June 19, 2013

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Location Revisited: Marketing’s cornerstone takes on a new paradigm

May 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment
foursquare_map

Location, location, location.

The concept immediately brings back to mind college marketing classes and textbooks; clear lessons from industrial age distribution models. The focus has slowly faded away, however, over the past couple of decades with the invention and growth of a digitally connected, flat economy in which we can buy anything… from anyone… from anywhere.

Except… for most of us, where we are is actually a huge driver of what we do. Mitch Lieberman, has recently been placing more emphasis on context. For a few years now, I’ve heard and seen statements floating by my activity streams like “Content is king, but context is queen”. Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are in the process of writing about the “Age of Context”.

They’ve all picked up on the fact that we’re moving from an era of BIG, CRUDE, AND MANUAL TO SMALL, MEASURED, AND AUTOMATIC.

All of us, in our personal and professional lives, are desiring requiring more relevance, more alignment, and more accurate filters to help us navigate the bombardment of information we encounter in our daily lives.

Relevance. Context. All of a sudden, location matters again. Though, it’s contribution to customer behavior is manifesting itself in a different manner.

Even with the dramatic rise of e-commerce, most consumers still purchase from brick and mortar stores. According to a 2012 study:

Though consumers are using their mobile devices more than ever to find deals and research products, they still love their brick-and-mortar stores, a new study shows. Despite the proliferation of devices, shopping applications and growing consumer comfort with the mobile channel, the vast majority (90 percent) of both online and offline shoppers involve a store visit in many of their purchases.

Until recently, e-commerce and brick and mortar business models have been largely detached. Even for many major retailers, stock, pricing, returns were not connected. That era is giving way to a connected experience where consumers interact with brands across channels (brick and mortar, 3rd party retail, e-commerce, social), with the increased expectation of a unified experience across them all.

If I’m at the beach, please don’t send me an offer about printer cartridges. If I’m out to dinner, an offer about a local gelateria is much more likely to get opened than an email about gardening services.

A growing sea of online technology companies allow our location patterns and habits to be tracked (and hopefully used for mutually beneficial purposes).

Companies like Facebook, Foursquare, and Yelp allow users to check in, sharing with their network where they are. At the same time, they’re also sharing their information with a growing cadre of location based advertisers. By knowing which areas consumers frequent, more relevant ads can arguably be served. In addition to understanding the sum total of checkins and locations, patterns can be detected, and psychographic, sociographic, and demographic profiles can arguably be constructed to recommend offers that are relevant based on previous behavior.

foursquare_map

Some consumers can’t be bothered with checking in, however. It takes time, effort, and giving away information to “big brother in the sky” isn’t all that appealing to most people, especially when there’s limited value in return.

Other emerging startups like PlaceMe, Banjo, Sonar, Friday, and Highlight automatically tracks your whereabouts and the whereabouts of others near you, offering serendipitous and/or more targeted “people discovery” opportunities.

But, without opting in or participating in any of the above, those little smartphones in our pockets are already tracking and providing plenty of information to the mobile platform vendors and application providers.

This controversial 2010 Wall Street Journal article highlighting an interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt provides clues related to role location plays in the future of context, commerce, and marketing.

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

Merging location data with transaction data

Until now, the emerging benefit and value of location data has struggled to find it’s legs in a meaningful way. However, when I was offered a discount on a purchase from American Express last year if I connected my AMEX account to my foursquare account, I immediately saw the benefit for AMEX. They already know what I spend money on. If they also know where I go, they can find all sorts of things out about me.

  • What % of my spending do I put on my AMEX card?
  • By merging transaction, demographic, and geogrpahic behavior patterns, they can begin to construct a psycho-graphic and/or deeper socio-graphic profile of me
  • By understanding who I am connected to and/or communicating with, they can potentially begin to understand purchasing behaviors within my network
  • Finally: the unknown. Like many emerging big data initiatives, finding unforeseen patterns in data models can provide new unforeseen opportunities.

Even without real time location data, merging data collected from the digital realm with other data sets presents new opportunities for contextual marketing. From AllThingsD:

Ticketmaster is doing all the normal stuff you’d expect to help users share with each other when they buy tickets to events. But it’s also the only partner that I saw mashing up multiple Open Graph applications.
If you listen to music on an Open Graph application like Spotify, Ticketmaster automatically detects (with your permission) and tells you when those artists are next playing in your town. Usually these apps depend on which artists you “Like” or explicitly follow. It seems smart to use real, dynamic listening data to figure this out.

VinTank is working on a technology that indexes preferences and buying behavior of premium wine lovers, sends alerts to wineries in Napa Valley when a potential fit for their products are nearby, allowing them to send a message or offer that should offer high appeal for that person.

However, Jack Dorsey’s Square, which is in the process of disrupting the world’s commerce payment systems, is approaching location based marketing from the opposite end of the spectrum, and thinks they’ll actually be able to make location more useful. While many first generation location apps vendors know where you are and perhaps what you’ve done, they typically don’t have any data on what you purchased. It’s the merging of location, transaction, and social data that some might describe as the next holy grail. Creating a recommendation engine based on financial transactions, and using location as a contextual filter for commercial transactions holds significant promise.

Deeper customer understanding at the center

At the center of customer focused innovation is understanding your customers better.Understanding where people go, and what they buy when they’re there will be a significant input for next generation commerce.

The data being collected by the payment gateways (Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Square, PayPal, GoPayment) is arguably more valuable than the transaction fees they are collecting. More intelligence is being built in to the purchase and sales cycles, respectively, and at the center of both sides are recommendation engines. Consumers are coming to expect Amazon.com-like suggestions that make their life easier and shorten the investment of discovery and analysis.

Understanding transactional and behavioral patterns and merging them together will arguably allow marketers to offer more precise offers and interactions based on a deeper understanding of their customer’s current context.

  • How is your organization leveraging location data?
  • What are the primary barriers you see?
  • How will privacy issues come in to play as technology advances?
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.



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The Digitization of Human Interactions: From Long Tail to Mass Disruption

February 13, 2012 by 21 Comments
Photo Credit: Ceibs.edu

Photo Credit: ceibs.edu

“Because the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, the business enterprise has two, and only two, basic functions: Marketing and Innovation.” – Peter Drucker

Last week I had the pleasure of spending some time at Online Marketing Summit at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel.

Aaron Kahlow founded the conference several years ago and it has seen tremendous growth in just a few years. In fact, it was acquired just a few months ago, and added to the growing list of brands at UBM TechWeb.

We are in the midst of a sizable evolution. That’s no surprise or epiphany to most of us. But peeling a layer or two off of the onion reveals deeper insights about what’s really happening, and more importantly, where senior marketers, should be allocating their money and time.

Marketing’s longtail (online, digital, seo) first became a fringe disruptor of marketing strategies (where we’ve been over the last 15 years or so), and has moved its way steadily towards securing its place as a core component of marketing practice (a few years into this journey now). In some organizations, it leads the way and sets the primary agenda related to an organization’s customer acquisition and retention strategies. For others, that change is quickly coming. Moving forward, “digital” not only will rule marketing, but has the potential to re-define entire business models (think what’s happened to books, music, media).

This once small sliver of the marketing universe is slowly and steadily charging its way to the label enabler of mass disruption.

Considering this phenomenon in 2006, specifically assessing Threadless’ new innovative crowdsourced manufacturing business model, Tim O’Reilly asked “How far off is a future in which the creative economy overflows the thin boundary that separates ‘information’ from ‘stuff’?”

If we consider for a moment the growth of gaming, augmented reality, digital and social network engagement, coupled with the rapidly expanding worlds of mobile and cloud computing, the very fabric of human interactions is being rewired. This clearly has significant implications on one core societal function: commerce, and with it of course, marketing.

Below are 5 key takeaways solidified during my time at #OMS12.

CONTENT STILL REIGNS

The content marketing drum has continued to get louder over the last decade. According to a 2012 study by the Content Marketing Institute;

  • 90% of B2B marketers do some kind of content marketing whether they realize it or not, and
  • 60% of B2B marketers intend to spend more on content marketing in the next 12 months.

It was a central theme at the conference, highlighted at 3 sessions I attended:

“The difference between good and great content marketing,” by Joe Pulizzi
“From Content to Customer” by Joe Chernov
“Integrating Social, SEO & Content” by Lee Odden

(You can find my raw session notes by clicking on the links above. There are plenty of good nuggets in there.)

Despite content marketing’s strong growth, 41% of the marketers in the CMI study said that their greatest challenge was creating content that engages prospects and customers.

I suspect that is because we are witnessing a changing of the guard. Brochureware, product feature catalogues, and brand messages just don’t resonate in a world where attention is the greatest and scarcest of resources.

Experienced marketers are having to unlearn what they know and relearn new tools and methodologies. Many new marketers don’t have the framework and business savvy that comes with experience to put all the pieces together.

Joe Pulluzi and Joe Chernov, respectively, reinforced the idea of creating something of extreme value and then giving it away for free. Social networks allow word of mouth referrals to take place with unprecedented speed and reach, and studies have shown that people are much less likely to share a heavily branded or gated piece of content. In their own words, they underscored the importance of establishing a position of expertise, providing something that is worth their attention, and talking about yourself as little as possible.

Advertisers have long used the concept of product placement for branding purposes within a context that is usually devoid of ads. This philosophy can now be applied across a wide range of mediums and content forms. Subtly branded communities (Proctor & Gamble has several), whitepapers, blogs, eBooks and infographics (HubSpot and Eloqua have done some really good things here) are all ways to fill the top of the funnel.

If you haven’t seen it, DC shoes shows how an experience can be created within a piece of content that resonates with a target audience. It’s a prime example of marketing innovation that has garnered more than 15,000,000 views to date.

Facebook is betting the farm on these principles with their announcement and foray into the world of “Sponsored Stories”, where sponsored content will be embedded within the context of “friends” digital interactions across the web.

While the manifestation of B2C vs. B2B content marketing may ultimately look significantly different, the underlying principles remain the same.

ANALYTICS PLAYING A BIGGER ROLE EVERYWHERE

Ironically, the exponentially increasing amount of digital content and digital interactions is creating overwhelmingly large sets of content, information, and data. Known to many as the issue of “Big Data”, appropriate filters and tools are increasingly important to help decision makers convert massive data sets into meaningful insights, which should ultimately contribute to critical decision making.

Asterdata, acquired last year by TeraData is using its technology to help marketers make sense of unstructured data from varying data sources to better understand the pulse of their marketplace.

The increasingly crowded Social Media Monitoring space was represented at the conference by Radian6, Marketwire Sysomos, and a relatively new entrant to the party named Metavana.

Metavana is particularly interesting for 2 reasons:

1. They claim that their sentiment analysis engine is 90% accurate, which quite frankly is hard to believe, as that practically would far exceed industry norms.
2. In partnership with Satmetrix, they are the exclusive provider of Social NPS – a “Net Promoter Score (NPS) derived from the expressions of sentiment on the social web.”

Claim number 2 is a HUGE (and hard to believe) claim that a previously structured classification (NPS survey response) can now be gleaned from unstructured social signals. These two points alone deserves some time, but this post is already bordering on eBook length, so we’ll save that for another day.

That said, Metavana has an impressive leadership team, and are ones to watch in the space.

DIGITAL FOOTPRINTS PROVIDE DEEPER INSIGHT INTO THE BUYER’S PURCHASING CYCLE

Because more and more of our lives are taking place in the context of a digital medium, digital footprints are being left across the web for marketers to examine. One of the major themes at the conference was the concept of “attribution”, or assigning the proper weight to multiple interactions that may have ultimately contributed to a purchase (or conversion). Up until recently, the “lead source” was typically attributed to the last conversion point, ignoring whether a prospect had had several interactions with an organization across multiple channels prior to that. New technology aims to properly identify, understand and weight each interaction for the amount that it contributed to a purchase or conversion, properly attributing impact of various touches on purchasing related actions during the buying cycle.

Amanda Kahlow, new VP of Consumer Intelligence for Business Online, highlighted how she had developed a program for Cisco, and other organizations, to understand customer and prospect digital signals to ultimately predict purchase behavior. In an interesting narrative about sifting through millions of data points and trying to find patters in the data, their algorithm was ultimately able to predict which prospects and customers were most ready to buy, and what size their order might be. This type of understanding and insight allowed Cisco to:

  • Do better targeted marketing
  • Alert sales, partners, resellers with the right leads and opportunities
  • Measure marketing effectiveness
  • Allow lead scoring to be data driven instead of using arbitrary numbers.

In the end, it’s a story of properly aligning resources with greatest marketplace opportunities in real time to maximize returns for the organization. As more and more buyers interact with digital content, it paves the way for new opportunities for organizations to listen and respond.

FROM BIG, CRUDE, AND MANUAL TO SMALL, MEASURED, AND AUTOMATIC

As a society, we continue to journey down a path from Big, Crude, and Manual to Small, Measured, and Automatic. In the marketing context, that means that we’ve transitioned from broadcast messages with an ask to buy to strategic analysis of buyer’s purchasing journeys and finely articulated responses to each of their actions, with an understanding that there is a detailed set of psychological drivers and interests at each stage of their journey,

It’s the job of marketing (and sales) to understand and align with that journey. The growth of marketing automation, revenue performance management, or whatever the vendors are calling themselves this month, is about automating interactions in the right way, at the right time, on the right channel, in response to prospects signals during the course of their purchasing journeys. Armed with continuous feedback (structured and unstructured, explicit and implicit), marketers increasingly have the opportunity to sense and respond to customer and prospect needs in real time.

WHAT IT ALL MEANS

What’s interesting to me is that the ubiquitousness of digital connection, and increasingly pervasive social network interactions has created a bifurcation in marketing’s focus. The social web has created a seeming “renaissance of transparency”. Being human and real is an often stated mantra for agencies and organizations to follow. The crowd demands it, and is now louder the companies ability to brand themselves. However, more so than ever before, marketing has become data driven, with marketers often moving deeper into the sales cycle, and being held to higher levels of accountability. There is a risk of the left brain taking over too much of the spotlight.

The greatest challenge for marketers today is precisely blending the art of storytelling with the science of analytics for maximum impact in their marketplace.

IN SUMMARY


The conference was great. Many attendees told me they had TOO MUCH to take back and work on. It was nice to catch up with some old friends, meet new ones, and get to know some folks a little better. While we are undergoing a dramatic shift, the old fundamentals of understanding your customer, and responding in a way that resonates is still firmly in place. Technology is changing how our customers behave, communicate, and expect organizations to respond. Organization who do this best will thrive. If these things aren’t yet on your radar, or you’ve shoved social media, content marketing, and/or marketing automation off into a figurative little dark corner within your organization, it may make sense to provide them with a cubicle or office space. Used properly, it holds potential for significant impact. Ignoring these over the long term may relegate your entire organization into that dark insignificant corner.

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CRM Magazine Announces 2009 CRM Market Awards (Social CRM gaining ground)

August 24, 2009 by 2 Comments

This morning, CRM Magazine released their 2009 CRM Market Awards to be announced at the CRM Evolution Conference.

Somewhat surprising recipients appear in the area of Rising Stars include Google, Facebook, Lithium Technologies, and Visible Technologies – internet and social media platforms. In addition to traditional CRM leaders Marc Benioff and Anthony Lye, more social and traditional media stars showed up in the Influentials category including Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Tony Hsieh, Tim O’Reilly, Jeremiah Owyang, and Ross Mayfield.

One key takeaway for me is this high profile validation of the rapidly merging worlds of Social Media and CRM – recently officially named Social CRM.  Please join the conversation on Twitter by using the #scrm hashtag.

CRM Magazine Announces Winners of 2009 CRM Market Awards

Companies, Customers, and Industry Visionaries Honored for Successes in the CRM Marketplace over the Previous 12 Months

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CRM magazine, the industry’s leading publication, announced the winners of its 2009 CRM Market Awards here today, in conjunction with the magazine’s CRM Evolution 2009 conference.

With its eighth annual CRM Market Awards, CRM magazine honors the vendors, consultants, and end-user companies that focus on customer relationships and the customer experience through the sophisticated integration of people, processes, and technologies. In each of 10 categories, the magazine named one Market Winner, denoting the highest score compared to its peers. Each category also produced four Market Leader awards and “One to Watch.”

“To stay competitive in a challenging economy, companies must come up with innovative ways to improve their customer relationship efforts. This is exactly what the recipients of the 2009 CRM Market Awards have done,” said David Myron, CRM magazine’s editorial director. “Congratulations to this year’s award recipients for their achievements over the last year. May their CRM efforts continue to succeed.”

Recipients were determined through an extensive three-month process and a proprietary rating formula that involves industry analysts, financial and corporate information, product and functionality assessments, and scores reflecting customer satisfaction.

* Enterprise Suite CRM — Winner: Salesforce.com
Leaders: Microsoft, Oracle, RightNow Technologies, SAP
One to Watch: NetSuite
* Midmarket Suite CRM — Winner: Salesforce.com
Leaders: Microsoft, Oracle, RightNow Technologies, Sage
One to Watch: NetSuite
* Small-Business Suite CRM — Winner: Salesforce.com
Leaders: Maximizer Software, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho
One to Watch: SugarCRM
* Sales Force Automation — Winner: Salesforce.com
Leaders: Microsoft, Oracle, RightNow Technologies, SAP
One to Watch: NetSuite


* Incentive Management — Winner: Xactly
Leaders: Callidus Software, Merced Systems, Synygy, Varicent Software
One to Watch: Makana Solutions
* Marketing Solutions — Winner: SAS Institute
Leaders: Alterian, Eloqua, Silverpop, Unica
One to Watch: Marketo
* Business Intelligence — Winner: IBM’s Cognos Software
Leaders: Information Builders, Oracle, SAP BusinessObjects, SAS Institute
One to Watch: Microsoft
* Data Quality — Winner: SAS Institute’s DataFlux
Leaders: IBM Information Integration Solutions, Informatica, SAP, Trillium Software (Harte-Hanks)
One to Watch: Pitney Bowes Business Insight
* Open-Source CRM — Winner: SugarCRM
Leaders: Compiere, Concursive, SplendidCRM, xTuple
One to Watch: vTiger
* Consultancies — Winner: Deloitte
Leaders: Accenture, Capgemini, Hitachi Consulting, IBM Global Business Services
Ones to Watch: Appirio and Bluewolf

Eight members of the CRM community were named by the magazine as 2009 Influential Leaders: Marc Benioff, cofounder, chairman, and chief executive officer at Salesforce.com; Chris Brogan, president of New Media Labs and social media thought leader; Tony Hsieh, chief executive officer at online-retailing trailblazer Zappos.com; Guy Kawasaki, author and cofounder of aggregation site Alltop; Anthony Lye, senior vice president for CRM at Oracle; Ross Mayfield, chairman, president, and cofounder at collaboration specialist Socialtext; Tim O’Reilly, founder and chief executive officer at publisher and event producer O’Reilly Media; and Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

The magazine also named six Rising Stars for the year, including nontraditional CRM players such as social networking behemoth Facebook and search-engine giant Google; information-from-the-cloud upstarts InsideView and Jigsaw; Lithium Technologies, a community-platform provider; and Visible Technologies, which offers brand monitoring and social media analysis.

Lastly, the magazine named four customer implementations as winners of its CRM Elite Award: ISS Belgium, for a large-scale Microsoft Dynamics CRM rollout; NBC Universal, for a sales and marketing effort using Salesforce.com; ShipServ, for its holistic use of Marketo, Salesforce.com, and social media; and Wrigleyville Sports, for its NetSuite e-commerce success.

The 2009 CRM Market Awards are being presented at the CRM Evolution 2009 conference at the Marriott Marquis in New York (http://www.destinationCRM.com/evolution). An expanded version of the results have been published in the September 2009 issue of CRM magazine—available in print and, as of September 1, 2009, in digital NXTBook format (http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/crmmedia/crm0909/index.php) and online at http://www.destinationCRM.com.

About CRM magazine

CRM magazine is the leading publication of the customer relationship management industry, covering sales, marketing, customer service, and strategy. The magazine also administers and hosts the annual CRM Evolution conference. Each of these properties is designed to serve customer-centric business initiatives, and leaders who recognize CRM as a key strategy for creating enhanced customer value in any industry. For more information about the magazine, its editorial calendar, or CRM in general, please visit us on the Web at http://www.destinationCRM.com, or on Twitter at @CRM (http://twitter.com/CRM) and @destinationCRM (http://twitter.com/destinationCRM). The destinationCRM Web site (which is updated daily) and the monthly magazine are properties of CRM Media, a division of Information Today, Inc.

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A primer on Social Media: Listen, Build, Engage, Share

May 19, 2009 by Leave a Comment

If you are just familiarizing yourself with social media and how to leverage it in your organization, Becky Carroll on the 1to1 media blog does a nice job of summarizing the benefits of Social Media, and how companies can leverage tools like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  She does a nice job of separating the “cool factor” and hype from tangible benefits that can be reaped.

Has your company leveraged Social Media to deepen customer relationships?Do you have plans to? What question or concerns to you have?  Soundoff.

Guest Blogger Becky Carroll: Social Media Builds Customer Relationships

One of the most common questions being asked right now is this: “What should my company do about social media?” As more and more businesses are jumping in and creating corporate profiles on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and flickr, marketers are feeling the pressure to jump on the bandwagon. Some of these marketers plan to use social media as a cool set of tools to build awareness about their company. However, it is much more than that. Social media can be an integral part of a strategy to build customer relationships.

Let’s look at how social media can be used to deepen customer interaction and increase customer loyalty.

Social media builds trust.
It allows companies to be perceived as more human. You aren’t just talking to Comcast; Frank Eliason is there for you. You want to know more about Zappos; Tony Hsieh tells it like it is. Customers don’t want relationships with faceless companies; they want relationships with other people. The use of social media hastens the trust-building process by putting people instantly in touch with other people–critical in these days of corporate bail-outs and public uneasiness. Trust is the main component of a strong customer strategy.

Social media builds community.
Customers can’t easily rally around a website, as there is little interaction there; but they can rally around a brand’s presence on social media. What makes these communities so powerful is that many of them have been built and sustained by a brand’s fans. Fiskars, which makes scissors, encouraged the formation of a scrapbooking community. However, it is their customer ambassadors, or Fiskateers, who are responsible for driving the conversation and inviting others to join in. National Instruments uses its community, powered by social media, to bring together business customers to share technical information with each other, which is then used in National Instruments marketing materials. These communities are examples of likeminded people coming together and interacting around a common purpose; in this case, a company’s products and services. Ongoing customer interaction and engagement such as these increase loyalty and ultimately rate of purchase.

Social media increases word of mouth.
It allows information to be shared peer-to-peer at light-speed around the globe. As a result, customers are turning to social media ratings and reviews to research an organization’s offerings before making a buying decision. This is especially true in the B2B environment, where a large number of B2B buyers are participating actively in social media for business–reading blogs, writing reviews, watching user-generated videos, and joining social networks (source: Forrester). All of this enables the rapid spread of company news and information, as well as the sharing of customer success stories. Organizations that enlist their customers to help evangelize their products and services via social media find those customers to be fiercely loyal and willing to share their experiences with others who are like them. This in turn builds trust, as well as the customer base.

Social media enables two-way conversations.
This is the gold in the equation. Where companies used to have to rely on one-way email blasts, advertisements, and direct mail pieces, they can now interact directly with customers via blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and a myriad of other social media tools. More is required than simply hanging out a corporate shingle on these sites, however. Companies need to fit these conversations into their overall customer strategy and marketing communications plan. In so doing, they will be able to gain deep customer insight from these new online interactions, including an understanding of customer behaviors and needs, as well as online reach and influence.

Getting Started
The best way to begin using social media is to stay quiet. Yes, social media enables great customer interactions, but first it is important to do some listening. Once a company has spent time monitoring conversations–about the company, competitors, the industry–only then is it truly equipped to begin participating in conversation. This is the best way to be relevant when stepping forward and inviting customers into your virtual lounge to get to know them, their likes and dislikes, as well as their personal side. The foundation will be laid, and rich customer relationships have every opportunity to blossom from these online engagements.

via Guest Blogger Becky Carroll: Social Media Builds Customer Relationships – Think customers: The 1to1 Blog.

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More on Social CRM: The evolution continues

May 6, 2009 by 3 Comments

Lots of conversation flying around about what Social CRM is, and what it isn’t. If you use Twitter and/or friend feed, I encourage you to join the conversation at #scrm.

Business and Sales have always been about relationships. People buy from people they like and from people who provide compelling value propositions for their problems.

These principles are timeless, well documented, and well proven.

Technology over the recent course of history, has provided the tools to enable this process to happen more quickly in a more efficient manner. Traditional CRM enables organizations to understand their customer bases better, and provides the backend framework to capture, organize, analyze customer data, and also provides the tools necessary for customer facing individuals to do their job more efficiently and effectively so that the customer experience is exceptional.

Social Media has birthed a new medium for traditional conversations to take place. The fundamentals are still the same. Customers will still buy from people they like and from people who provide compelling value propositions for their problems.

What is different is that an individual in Madrid can have a question pop into their head, and 2 minutes later can have an answer or be engaged with a total stranger in San Diego via the medium of Social Media.

Social Media is simply the next evolution of global internet communications. User Groups, Message Boards, Email have all been the precursors. Social media has just extended the reach and the increased the speed by which these communications happen.

Social CRM is the method of organizing, managing, and analyzing these conversations and interactions executed across the social networking landscape.  In my experience, these interactions are many times a precursor or a sample of what has previously been managed and tracked in traditional CRM systems. My Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook interactions sometimes morph into a conversation that justifies an entry into my traditional CRM system, whereby phone calls, activities, meetings, and opportunities are tracked. Social Media Interactions are “Real Interactions Lite”

They are not mutually exclusive, and Social CRM is not the answer for failed Traditional CRM. They are both blends of process, strategy, and supporting technology that enable us to collectively understand and meet the needs of our customers.  Social Media and Social CRM simply provide another component by which to understand, engage, and interact with our customers, partners, and prospects better.

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