Social Media CRM: What Are the Rules of Engagement?
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Whether you're Microsoft or Mel's Meat Market, the true power of social media and its impact on brands is really only beginning to be felt. As futurologist Ian Pearson stated in Gartner's Customer Relationship Management Summit earlier this year, the rapid pace of change in technology means that companies need to focus on agility instead of just optimization when it comes to integrating social media and CRM applications.
Both affordable and easy to use, tools for monitoring a brand or reputation are essential and keep getting better. Trackur, Nambu, and the social media discussion search engine backtype all come to mind. Creating and capturing market conversations with customers has also improved greatly with the advent of online branded communities such as Lotus Connections and Clearstep as well as Lithium's emphasis on community and CRM. We have monitoring, communities, and collaboration: but something still seems to be missing.
We need rules of engagement for social CRM.
In other words, how do you effectively manage your dialogue with the market in terms of sharing information, fast-tracking problems, and responding to questions, both internally and externally, with customers, prospects, employees, other stakeholders, and the public? Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang agrees there's a gap here.
Although social CRM platforms and tools continue to evolve and improve, more attention needs to be given to process, ideology and roles in social media engagement. Process could involve your listening strategy: is it enterprise-wide or centralized? For roles, how and when would online conversations get routed to customer service/support, and when would they get routed to your PR, marketing or sales department? Just as important is establishing responsibilities and guidelines for engagement. When does a complaint get routed to the CEO, or a product idea go to your R&D group?
Companies are beginning to figure out how to use social CRM more efficiently by adapting their applications and workflow and adding more "community managers." These include Dell, Intuit, H&R Block, and certainly Comcast. Several community platforms are morphing as well and show promise for providing more robust social CRM capabilities. Neighborhood America's ELAvate platform, for example, includes multiple components for generating ideas, collecting large-scale public comment, and creating a white-label social network. Likewise, Radian6 has introduced a social CRM solution to integrate with Salesforce.com's service cloud; with this, sales and support teams can cross-reference social media content with customer and prospect information, streamline workflow, and manage real-time responses across the enterprise.
Still, it appears social CRM technology is well ahead of the day-to-day reality of actually managing online conversations. We need more thought given to strategy, process, and roles for engaging with customers and non-customers alike: the next new frontier of social media. Are you prepared? Please comment!
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I think we are seeing the most traction in social engagement/management in the realm of customer service (i.e., Dell and Comcast). I think this has a lot to do with the relative simplicity of most (not all) customer service issues--problem, resolution, satisfaction.
However, the challenge of engaging and implementing social media with sales process is more complex. You have a broad range of engagement levels from the top of the sales funnel to the bottom. From lead management and nurturing to sales ready.
Lots of opportunity, but lots of creativity needed to make it really effective, consumer friendly, and scalable.
what social media websites are they collecting? Could the app get the fb data about the brand？
Regardless of the tools, businesses and business development managers still need to track the activity generated by their sales force and link that activity to legitimate opportunities. Hence, the question will always need to be answered - was the time well spent? Fundamentals still apply, not as sexy for sure, but imperative.
I agree that it will take a lot of creativity to create the next generation of CRM systems and processes deliver. The question has my attention and I am interested in more conversations to push the ideas forward faster.
Am I prepared? I am prepared to live creatively, be open to what needs to happen next and stay true to fundamentals. If any of these tools can help me do that, right on.
Social CRM is going to be a VERY interesting space, but I read too much about using it to track how your brand is being discussed on the Social Web. This isn't relevant for smaller companies without known brands and who want to use social media to win new customers.
For these guys, they want to hear what CRM companies are doing to help them identify people on the Social Web discussing their market or a need for solutions they offer.
I have a fear that Social CRM vendors will keep chasing the whole brand management perspective and alienate the many millions of small companies keen to use social media but to broaden their reach, not just maintain it.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
@Bill Rice
Couldn't agree more, Bill. Dell ranked #2 among top global brands for its deep engagement with social media channels in a recent report by the Altimeter Group which you can find summarized here: http://www.altimetergroup.com/2009/07/engagementdb.html. And tapping social media as part of the sales process is a new, exciting frontier - not to mention integrating sales with customer service, PR, marketing and across other critical parts of an enterprise. Should be interesting!
@scallet
Precisely the challenge with the social CRM space right now is that different apps monitor different social media. Technorati, RSS feeds, Google Alerts track a wide range of sites and blogs; TweetDeck and TweetGrid monitor Twitter; and so it goes. Platforms such as Lithium do a nice job of integrating these. And others like Scout Labs and Radian6 are beginning to reveal the further possibilities of employee and customer engagement. The biggest missing piece in all this remains Facebook - where they've only recently started testing features that let users go public with their conversations. More on that at CRM Daily: http://www.crm-daily.com/news/How-Many-Facebookers-To-Go-Public-/story.xhtml?story_id=132000D8U43O&full_skip=1
@Ian Hendry
Ian, that's exactly the reason we, too, are fascinated with this topic - looking beyond the monitoring side of social media and beginning to adopt processes, roles and rules for engagement with customers. No doubt monitoring tools will continue to become increasingly sophisticated - but what do you do with the data you collect? And what if you're a small- or medium-sized business: how to use this business intelligence to effectively interact with your customers, improve products, generate sales? Questions, questions. Certainly there are some fascinating challenges - and opportunities - before us. You make excellent points.
I agree that things are going to change dramatically in the up in coming months. I think the best new site is http://www.ClubDistrict.com it is Positive Vibes and good Energy.
Dave and Ian,
This is part of the discussion that I think is critical, and something I hear often. I'm a small business and no one is talking about me, specifically. How do I leverage what's happening on the social web?
Part of it is very much our job to keep educating people that monitoring, listening, and engagement is not always specific to your brand. It can be within your industry, over and above you brand, in ways that help you get connected with the *potential* of these discussions and your participation in them. The key here is focus; understanding your goals as a business very clearly, and using that to guide your online strategies. Monitoring and listening can be useful in much broader senses to build a social CRM strategy, and we're going to continue to explore ways to help businesses build that facet.
Cheers,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community, Radian6
@ambercadabra
I agree that it will take a lot of creativity to create the next generation of CRM systems and processes deliver. The question has my attention and I am interested in more conversations to push the ideas forward faster. keep posting. Will be visiting back soon.
Exactly what we have been trying to drive home to companies here in India.
An obvious step is to integrate the social media with the CRM tools (www.crm.sysblitz.com provides just the same).
Just another simple way to integrate everything well!! :)
Cheers
Roopam
www.sysblitz.com