frame of mind at the time and better understand life events that may affect purchase decisions.
  • Search Engine Optimization – most companies have paid and organic search strategies.  If your site does not optimize for what customers are asking for then your your competitors will enjoy more organic result while you will end up paying dearly for your web search traffic.  As social typically creates a wealth of fresh content (of which gets spidered by the engines quickly), you can focus the topics of your content to better effect organic results that your prospects are using at the time.
  • Content Management – Ask this wealth of content is developed, you are creating a corporate asset.  If you are a global company or run across an enterprise, there is a lot of value to making those assets reusable across campaigns, countries, departments, etc.
  • Mobile - find companies where they are, when they are there and in the way they want to be found.
  • e-Commerce – Imagine going to Best Buy site, searching for TVs and your friends from Facebook populate the TV screens.  You would be more apt to take notice and spend time.
  • Website-optimization – Imagine once again that the first set of comments on that TV are that of your friends who have purchased that same TV.

This does not even mention customer service, marketing, advertising and running campaigns.  To cover this topic in more depth is Adam Cohen.  Adam is a partner at digital agency Rosetta.  He will tackle one of the bigger issues that we have had on this chat and is more than capable of doing so.  The topic and questions this week will be:

Topic: Weaving Social Throughout Your Digital Marketing

Q1) How should marketers approach weaving social media tactics into their marketing arsenal?
Q2) Why does blending social media improve the effectiveness of other tactics?
Q3) Which tactics have the most impact when combined with social media? (Think both digital and traditional)

Be sure to follow the conversation this Tuesday 7/20 at noon EST by tracking the #SM69 tag on Twitter or visit our live page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com.

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Posted in corporate, Mobile, Public Relations, SEO, social media, SocialCRM | 4 Comments »

Social CRM – Lipstick on CRM or Transformational Business Model?

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

We spend a lot of time on this chat discussing social media and marketing with details like implementing, measuring, strategizing, executing,lipstick engaging, etc.  Let’s say we dial it in and our community efforts are going great and growing quickly.  I say, SO WHAT!  If you’re not converting these prospects and customers to do something then who cares.  All this social stuff doesn’t matter if you don’t sell more stuff or keep existing customers on board longer by providing better service.  Another way to look at it is turning regular customers into advocates and detractors into believers.  This happens when you engage the customer quickly, meet expectations, deliver quality and consistency over time in an open and transparent way.  Companies manage these interactions today using internal tracking systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM).  But wait, customers are not using old ways to communicate, they are using new ways to engage and interact with social tools.  this leaves companies scrambling to figure out how to engage and interact from their internal legacy systems.  Along comes Social CRM.

Everyone is trying to define Social CRM (great resource from Bob Thompson) in their own way and yet no one definition quite fits all needs yet.  One definition by Paul Greenberg makes a lot more sense than many others I’ve seen.  He says:

CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.

But we are not here to define it, our intent is to educate a new legion of corporate soldiers - hell bent on infusing their companies with social goodness both externally and internally.  So what does Social CRM look like?  Here’s a possibility:

  • Traditional CRM: (sales) prospects become leads, leads become accounts and from accounts come opportunities.  Sales people are managed with activity levels (# of calls, emails), funnels are staged and it becomes more operationally focused (read: process focused not customer focused)
  • Social CRM: in an online home improvement Q&A, a homeowner asks “what goes better on a kitchen floor, wood, carpet or tile?” A professional from a home improvement big box store responds with “Tile, because wood might warp with water spills and carpet will hide food that drops.  I am going to forward you a direct line to our local store and a 15% coupon on flooring tile.  Come in this weekend and I’ll make sure Joe is available to walk you through the options in person.”  CRM is updated, Joe at store is notified and homeowner is sent an email with a “Tweet This” link on your experience.  The new measurement might be interactions started, prospects referred and  conversational intent.

A couple of things are happening here.  1) Sales forces must change the “50 calls/day = 10 meetings /week =1 sale/month” sales by the numbers approach to an approach that engages with prospects and their needs and over-delivers with solutions that are relevant at the time.  2) Systems must be able to support this distributed engagement and broaden the ownership roles across many levels of a customer taking what is traditionally an inside-out approach and integrating more of an outside-in model.

To  help us make sense of this all, we’ve invited Aaron Strout to help us moderate the topic this week.  Aaron is a proven professional in this space working from both the vendor and customer side, and is a social heavyweight for sure.  We’ll need a heavywieght as we explore this relatively new topic of Social CRM and begin to identify places to consider implementing within our collective companies.   The chat will consist of 3 questions as usual coming 20 minutes apart and starting at 12 noon EST.  Join in by following #socialmedia through Twitter or to make it easier follow our LIVE page during the event.  The topic:

Social CRM – Lipstick on CRM or Transformational Business Model?

Q1: How does adding social make CRM better?

Q2:  If social is front end & CRM is back end, what information is important to capture into CRM?

Q3:  How can Social CRM help improve conversion (cover sales, service, support)?

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Posted in corporate, SocialCRM | 13 Comments »