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Social CRM - the next big thing?

June 13, 2009

in Social CRM, Social Graph, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

In April 2009, Jeremiah Owyang and Forrester released their latest report, ‘Future of the Social Web‘, which illustrates how social networks and marketers will have to change their strategies going forward.

The report suggests that within approximately two years, social networks will be more powerful than corporate websites and CRM systems – this can be further defined as the ‘era of social commerce’. One significant finding that marketers should make sense of and start planning for is Social CRM.

What exactly is Social CRM?

The traditional CRM system assists an organisation by bringing together data from all areas of an organisation, giving a 360-degree view of a customer for marketing and sales to make informed decisions on cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. At the same time, this data can be used to shape marketing strategies and corporate communications.

Social CRM, on the other hand, is your existing CRM that has the ability to leverage the social web and automate the conversation process. The social CRM can be used by marketing and sales teams to listen to conversations, craft appropriate messages, join in immediately with customer conversation and offer them value in terms of information and solutions.

Social CRM has the ability to:

  • Convert content to conversations therefore humanising a company so that customers regard the organisation as a trusted peer.
  • Extend conversations into collaborative experiences, putting the customer at the core of a company’s strategy.
  • Transform these experiences into meaningful relationships based upon real customer engagement.

When thinking in terms of ROI for setting up this system, the value is in developing relationships and long term loyalty that serve your business over time.   Social CRM will help generate marketing intelligence, providing the marketing department with insight that will assist your company to source better leads and reduce customer support costs through self-helping communities.

Adopting the Social CRM mindset

To begin with, marketers should dedicate time to working with brand advocates, involving them in shaping the product and communications. This is how social CRM is supposed to work; through the integration of customer social networks.

You should find that your existing customers belong to social networks and openly add more information to their profile than what you have in your traditional CRM system. Therefore you should think creatively of ways to integrate your customer’s networks into your current CRM.

If you think about it, a customer’s LinkedIn profile probably has more information than your CRM system would ever accommodate. A LinkedIn profile for example, would feature education, awards, associated groups customers identify with, furthermore their personal/company blog and Twitter feed can be fed into their profile. Most important is that you have sight of their entire business social network, including colleagues, suppliers and partners.

Now is the time to give some thought on how to connect social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter to your existing CRM and look to share information in a two-way manner. At the same time, it is important to be mindful that your customers should be able to control what information is shared with you, as social media best practice is all about giving customer control over the dialogue.

Going forward

Marketers need to understand that social networks and communities will influence CRM; resulting in corporate sites and marketing communications being able to recognise social relationships and customers preferences and deliver customised experiences to them in real-time. We are still some distance from this scenario; however companies such as Appiro and Salesforce are already leading the way in Social CRM.

Earlier this year, Appiro developed a Facebook application that can easily be rebranded by marketers for campaign activity. This application can be distributed at the same time sharing information, recommending information to peers, and used for other purposes such as recruiting, word of mouth, and other typical social network activities. As the information is shared, it can then be passed to a landing page where users can submit information in a web form that is stored on Salesforce.

Social CRM is both exciting and daunting, but by taking tiny steps to understand social media, and experimenting through integrating social tools into your CRM system now, then testing and improving, you will be very well prepared.

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Twitter - The Individual Within the Tribe

December 16, 2008

in Individual as Medium, Micro-blogging, Social Media, Social Networking, Tribe, Twitter

Having become a heavy Twitter user these past few months I can now classify myself as an individual within a tribe.  The Twitter tribe I belong to consists of groups of individuals such as myself who share a common interest (Twitter) and unite to form a parallel social universe.  
In my own case I’m interested in following those with a shared passion for social media and our universe is supported by rituals, for example sharing links to blog posts, pages etc… in the form of TinyUrls, retweeting ‘tweets’ that we identify with as well as asking questions and responding to others.

Decline in the use of social network sites such as Facebook
Like myself, using Twitter I’m sure has now become a habit for many.  Not only do I regularly tweet throughout the day but in an evening I regularly use Twitter and enjoy doing so because I’m learning, engaging, participating all at the same time with like minded people.
I have seen the stats of my use of social network sites such as Facebook rapidly decline.  I rarely login to check what is going on with my friends and family on Facebook, not because I’m not interested, but because I want to spend my time engaging and interacting with like minded individuals (people like me) in my own parallel universe on Twitter.  
My very close friends and family would be bored to tears listening to talk about social media marketing and engagement marketing, but with my Twitter tribe we can all tweet for hours about a subject we feel passionate about.   So is the Twitter tribe starting to replace a certain role once provided by my family and friends via Facebook?

The inner workings of the tribe
Taking this further can the Twitter social universe that I’m a part of be defined as a church where we all congregate to celebrate what we are most passionate about, which for myself is social media?  I’m not going to use the word ‘cult’ to associate this to my tribe as there are negative connotations associated with the word, however the behaviour displayed by some Twitter consumers comes very close to that of a cult.

Twitter could be seen as a place of worship of icons that we admire within the social media world where many individuals are increasingly likely to conform to the influences of their peers.
These icons for me such as @jowyang, @ChrisBrogan, @ScottMonty are evangelists of social media whom represent both a career and passion for many.  
It is not uncommon when these icons reply to followers they feel that they have been blessed, which further encourages their need to particpate in the tribe, continuing their journey on Twitter enlightenment!
Many tweets I have witnessed publically declare they “cannot believe that @Scobelizer has replied”directly to them or that @StephenFry “just tweeted me back” - but this is just one part of the enjoyment of using Twitter, other Twit fun includes building up your social graph, discovering great content, tools and research.  

One tweet I have used to sum up Twitter that has been retweeted by many who also identify with my sentiment is:  ”I cannot believe how addictive twitter can be - it is voyeuristic as well as participatory.” 

Come and Join me in my social universe at: http://www.twitter.com/tomchapman

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Widgets - Social Advertising for Childsifoundation

December 14, 2008

in Buzz Marketing, Collaboration, Crowdsourcing, Flickr, Not for Profit, Social Advertising, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, Widgets, Word of Mouth Marketing, YouTube, facebook

Yesterday I was contacted by Kirsty Stephenson from Childsifoundation via Twitter asking if I could give them some quick advice on their social media activities.  

Childsifoundation is a charity aiming to build a home for abandoned children in Uganda and their business strategy is purely collaboration which is the perfect fit for Web 2.0 harnessing the power of the community and crowdsourcing.  They already use Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and have a great blog.  Their strategy at the moment is outreach and increasing word of mouth marketing for the charity before they move onto asking for money donations.

I immediately replied to their request to give some advice on the use of widgets as part of their social media activity for the first step.  Below is the e-mail I sent:

Hi Kirsty,

With regard to your Facebook group the first thing you should really look to do is create a ‘widget’ and place it on your profile page.

Widgets simply allow consumers to grab and share your social ad at the same time promoting your charity and encourages word of mouth marketing.

This can not only be shared amongst your Facebook group but can also be shared with other major social networking sites increasing your reach and seeding content further.

Earlier this year I interviewed Ted Hunt from innocent drinks who used this form of social advertising to promote their buy 1 grow 1 tree campaign: http://grow.innocentdrinks.co.uk/

A widget is essentially a ‘pin badge’ for your supporters web pages, profiles, blogs etc… and increases the virality of the campaign.  This is a perfect fit not only for your charity’s business strategy as it is focussed on word of mouth marketing as you want to spreading the word via communities, but it also continues engagement simply by updating the content within the widget such as week by week progress reports of your charity’s activities.

Because you already have video content you can make this immediately into a widget, but ensure that the video gets its message across in 20 secs max as attention span of consumers will not go beyond this.

You can also create a variety of widgets for example another widget would include a the list of charitable things that you want users to do, so they can quickly view this list and click on what needs to be donated - as a result you increase your reach.

Take a look at the following ‘In Widget’ example at http://www.clearspring.com/services/widgetmedia/gallery

You can transform your ‘Get Involved’ list into a dynamic list that users can click on and find out more.  Your ‘Get Involved’ page is a really engaging page as consumers can interact as see if there is anything they can help with or contact their friends if they know someone else with the skills to assist. Engagement is the key to social media.

Place this widget on your blog too as your blog is the launch pad for all other social media activity and visitors will be able to grab and share this application at any time.  You can also track where your widget has been shared so you can monitor your campaign performance and reach.

You can then use this widget as a donating tool later on when you move onto the next stage of your strategy.

Set up an account and create your social widgets over at http://www.clearspring.com/ it is very simple to use and effective.

Hope this helps you out at this stage.

Best regards,

Tom.

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Mobile social networks and mobile social networking – MoSo

November 28, 2008

in Mobile, Social Media, Social Networking

Mobile social networking is increasing in popularity.  This is due not only to the introduction of smart phones such as the iPhone, Nokia N96 and Google Android, but also because mobile broadband is now a popular bolt-on for mobile contracts.  Mobile broadband providers such as Vodafone for example offer free access to the Facebook mobile operators platform.

On-deck social networks
In the UK, mainstream social networks such as Facebook available on-deck are most popular due to the critical mass of their online platforms that have migrated to mobile.  I know from first hand experience how popular Facebook mobile is, from the amount of use by staff and friends and when logged into my Facebook account I can see the large number of profile updates made via phone.

Off-deck social networks
Other ‘off-deck’ social networks are available as a software download to phone that allow users to set up group networks once installed.  One popular example is German based mobile social network platform Aka-Aki.
Aka-Aki is a location based social network and was founded by the students at the University of Arts Berlin in 2006 and has since achieved great success in terms of member numbers throughout its backyard of Berlin city.

Location-based social networking offered by Aka-Aki allows its community members to share their location using bluetooth. Members can add comments about a restaurant, inform friends that they’re going to a gig in town or just find out if anyone they know using the network happens to be nearby so weak-tie relationships form.
Aka-Aki is looking to introduce its location based mobile social network to the UK in 2009 and in my opinion it will easily achieve brand recognition through their cool ‘elk‘ icon, but the network faces tough competition from already established social network platforms available on-deck.

Chinwag MoSo Rising event 
Two weeks ago I attended the Chinwag event MoSo Rising in London to get the skinny on mobile social networks going forward into 2009.

MoSo Rising’s focus was predominantly a technology and software based discussion – I personally wanted to learn how brands can successfully use mobile social networks to engage with consumers as opposed to the technology behind the user experience. 
My key takeout from the event is that the mobile itself should not be seen as the ‘web in your pocket’ but as an extension to online activities and to assist in continuing the engagement with consumers around mobile activities and communities.  This is an obvious point and one that is important because the behaviour of mobile and web use is totally different.  MoSo content should be adapted and targeted to mobile use and applications.  For example developers and content providers should be looking to target those consumers that cannot access the web from their workplace but who want to engage and stay connected with their group networks.  So we’re looking at taxi drivers, nurses, building contractors, basically anyone away from a fixed line connection that have a phone they can use to network with.  
There is a great deal of potential for MoSo as pretty much everyone has a mobile phone, although not everyone has a smart phone and mobile handsets in the UK have reached saturation point.  Still it will be interesting to see if 2009 will finally be the year for mobile marketing, social media and social networks in particular.

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