While the following examples are based on the experience with the social business applications from Xeesm, it demonstrates in an interesting way how businesses can leverage social media today, way beyond blogging and tweeting. The following use cases are grouped by 8 categories including Sales, Marketing, Partner Collaboration, Product Management, Logistics & Supply Chain,  HR and the executive bench.

(1) Sales Contact Management
Sales teams use Xeesm to keep all their clients in one place. Like the old address book where they had street address and phone number, the modern day sales people know the LinkedIn profiles, Twitter names, Facebook pages, Slideshare Accounts, YouTube channels, Bookmarks and more about their clients to truly socialize.

(2) Outbound Call Centers
Sales teams also use Xeesm as a replacement to the old cold calling processes. Instead of calling 100 people a day, being able to leave 20 voice mails and reach 3 people, the social sales outreach connect with people in the social web, connect and develops a more social and therefor more successful relationship.

(3) Lead Identification
One of the most relevant questions asked in the social web is “Does anybody has experience with…”. Agile sales organizations identify those opportunities and try to be as helpful as possible, introducing a prospect with experienced customers. The Xeesm Lead Identification process is supported by the universal Flight manager.

(4) B2B Sales Processes
Xeesm Flights are used for B2B sales teams to follow the new sales processes. As buying pattern have changed, sales teams align their processes to the new reality. Xeesm Flights are used to map sales processes to the company or business specific buying pattern and navigate sales teams through the new process.

(5) B2C Sales Engagement
Sales teams in the B2C world have typically shorter sales cycles, no contract negotiation with a legal entity and different buying pattern. Xeesm helps B2C sales teams to keep in touch with influential customers, prospects and new market entries.

(6) Influencer Relationship
Marketing Pros use Xeesm to keep a social relationship with the key influencer in their market, media people, blogger, outspoken customers, key business partners, and more. Many use Xeesm FLIGHTs to create, track and execute on social media campaigns.

(7) Event Coordination
Social media based events is not only posting the event but working with the market to help spread the word. Xeesm Flights are used by marketing pros to introduce an event and fuel the advocates with ongoing new information. The objective tracking feature allows to monitor the marketing teams but also external team’s activities.

(8) Lead Generation & Distribution
In combination with Social Media Monitoring tools, marketing managers use Xeesm to enter actively engaged people into a Xeesm Flight and share the flight with others such as sales, product management or other departments. As such Xeesm is used as an internal rapid respons system independent of existing corporate silos.

(9) Market Research
Marketing managers keep their most influential contacts in Xeesm to be able to quickly reach out for any kind of market research. Research objectives can be tracked and information is quickly gathered.

(10) Campaign Tracking
The many places and spaces of the company and its most influential partners and market constituencies is conquered by keeping all those places in one list within Xeesm. Campaign objectves can be tracked by location, initiative or target group.

(11) Partner Management
Partner managers use Xeesm to develop a better social relationship with their partners. Instead of having just name, company and streetaddress in a PRM system, partner managers see their partners in the social web, their LinkedIn profiles, Blogs, Facebook accounts, Twitter presence, slideshare presentations and more. Using Xeesm provides a deeper social relationship over time and the ZADEA technology eliminates outdated partner databases.

(12) Deal Registration
The new deal registration system is used as a multi program and multi vendor solution so that partners can use one system for all their vendors. Social media based deal registration eliminates duplicate data entry and provides a more social face to business applications.

(13) Indirect Social Marketing Collaboration
While reseller may not be vivid blogger, savvy video creator or highly engaged in Twitter partners always have been the primary contact to the local markets. The “Indirect Social Marketing” Program (Insoma) gives vendors a more direct access to the installed base, without requesting the partner to reveal their connections.

(14) Social Media MDF
Vendors will soon be able to use Xeesm as a Social MDF program. As market development more and more needs to happen in the social web, vendors are eager to see their partners engage. The Social MDF program will help track engagement and provide benefits based onm engagement level – no longer only based on revenue.

(15) Product Launch Support
Product managers use Xeesm to keep in touch with key influencer in the market such as Blogger, Analysts, Industry Experts, leading customers, early adopters, press, media, beta tester and similar groups to be able to ask for support once a new product is launched or revised products get relaunched. PMs setup specific FLIGHTs to monitor and guide their closest friends through the launch event.

(16) Product Request Gathering
In order to be as close as possible to the most relevant customers and influencer, PMs use Xeesm to stay in touch and follow some milestones during the request gathering period.

(17) Knowledge Relations Management
Support managers use Xeesm to keep in touch with key knowledge carrier and experts and connect them with customers whenever it makes sense.The team also feeds experts with new knowledge to accelerate knowledge distribution.

(18) External Support Amplification
Support teams stay in touch with highly active community members and give them premium support in order to reduce their own workload.The system is also used to rank leading support community members and provide special treatment.

(19) Xeesm as an early warning system
A logistics team began to explore Xeesm to keep in touch with key market influencer. Active blogger and technology freaks who test products very early on and share their findings with the community. The logistics team stays in touch, checks the activities and tries to discover market trends and positive or negative test results early on.

(20) Supplier Relations
Purchase managers and also reseller channels use Xeesm to manage their list of vendors and suppliers, keep ‘watch lists’ and create a stronger more social relationship with the relevant contacts. Flights may be use during portfolio expansion strategies or while developing new vendor sources.

(21) Xeesm to help recruiter
Hiring managers and recruiter use Xeesm to reduce the profile search from one hour on average to a few minutes. Candidates with a Xeesm greatly improve their chance to be reviewed in full length. HR Managers also use Xeesm to better understand what their team’s representation in the social web is and how they can help to improve it.

(22) Xeesm as a team support system
In particular in large organizations employees may just not know if the overstep the borderline between personal opinion and company related content. An HR team started to use Xeesm to help guide the team by monitoring their activities. It was important to them: “We encourage our team to use the social web, so we don’t control – but we guide simply by understanding who is out there”.

(23) Identity Conservation
People in transition use Xeesm to ensure that recruiter or hiring manger know exactly who they are and the places they are active on. In a recent case a person wasn’t hired because of a negative impression on one of the sites, which later turned out, it was a different person with the same name in the same city.

(24) Corporate Silo Dissolution
Helping teams leverage each others contacts across an enterprise is the number one interest from executives in using Xeesm. While insights into opportunities, campaigns, hiring processes and other activities are so much easier and system administration overhead is nicely reduced, Executives have a way to quickly introduce the right contacts in the respective process and help all their teams to be more successful.

Another good report came out from Altimeter Group. It may inspire you for even more ways to use Xeesm:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Activities, CRM, Case Study, Listening, SCRM, SRM, Social relationship management, Tools, customer care, social media trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Axel Schultze.