Engaging Customers With Social Media "Ideas" and Technology

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Is it really all that new?

***tier3square.shtml***Engaging customers with social media is becoming more than just a buzz. People are tweetering and twattering and twipping all over the place. And these twitterers are obviously in the business.

It doesn't seem that so many consumers are  interested in terms such as "social media", "social crm", or "the social web" as the evangelists are. I'm basing this on some quick SEO research I did on daily search volumes at Wordtracker.com.

• Number of Daily Searches for "Social CRM"
  

• Number of Daily Searches for "CRM 2.0"
  

• Number of Daily Searches for "Social Web"
  

• Number of Daily Searches for "Social Media"
  

On the other hand….

• Number of Daily Searches for "Twitter"
  

• Number of Daily Searches for "Facebook"
  

• Number of Daily Searches for "MySpace"
  

Obviously, what we call it isn't important when the folks zero right in one specific technology pieces that make it up, often ignoring other pieces. Will they simply ignore you if you start using new catch phrases and acronyms?

Either way, thought leaders, and now CRM software vendors, are moving forward at a good clip. The term social CRM (now formerly CRM 2.0) is thrown around a lot to refer to ways of incorporating new web based collaboration media into your CRM program; but the idea of engaging your customers with social media is not new. In fact, that's what CRM has always really been about, hasn't it? At least engaging customers has been.

I realize that to some, I'm a bucket of cold water over the head, right before that moment of passion. I truly apologize, but this is my way of engaging my vendor, the social CRM evangelist. Through this sort of engagement, I hope to learn what I don't know. I need data. I need information. And I have opinions. Are you listening?

I don't want Power Point presentations...

Engaging Customers with Social Media in the Distant Past

We have had interaction tools over the Internet (and pre-public Internet) for quite a long time now. I can remember back in the 1980's, yes that long ago, interacting on BBS systems and then CompuServe, then AOL came along. There is nothing new here. Those were online communities, or social networks. I used to hang out in a number of software vendor forums back then and guess what? The vendors were listening to the chatter about their product, and sometimes, they even participated. That, of course, depended on the vendor.

Now, can someone please tell me what's changed beyond some technology?  Why weren't there social evangelists back then? Weren't we engaging customers with social media?

The Internet soon opened up the doors to content sites where anyone with time on their hands could put up a website, whether for a hobby or to attack a brand. Newsgroups have been around even longer where you could find chatter on any topic you desired. Web based forums soon became a popular way to share information, opinions and frustrations. Was anyone listening? I think that they were. I've witnessed many examples of companies stepping in to protect their reputation, or to sincerely help someone out.

We've been able to seek these venues out via search engines for a long time now. Google has let us do that on auto-pilot with Google Alerts.

Then came blogging and Web 2.0, where an opinion maker could write, and anyone could comment. On my website visitors are permitted to create their own web pages (just like at the bottom of this page) and have others can comment on those creations. Yes, I moderate them, but published content related to a their topic is created and distributed around the Internet just as any blog update would be. In fact, my whole website is a blog and a content site at the same time, which I think is kind of cool. It's Content 2.0!

The point is this, as I can clearly see a cottage industry of "social" experts developing quickly, I need to be clear about where I stand. When someone evangelizes that Twitter is the next CRM they are being extremely naïve. CRM is not a technology in the first place, and technologies like Twitter are simply new channels for engaging your customers with social media. These tools can certainly be incorporated into your CRM program (strategy, process and technology), though.  Go ahead, run your business on Twitter!

Engaging Customers with Social Media - Where is it Going?

My favorite quote of all time is "The cool thing about technology is that it keeps getting cooler". I do really love technology.  But, CRM is about relationships and we've been having them for a long time, on and off the Internet. I'd like to talk more about the cool things technology can do to make previously unthinkable relationship strategies -- thinkable. Here are a couple recent things that I think are cool. I'm sure there are many more...and I'd like to hear about them.

• Salesforce.com creating the "Ideas" module where customers can add ideas and the community can vote them up or down, thus engaging their customers with social media
• Salesforce.com integrating Twitter so customer service reps can monitor brand related chatter (actually, I thinking something like riendFeed that monitors multiple channels is a better idea - maybe they do, I haven't researched it).
• CustomerFX (a CRM consultancy) tweeting posts (@4SalesLogix) to their various CRM forums so anyone listening can jump in to help answer a question. I think that's pretty cool and I'm pretty sure is the brainchild of @RyanFarley so I thought I'd give him a plug.

What kind of cool applications do you see where the various channels on the Internet are finally used to their fullest capability for engaging customers with social media? I'm looking for solutions to problems that have been impossible to solve before (or unnecessary to solve because technology just created the problem).

One other thing, will the middle market watch the big boys waste billions of dollars on ineffective "social media" gadgetry (can anyone say CRM failure?) and decide to sit on the sidelines? Or have we finally found Nirvana in tools like Twitter? Oh man, I haven't played Nirvana in awhile, glad I thought of that!

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