Social Media Marketing

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SOCIAL CRM AND D
ECISION S
UPPORT
organize the relatively unstructured qualitative data into themes or categories so that
you can make sense of the conversations. Figure 5.6 shows a typical social analytics
dashboard and the way in which its data can be used to understand a conversation.
Figure 5.6 Social Analytics
The insight gained into what customers are talking about—and hence how your
product or service experience is perceived in the marketplace by your customers—is useful
beyond marketing. This is an important point to note, as I mentioned in Chapter 4, “The
Social Business Ecosystem,” in that many organizations adopting social-media-based pro-
grams place the marketing department at the focal point for this work.
Here’s why this happens and why it’s important to see beyond marketing.
Connecting social media with marketing makes sense if one considers the impact of a
positive or negative post on sales. Clearly, these outside-of-brand-control comments,
helpful or otherwise, keep sales managers and marketers up at night precisely because
they cannot be controlled. However, when a business as a whole steps past marketing
in its collective view of “social business,” the conversations become more predictable
and as such the ability to manage these conversations (in the direction of “more favor-
able”) becomes possible.
Looked at across the business or organization, social media extends far beyond
marketing. Looking at the purchase funnel, shown in Figure 5.7, you can see that it’s
actually a better bet that social media has relatively little to do with marketing. Beyond
creating a platform in which marketers—certain caveats respected—are welcome to
participate along with everyone else in appropriate conversations, the origin of the con-
versations themselves has more to do with Operations, HR, and Customer Care—all of
whom contribute in a tangible manner to what is talked about on the Social Web—and
relatively less to do with marketing per se.