Social Media Branded Communities & Social CRM

By Barton Goldenberg

In this blog post, I will explore how an organization can monitor and filter relevant insight generated from Social Media communities.  An organization can integrate social insight into their Social CRM application.  Afterward, their staff can leverage this information to better engage with customers.

Social Media tools do an excellent job of capturing information from business colleagues and channels/partners. Social Media tools can be used to share this information in a collective manner. Knowledge from an organization can be channeled into the Social Media platform’s knowledgebase.  Afterward, it can be shared among community participants.

Painless Branded Community Management

To leverage Social Media branded communities, all employees need to learn to move external expertise requests to an internal or partner Social Media community. This collaboration does not require the approval of posted comments before being placed in the organization’s knowledgebase.  Enterprise expertise can be monitored and filtered with Social Media community tools. These tools ensure that only relevant information is sent to the Social Media platform database.

Social Media communities will be monitored by the community administrator or other community members. These all will work to confirm that all posted information is correct.  Over time, enterprise expertise can be amended so that information accuracy improves.  The result of internal Social Media Branded Communities is powerful.  It creates an institutional knowledgebase created from employee/partner responses to posted questions.  Most employees/partners currently use Social Media communities to obtain reviews of products. Thus, they are inclined to participate in an internal Social Media branded community.

Integrating Social Media Branded Communities and Social CRM

There are two integration points between Social Media Branded Communities and Social CRM:

• Starting in the Social Media community:A customer issue gets discussed and possibly resolved in a Social Media community. It next gets integrated into a customer or partner profile for engagement.
• Starting in the Social CRM application: There can be an issue posted in a petal of a Social CRM customer or partner profile. This issue next can be uploaded into the Social Media community for review.  Community members can develop a proposed solution for the customer or partner.  The solution is then imported back into the customer or partner profile. It can also be stored in the community database for use in solving similar problems in the future.

In the next blog post, I will turn to how organizations can overcome skepticism to exploit Social CRM.

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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.