Does Social Media have a role in CRM?
3 April, 2012 at 1:12 pm Tim Roberts ARTS Australia 3 comments
I don’t know, what do you think?
I was asked by a client the other day whether Social Media should have been documented more in a CRM specification. I said that I had presumed so, but when I tried to define tasks or information requirements that overlapped CRM to Social Media a short paragraph seemed to do the job.
I am not diminishing the value of Social Media. But Social Media is about a conversation and the extension of Customer Relationship Management is not Customer Conversation Management.
Listening is more important than talking, preaching or promoting. The latter does not encourage or enhance engagement, listening does.
So back to CRM. I guess you could record a customer’s FB page, twitter account, Linked in page and so-on. But that is just like recording phone numbers, it does not mean you are or will listen to them or learn from them what interests them, excites them, annoys them, even what they think about you and what you do.
I think the missing link is legwork. Sorry for the mixed analogies, but the legwork of listening is essential, whether automated or manual. Listening to Social Media channels may result in learning and provide the trigger for activity. That trigger may be a complaint, compliment, indication of a prospect or a warning of a defector (maybe lapsing subscriber is less inflamatory). Various Social media channels need to be monitored for triggers and when a trigger is identified, a CRM may then assist in managing the customer incident, communication, activity, induction, loyalty, upgrade, re-attraction and other stages of an ongoing, developing and evolving relationship.
Therein lies the challenge, identifying triggers by the action of listening to the multitude of conversations. A CRM can record Social Media identifiers, integration will eventually enable the monitoring of the social media channels for individuals. However, intelligence will be required to be added to that listening to accurately identify triggers for the proactive (even just reactive) management of the relationship.
Then we get to the issue of privacy … oh boy – let’s leave that for another day.
Entry filed under: audience development, CRM, Online, Social Media. Tags: Arts Marketing, CRM, Online, Social Media.
1.
Simon Boichot (@boichot) | 3 April, 2012 at 7:07 pm
Some comments on this article (brainstorming):
Managing social relationship shouldn’t be done too much via CRM, or if so, it should be done with a personnal filter after the automation.
For example : if the CRM auto respond or auto add some individuals in our social network, the next step is interaction, and the problem then is to filter the information inside your community.
Social crm and the concept of internet noise and filtering has been well understood by the startups and the recent news of Rapportive bought by LinkedIn (SocialCRM based on mail) or Summify (Summary of links shared by your community) bought by Twitter are some good indicators of the important services we will need soon.
Personally I think social networks management and Social CRM need to be done through an implication of the team, everyone should pass the word and interact on social networks or the strategy will soon be transformed on something artificial that every follower will understand… and you will finally lose the attention and the contact.
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Elke Schmitt | 12 April, 2012 at 11:46 pm
I am convinced that Social Media has a role in CRM. If we talk about customer relation management that means, that a relationship should be established. How do you establish relationships? Mainly through talking and listening. This is where the social media part comes in. Nowadays, clients do not only want to be part of your client database, they want to interact and find out more about products by searching on social media channels. If a company is not present in all the important channels they can give the feeling that they don´t care about their customers. –> the relationship faints…
Maybe this is not true for all areas but I think that Social Media is a Must. Here is an interesting infographic that we have created about CRM and SCRM where you can learn about different CRM apps and Social CRM solutions and compare them: http://www.getapp.com/infographics/most-important-online-crm-and-social-crm-apps
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Tim Roberts | 17 April, 2012 at 2:46 pm
I really don’t like this term Social CRM. I do not believe that CRM does not facilitate social interaction. Social CRM, smacks of eCRM and other similar misunderstandings or misapplications of the term to try and justify products (yes a ‘product orientation’ at vendor level). It reminds me of the ‘invention’ of the 5 P’s followed by the 7 P’s, which was a misinterpretation of the 4P’s, that weren’t broke.
Your point about “establishing relationships” is interesting. Do you infer that is all CRM is about? Ongoing management of the relationship is an important aspect, surely?
No client really wants to be part of your “client database”, the database is only a means to an end. The end is management of a relationship from the beginnings over the lifecycle of the constituent.
I certainly do not believe a company has to be present in all channels, particularly if they are not communicating effectively in those channels. I would err on less is better than more channels with token efforts. A caring relationship is through attention and responsiveness and that can be delivered by one channel if done properly.
I am not persuaded from the infographic that there is useful integration of Social Media in the larger task of CRM (i.e. information enabled Relationship Marketing). The larger issue is the strategic integration of Social Media into Relationship Marketing. As Simon suggests the issue is meaningfully filtering the Social Media chatter and collecting and categorising at an individual level direct to a customer record. Are these applications and integrations really adding value to the knowledge of an individual customer via automation? I worry that many are just applying mass media logic and tactics to a new media … Social Media.