Social CRM

Long time, no write. Last time I wrote, in "Following the Footsteps of the Top Sales Reps" I wrote about the use of social input in prospecting leads in sales. That use case involved analyzing structured data for socially-tuned sales recommendations. Outside the sales domain, social applications are making increasingly significant impact in how we live, connect with one another, make decisions, and solve problems. People, or at least my peers, have become much more trusting and reliant on social input available on the internet.

For example, I am listening to Pandora on my Blackberry as I write. Pandora on Blackberry rocks. It is an innovation that clearly disrupts iTunes and iPod. With Pandora, I am letting people like me to refine and play the songs that I might like. Does this mean I trust my peers more than myself? Perhaps. By partaking in the voting process, I can also give back to the community as well as to myself. It is a good thing Apple has added a recommendation feature.

In another example, in the customer support arena, when getting answers to everyday issues, Yahoo Answers is a great way to zero in on the best solutions. Yahoo Answers is a fantastic site that motivates community members to
provide answers to one another by awarding points and reputation levels for activities.

Companies are starting to take note and have introduced similar capabilities to engage their customers. In the customer support arena, Samsung has such an example. I have actually "enjoyed" debugging issues with Samsung technicians and other Samsung owners on CNET's Samsung forum. I enjoyed being in the virtual company of the people who have run into similar issues. More often a lurker than an active poster, I benefited from referencing solutions eventually arrived at by the original posters.

In addition to purpose-built web 2.0-inspired enterprise sites, micro-blogging sites like Twitter also provide opportunities for companies can listen to, and possibly, have conversations with, their current and target customer segments.

Speaking of listening to the crowd, I found this New York Times piece on Twitter words used during this year's Super Bowl very interesting. As people use their favorite channels to express themselves and converse with others, companies can set up listening posts to discern changes in sentiments, and shifts in perceptions and preferences in their target demographic segments.

It is almost dinner time. I wonder where that Kogi truck is headed. Ah, 4100 in Silverlake. Too bad I am more than 300 miles away. I will plant some key words in my tweets. Maybe the Kogi truck guys will hear me. My geotag should say NorCal.

I watched a talk given by Seth Godin over the weekend. Seth described the inadequacies of broadcast marketing, specifically as it relates to television. The volume of information that is available and pushed on people everyday means that people have less time per topic to deal with the incoming flood of information. The average person has become very good at ignoring the average subject.

In the end, whether a business or personal conversation, I don’t want to broadcast to the average person and risk being ignored. I want to have a discussion with people who share the same interests and passions: friends, innovators, early adopters, hyper-influencers; people who want information and want to participate in the conversation. If I can succeed in establishing a rapport with this group, they will in turn influence their friends, co-workers and their social media followers.

Near the end of Seth’s talk, I finally noticed one of the footnotes next to the video: Filmed in 2003. I was shocked – he seems to be describing the role of social media today, yet this was long before Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other players shaped how I get information. The influence of social technologies is not a solution looking for a problem, but they are addressing a real problem with communication today.

Social media has done several things to make it easier to communicate:
• Enabled individuals to participate in the conversation, not just the marketing machines of television, print, website owners
• Enabled individuals to subscribe or follow people, groups and topics they are interested in. Contrast this with email where you are deciding what the audience is interested in. With email you can deliver the message to specific people, but there’s a good chance it will be ignored.
• Simplified the means of conversation. The free form nature of blog posts means we don’t need to conform to a preset communication format. The 140 character limit on twitter or other micro-blogging forums may seem like a constraint, but it makes it focus in the message and not the format.

“When you give people easier ways to share information, more good things will happen. This quote, and the title of this post, is from Evan Williams, CEO and Founder of Twitter. Social media enables a conversation with an engaged audience; this is a good thing for your business.