Most companies have moved beyond experimenting with social media, but few companies are experts at integrating the media into all aspects of the business.
"Managing a Facebook page to promote the latest campaign isn't really social business, it's just social added to existing interactive marketing," writes Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Altimeter Group.
Many companies aren't integrating social media across the enterprise. The rollout generally starts in marketing, specifically corporate communications; followed by customer support, which uses social media to respond to angry customers; followed by product teams and then connectivity with partners and the supply chain, Owyang writes.
"Companies barely even have a full view of their customers" in social media, because the customer data is locked up in silos in brand monitoring and Facebook apps and spread out across the company.
Owyang describes three criteria that determine whether a company is an advanced social business. First, he looks at whether all employees using social media "in a safe and organized way." Then he looks for data aggregated from multiple locations and for the company to be able to predict and anticipate what customers are going to do. Third, "they stop using the terms 'social business' and just use the term 'business' as this integrates into their normal digital communications."
Ad Age's Maureen Morrison says one obstacle to creating advanced social businesses is that marketers are having a tough time integrating social media and CRM. Marketers have robust CRM databases they use to target direct mail and email offers, and a growing number have strong Facebook or Twitter followings. "But few marketers have figured out how to marry the two," Morrison writes.
The idea of one grand database of consumer information, interests and intentions is the holy grail for managing marketer-customer relationships, and the idea of using social data from a network like Facebook to get there is hugely appealing. But when it comes to integrating this kind of social data, it's easier said than done.
My take: Social and CRM information need to go in two directions. If a consumer describes interactions with a brand on social media, that information needs to be recorded in the CRM database, so customer representatives are aware of the comments when they interact with the customer. If a customer declares on Twitter, "I just had a lousy flight on Pan Am," that comment will be taken into account the next time that customer interacts with Pan Am. Brands are already taking baby steps in that direction by having customer service reps monitor Twitter and other social media for customer complaints and deal with them.
Of course, monitoring customer interactions with social media is stepping into a privacy minefield. But the rewards are big for both brands and consumers.
It would be even more rewarding if the interaction went the other way -- from a brand's CRM system out to social media. Imagine a consumer who owns 10 pairs of Levi's 501 jeans. He walks into an outlet of The Gap and instantly receives push notifications letting him know about shirts and belts on sale that would go nicely with those jeans. Again, the privacy implications -- as well as the risk of alienating customers by being plain annoying -- are huge, but so are the potential rewards.
How is your company doing at integrating social media and CRM? Integrating social media throughout the business? Let us know.
Social media should best only be a starting point in creating customer relationship, much like the clarion call towards the brand. The ultimate goal though, should be to form a personal relationship with each individual, once they become customer. These personal relationships are carried in the CRM and after that, social media only need be used as a medium to support such one-on-one relationship e.g. by customized location based ads.
@kicheko - I don't even know whether social media should be a starting point. I am getting a sense that social media is an amplifier for other forms of marketing.
Other forms of marketing will work -- albeit not as well -- without social media. The reverse is not the case. You can't build business on social media alone, or even start a business that way.
Social media Vs. CRM? I would think that social media is PART of CRM. Social media is essentially public CRM which demonstrates a brand or oganization's customer service ability. Of course it can be used for news as well, but to me CRM would be the most obvious use of social media.
It shouldn't be the 'start'. Once the customer intiates a relationship with a brand or org via social media, that's more or less an indicator of said customer's preferred method of conversation, right? (Unless said customer tells you otherwise)
A personal anecdote here, about social media as CRM: Our favorite pizza place has, for a long time, been a small local chain. Service used to be great, but it's falling down lately, with long hold times and delivery times.
I didn't want to give the guy who answered the phone a hard time about it. It's not his fault the place is short-staffed; he seems to be working pretty hard.
If I asked to speak to the manager, the guy who answered the phone would get in trouble, and the manager might not be able to do anything about it.
I wanted upper management -- the guys who set policy -- to hear me. So I wrote a review on Yelp.
I'm all for posting information on Yelp (good or bad) regarding companies to know my opinion about their service and/or product quality offering. But you would be surprised at how many don't even know Yelp.
The first week of February, I was a speaker for Social Media Marketing for a local chamber meeting. One of the first things that I asked the audience was about their awareness of how their company works with, deals with, and responds to social media events/postings about their brand,product, or service. Out of 50+ people in the room only one business owner even understoof the impact of social media towards their business. I practically had my mouth hit the floor from the overall lack of knowledge (and caring) that most of these owners had. So during my 30 minutes of time with them, I basically touched on every major trend of social media and then started having people in the audience pull their own companies up on Yelp, Facebook, and Twitter. The typical response was "I never heard about this".
So while your review is probably just and fair, it may take a call to corporate (the owners) just to get the attention to the problem that it deserves.
@cvargas - I do know that this particular place monitors its Yelp ratings; I've seen its responses to comments.
But I have received no response to mine.
Your advice to let management know directly is good, but I don't know that I want to put that much effort into ordering pizza. I'll try them once or twice more, and if service continues below par, I'll probably just vote with my fingers and use those fingers to dial another pizza place. Indeed, reviews on Yelp point me to one particular pizza place that supposedly has great New York style pizza; as an expat New Yorker I find that appealing.
I wish Yelp had been around when I lived by you. There was a restaurant that claimed to have (and make) Chicago Style Hotdogs, Italian Beef, and a whole assortment of other Chicago Style cuisine. Truth is they were one of the worst places I think I have potentially ever eaten at (outside of some of the military food that I had the pleasure to enjoy for a few years). I think that they were either in Santee or El Cajon.
Eventually we found a place up by Ramona that actually made really good Chicago Style foods. Granted at the time I was not as familar with those types of foods as I am now after having lived up in this area for a number of years, but having vistied Chicago on several occasions I knew the first place was junk.
So good luck on the pizza and hopefully they won't let you down next time.
I concur in thinking that Social Media should be part of a CRM system for a company. Overcoming the privacy issues however could be a tip toe dance. If a customer is willing to provide their social media accounts or link them to a CRM profile, then there can be all sorts of issues that arise if said company starts recording such information verses "monitoring for trends"
Social media should best only be a starting point in creating customer relationship
kicheko - As Mitch suspects, social media isn't the starting point of a customer relationship. My readings tell me that social media is useful largely for customer retention and loyalty, not acquisition. That makes total sense--when you say you "like" a brand, that means you've already hyad a positive experience with that brand before.
"Social media should best only be a starting point in creating customer relationship'"
Considering the amount of time spent by an average user, also the customer, on social media these days and for many of them, social media being the most significant source in maintaining personal relationships, I will not agree that it should be a secondary mean after the customer has been achieved intially through social media. I think CRM and social media need to be integrated, though hard but possible in long run, so that the medium adopted by customers as a routine should be made the basis for continuous interaction with the customer, in turn securing customer loyalty and obtaining effective and unmanipulated feedback.
True, theory may be different from results. However, I am not sure about the outcome of social-first campaigns.
We must also consider that there cant be any decisive opinion about social media's effectiveness. There are pros and cons. From companies' perspective, social media can be an advertising medium if a product is highly appreciated. If it isnt liked by customers, unnecessary criticism may damage the brand image. From customer's perspective, he may get reviews about a product or solutions for problem that are generally faced by other users however, it cant be medium where a customer can discuss specific solutions that may lead to disclosure of confidential details.
I'm planning a CRM program and I'd loooooove to be able to integrate social and CRM. The easiest way I could see it happening is to have a customer log into his/her account online, and then ask the him/her to link and authenticate social network accounts. But some CRM programs don't have web logins, so good luck with that.
One thing that I've been working with clients on recently is the aspect of capturing their social media information (even if it is in a note). The vast majority of CRM's don't allow for this information to be inputed directly unless you have a few custom fields that you can dedicate to this info. However taking the first steps of gathering this information is equally valuable, even if it has to be extracted later on to be useful.
FB and Twitter both provide API's that can be setup for integration, but like you indicated the web based systems typically aren't available to integrate at that level.
I would agree. However the biggest down fall to these integrations is that unless it is a major CRM system that a company is paying top dollar for full support and upgrades that are rolled out, I think that many of them are still going to be lagging behind because they are hesitant to bring on a new version/component that may cause their existing (modified) system to potentially break.
So the reality of implementation may still be further away than it should/need be.
There's Nimble, but I think it's more like a social version of Salesforce. These sales-focused CRM packages don't seem to be appropriate for FMCG-type applications. I'm hoping for at least three mass CRM services to come up with social media integration so that the software matures fast.
To fully automatically integrate CRM and social media, there are three things that would be needed as algorithms, and only one of them is well-developed:
1. Really extensive, usable in real time relational databasing. This has been around for a while, and a company that wants to be first to have seamless CRM/social can buy this off the rack (and then hire some technical specialists to tweak it into what's needed)
On the way:
2. Reliable text-interpreting software, that can tell the difference between "I flew on Sorda-Reliable Airways and had the usual 'great' flight" and "I had a great flight on Sorda-Reliable" and can guess that AW might stand for Airways in one Tweet, Adorable Wife in another, and a root beer chain in a third.
and finally not really there yet:
3. Open source only intel software that successfully identifies known people with their on line id's and does not result in privacy advocates storming the gates.
Without all three in a seamless package, it's going to be rocky for a while, and there will be some failures (some of them very public) before it comes into its own.
Whoops, I didn't mean the code has to be open source; I was using the term the way that the intelligence community does, where "open sources" are things like foreign newspapers, radio call in shows, and other fully public information sources. "Open-source only" in this context means "not using anything that will get you busted about privacy, and in fact provably not accepting any data that might get you busted."
But what we're seeing now is an erosion of "open source" (in the intelligence-community sense) information. Marketers are getting in trouble for combining public or legitimately acquired information in new ways. So Target manages to figure out that women are pregnant based on their buying pattern at Target, and Google gets in trouble in Germany for publishing Street View photos of people's houses -- the same exact view you get if you walk or drive past those houses.
Mitch, exactly, and here's another point from the world of military/political/foreign affairs intelligence, where it's been known for ages: secrets spill out of open-source intel at least as readily as they do out of traditional espionage and reconnaissance, and a very large part of those sources have to stay open because that's their job. (See my novel Payback City for how a terrorist operation might, for example, be able to track police and military people trying to stop them by attacking at rush hour and using traffic reports, or consider how the price of (or number of ration coupons issued for) diesel fuel in September-November tells you an immense amount about how good the harvest was (because in grain-growing countries, harvesting machinery causes a big spike in diesel at that time). That's one way Western intelligence agencies estimated Soviet grain harvests. The modern world runs on so much information that deducing the hidden parts from the open ones is relatively easy.
But it's not usually done for friendly purposes, and most of us prefer to believe it can't be done. Just at the moment there's a tempest in a teapot about False Flesh and that's not nearly as good a guess about what people look like as Target is making about who they are. Most of us like our anonymity; knowing how quickly it could be stripped off is difficult to deal with.
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