Social Networking in the Business - Part 1
Social Networking in the Business – part 1
Customer relationship Management (CRM) and Social Networking
Social Networking continues to grow and although there is a lot of trivia being discussed there are also some serious business discussions and related business information being passed around. We should not ignore this information as it may be useful to our business and I don’t believe the phenomenon (if that is what it is) of Social Networking will go away. If anything we will see more people joining in the discussions and more products and innovative ways of communicating coming out of it, so if you don’t engage early then you may be in danger of missing out on any opportunities that evolve. Engagement doesn’t mean you need to start ‘Tweeting’ straight away or anything like that but as a minimum you must understand these technologies and track their progress. I would also recommend you consider some minimal involvement if only at pilot level.
What is this business information that might be so interesting? As an example we may see information posted about what our clients are saying/doing, what competitors are saying/doing, changes in the markets we operate in, regulatory discussions, new product launches, strategic appointments, expert opinions and much more.
The difference with the social network world is that it is instant, prolific and often from unknown sources. This means we are also in danger of information overload and sifting the information into useful and non useful is very time consuming. It also gives us some potential concerns as we don’t know how true the information is and whether it is genuine or malicious.
If however we can somehow control that aspect then shouldn’t we be linking social networking technologies to CRM (Customer Relationship Marketing)?
CRM is mainly a contact system (Whom you know and what you know about them) and used for Customer and prospect management mainly by people involved in sales and marketing activities.
Social Networking is more search engine/ introduction broker/ discussion board and is about relationships (Who knows who) but also instant information on what’s happening at a moment in time and sharing of that information and would include products like:-
- Social networking for lead generation and qualification (Plaxo, Linkedin, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc)
- Alerts (Google alert for Customers and prospects, Twitter alerts)
- Discussions (Blogs/ Twitter/ Huddle etc)
- Contact networks (relationship search engine that resides behind the firewall and analyses CRM/outlook/resume documents/ communication patterns in email)
- Visual/Vocal information (Podcasting/ YouTube/ Flickr/ Slideshare etc)
The benefits of linking the two areas of CRM and Social Networking are ensuring you have all the latest news (and gossip) available in your CRM system so you can be in a better position to talk to the client about things that are affecting them at that time. This would give them some confidence that you were taking time to understand their business. It may give you more information about their pain points and how your services/products could help. It may also generate ideas about how you can respond to market trends or competitive products. Even in this new world the old adage of knowledge is power remains key.
It should go without saying that this is additional or supplementary information and should not replace the normal marketing research and business news information that you may currently receive from known and trusted sources.
The problem is going to be what you let through into CRM from these social network systems and how you add this supplementary information to the main information you hold at that level. There are ways to apply some form of filtering but it could be very time consuming and expensive if you have to employ somebody to filter it.
There are products that are now trying to interpret the information and filter it into topics or specific market areas in order to see trends rather than one off comments that may be misleading. I would expect as the market matures we may well see more of these types of products. We will also see the main stream CRM players integrate Social Networking into their products and these may well include some form of filtering as standard.
It is an exciting time and I don’t expect it to stand still for very long.



