Crm and social media white paper

CRM and Social Media
White Paper

Presented at:
“CRM Business Revolution”, Aug 23‐24, 2010, Asia Business Forum
Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel
Singapore

Roland Hor
Executive Consultant, Catalyst Connector
Email: rolandhor@catalystorigin.com
Web: www.catalystconnector.com

2 CRM and Social Media “CRM Business Revolution”, Aug 23‐24, 2010, Singapore

Introduction
This document is aimed at providing a general overview of the confluence of Customer Relationship
Management and Social Media.

The topics that I will be covering are:

1. Trends for CRM and Social Media
2. Social media applications and tools for CRM
3. Measuring and monitoring
4. Social media for CRM use cases

Trends for CRM and Social Media
Browsing the web recently, I noticed an article with the title of “Nobody wants to hear about CRM
anymore”.  On further investigation, I discovered that someone in the CRM industry uttered this phrase.
It was RightNow Technologies’ CMO trying to explain why his company has repositioned away from the
US$13bn CRM industry. RightNow is quite a prominent on‐demand ‘CRM’ company. I am familiar with
RightNow as it was one of my competitors when I was working in the SaaS CRM business. So a move like
this must certainly have been the thoroughly thought through.
Anyway, his premise was that the key issue now is Customer Experience (CX), powered by a blend of
social media and knowledge management.

 “There is so much history of CRM being the internal system of your sales, service and marketing, as
opposed to a customer interaction enabler, that all of this history was constraining the conversation
and even constraining people’s thinking about what systems could do to enable their interactions."
 “The tipping point was the emergence of ‘new, exciting things’ such as social media, knowledge
management and feedback management that were developing around CRM but were not viewed as
part of it by the market”.

This is further illustrated by SAP’s realization that:
“CRM systems used to capture all the dialogue—between seller and customer.  Only now, they’ve
realized that was only 5% of the real dialogue.  The other 95% of the real dialogue happens between
customers”
The driver of this change is Social Media. For the purposes of this talk (since we are in a CRM
Conference), I’ll refer to this change as moving from CRM to Social CRM.

Roland Hor Catalyst Connector


Social Customer – Customer Ecosystem
This paradigm shift is brought about by the ‘hyper‐growth’ of all the stuff comprising the so‐called Web
2.0 – blogs, wikis, other user‐generated content and social networks etc.
Many presentations and statistics are available that regale the rise of social media – so I won’t do that
here. Just to set the stage,here’s a good video summary of what I am referring to..
In the most recent version of his best‐selling book “CRM at the Speed of Light, Fourth Edition: Social
CRM Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers”, Paul Greenberg (also known as
“The Godfather of CRM”) explicated lucidly what is going on with CRM and Social Media.
He described the ‘Social Customer’ and ‘Customer Ecosystem’. Users (read customers) have very rapidly
been empowered via the growth of the internet:

 ability to communicate via the Internet with complete strangers

 users of the products not only knew more about those products than the manufacturers who made
them or the retailers who sold them,

 people trust their peers or supposed peers more than any of the corporate declarations of quality
and value
The power of the Internet for both customers and businesses became apparent in the mid‐1990s
when both e‐commerce and online review sites became increasingly popular ways to do business
and communicate. It made information easily available directly from the manufacturer or
retailer via their websites. It also gave, for the first time, an independent voice to the users of the
products and services being bought, who were often far more knowledgeable than the actual
producers.



Price and availability were no longer the way to a customer’s wallet share. Experiences became
the thing.

He referred to this as the “Experience Economy”.
We have moved,
From:
How do you manage the relationships you have with customers in such a way that you can
increase your revenue opportunities with them?
How do you capture and aggregate enough customer data to give you a well‐rounded record of
customer information to help you make better decisions on how your customers would respond
to you?
The holy grail of CRM – consistent 360‐degree view of the customer, available to who needed it,
when they needed it.
To:
Now, customers dictate how they will purchase and consume—where, when, and how much—
using a variety of channels largely, if not exclusively, configured by them: They are using
community‐based online tools (social networking, social book‐marking, and social shopping) to
guide one another…
It is now, as they say a buyer’s market – the Customer’s Ecosystem.



Source: CRM at the Speed of Light

The new CRM is the Social CRM. An apt definition from Greenberg:
Social CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business
rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a
collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted &
transparent business environment.
It is the company's response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.

Technology Evolution
This new paradigm dictates that the strategy and technology evolve. I will focus on the technology, tools
and applications needed to address the Social CRM rather than the processes and strategy – which
themselves justify a much larger discussion.

A chasm now exists between what companies have invested in, and what their customers are using, and
needing. Bridging this gap will entail IT and application architectures based on ‘outside‐in’ information



flow rather than just optimizing and automating internal processes and optimizing ‘inside‐out’
messaging. Seen in this light, the traditional CRM tools and processes are analogous to navel‐gazing.

Social Media – Tools and Applications
Here’s the meat of this conversation – the tools and applications that constitute Social Media today and
in the near future. Thus far we have mentioned that customers are using Social Media to communicate
amongst themselves and to formulate opinions, reviews and recommendations. We have not quite
elaborated on what these tools and applications are and how they might be used.

Blogs
 Blogs are the most prevalent form of social media. They are the best entry points for an
incremental social media plan because they are the easiest to understand and have the most
commonly available tools.

 A blog is a web‐based log or journal – a web log. It is a running account of events, thoughts or
ideas that can be authored by one or more people. It is typically used by businesses for
marketing, branding, customer outreach or even internally to discuss ideas or as a team
document. The business blog typically has a specific focus i.e. subject matter expertise, a
particular ongoing message or environment that the company wants to promote.

 Blogging tools
o Six Apart – Movable Type and its hosted version, Typepad, are in the vein of a product
set built to be the center of a community platform—a social publishing platform
o Word Press – Word Press is more focused on being a platform for blogging.

 There are multiple uses for blogs in a business engagement context:



o They offer direct access to senior management for customers (such as General Motors
FastLane, http://fastlane.gmblogs.com).
o They are a place for customers to collaborate on ideas (such as MyStarbucks Ideas,
http://mystarbucksideas.com).

o They provide a place to deal with customer service issues that invites customers to help
solve problems. (For example, Comcast Cares is a Twitter microblogging outreach site,
http://twitter.com/comcastcares.)

o They offer a way to link to and collaborate with business partners and sales channels
(such as Dell Channel, http://en.community.dell.com/dell‐



blogs/Direct2Dell/b/direct2dell/default.aspx).

Wikis
 A wiki is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or
modify content, using a simplified markup language.

 A corporate wiki is a wiki used in a corporate (or organizational) context, especially to enhance
internal knowledge sharing. Wikis are increasingly used internally by companies and public
sector organizations, some as prominent as Adobe Systems, Intel, Microsoft, and the FBI.

 Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. Wikis
are also used for project management (better collaboration) and even marketing purposes
(wikis for customers).

 Some Wiki Tools:



o SocialText (www.socialtext.com/)

o Wikii (http://wikkii.com/wiki/Free_Wiki_Hosting)

 Use Cases



o Wikis can drive collaboration between customers and employees which in turn drives
innovation (IBM, Innovation Jams).
o Flexible tool for project management (Qlimited, www.socialtext.com/customers/case‐
studies/qltd/).
o Repository for a dynamic knowledge base and on‐demand content delivery system
(ZohoCRM Wiki, http://zohocrm.wiki.zoho.com/).
o They allow you to tap external resources for knowledge and insight (SugarCRM’s Sugar
Developer Wiki, www.sugarcrm.com/wiki/index.php?title=Sugar_Developer_Wiki).

Podcasts
 A podcast is an audio file that uses syndication technology (like RSS) to distribute the broadcast
to subscribers or allow them to download to computers or portable music devices. The content
is usually specific to a theme or interest. Sort of an Audio blog.

 Can be labor intensive and/or expensive to do well.

 Use Cases
o They are superb learning tools (see MIT OpenCourseWare programs,
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/av/).
o They can support a marketing effort that is focused around mindshare and thought
leadership (such as Motorola Enterprise Group—see an interview with Eduardo Conrado
of Motorola on this subject at www.marketingprofs.com/7/eduardo‐conradousing‐
thought‐leadership‐to‐position‐motorola‐dunay.asp).
o They reach tech‐friendly (not necessarily savvy) audiences that might not otherwise be
reached. (e.g. iTunes)

Social Tagging and Folksonomies
 User‐generated content (UGC) – reviews, social tags, social bookmarks, comments, rankings,
ratings and photos, and videos. Familiar ones are or course: Youtube, Flickr, Digg, Del.i.cio.us

 Indexing is via a folksonomy, which is a socially constructed classification scheme (as opposed to
a taxonomy – which is a hierarchically constructed one). In a taxonomy the categories
(constraints!?) of the scheme are imposed, and you are forced into choosing the category that’s
the least of evils. A folksonomy uses social tags—keywords that the consumer/producer of
content can create.

 Tools:
o Connectbeam
o IBM Lotus Connections

 Use Cases



o Tagging fosters the growth of communities organized around common interests and
viewpoints

o Tagging improves your ability to do topical research (e.g. Slideshare,
www.slideshare.net).
o Looking at tags or tag clouds provides valuable insight into how taggers qua customers
are thinking. A tag cloud is a visual depiction of user‐generated tags, or simply the word
content of a site, typically used to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually
single words and are normally listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is



shown with font size or color

Social Networks and Communities
A definition from Wikipedia:
“A social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called "nodes",
which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship,
kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of
beliefs, knowledge or prestige.”
Nowadays, when we say Social Network, most of us are actually referring to what is Wikipedia calls a
Social Network Service:
“A social network service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and
reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or
activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a
profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are
web based and provide means for users to interact over the internet, such as e‐mail and instant
messaging. Although online community services are sometimes considered as a social network
service. In a broader sense, social network service usually means an individual‐centered service
whereas online community services are group‐centered. Social networking sites allow users to
share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks.”



The key difference is that with the online version, internet and mobile technologies have essentially
super‐charged networking and connections:

 This amplifies the speed, scope and, unfortunately, superficiality of our interactions and
connections. The result is that the spread of perceptions, knowledge, is much faster, greater in
reach and the effects more pronounced.

 You don’t have to physically be in the presence of the other members or the key intersection points
of the network (called nodes) to have an impact on the network.

 You can capture the data that is provided by the members’ conversations. You can respond to the
members’ concerns, fears, disgust, or love, even if you had no idea that the member was conversing
about it that day.

 You can uncover and analyze the conversation a lot easier than in the past. All the information is
right there for the picking.

Tools and Applications
The most popular ones are:

 Facebook – Currently the 700 pound gorilla in this space. Started originally for purely social and
non‐business related networks it has grown so big that business can no longer ignore it in their
CRM and marketing plans. Multiple conversations are going on among their customers,
potential customers and ex‐customers – with or without their engagement. Some examples of
business in Facebook:
o I Hate General Motors
(http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6477213313#!/group.php?gid=6477213313
&v=wall)



o Coca Cola Fan Page (http://www.facebook.com/cocacola?v=wall)

 Linked In – this is a business/professional oriented social networking service, sort of like a
Facebook for professionals. It is a powerful channel to make business connections and promote
yourself professionally.

 Twitter is all about:
o What are you doing right now?
o Optimized for Web, IM, Phone channels
o Offers Real time interaction in one sentence



o For businesses it appears that Twitter can also be a powerful marketing channel:

Source: FASTCOMPANY ‐ Twitter Crushing Facebook's Click‐Through Rate: Report
(http://www.fastcompany.com/1694174/twitter‐crushing‐facebooks‐click‐through‐rate‐report)

Mobile
Thus far, CRM has been applied in mobile settings in sales and field service. With speed of innovation in
technology, user interface, GPS and mobile cellular network infrastructure and the popularity in social
networking, the always on and available CRM channel is here now. This is the a very exciting space right
now in 2010 due to the possibility of applications based on location awareness and sensitivity. With the
success of the smartphone (e.g. iPhone, Samsung Galaxy) and emergence of other untethered devices
(iPad), the possibilities for mobile Social CRM are huge.
Examples of some social location‐based services are:
 Foursquare
 Google Lattitude
 YELP (YELlow Pages)
 ShopKick
 Facebook Places

With GPS and internet integration, special offers and discounts can be targeted based on
demographics well as geo‐location.



Next up will be the integration of Augmented Reality. This is where physical images are overlaid with
rich information derived from databases and the internet to provide something like the HUD (heads‐
up displays) of modern aircraft – only in this case it will be for shoppers. Example – Layar Reality
Browser (http://www.layar.com/)

Monitoring and Measurement
Online Social media is akin to the “largest cocktail party in the world” a virtual room filled with people
driven by desire to communicate and share and hosting multiple concurrent independent conversations.
These conversations will be about you, your competitors or your industry, people looking for a product
like yours. The key here is that these conversations will happen regardless of whether you are listening
or not. Hence listening is mandatory.
When we start on a program or project to do something we need to be able to measure and monitor the
progress. The adage “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” also applies to managing your social
CRM efforts.

Monitoring
 Continuous and immediate discovery of conversations with the purpose of learning, engaging,
helping and collaborating
 More real‐time than measurement, as one of the purposes is to track keywords as they appear, with
the goal of quick reaction



 Monitoring answers the question “Who is talking about xyz right now and what are they saying?”

Measurement
 Measurement is concerned with metrics over a specified (longer) time period.
 Slice‐and‐dice the data
 Measurement is meant to answers questions of
o “How did my keywords perform?”
o “How does that compare to my competitors?”
o “What are the trends”
o “How to make my product better for people who are giving me feedback?”

Some tools

Google

Google Alerts
This is Google’s content monitoring service, that automatically notifies users when new content from
news, web, blogs, video and/or discussion groups matches a set of search terms selected by the user
and stored by the Google Alerts service. Notifications can be sent by email, as a web feed or via iGoogle.
Google Alerts only provides content from Google's own search engine.

Google Analytics
This is a free service that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. It can track visitors
from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay‐per‐click networks, email marketing
and digital collateral (e.g. links within PDF documents). It is the most widely used website statistics
service, currently in use at around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites.
It offers a high level dashboard for the casual user, and in‐depth data further into the report set. Poorly
performing pages can be identified using techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came



from (referrers), how long they stayed and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced
features, such as custom visitor segmentation.

Facebook Insights
This is analytics for Facebook pages. According to Facebook, “Insights provides Facebook Page owners …
with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and
demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners … are better equipped to
improve their business with Facebook”.



Twitter tools

Excerpt from 3 Great Sites for Following Conversations on Twitter
(http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3‐great‐sites‐for‐following‐conversations‐on‐twitter/)

Twitoaster
Twitoaster is probably the easiest of the bunch to get started with – all you have to do is follow @twitoaster on Twitter. Then,
Twitoaster goes to work for you. Every time someone responds to one of your tweets, the conversation is threaded on
Twitoaster. You can see the number of replies (a number that’s frequently updated) to a given tweet, as well as see what
people said. You can also log in to your Twitter account on Twitoaster, which lets you reply to your replies right from within the
conversation.
Twitoaster also offers a couple of cool features – it tracks the number of replies a given account gets, as well as how you rank
among Twitoaster users. It’s a full‐featured way to track replies, as well as see who’s responding to your tweets.

Tweetree
Tweetree is really two great services in one – it creates conversation threads for replies, and it’s a total overhaul and
improvement on the Twitter interface. First, the interface. Tweetree allows you to pull in external content – videos, images, and
the like – and experience it directly within Tweetree. It also takes all shortened URLs, and shows where they actually go – a nice
touch to avoid RickRolls and the like.
The conversation threading, too, is a great feature of Tweetree. It brings in all conversations you’re a part of on Twitter (even
showing the tweets you replied to), and puts them in tree form, nesting the replies throughout the conversation. If you’re
getting the “oh, how cool” tweets a lot, or replied about something you can’t remember for the life of you, Tweetree keeps
track of it for you. You can do everything in Tweetree you’d want to do in Twitter, and actually a whole lot more.

Threaded Tweets
ThreadedTweets rocks the world of real‐time conversation threading. You can sign up for ThreadedTweets without having to
give your Twitter password, because it uses Twitter’s OAuth system to authenticate, rather than asking for your password.
Once you’re signed in, you’ll get real‐time monitoring of all the replies to your tweets, which are threaded into a conversation
for you.



ThreadedTweets also keeps a list of Popular conversations, which you can read and view easily. Every conversation has a
permalink, which makes it even easier to keep monitored and updated. There’s even an embeddable widget for tracking a
conversation on another site – this makes ThreadedTweets both a conversation tool and a real‐time search, which is a great
combination.

Twitalyzer
Twitalyzer is a measurement tool for short‐media messaging or micro‐blogging with Twitter being the
dominant platform. Twitalyzer has been created for businesses and not for the casual user and for those
where accountability is important. It takes data and puts into meaningful key performance indicators
such as Clout, Influence and Impact.



Socialmention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content
from across the universe into a single stream of information.
It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new
product, or any topic across the web's social media landscape in real‐time. Social Mention monitors
100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google
etc.
Social Mention currently provides a point‐in‐time social media search and analysis service, daily social
media alerts, and API.

Aggregated lists of Monitoring and Measurement Tools
Here is a useful link that provides a gamut of options:
A Wiki of Social Media Monitoring Solutions (http://wiki.kenburbary.com/)

Social CRM Use Cases and Case Studies
Use Cases
The Altimeter Group have published what they consider to be the 18 possible use cases of Social CRM,
“Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management ‐ 18 Use Cases That Show Business How to
Finally Put Customers First”:
Social CRM does not replace existing CRM efforts – instead it adds more value. In fact, Social
CRM augments social networking to serve as a new channel within existing end‐to‐end CRM
processes and investments. Social CRM enhances the relationship aspect of CRM and builds on
improving the relationships with more meaningful interactions.



Source: Altimeter Group

Case Studies
Here are a couple of interesting case studies of how some businesses have harnessed the power of
Social CRM for their benefit.

Faceconnector (Salesforce.com, Facebook)
Faceconnector (aka FaceForce) was the first business application on Facebook. It integrates Facebook
data with Salesforce.com’s AppExchangeTM by allowing users to tap the power of their personal
networks to build better relationships with customers, colleagues, and business partners. It integrates
by pulling Facebook profile information into Salesforce Account, Lead, and Contact records in real time.



Old Spice (TV, Youtube, Twitter)
This is a celebrated social media campaign by
Proctor and Gamble to market and promote
their Old Spice brand.

It provides and insight in to how to marry the
strengths of mass media (immediacy, reach,
authority) with new media (interactivity,
longevity, authentic, community). It
successfully integrated mass media (TV ad
during Superbowl) with Twitter (allowing
followers to have a conversation with the
brand and suggest alternatives) with Youtube
(where customized videos of the original ad
were published and shared).



Take Aways
We started this talk with my relating my encounter with an article entitled “Nobody wants to hear about
CRM anymore”. By the way I also encountered this picture somewhere:

My take is that CRM is not ‘Dead’. However, our notions of what it constitutes and more importantly
how it strategically fits into business has changed forever. Traditional CRM’s holy grail of the 360
Customer View is now the 3D Customer Perspective, that includes their social experiences and
networks.

CRM  Social CRM = Customer Experience + Social media and Knowledge Management
Thus follows:

 Our concept of information flows have now changed from Outside In to Inside Out

 Transparency and Conversation take precedence over Marketing and Spin.

 And of course some things never change: technology is an enabler, Social CRM is a philosophy and
strategy


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