“Build it, and they will come” only works in the movies. Social Media is a “build it, nurture it, engage them, and they may come and stay.”
- Seth Godin: Author, Entrepreneur
For several months now, my friends, peers, and followers have been asking me to write about Social CRM. I’ve been resisting it because I struggled with a way to approach such a broad and far reaching topic. However, I haven’t been ignoring the subject, I’ve been thinking about how to write about it. Well, I’ve finally figured it out. Hooray! This is the first of a four part series on Social CRM. In this installment, I want to give a basic introduction on social CRM and set the stage for the three detailed articles that follow.
Social CRM means a lot of things to a lot of different people and it is very possible that you may disagree with my basic definitions.
“Social CRM is the process of enabling collaboration and conversation around your products, your services, and your organization.”
I think that social CRM represents the new frontier of customer engagement and as such, the effective implementation of social CRM strategies needs to span the traditional internal boundaries of marketing, sales and customer service. Now, there are a lot of people (CEOs, Consultants, etc.) that try to make this topic seem very complex. I respectfully suggest to you that it isn’t that hard if you break the topic into a set of manageable sections. I call these sections communities.
In the next three articles, I am going to dig into each of these communities and the technologies that can be leveraged to provide the stakeholders the ability to engage and collaborate. The key take-away from this post is that you can’t ignore the impact and importance of social media. As more and more of our customers look to social media and peer-driven recommendations for products and services, we need to be able to harness this voice to drive innovation, awareness, engagement, and collaboration.
As always, let me know what you think. Let’s keep the conversation going.
Make sure you read the next post in the series to learn more.
