Microsoft Advertising just published the results of a survey with 700 major corporation on their use of social media.
What is the most important reason for these companies to invest time, money and resources in social media?
- 27% Word of Mouth
- 26% Brand considerations
- 21% Direct Response
- 18% CRM
- 6% ‘inbound’ or ‘listening’
What does "Word of mouth" mean?
For the purposes of this study, it means three things:
- Identifying and reaching influencers
- Generating word-of-mouth, or conversations about brand, products, or deals
- Rebroadcasting word of mouth to target audience
Leading social media marketers, however, believe that almost two thirds of the ‘word of mouth’ they work so hard to generate doesn’t reach their target audience.
There are also significant challenges to be solved in driving ‘word of mouth’ and managing social communities. Specifically, many social marketers face challenges in
- making sure their communities are target appropriate
- getting new fans and followers
- preventing churn
In my talk yesterday at Stichting Marketing's Social CRM Seminar I focused on a number of social crm tools for small projects and teams. The tools I mentioned were:
- Gist
- Flowtown
- Qwerly (which is really a Data API)
Informationweek.com recently published a list of 14 Leading Social CRM Applications:
Social CRM is a double-edged sword. It gives businesses a tremendous opportunity to easily communicate with consumers, rapidly answering questions and responding to concerns. But it also gives companies more chances to slip-up or to be perceived as being unresponsive or uncaring. That is why a growing number of organizations are stepping beyond the confines of traditional customer relationship management and incorporating social media into the next wave of CRM implementation.
- Oracle Siebel CRM
- Salesforce.com
- SAP CRM
- Lithium Social Customer Suite
- RightNow CX For Facebook
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
- NetSuite CRM+
- Sage SalesLogix Cloud CRM
- Zoho CRM
- Jive Engage
- Batchbook CRM
- SugarCRM
- Parature For Facebook
- Nimble Contact
Any other missing from this list?
Traditional CRM is based around information that companies could collect on their customers and then input into a CRM system that allows them to better target various customers.
Social CRM is a philosophy and business strategy designed to engage the customer in a mutually beneficial relationship. It's supported by social technology, business rules, workflow and processes.
Social CRM's key changes:
- CR Department
In most organisations today, the Customer Relations department will play a bigger role by taking charge of the brand's social presence, while handling customer engagement online.
- Advocacy and Experience
Rather than sending passive messages to customers, incorporate them into the system as advocates. Now, there is collaboration amongst both parties to solve business problems.
More where this came from:
CRM expert Paul Greenberg gave a keynote at Enterprise 2.0 on social CRM. In preparation of his keynote, Greenberg published Social CRM? Really? REALLY? at MyCustomer.com. He mentions how P&G may be the only company with a holistic social CRM strategy - yet it doesn't call it SCRM. What can we conclude from this?
- Customer communities, e.g. Vocalpoint, a network of 600,000 mothers. Benefits: customer engagement, marketing reach; product co-creation and feedback.
- Social marketing, e.g. the Secret Sparklebody Spray launch in 2005. Benefits: Direct revenue benefit attributable to cost-effective social marketing campaigns and locations.
- Product co-creation, e.g. the Connect-and-Develop program. Benefits: new product development and R&D problem solution at a fraction of the cost of an internal effort. Meeting KPI of 50% of all ideas coming from external sources by 2010.
- Customer-centered supply chain, e.g. "pricing from the shelf back".
- Customer experience: the core for social CRM as well as CRM was, and is, the customer’s experience.
Further reading:
"CRM systems need to actually acquire and fully integrate listening and monitoring into their offering." This enables "listening tools [to] close the loop on customer history and response recording."
Users have made on thing clear to sites: when it comes to using and existing online identity to log in to a website, they want a choice of providers.
Overall the most popular online identities to log in with are Facebook (52% for entertainment sites) and Twitter (45% for news sites).
Profile data is available to websites after a user authenticates directly using an existing identity. Data varies widely by provider and depends on user permissions.
Full infographic at:
Two quotes from Chess Media Group's Guide to Understanding Social CRM:
"Social CRM is based on the simple premise that you are able to interact with your customers based on their needs, not your rules."
"[T]hese customers are more engaged than ever before, and are setting the tone, pace and direction that companies must go. Companies must begin to collaborate with and engage the customer, but need to be respectful, and therefore must also deliberately decide on the proper response to each interaction with her. This will require greater internal collaboration with finance, operations, innovation, and other departments within the company."
Further reading:
I'm not sure if I agree with all of the insights in Put social in your sales process and get to the next level but these comparisons made me think:
- Social media monitoring – the new lead gen
- Social engagement – the new cold calling
- Sharing and caring – the new nurturing process
- Community management – the new reference selling
- Mind share development – the new competitive edge
- Advocates engagement – the new closing amplifier
- Social CRM – your new Rolodex
More in this Slide deck:
Authors:
- Andy Rudin, Expert in sales strategies for information technology products and services, Managing Principal at Outside Technologies, Inc
- Axel Schultze, Founder and CEO of Xeequa, President of the Social Media Academy
