Earlier this month, one of our team had the
fortune of a day out at our nation’s capital to attend the Internet
World 2011 event. After a day of meeting, greeting, networking and
learning, they returned the next day brimming with new ideas and
brandishing what seemed to be a small forest-worth of flyers,
pamphlets, and whitepapers (also known as bumf).
Now, when you attend an event such as this, it
is great if you can identify one thing that stands out, that has
legs, and this year it is Social CRM.
At this point, some of you are thinking that
this is another buzzword thought up by some bright spark in a
minimalist new media company which involved taking something that
has existed for ages and making it ‘shiny and new’ by sticking the
word ‘social’ in front of it. However, this makes sense, and if you
have been spending the last couple of years getting stuck into
social media you should be looking into it, today.
Social CRM is an evolution of the traditional
concept of CRM (that’s Customer Relationship Management, to you and
me). However, despite its name, traditional CRM is actually company
focussed, it creates a process by which a company can organise its
sales, marketing and support functions to target customers with
communications in order to leverage more out of their wallet.
However, the traditional CRM process is fundamentally one-way.
Your customers now expect collaboration any
time, any place, any where, instead of simply having marketing
messages pushed to them. Customers expect to talk with brands to
solve their specific problems and shape their own relationships
with those brands. This is a crucial difference between traditional
and Social CRM. The pay-off is that brands that do this well will
benefit from customers that act as brand advocates, open to
promoting and recommending them through social channels which are
an increasingly important marketing tool that can dovetail with
other marketing efforts such as search engine optimsation.
The issue for many organisations is that there
now needs to be a change in mindset. Many of you reading this will
have invested a large amount of time and money building presences
on social media sites. However, you now have to move away from
Follower counts, Re-tweets and Likes to understand how you are
going to manage the online communities that you have created and
how you are going to create value from them. Failing to do so will
send your social presence in decline and put back the progress you
have made; now is the time to realise the CRM value of social
media.
Authored by Ian
Cockayne