I would have never thought Facebook was a verb, but it is a framework where verbs are in action. Nice primer on FB – this is “the what is facebook all about” slide show.
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Facebook
Many organizations and individuals have had the opportunity to access and understand their customer relationships, but how does social media change customer relationships? In fact millions have been invested in monolithic implementations which may not be able to manage the complexity or drive value from the changing customer dynamics. Will/does social media drive loyalty or materially revenue? Will your CRM system be able to scale to the need? This post will ask more questions than provide answers. Or perhaps the post will imply answers through the questions.
Significant investments in CRM applications over the past decade and continues to drive improved understanding and value, but is there an expiration date on your CRM application? Does CRM need to morph in to Social Customer Relationship Management? I know it needs to have a 3 character acronym, but nevertheless it may just represent the next Killer App. A CRM application that provides a way to support social attributes of your customer, it involves identity, influence and managing against infinite consumer personas.
So let’s just think about the benefits of thinking social when deploying a CRM solution:
Identity
Through the ability to enable customers to manage their own data is a core value of the customer self-service, I know how late 90’s of me, but isn’t this the value of social networks too? Who, Where, Why and How are typically why social networks exist and infrastructures for managing users. The benefits of using Facebook, openID or another identity framework allows for not only better management options, but richer attributes as they relate to relationships and transactions outside of an enterprise. What is the value of where they participate? Is there any value in the content they create? Is this even worth knowing?
Understanding Influence
Customer relationships are complex things – they drive revenue, they impact profitability and can defer revenue and the social customer is a growing influence on ALL of these. If there is a shared identity or a better understanding of the influence of a user, marketers can use this data to prioritize online ad spend and drive a focused social media agenda, rather than the almost product centric or the other extreme – the buzzword shotgun approach. What is the value of linking a customer user to the online rantings of a user on a forum? What is the value of knowing what their interests are?
Customer Persona’s are just Tiers or Use Cases – A new business Model
Old world CRM manages customers by products, groups or companies – not by the myriad interactions which are not unique to a given business, but driven by relationship, interactions and membership. These items effectively are the spatial relevance of a user and the value of place online. As we drive value from online relationships the complexity of a user is no longer the product, the company or service requests a user places, but something else. CRM is so centered on the revenue and costs of a customer, rather than the value a customer brings to an organization.
Where do your customers congregate, contribute and have conversations online and how can a business leverage this would be a benefit of SCRM. How can we prioritize effort, spend and relationship management of customers – more specifically their employee users on the value they bring to the business beyond the credits and debits. This is the challenge or business issue which a Social Customer Relationship Management solution would solve, not just orders and support tickets.
So where is our Seibel Facebook App?
So I got to thinking about a link from Chris Brogan via Twitter. The link had a very interesting post on communal data and trust. Which got me to thinking about ownership, the right to assign and what owning an identity meant and what attributes are portable. Is identity essentially a concept/social construct, where a “user” is an identity instance or sliver effectively shared within the constructs of the service and within a service’s capabilities. As a user, we overtly agree to acceptably use the service with certain constraints. Can trust be a function of shared identity transactions?
What a terrifically conceptual afternoon today has been thanks to Twitter.
I know we are all enamored with widgets, social networks and alike, but it can become just a bunch of WORK! So I spent the weekend overhauling my tools, blog and networks to make it just a little easier. So to save YOU time, I’ve put together some insights I received from the let’s say – at least the last 7 days of work.
Tools
The right tools for the right job, not just relevant to carpenters, appears to be good for bloggers as well. I’ve been watching folks use tools on twitter, like [tag]twitterific[/tag], I’ve been playing with my bookmarking sites and just seeing how it might best be coordinated. My previous content management strategy very much had a herding cats feel to it. Here are some of the tools which I’ve centered on based on input from other folks:
- Shareaholic – a single firefox plug-in which manages all of my go forward social networks. No more crazy toolbars or additional buttons – a single drop down! Needless to say, Firefox is a must have tool.
- Feedburner – Yes, I know everyone knows about [tag]Feedburner[/tag], but did you know the Pro tools are FREE now? Each tab now has new cool stuff you can use, not just for optimizing your feed, but also your site. There are a whole bunch a goodies in there for you – Feedburner, not just for RSS – a single interface to Optimize, Publicize and Monetize (I’m not monetizing, but I guess I could go for the $.04/mo I might get) and Troubleshootize.
- FeedFlare – I know, it’s part of feedburner, but it’s so cool because it replaced my previous WordPress plug-in for bookmarking and I think my site is faster, just because of this.
Your Friends and Your Networks – Your TIME
Managing networks, bookmarks and actively participating is a bunch of work. So I QUIT! Sorta anyhow – I’ve centered on only a handful Facebook, del.icio.us, Digg and StumbleUpon (I only kept stumble since it’s a lightweight commitment). Last but not least – Twitter, I’m not sure why I like this so much, it is just fun – I think because it is [tag]iPhone[/tag] friendly and not that much of a commitment – getting the theme here? Social Media-Life Balance
Intelligent Design
Since I’m fundamentally a lazy cat, I really needed to step back and think about how I wanted my online experience to evolve. So I found myself just getting way into the constructs of understanding relationships, what smart folks do online, (this requires a bunch of reading) and what I really want to do with my spare time and why. So I mapped out goals, systems, tools and traffic patterns to understand where I should focus on delivering reasonably meaningful content to the marketplace and I realized I had an accidental architecture. I had bits of mediocre content flying all over this Arpanet.
So what did I do? I decided to literally diagram where I am, where my readers are spatially on the web compared to where I am and weighted “objects” on benefit, effort and a totally subjective cool factor. Yes, I think everything can be put into model. Once I did that I figured out my haphazard hairball or spaghetti online existence just wasn’t what I wanted. So where did I start? My blog and worked out from the brand nucleus.
- Usability: Your stuff has to easily navigated to be read! That’s right, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about what goes where and why is something is on my blog until now. Guess what – there’s less clutter and in just the short time I’ve been re-designed, I’ve had more subscribers than any other single day! Clean is good.
- Consistency: This is as much about content, as it is about the frequency, so I automated a few things with behind the scenes posting automation/replication. I still need to clean things up a little, but Twitterfeed and the WordPress plug-in Postalicious will be making my life just a little easier and establishing a reliable flow of content, I would like to read. I think I still have a little recursive content, but I’ll have that fixed by Wednesday.
- Necessity – Only use things that add value. If a widget doesn’t derive benefits which you can PROVE in your analytics, then its got to go. You know what there’s an interesting side benefit- less widgets = faster site.
This is what I have for now, I’ll keep thinking about it and if you have ideas or recommendations let me and my readers know.