Social Media Marketing

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UNDERSTAND THE C
ONVERSATIONS T
HAT M
ATTER
process change and recognition of the need for collaboration across many fronts. This
is different, and it is important to set these expectations early on.
Getting Social CRM right—and successfully applying it to your business to cre-
ate a genuinely collaborative relationship that leverages customer insight—depends
more on creating an internal culture around change, around collaborative workflow,
and around processes like ideation than on the implementation of any particular
toolset. In my social media marketing workshops, for example, the workshops and
exercises do not begin with social media tools: they end with them. The workshops
begin with an explanation of business objectives and customers and the dynamics of
the Social Web. With such an understanding in place, it’s easy to choose the particular
tools that are most likely to produce the desired results. Starting instead from the point
of view of tools, the result would be an endless chasing of me-too ideas. Sometimes this
approach works, fair enough, but more often this copy-cat approach doesn’t.
Adoption of Social CRM follows the same rules: Without an underlying, busi-
ness-driven framework, your efforts to redefine your innovation process will quickly
die out. Social CRM directly impacts the management and decision-making processes
within an organization by connecting the experiences that form around the products
and services delivered to the marketplace with the business processes that create and
sustain them. Product and service innovation, where ideas become reality, is certainly
part of it. So are customer-support processes, where the post-purchase issues that inevi-
tably occur are sorted out. So too are your HR department, your supply chain, and
your delivery network. You get the idea.
When choosing a Social CRM toolset, start with your business, your culture,
and your internal processes to create the overall platform that provides the connec-
tions to your customers, that supports the formal processes of active listening, and that
encourages your customers to share their ideas on how they’d like to see your business
evolve based on their own experience with your product or service.
Understand the Conversations That Matter
Listening to the conversations in your marketplace is the starting point in becoming a
business that deeply integrates customer input. The application of more rigorous ana-
lytics to these conversations yields clues as to how an organization might use this input
to improve a product or service. It also reveals why the highly recommended cross-
functional work team approach to managing the Social Web is so essential.
Listening is an intuitively sensible starting point in a social business program and
is largely risk-free. Unless you make it known otherwise, no one knows you’re listening
except you! As a further motivator, your customers and stakeholders will almost surely
recognize when you are not listening. If you’ve ever hollered for help in an empty room,
you know how obvious it is—and what it feels like—when no one is listening. Even