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CUSTOMER R
ELATIONSHIPS
: CRM G
ETS S
OCIAL
sites, collected through social analytics tools, for example, can provide real clues as to
where in the ascension to brand advocate (or descension to detractor) a particular indi-
vidual is at any given moment.
This new role of the customer, based in relationships and shared activities that
play out on the Social Web, can be effectively understood and managed by borrowing
some of the ideas and practices of traditional CRM and then weaving into them the
essential social concepts of shared outcomes, influencer and expert identification, and
general treatment of the marketplace as a social community.
On the Social Web, participants form relationships for specific purposes: fun,
discovery, or other uses of collective knowledge to better accomplish their own goals.
In the context of social business, the motivations include becoming smarter about a
product or service as a customer or innovating and extending the value of personal
contributions as employees. The changing nature of the overall relationship between
a business and its customers can be understood by following the conversations along
with the participants and the relationships between them: From the design of the
products and services and their delivery into the marketplace to the conversations that
form about them on the Social Web the telltale indicators are available. This provides a
highly valuable window of insight into what your customers or stakeholders are really
thinking, and what they are likely to do next. Social CRM, as it is being defined now,
gives you a potential competitive advantage in both strategic planning and tactical
response with regard to what is happening on and around the Social Web.
The New Role of Influence
Consider a typical conversation on the Social Web, say a potential customer who is
reading a review and talking with a friend over Twitter about it. That review was writ-
ten by someone, and it was written for a reason. Who that person is—think profile
plus connections—provides a clue as to the motivation behind the review. Further, that
review is the result of an experience that is itself driven by a business process.
Looked at in a macro sense, a potential customer reading a review is actually
looking at the net result of a business process through the eyes of someone with an iden-
tifiable motive or point of view. If that motive or point of view can be understood, you
can sort out the real business impact of the review (if any) and then apply this knowledge
to your business and adjust as necessary your own business processes that are creating
the experiences that drove that review. In other words, knowing who is talking about you
(and not just what they are saying) is fundamental to understanding and then optimizing
your processes to produce the conversations you want, and addressing and correcting the
processes that drive the conversations you’d rather not see.
Social CRM—treated in depth in Chapter 9, “Social CRM”—is the emerging
discipline that does just this. Social CRM joins up a couple of existing business tech-
nologies and associated practices. The “social” component draws on the interactions