Social CRM or the use of social media combined with traditional CRM campaigns and software potentially gives marketers the ability to move faster, scale quicker and breakthrough long-standing internal silos.
In theory the real-time nature of social media conversations add another dimension and another marketing challenge to the prospect of building and sustaining meaningful customer relationships. "Social CRM," it is claimed, "enhances the relationship aspect of CRM and builds on improving the relationships with more meaningful interactions… It is the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation."
Social CRM is a way for companies to regain entry to on-going conversations about them. Customers "discovered that they can enjoy a more accurate, timely and relevant customer experience without the organizations disrupting the flow of influence." Traditional CRM programs don't get it, are brand rather than customer-centric, can't move fast enough to counter a hit or a groundswell on Twitter and don't have the social cred to mix it up with their own customers. Therefore social CRM gives brands a fighting chance.
Driving this idea forward is a new study from Altimeter titled "The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, The New Rules of Relationship Management authored by Ray Wang and Jeremiah Owyang. The 18 cases are plotted on a quadrant matrix with axises for market and technical maturity and speed of adoption.
Presented as a work-in-progress, the use cases and attending rhetoric are catalysts for crowdsourcing more analysis and more insight from the CRM and marketing community. They also make a considerable nod to thirty CRM vendors many of who are prospective Altimeter clients.
The majority of the use cases center around the ability to listen, monitor, discern, engage and rapidly respond to movements in the social sphere. The authors cite the 5Ms – monitoring, mapping, management, middleware and measurement as the "foundational processes to provide a framework to filter huge signal-to-noise ratios from blogs, tweets and other social media."
There is an unarticulated underlying assumption that the current or evolving set of automated tools can separate the signals from the considerable noise in social media and produce insights or intelligence that moves markets. It's something the NSA, with all the computing power in the world, aspires to. And it's far from true.
The current tool set is based on a bunch of baked-in untested assumptions and algorithms which often require considerable reading of the tea-leaves and spin to create a sharp=edge or meaningful insight. And while marketing, PR and social media gurus of all stripes cite sentiment analysis and keyword mining tools as the latest wonder; they are much less wonderful than advertised.
The use case scenarios are filled with provocative ideas. Consider these:
Marketers must identify top influencers, rank top conversations, prioritize top channels, identify velocity of discussion and gauge the tone of topics. Absent common definitions or mathematical formulas for most of these terms sorting, weighting and filtering then judging impact, reach and influence are very difficult to do convincingly. This will be the immediate gating factor for social media analytics and the tools being sold today. Defining terms and creating benchmarks should be top priority for the marketing analytical community.
Brands must track what's being said so they can quickly respond. They must constantly monitor sentiment, velocity, discussion and relationships in order to make real-time corrections. Brands have been doing this in one way or another for 50 years. The trick is to understand how to efficiently mine sentiment, assess velocity, leverage relationships and connect these variables to business results. Nobody really knows where the threshold of ill feelings intersects with sales declines. And nobody really knows how or how long the reservoir of brand affinity and brand loyalty mitigates real missteps or name calling on social networks.
Social media cues creative development. Armed with real-time information about words, language, tone, environment and intensity, marketers can craft messages targeted to specific social media channels that will penetrate faster and resonate longer or further.
Events are no longer fixed in time or space. Social media extends the pre-sell run-up and the message runway for any event. It also enhances the experience with real-time reactions and interactions and creates its own after-party and long tail. Social media extends event shelf-life. The Internet makes every event a global experience. Events or segments can be spun out across the Web in real time or persist on YouTube or other sites forever.
Organizations must identify not only where their key prospects and customers interact but also the key needs that a brand aims to help with. Social media helps discern watering holes and pain points. In theory, customers gather and talk about issues outside the earshot of brands and in terms that rarely mirror marketing speak. Social media threatens to expose who's talking, where and how to make marketing and sales messages infinitely more effective. " By participating in the right conversation at the right time, a sale can be intercepted from a competitor's hand." Or social media can reveal "the information needed to rank an individual's level of influence, determine friend or foe status, associate the relationship with the organization and select an appropriate response channel." This sounds great but requires considerable data collection and processing combined with field level intelligence; a combination few marketers have mastered.
Smart organizations recruit, recognize and reward advocates who provide support. "Advocates also play a role in responding to scenarios where it may be awkward for the organization to address such PR fires." Social media breeds shills who can be deployed in a crisis and plausibly denied by the company.
Organizations can no longer afford to design products and services in a vacuum. "Organizations must capitalize on innovation trends that range from product fixes and enhancement requests to feature and solution suggestions." Online customer conversations can yield genuine intelligence about products and services that can sped innovation and inform subsequent offerings. By capturing, organizing and prioritizing ideas in the social media realm, " customers, partners and industry watchers can play a role to expedite requirements gathering, prototyping and demo tests." What this doesn't say is that the pre-requisite for effectiveness, assuming you can gather and process the data, is an openness on the part of technologists and developers who own product sets and who consistently and notoriously think they know better than their customers.
There is no question social media will play a role as CRM evolves. Exactly how and with what weight has yet to be worked out. Some of these ideas are the early imaginings of advocates, dreamers and entrepreneurs. Others are solid approaches that will migrate from traditional and offline formats onto the Web and social media.
In most cases the marketing approach and the customer relationship management concepts are not new. What's new is the connection to and use of social media in a CRM context. In some cases social media's contribution to improved CRM is happening now. In most, Altimeter is laying out a future agenda.
