Getting social media for CRM right
How do you use social media for CRM?
This issue has been percolating just under my skin for a while now. I often hear it said where I work that we still haven’t figured out how to use social media and I’d guess that’s probably true of many places. I think, though, that most folks who are charged with figuring out how to use social media to their advantage are simply looking at it the wrong way.
Often, it’s about setting up Facebook groups or fan pages, or making sure their organization is tweeting announcements from corporate accounts. Some build networks to try and drive traffic to their web sites. I’m not saying any of these efforts is necessarily wrong. Ineffective for the most part? Yes. If, to you, social media is about getting followers, becoming a guru or simply driving traffic to another site, it’s likely not going to be effective for long-term benefit.
External social networks like Twitter and Facebook allow limited conversations but not ones which are contextually centered on your business or organization. In truth they are more about broadcast than social. Try having a real conversation with someone on Twitter sometime. It’s not impossible, but support and issue resolution will likely need to move to another forum to be completed. A good conversation happens because there’s a two-way dialogue and it’s at least somewhat intimate.
Where should you do it?
I’d argue that the best social media CRM implementations happen right on your own interactive properties. Where do your constituents interact with you? If I’ve got an issue with a product or service, I usually start by conducting a web search, then refining it down to a search in a knowledge base or FAQ at the site of the organization of interest to me. An external social network is not a comfortable or intimate enough environment for this. Plus, it may just be a personal preference, but I don’t follow corporate tweets and I don’t join corporate Facebook groups or pages. Frankly, I update Facebook through ping.fm or another service and rarely directly visit the site any more.
A colleague recently recounted an experience in which his son was purchasing something from a site halfway around the world. He had a question that couldn’t be answered without some help, and was very impressed when he could have a live chat with a customer service representative via an on-page box. He had to input his name and issue and wait in a short queue. The question was answered quickly and the purchase completed. By contrast, think about the same situation but one where the customer is forced to leave a voice message or send an email after hours and wait a few days or longer, or sometimes not receive a response at all. The opportunity is lost and the customer has likely gone to a competitor.
Think about the Amazon.com model. Not only can users review books and publish wish-lists for their purchases, but reviews can then be subject to ratings. The system continually provides more and more information of relevance to a potential customer within Amazon’s own context, not via external networks. While a post-secondary institution like the one where I work is hesitant to allow customer reviews of courses for myriad reasons, opening your organization up to external feedback and publishing relevant information to assist potential customers in their decision-making process will continue to become increasingly important in order to compete.
How should you do it?
ReadWriteWeb has some solid thoughts on how you need to think about a social media CRM strategy. While I still think the features need to be part of what you do on the web, IBM’s thinking is to extend an external network like Facebook to connect students and mentors in a more meaningful way:
Even if you think I’m wrong and an external network is your solution, you’ve still got to choose the right one to reach your audience. A big chunk of BCIT’s student demographic is older and looking at applied skills to improve their job prospects or is upgrading, mid-career. Twitter might reach some of that target for push communications, but not so much for a traditional post-secondary trying to reach mostly students who are still in high school:
What about employee collaboration?
Intel published a white paper documenting their approach to developing a social computing intranet strategy. They did wide consultation across the enterprise and engaged with key stakeholders, developed usage policies upfront, performed user and proof-of-concept testing and outlined a solid architecture and phased approach to rollout. In short, they took a user-centred design philosophy and set measurable goals and objectives. This is something that any organization should do whether their implementation is internally or customer focused.
Based on my own experience at large organizations, the measurable objectives are often missing. The desire to use a cool tool often seems to trump a problem-solving approach, where the right tool is used to solve a business problem. Post-secondary institutions, in particular, are caught between the desire to leverage the web more effectively for employee productivity, while they grapple internally with labyrinthine policies and rules and red herring privacy concerns about how employees use web technologies.
Perhaps I’ll leave the last word on social media on intranets to Jakob Nielsen’s findings:
Underground efforts yield big results. Companies are turning a blind eye to underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, and then sanctioning them within the enterprise.
Frontline workers are driving the vision. Often, senior managers aren’t open to the possibilities for enterprise 2.0 innovation because they’re not actively using these tools outside of work. Indeed, many senior managers still consider such tools as something their kids do. One of the dirty secrets of enterprise 2.0 is that you don’t have to teach or convince younger workers to use these tools; they expect them and integrate them as easily into their work lives as they do in their personal lives.
Communities are self-policing. When left to their own devices, communities police themselves, leaving very little need for tight organizational control. And such peer-to-peer policing is often more effective than a big brother approach. Companies that we studied said abuse was rare in their communities.
Business need is the big driver. Although our report discusses specific tools (blogs, wikis, and such), enterprise 2.0′s power is not about tools, it’s about the communication shift that those tools enable.
Organizations must cede power. Using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with customers has taught many companies that they can no longer control the message. This also rings true when using Web 2.0 tools for internal communication. Companies that once held to a command-and-control paradigm for corporate messaging are finding it hard to maintain that stance.
September 6th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
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September 7th, 2009 at 5:48 am
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September 8th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Great post; very interesting and many good points made.
Great observations…
“Based on my own experience at large organizations, the measurable objectives are often missing. The desire to use a cool tool often seems to trump a problem-solving approach, where the right tool is used to solve a business problem. Post-secondary institutions, in particular, are caught between the desire to leverage the web more effectively for employee productivity, while they grapple internally with labyrinthine policies and rules and red herring privacy concerns about how employees use web technologies.”
With people working together, it can evolve, it just takes time.
Great post just the kind I like reading all the way through