Social Media Marketing

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BUILD A S
OCIAL CRM P
ROGRAM
the design of your in-store checkout queuing system or online shopping cart—that will
shape the use cases at the heart of your Social CRM planning process. Connect these
with the identified root causes of conversations—positive or negative—and use this
information to guide your planning, implementation, and measurement process.
Your Social CRM Team: It’s Bigger Than “Just You”
Pick your team wisely. Though simple in concept, it’s harder in practice but will make
all the difference. Start with your work team: Whose idea is this “social technology”
effort, and how much support for it is there? You can do Twitter alone, and many orga-
nizations have successfully kicked off what became social business programs in exactly
this way. At the same time, you can’t generally support a community or an ideation
platform by yourself. When building your team, look back at the business processes
that create the experiences you want to impact. A great starting point for your team
includes someone from each of the units or functional areas who is a direct contributor
or controller with regard to these processes.
As an example of what this looks like in practice, consider the efforts of Philips’
Consumer Business Units, a client of mine in The Netherlands. The mainstays of
Philips’ implementation of social media and social business practices are built around a
defined engagement process, one that depends on the participation of cross-functional
teams that support their social business objectives. Marco Roncaglio, Director of
Online Marketing, stresses the importance of the combination of process, dedicated
resources, content strategy, and a cross-functional support team.
I asked Marco about this program and about how he and the larger team around
him were approaching this:
“In order to step up and leverage the social technology opportunity we
felt that we had to combine a bottom-up approach—wide endorsement
and adoption— with a top-down approach—key champions and leader-
ship. As we are developing our long term vision, our social media content
strategy and formally allocating dedicated resources, we are also putting
in place an organizational foundation to support the business objectives.
We have created a cross functional team, developed a very specific seven-
step social media marketing planning and implementation system so that
we can identify and spread best practices, established core solution and
technology components (for example, listening tools, blogging and similar
platforms) and of course defined the business principles and social com-
puting policies that apply immediately, across the organization.”
The approach that Marco and the combined teams across Philips’ Consumer
Business Unit have taken is instructive in this regard: They have carefully defined
what they want to accomplish, gathered together the resources (people, budgets, tools)
needed to succeed, and established the metrics and policies that will guide their efforts.