Social Media Wave- Social Media Marketing Agency

 Using Social Media to develop a CEM Strategy

Originally written for CRM Connect Newsletter for January 2010- CS

Large organizations have been experimenting with Social Media Methods in many ways over the last 2 years. Of the many iterations and perceptions of Social Media the main buzz trio keep percolating to the surface- namely Facebook, You Tube and Twitter.

If we look at where these are being used in the broad scope of customer experience, it's quite obvious that they are social network sites which allow customers and prospects to find our pages. If they are new to our brand and company, this is a bonus to our sales process.

What many companies fail to realize is that these sites are just parallel channels for aggregation and propagation. What this means is you cannot rely on them to handle all of your interactions and information dessimination on their own.

Referring back to large organizations, they are using internal Social Media tools in all departments which act as what we call “internal and external facing” communities and neighbourhoods.

Internal communities are used to build continuity between all departments and a variety of customer matricies. This would be used to segment various product lines, services, geography, inside sales, direct teams etc. Depending on how the orgainization maps to their customer's buy cycle and support requirements.

This is a good news, bad news scenario- good for customers but perceivably expensive for companies to implement. The large company reference would be spending in the range of 300K for a year worth of Social Media support for their sales and support operations, product development and other departmental interactions.

So more good news is that we can emulate the model and implement the same functional specifications with mid range SAAS and Open Source tools. These tools for the most part are a hybrid of add on suites for CRM systems like SalesForce.com and the balance allow us to input customer data into CRM automatically.

This essentially allows a company of any size to get past experimentation and into action using “Socialized CRM” tools and strategies. We can then create a “voice of the customer” model where we can appease the need for real time, 24/7 access to information, Wikis, product configuators, upgrade sales and sending lead based forms data directly from informational videos with automated follow up capabilities.

This allows organizations to engage with customers, listen to their needs and respond in a fashion that they are increasingly expecting to be able to reach your company, it's resources and complete transactions in one easy step- oh, and in real time 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week.

Social Media platforms and tools allow us to develop many models to support line business functions- so perhaps you could examine what part of your Customer Experience matrix needs the most improvement or better yet, what those customers and prospects are demanding.

A large part of Social Media impementation success is in developing strategies. One key component in making Social Media acceptable to many customers is making the experience fun and engaging. We have developed some fun video based content for clients who do not want to create a dichotomy of push marketing ads and inbound dry, unfriendly decision tree voice prompts. Video can now actually be provisioned to create these models with context driven prompts to allow people to interact with your resources in a 100% meaningful way.

Having these interactions tracked by CRM and followed up on immediately make for increases in sales and rising CUSAT metrics at the same time.

Using the aformentioned Social Networking tools like Facebook, You Tube and Twitter make them more available to the masses who might find you there first, saving them time and  energy engaging with your brand, product, service or company- depending how you are structured.

So in summary, using Social Media is a must have methodology to embrace customers and prospects in a way that is meaningful to them while increasing your exposure to many new opportunities.

 Craig Stark

Principal

Social Media Wave

@socialmediawave