The Five Ms of Social CRM, Part 1
BREAKING DOWN SOCIAL CUSTOMER INSIGHTS: THE FIVE Ms OF SOCIAL CRM
Before we get into granular specifics use cases, and what each of them looks like on a day-to-day basis, let’s break down the foundation, the Five Ms of Social CRM, so you understand Social Customer Insights and the baseline use cases.
Monitoring
Brands use social media monitoring software every day, all day, to see what social customers are saying about them. On weekends or holidays this can be outsourced to an overseas team that can notify the brand in case of an emergency or high-sensitivity incident. This software collects all of the disparate data inputs from the social Web—social networks, message boards, blogs, microblogs, personal Web sites, video sites—then compiles it into an easily readable format (e.g., a few minutes per day) that can be automagically input into a CRM tool.
For example, the marketing team at pet treat brand Waggin’ Train gets e-mail updates from Lithium every morning at 8:00 A.M., and logs into their dashboard. Gatorade has a Chicago-based “Mission Control” hub from which they engage the social customer: it looks like a cross between Facebook, NASA, and ESPN Sportscenter. Radian6, Lithium, and RightNow are three vendors whose monitoring software works quite well.
The main issue with monitoring is that keywords need to be incredibly well tested for these solutions to be effective. Also, the monitoring clock needs to be covered 24/7 if you’re a big brand. If you’re unsure whether this is economically feasible, ballpark what a damaging incident on a Saturday morning would cost the brand if no response was made until Monday.
Mapping
These are the software solutions that identify relationships between customers, and they typically live on top of CRM platforms, although they can also exist in stand-alone environments (like Facebook profiles). Social CRM data (in the CRM tool) is enriched by adding this layer of social metadata (yup, data about data) that tells brands more information about who their customers really are (e.g., LinkedIn profile, Google profile, Facebook profile), what they really want, and how they’re related to one another. If the brand wants to know who the “influencers” are, this is where it’s calculated.
The team at my consulting firm uses InsideView to enrich lead and opportunity data as soon as they are contacted by a prospective buyer, making sales close time shorter, and making sales pitches more relevant to prospects. An early example of a mapping solution was Clara Shih’s Faceforce, which combined Facebook data with Salesforce’s CRM data. Salesview (InsideView), Facebook, and Xobni Pro are known for their solid mapping capabilities.
The catch with mapping is that if users don’t enter a lot of their data for you (i.e., Facebook profile information), your team is going to have a lot of work to do to manually collect this data. Make it easy for your customers or potential customers to enter data by enticing them with a special offer, faster service, or something amazingly cool (think of this data as highly valuable, so give a high-value perk in return).
Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.
This installment continues Chapter 4: Social Customer Insights and an Introduction to the 23 Use Cases of Social CRM. We start to look at the five underlying concepts in the use cases.
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