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c h a p t e r9 :SOCIAL CRM■It might be helpful to take a minute and understand why the adoption of
Enterprise 2.0 practices—certainly not the only way to approach Social CRM but
one that really brings a business and marketing focus to it—is so important. Consider
traditional advertising and some of the eyeglass scratch-repair kits you may have seen
advertised on TV, or many of the teeth whitening products that have been pushed your
way online. Use Google to research these, and draw your own conclusions about how
well they actually work: Fundamentally, most of them don’t work, or at least not as
claimed. Yet people still buy them, because traditional advertising is well-suited for
creating demand. By contrast, when you search for these products on the (social) Web,
you find the actual experiences of people who’ve tried them. In the case of the specific
products mentioned, the actual experiences, ratings, and reviews drive considerably
less demand.
The Social Web brings the power of collective experiences to the purchase
process: When you use the Social Web to research teeth whiteners or eyeglass scratch-
repair kits—or anything else—you benefit from the collective experience of anyone
who has tried these products and written a review about the experience or its perfor-
mance. This in turn drives the impact of social media on business and marketing, and
in part gives rise to the adoption of social media as a part of a marketing program.
Social CRM wraps this entire process, pulling the information contained in the reviews
all the way back into the design of the products. Who knows: Maybe one day there will
actually be a $50 teeth whitener that really works in an hour, or a $10 scratch repair
kit that actually repairs your glasses. But don’t hold your breath. Firms that will will-
ingly lie to you, or who will create and run deliberately misleading advertisements, are
least-of-all likely to seek customer input in the development of better products. Social
technology is more likely—at least in the short term—to weed out these types of firms.What Defines a Social CRM Program?
A typical social media program contains a listening component, an outreach compo-
nent, and a participative component. It may include, for example, a social media ana-
lytics dashboard like those offered by Radian6 or Oxyme, a blogger outreach program
powered by a tool like BuzzStream or Sysomos, and a participative presence, or brand
outpost, in the form of a Facebook business page or Twitter presence where outbound
messages are directed to fans and followers in response to specific questions, sugges-
tion, or other comments.
Social CRM takes it one step further: Social CRM recognizes that conversations
that occur on the Social Web—and in particular the conversations that marketers are
initially interested in “controlling”—are in fact caused by experiences that result from
processes inside the organization. By adding the ideation and support platforms, for
example, to a social media program a direct connection is created between the busi-
ness and its customers. This connection is the start down the path to social business, as