Social Media and CRM - Short Paper

UNIVERSITY RESEARCH PAPER

Social Media and CRM
Short Research Paper
By
KATHAN BHATT

A Short Research Paper providing knowledge about current trends in internet marketing and social
media to improve customer relationship management.

Social Media and CRM Kathan Bhatt

Abstract:
A new media and medium is in existence for human beings to communicate, express and
share. The increased internet usage and its simplified accessibility through various portable
devices have resulted into a new platform for both the consumers and organizations.

As the new culture is in existence, it has started replacing the traditional “publish and view”
perception. People now-a-days prefer to interact, engage and share their experiences using
user centric platforms provided on the World Wide Web. It influences the freedom of act to
everyone over internet. Any internet user is capable to write a comment on a writer’s,
business conglomerate’s or celebrity’s blog and expect a reply.

There might be varying reasons for everyone to participate in online social activities, but the
content that is created by users have been resulted into dynamic web where the consumers
of content are tuning out to be prosumers (provider + consumer). It helps sharing of
information among peers as well as with big media players and other organizations. The
Web has become a dynamic content provider for people allowing them to participate in
various activities.

This paper is an effort to identify various opportunities on Social Media, study the presence
of corporate in Social Network and suggest some concepts that can help an organization to
enter into Social Media.

1. INTRODUCTION:
Over a last decade the Internet has contributed a lot in changing our life – both from a
business as well as social perspective. Currently the industry expert’s calls Web 2.0 as an
extreme set of innovative tools that is far beyond internet surfing and website publishing.
Web 2.0 has enabled us to interact with everyone quickly and easily with little or no cost.
With over billions of people accessing internet on daily basis it has become a new world of
interaction influencing major change in Social behaviour.

The World Wide Web: In 1989 a scientist at CERN named Tim Berners-Lee invented World
Wide Web, with the aim to provide links to any information from anywhere.

Generation First – Web 1.0: It was introduced to public in 1993 along with the release of
WWW. It was originally targeted for static information access by merging personal
computers, computer network and hypertext. Most of the websites were only owned my
institutes and organizations. Users were able to access the information that has been
already published using navigation through link directories. Minimum information was
available and no personalization existed during those days (Agrawal et al, 2011).

Generation second – Web 2.0: With the help of evolving Web technologies and increased
internet penetration, consumers turned out to be prosumers. They not only consume the
content but also started contributing over the Web. Consumers become content providers.
As a result of which: a read-write web was introduced with user generated data. An era of
Social Media started bumbling with numerous conversations where user can share, tag, post
and discuss about various contents that include: books, forums, photos, music, movies,

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events, articles, products and places. Some example websites for all such activities are:
Amazon, Blogs, Flicker, Netflix etc (Agrawal et al, 2011).

With the growing awareness, the corporate world started paying attention on their online
footprints. Utilizing the Social media and controlling the online reputation become a part of
their routine PR activity promoting their role from providers to participants. Along with this
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) adopted a new meaning by redefining itself as
E-CRM. All this led to a new movement of branding where the individual users started
controlling the brand. This made advertisers and marketers keen about identifying the ways
to influence online behaviour of individuals to help promote their brands in quick and easy
way without legal involvement giving birth to a new business term called Social Media
Optimization (SMO).

Consumer Social Networking: The concept of online Social Networking became dominant in
2007 along with the success of two social networking applications: MySpace and facebook.
Their success story relies on the fulfilment of a simple need – to connect and socialize with
others. None of us can argue its success statistics as there are more than 200 million people
active on one or more social networking sites.

Considering facebook as the most popular Social Media website, the total number of active
users are 800 Million as on September 22, 2011 with monthly growth rate of 3.73% (source:
Wikipedia).

Corporate Social Networking: With a noticeable growth in number of internet and social
media users, the corporate world started realizing the business benefits of Social Media. It
motivated them to define new business strategies for corporate social marketing by
stepping into Social Media creating a new benchmark.

2. IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND ONLINE REPUTATION FOR BUSINESS:
Down the ages, word of mouth (WOM) has been considered as the best medium for
information propagation, and today the Social Media is a hub of conversations in form of
tweets, comments, scraps, likes, posts, votes, videos, audios, photographs etc. It is playing a
motivating role in promoting brands, understanding public opinions, sharing music albums
and movie reviews, product ratings and most importantly breaking and spreading news
using single-click-share method provided on most of the websites. Sensitive information and
disaster news has reached number of people faster than line news. Also, Social Media is a
proven tool to keep in touch with past and present buddies and also for tracking people by
following their online activities.

A company’s online identity or business e-image is far beyond what is has in the content of
its website. Every organization holding an online identity is not only about their website, but
it is about their online reputation. It is all about: what are the public opinions for their
business and how many people recommends it? Such questions are very sensitive and are
necessary to be considered by every business organization to improve its online reputation
(Hoffman T, 2008; Lauren B, 2012).

Improving Online Reputation: The term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very common
now-a-days. Google being the most popular search engine has provided number of tools to
improve the visibility of your web page over internet. A Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is
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responsible to fetch and display the information for the entered keyword in search box of
any search engine. The information that is visible to user is dependent on Page Rank. The
higher the Page Rank, the more chances for your business page to be displayed on SERP.
Initially the Page Rank of any website is rated as 0/10. It depends on number of factors like:
average traffic to your website, quality of content, appropriate use of Keywords,
appropriate web page titles, the type of domain name and URL’s you use, number of
existing do-follow links etc.

Social Media plays an important role for improving your online reputation and also for
improving Page Rank. Social Media is the only medium to up-lift the user traffic to your
website by posting interesting offers, news, events etc. Whereas the presence of your do-
follow links on online forums and popular blogs also helps improving your overall Page Rank.
If your business page appears on the first page of SERP along with other relevant pages that
describes about your business, then it means that you really hold a good online reputation.

It is necessary to understand that achieving good online reputation and effective business
optimization is not a quick process. But it has been proved to be very important in today’s
digital world to maintain the level of trust, reliability and competency among your
customers. Hence, most of the corporate firm relies on SEO tactics to optimize their own
business popularity in order to manage and maintain Customer Relationship.

3. SOCIAL MEDIA – A PLAYGROUND FOR ORGANIZATIONS:
Along with the number of online activities people simply share word of mouth about various
brands and its product many a times, if all this is ongoing why should organizations remain
behind? Thus, Social Media providing space to organizations to share their word of mouth
becomes a playground for them to promote their brand in a simpler way approaching
number of customers at a time.

A business reputation depends on how people perceive about the business. This people
include: consumers, suppliers, partners and the general public. In order to control and
overcome negative reputation, organizations need to setup Social Media Services using
computer applications, open source APIs, widgets and other collaborative tools. The Social
Networking Services like facebook and Google have started providing online space to the
corporate firms in form of page. Creating a Google or facebook page organizations can
create their content to state their presence on Social Media websites. This content can be
easily embedded, shared and re-used which could be in form of a post, comment, tweet,
scrap, audio or a video for ease of access depending on the way an organization needs to
promote it. Such an information sharing is nearly similar to advertising campaign ruled by
any organization. Social Media campaigning is far better than in-person campaigning in
terms of speed it gains over internet (Faux G, 2010).

Special Offers: Digital guru Chris Brogan advised a person on twitter: “things that help other
is what gets more shares.” It means that, any online promotional product or a service offer
will be shared more and more by public. People normally shares interesting offers with their
friends and relatives to help them avail the advantage of offer before it gets exhausted. The
Social Media is the fastest medium to share word of mouth. Hence, consumers itself
becomes prosumers as they consume the product for self usage as well as advertise it
among others.

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Integrating Technologies for better output: Many of the business organizations have been
successful using popular mobile OS called Android to develop certain business specific
applications. Most of the IT organizations publishes a pro version and distributes it among
their clients and receives feedback on the same via Social Media. This helps them to
perform better by identifying customer expectations.

Sharing company culture: Companies that considers the importance of Online Reputation
encourages their employees and top management to blog and tweet, which allows general
public or regular customers to interact with them directly creating a sense of trust and
involvement.

Information Centre: Providing a social platform for product review, service launch or service
update enables consumers to explore user reviews about the product or service quality.
Such an information centre becomes equally important for both the consumers and
producers. It avoids consumers for selecting a wrong product and simultaneously user
reviews help organizations to come-up with a better product next time. Public polls and
public opinions stand as the best solution on social media to focus on producing improved
consumer centric products by understanding their demands that they share with us online.

Apart from what we discussed, there are certain other business areas where Social Media
has proven their importance. Today we can find a like, share or tweet button on every
webpage, either it is about a product or service. Other areas that Social Media covers are:
Employee recruitments, developing business relations for outsourcing, Vendor Relationship
management, Fund raising for a cause, research intelligence and identifying consumer
behaviour over a new product or service launch.

4. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION:
Challenges, Pros and Cons on utilization of Social Media for business networking: Many
business firms conceit that Social Media is a competitive time pass. But the fact is that users
on Social Media are equally aware about its power. Any wrong step taken over social
network can lead towards negative reputation (Lauren B, 2012). There are many cases
where public openly protest on social media against several fake of irrelevant products and
its use, damaging the overall reputation of that entire firm. Thus for every organization,
what and how you behave on social media is very much important to retain the earned
reputation.

Planning for Social Media: Use of Social Media should be an integral part of company
strategy for business promotion. It often requires skilled staff as it is similar to various other
business processes that requires thorough observation, analysis and planning right from its
initiation. It is also necessary to retain the dedicated staff to manage and maintain use of
social media for business benefit. Failure to do so might affect your reputation and
positioning over the internet. CEO, managers and employees of such organizations often
need to undergo training for improving their online conversation skills.

Future: Social Media is all about society and its people. It deals with seamless connection of
people as an individual as well as a representative of a group to which it belongs. It is a very
delicate platform where even a single wrong act can be disastrous. It is still evolving as
number of new players and consumers join in every day. It is in state of experiment yet and

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our actions will determine the face it will adopt. We are ultimately stepping towards an
acceptable, personal, ubiquitous and collaborative web.

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References:
1. Acker, O 2011, 'Social CRM: How companies can link into the social web of consumers',
Journal Of Direct, Data & Digital Marketing Practice, 13, 1, p. 3, Vocational Studies
Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 25 March 2012.

2. Agarwal, S, Mondal, A & Nath A, 2011, ‘Social Media – The New Corporate
Playground’ International Journal of Research and Reviews in Computer Science, 2, 3,
pp. 696-700, viewed 19 February 2012.

3. Bhatt K, 2011, ‘A Pinch of Search Engine Optimization to Improve Online Reputation’
Available at: http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Pinch-of-Search-Engine-Optimization-to-
Improve-Online-Reputation&id=6715869 viewed 20 March 2012.

4. Carolyn H B & Gautam P, (2011) "From social media to social customer relationship
management", Strategy & Leadership, 39, 5, pp.30 – 37, viewed 31 March 2012.

5. Chatterjee, S, 2012, ‘Social CRM and its impact on Pharmaceutical industry’
International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 2, 1,pp. 1-8, viewed 19 February
2012.

6. Foux, G 2010, 'Integrating social into your business', Journal Of Direct, Data & Digital
Marketing Practice, 12, 2, p. 128, Vocational Studies Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 9 April
2012.

7. Hoffman, T 2008, 'ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT. (C over story)', Computerworld,
42, 12, p. 22, Vocational Studies Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 23 March 2012.

8. Lauren, B 2012 ‘Protect Your (Online) Rep’ Registered Rep, 36, 3, p. 13, Business Source
Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 27 March 2012.

9. Patil, K, Dhobale, R & Pillai, B 2011, ‘Marketing and Commercialization Strategies’
International Journal for Business, Strategy and Management, 1, 1, p. 14, viewed on
6 March 2012.

10. Woodcock, N 2011, 'The evolving data architecture of social customer relationship
management', Journal Of Direct, Data & Digital Marketing Practice, 12, 3, p. 249, Vocational
Studies Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 9 April 2012.

11. Woodcock, N, Green, A, & Starkey, M 2011, 'Social CRM as a business strategy', Journal Of
Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management, 18, 1, pp. 50-64, Business Source
Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 1 April 2012.

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Appendix:
Case Study:
Company name: Lets Nurture
Company Profile: IT Outsourcing (Web Design |SEO| Mobile App Development)

Lets Nurture is an IT outsourcing firm and also provides Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as
well as Social Media Optimization (SMO) services to its global clients under a brand name
titled Affordable SEO Services. It has been active since many years in providing SEO and
SMO services to its major clients from UK and US. Since it is itself an SEO firm it needs to
hold a good online reputation over the internet and it has been successful to maintain it. To
prove it, if you just type the keyword ‘Lets Nurture’ on Google search, the first 10 results on
a Search Engine Result Page will be about Lets Nurture. They also hold the same reputation
for Affordable SEO Services. This firm highly active on Social Media, you can find their
presence on facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pin It, Foursquare and many more.

Social Media efforts on Affordable SEO Services site and facebook activities on Lets Nurture
page are the only reasons behind the success they have earned so far. The facebook insights
analysed on their business page shows in average 500 visits per week. Apart from that, we
are successful in increasing their Twitter followers from 900 to 1600+ within two months of
period utilizing the tools and techniques that are provided by social networking sites.

The table below clearly depicts the data regarding last 3 months referral traffic to their
company website:

Source Visits Pages/Visit Avg. Visit Duration % New Visits Bounce Rate
stumbleupon.com 186 2.06 00:02:27 75.27% 51.08%
facebook.com 84 2.25 00:01:33 73.81% 45.24%
linkedin.com 72 2.53 00:01:23 36.11% 51.39%
t.co 71 3.07 00:03:42 36.62% 35.21%
pinterest.com 52 2.44 00:02:46 69.23% 42.31%
delicious.com 15 5 00:11:43 26.67% 40.00%
reddit.com 9 1.78 00:03:29 44.44% 55.56%
plus.url.google.com 30 6.33 00:05:33 90.00% 6.67%

The table above clearly describes how efficient they are on Social Media. Also the company
has been well appreciated for providing various SEO tips on their facebook as well as Twitter
page, to keep their fellow clients upgraded about what changes does search engine revels
and how to overcome it.

Apart from all this, the company also succeeded in developing a Social CRM mobile
application based on Android Technology. They developed an Android Application in which
a client can check the current status of their website. The statics displayed in that
application include: Google rank, World rank by Alexa, facebook likes, number of followers

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on Twitter and more. This was the biggest achievement of Lets Nurture in terms of
customer relationship management.

Source:
Self generated case-study from the provided data by personally visiting the organization.
URL:
www.letsnurture.com
www.affordable-seo-services.com

Abbreviations:

SCRM – Social Customer Relationship Management
ORM – Online Reputation Management
PR – Page Rank
SERP – Search Engine Result Page
Mobile OS – Mobile Operating System
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
SMO – Social Media Optimization

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