Social Media & Social Networks in Social CRM

There was an excellent discussion around the place of Social Media in CRM last week on the #SCRM channel on Twitter. The agreed consensus was that Social Media should be treated as just another customer channel in CRM system as initially suggested by Jesus Hoyos.

This inherently means measuring the effectiveness of the channel. And Jill Dyche too agrees with that in her latest post today. She also talks about the talking-listening-acting stuff that I covered in a slightly different manner in my last post on Trust & Reputation in Social CRM as listen-analyse-influence.

And then yesterday I had a conversation with Fabio Cipriani about including set up of blogs/wikis/networks in CRM 2.0 strategy, not just using Social CRM tools. This was quite the other end of the spectrum from where Jill was approaching the issue of Social CRM.

To add more depth to Fabio's query, let me state what is coming out as a key point in the current Gartner CRM Summit under way in UK (emphasis mine):

"In '99 it was Y2K, technical uncertainties and anxieties around technical capabilities," Kaila said. "You're seeing a similar level of anxiety today, and it's really around the rise of social networking. Customers are really empowered. Companies are not the first place people go for information. From an enterprise perspective, they're becoming a little insecure about how to support or integrate it. In my
opinion, apart from the global economic crisis, companies are most worried about social networking and how that impacts how they interact with customers."

This fear stated above is in fact supported by survey reports too. As per a recent study by Coleman Parks Research (get a summary of it here from Avanade):

1. More than 75 percent of companies worldwide admit that social networking will come into the business undetected if not pro-actively managed.
   
2. Approximately 60 percent of respondents say integrating social media technologies is not on the agenda.
   
3. Only 18 percent of respondents have any kind of strategy in place to integrate these technologies within the company for employees.

If that was not damning enough, the real deterrents seem to be perceived fears (at least to me), especially of the unknown, though I do not blame the risk averse IT:

1. Concerns about security (76 percent).
   
2. Senior management apathy (57 percent).
   
3. Fear of using unproven technologies (58 percent).
   
4. Half of companies fear a negative impact on productivity.

Concerns about security diminishes if businesses implement social media & networking apps within their firewall rather than rely on external sites/services. Business can certainly build niche brand centric communities & in fact profit from it! These are what I call at my work place as "gated communities". These gated communities would provide both social networking features as well as social media for user content creation. The gated communities have to be integrated with CRM systems obviously and there needs to be ETL of Social & CRM Data.

The rest of the deterrents need just plain education.

Finally, I posted my first attempt at mapping the stages in buying process of a customer to Social Media yesterday, with some inspiration & examples from searching & discussions in the social web as well as more traditional means of reading dead tree materials, etc.

To summarise this post, my reading from all these recent conversations around Social Media & Social Networks in Social CRM:

1. Social Media is just another customer channel in CRM & needs to be measured for its effective use.
2. Social CRM is the effective use of Social Media, out there on the Internet as well as gated communities, aligned to the customer's buying process.
3. Listen, Analyse & Influence are the three golden tasks of a Social CRM process.
   

P.S.: If any proprietary information has been posted, pls do let me know & I will take it off if required.