Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or@attensity360, or find her musings on her personal blog and hercompany’s blog.
If you have been tracking conversations around social media for business, you have undoubtedly come across people talking about Social CRM. If you are anything like me, the first time you heard it, you probably rolled your eyes and said, “Ugh, another social media buzzword!” And while I do take issue with the jargon itself (and will discuss that later), Social CRM is a central concept that businesses need to understand deeply and integrate fully, in order to serve the social customer.
and Facebook
, favoring what her network has curated and surfaced as important information.Bottom line: The social customer owns the relationship, and you need to earn her trust.
Paul Greenberg, and author and leading authority on SCRM, stated that Social CRM is “…designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide a mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company response to the customer’s owning of the relationship.”
Another great definition was put forward by Michael Fauschette: “Social CRM is the tools and processes that encourage better, more effective customer interaction and leverage the collective intelligence of the broader customer community with the intended result of increasing intimacy between an organization and its prospects and customers. The goal is to make the relationship with the customer more intimate and tied to the company by building a public ecosystem to better understand what they want and how they interact with the various company touchpoints like sales, customer service etc…”
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what you call Social CRM or how you define it, as long as you understand it and know how to apply it to your organization. It’s all about the execution. At Attensity, for example, we developed the “LARA” framework, which addresses the end-to-end process of Social CRM:
Jacob Morgan of Chess Media has developed this pretty comprehensive diagram that I like to refer to:
As mentioned above, I don’t necessarily agree that Social CRM is the best name for this kind of process because CRM has typically enabled one-way conversations with customers, with a disproportionate focus on technology. The name CRM stands for “customer relationship management,” which is a misnomer because the company no longer controls or manages the relationship –- the customer does.
In one of my favorite quotes about Social CRM, Mitch Lieberman states that “Social CRM is about bringing “me” [the social customer] into the ecosystem… It is not about the technology, it is about the people, process and cultural shifts necessary to support and grow a business.” This is a very important notion to understand in order to avoid coming down with a case of “analysis paralysis.” We all have a tendency to over complicate things, and while SCRM is a big concept that takes a lot of savvy and planning to get right, it’s really very simple at its core. Companies that successfully execute on the Social CRM process share the following characteristics:
— Social engagement must be enterprise-wide. To achieve this goal, you need to “socialize” the organization. The larger and more entrenched your organization is in traditional ways of handling customer interactions (inbound or outbound), the more difficult this task will be.
How do you socialize the organization? Through proper training, alignment of objectives (the quintessential question of “what’s in it for me?”), and providing leadership and mentoring. Marketers within your organization need to understand that a brand is no longer what you tell your customers it is –- it is now what they say it is. Make sure the salespeople know how to use Twitter to build relationships without spamming their networks. Empower customer service to help, and product teams to gather and act on feedback.
Overall, the toughest task of “socialization” is conveying the notion that the more the brand lets go of its desire to control the message, the more they will be able to shape it collaboratively with its customers. This is where a social media director/manager becomes a crucial hire, because she will provide direction for the entire organization.
— To truly provide a “mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment,” per Paul Greenberg, the organization must be irrevocably oriented towards transparency and customer service. Why are companies like Zappos so successful, while others’ attempts at helping on Twitter resemble a “me too” strategy? Because transparency, taking risks, and providing a “no-matter-what-it-takes” kind of service are part of their corporate DNA.
If you don’t have the guts to truly commit to transparency and service, and if you don’t empower your people to act on behalf of the company (which will inevitably lead to some unintentional mistakes), you won’t get very far. You must embrace experimentation, take smart risks, and “fail fast.”
— I can’t stress enough the importance of putting the right processes in place to truly listen and engage. Because the sheer volume of social media conversations is staggering, you need a plan to triage, prioritize and activate the right people in the organization to engage properly. After you socialize the organization, take the time to figure out who the right internal resources are in at least these areas of the organization: Customer service, PR, marketing, sales, and product feedback.
Develop a process by which a social media message gets routed to one of the above groups and activate the right resources for an immediate response. There must also be a robust crowdsourcing component, which will empower customers to provide direct product feedback, and the organization to ensure that the feedback is heard and acted upon (UserVoice is a terrific platform for this).
The social customer may go to Twitter with a question, a user forum with a customer service query, Facebook with a compliment, or Yelp with a complaint. The processes you establish will largely determine your ability to respond quickly and with the relevant information, while uniting all of these interactions under one customer record.
At the end of the day, you must ask yourself if the steps above help you enrich the two-way relationship between the social customer and your social business.
Even though Social CRM is mostly about people and processes, you do need the right tools to help you achieve the following:
Are you ready for enterprise-wide engagement? Can your organization support Social CRM? What are some of the steps you have taken to build a rich relationship with your social customer?
Credit where credit is due? In March, I wrote a post about a Greenpeace-inspired Facebook revolt against Nestlé that protested the company's sourcing of palm oil from suppliers in Indonesia who were reportedly destroying rainforest habitat and driving the orangutan to extinction.
I was intrigued by the fact that Nestlé's Facebook representative had made the mistake of actually being a human being instead of a faceless marketing drone, thereby earning the great ire of the social media mob for his "rudeness." And I launched a little driveby attack on "people who imagine that they are engaging in some form of meaningful social protest by posting complaints about a company while sporting juvenile profile pictures on a Facebook fan page."
Well, shame on me. On Monday Nestlé announced that it would pursue the goal of a "no deforestation footprint" by working with the respected non-profitThe Forest Trust "to build responsible supply chains by identifying and addressing embedded social and environmental issues." While I'm not entirely sure how different this new promise is from Nestlé's previous pledge that 100 percent of the palm oil used by the company would come from sustainable sources by 2015, Greenpeace is declaring victory, with a big shout-out to social media.
With nearly 1.5m views of our Kit Kat advert, over 200,000 emails sent, hundreds of phone calls and countless Facebook comments, you made it clear to Nestlé that it had to address the problems with the palm oil and paper products it buys.
Publish Post
So maybe Facebook comments are a form of meaningful social protest -- at least insofar as they manage to generate lots and lots of media coverage.
Health-care reform was a tale of two Presidents.
The first, President Barack Obama (circa 2009), had the expectation that health-care reform could be driven through Congress and straight to his desk with little more than his mandate that it get done. Last summer, he demanded a bill on his desk by Labor Day.
Washington laughed.
His leadership was in question. The innovation that got this little-known senator from Illinois elected was nowhere to be seen.
Facing failure, President Obama (circa 2010) remembered the skills required to cajole a team into working together. He recalled the leadership and creative innovation necessary to craft a workable bill. In February, he held a televised address with GOP leaders at a Conservative conference. He crossed the country to attend Town Hall meetings and other public forums. He took an Ohio woman who lost her health insurance before being diagnosed with cancer and made her the face of reform.
On Mar. 21, Congress passed the Health-Care Reform Bill.
Though some people debate the comprehensiveness of the reform, and some lament the backroom politicking that seemingly went on, friend and foe alike have commented on how the President's resurrected leadership guided this measure through.
Innovation has been a key ingredient of the Obama Presidency. Last September, his office drafted the "Strategy for American Innovation." The document paper called for "agencies to increase their ability to promote and harness innovation by using policy tools such as prizes and challenges." The State Dept., the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, the Energy Dept., and the Environmental Protection Agency have so far risen to the challenge. Each is using prizes, grants, and recognition to encourage private-sector participation in a greater innovation renaissance and public-private partnership. President Obama set a goal and communicated it across governmental agencies.
Transfer that thinking from Pennsylvania Avenue to Main Street, from Inside the Beltway to the Halls of Corporate America. Envision each of those departments and agencies as silos within a company. Each is charged with serving the greater corporate good by developing innovation.
The White House is driving inspired innovation. You can too. Here are four ideas to bear in mind when looking to implement innovation within an organization.
Inspiration
With the President's and White House's support, independent agencies are charged with seeking innovation—and to encourage it in others. That's the CEO's role, too. Corporate chiefs have to inspire and lead by example. When Obama faced stern opposition over the health-care bill, he led by example, walked the talk, and stayed engaged throughout the process.
Net Results / Net Rewards
In March, the Office of Management & Budget released a memorandum, Guidance on the Use of Challenges and Prizes to Promote Open Government. The document outlined the "potential benefits of prizes" to pay for results, to highlight excellence and to motivate, inspire, and guide others. In addition, prizes "further a Federal agency's mission by attracting more interest and attention to a defined program, activity, or issue of concern." Does your organization reward innovative employees with encouragement, recognition from management, or the chance to lead a team or project? These simple nods can be powerful motivators.
Value Creation
No leader is an island. Nor is a government agency—or corporate department. Successful innovation starts at the top and then trickles down throughout an organization—all with the aim of creating value. For-profit corporations find value in supporting the bottom line. Does your innovation have its focus there?
Results
Success—whether it arises in innovation that leads to new product development or a system that streamlines an organization—must be observable and measurable. It must stem from accountability and lead to tangible results. Leaders lay out their goals, inspire their team, and set a common, results-focused goal.
For Chief Innovation Officer Obama, inspiration, rewards, value creation and results were key imperatives on the path to the successful passage of health-care reform legislation. Do you employ the same imperatives?
—With Jeff Zbar
Robert Brands is the founder of InnovationCoach.com, and the author of Robert's Rules of Innovation: A 10-Step Program for Corporate Survival, published in March 2010.
