Leverage Social Media Information to Advance Your Social CRM Efforts

By Barton Goldenberg

The Social Media phenomenon is forcing organizations to build a more customer-centered focus.  The use of Social Media tools is driving organizations to leverage Social Media information.  Social Media information is being used extensively for organizations’ CRM efforts.

Below is a Social CRM framework that I will be referring to frequently in future blog posts:

Social CRM Framework

I am describing a prominent four-step Social CRM framework:

Step #1: Monitor Digital Customer Communities to Glean ‘Social Insight

There are currently over 200 monitoring tools that listen to over 150 million Social Media Websites/communities.  Social Media monitoring tools are ‘digital crawlers’ that listen to designated Social Media communities. These tools listen for criteria such as key words, tone, sentiment, volume, demographics, etc.  Organizations like Marriott will use these tools to know who and what is being commented about themselves on Social Media communities.

Step #2: Filter Social Media Insight

The next Social CRM framework step is to filter what is said in both public and private Social Media communities.  A state-of-the-art Social Media monitoring tool can leverage filtering to:

• Monitor filtered volume, demographics, location, tone and sentiment of Social Media posts.
• Identify Social Media influencers
• Monitor filtered comments from communities and blogs from one tool console.
• Provide for workflow management functionality.
• Deliver spam management and text analysis of unstructured text.
• Auto-compare brand sentiment to competitors.

Step #3: Integrate Social Insight into an Organization’s Social CRM Application

Relevant Social Media insight can be imported into the organization’s Social CRM application after filtering relevant Social media information.  This insight can be used for the organization’s customer engagement process.  Social insight integrated into a Social CRM application is at the core of the Social CRM industry. Organizations now have a unique opportunity to leverage social insight in their sales, marketing and customer service efforts.

Social insight provides dynamic information on the customer’s sentimental feeling on the organization. It complements the static and historical information that is found in a customer profile.  The organization has better customer understanding with social insight in the customer profile.  The organization is also in a better position to engage with the customer. There are now new ways to engage with the customer in a more meaningful manner.

Step #4: Leveraging Social Insight to Achieve Enhanced Customer Engagement (Final Step)

The organization observes which Social Media channel the customer utilized to create the social insight.  It then utilizes that channel to engage back with that customer.  For example, a customer utilizes a Facebook public community channel to post a comment.  Afterward, the organization engages that customer via that channel.  Same thing applies with customer engagement via a Twitter community, a Social Media community, a blog, etc.

The big leveraging social insight challenge is to achieve enhanced customer engagement. It revolves around the question: How best to utilize social insight that is now stored in the Social CRM profile?  I advise that management should create employee guidelines on social insight information utilization. Employees will thus respect the sensitivity of the customers’ social insight information. Organizations will train their Social CRM users on scenarios for when and when not to utilize social insight.  Management should set aside time to successfully accomplish these critically-important activities.

In the next few blog posts, I will examine several of the challenges and opportunities associated with the effective use of this Social CRM framework.

– – – – – – – — – – – – – –

Barton Goldenberg, is the founder and president of ISM Inc., customer-centric strategists/implementers serving best-in-class organizations globally. As a CRM leader for 30 years, he was among the first three inductees in the CRM Hall of Fame. Recognized as a leading “customer-focused” author, his latest book, The Definitive Guide to Social CRM, is hailed as the roadmap for Social CRM success. Barton is a popular speaker on “maximizing customer relationships to gain market insights, customers and profits”. He is a long-term columnist for CRM Magazine and speaker for CRMevolution and frequently quoted in the media.