Many things in life are counter intuitive – social media is one of them.

Strategy Development

For every important business task it is wise to build a strategy – social media is no different

Intuitive
- You involve your management team
- You review your current position – make an audit
- Do a survey what customers may be interested in
- Create a plan
- You roll out your social media strategy

Counter Intuitive
- Before you do anything you connect with your customers and have conversations
- You ask them what their strategy is and how you can participate
- You create a customer based strategy team and involve your management
- Your customers create a social media strategy with you
- There is nothing to roll out as it is their work to a large degree

Marketing Engagement

The name “Social MEDIA” indicates it is a marketing thing and since marketing was responsible to “attract the masses”, social media is intuitively a marketing responsibility.

Intuitive
- Traditional marketing is getting less effective so let’s explore social media
- Assume this is a new “channel” and promote products and services through tweets and posts
- Since resources are scares let’s outsource the work and have others do it
- Measure results as increase in traffic and number of followers

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Republished with author's permission from original post.

I really liked Apple. I have an iPhone and an iPad. But the most recent experience made me think: how far can they take it?

We tried to buy a few iPads for customers. After the typical dial this - dial that - we landed at a customer service desk. An extremely arrogant person lectured us that we can't just buy iPads and make it a present. Woh woh who - we are just asking.... We were lectured further if we "violate" the purchase agreement (do we have to sign an "agreement") we may be expelled to buy any apple product.

This reminded my on Russian economy where people stood in line to buy something and needed to be thankful to be in the "elected circle" to even get a product. Ok I have to admit the whole "waiting list campaign" is a real cool marketing idea. Most know it has nothing to do with availability but just marketing - but hey it's cool to watch it.

But now if we put it all together - is that going to be too much? Do I risk to be expelled by writing this - maybe the Apple KGB - is watching me?

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Most of us noticed that LinkedIn groups are often times as bad as your email inbox – full of spam. No more conversations just webinar announcements and email catcher.

LinkedIn made a great move to alert group managers if an account has zero or very low number of connections and want to join your group.

Once you check the persons profile you will quickly see it is an account just setup to go into groups and promote whatever they can.

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Republished with author's permission from original post.

There are a lot of discussions and endless posts about Social CRM being a philosophy, a strategy and other esoteric viewpoints. Hmmm – why is that?

First: The term Social CRM was coined by Oracle in 2008 – certainly not as an esoteric view of the world but a technology that is going to evolve in the future. Over time others chimed in and companies like Nimble, SocioToco and Xeesm began to actually build products from scratch and the traditional CRM companies will soon have solutions too. Social CRM = Technology.

Many consultants and analysts however pointed to the esoteric part of Social CRM for several reasons:

- One it is good for selling consulting hours
- Two there was no solution to implement anyway
- Three it provides an open field for discussion, confusion and then offer help to resolve it.

But there is a thing called social media where it is much harder to base your consulting business on the “fear uncertainty and doubt model”

An interesting list of influencer you may check. It is not a quality seal but at least people who are very active in the social web and do understand the social part of Social CRM.  http://wthashtag.com/Scrm

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We see too many “social media marketing campaigns” fail. Worst of all: Agencies who developed those “campaigns” even continue to promote those as success stories and case studies, despite the fact that the campaign was a complete disaster. You hear from companies making millions over Twitter, you hear companies who are “wildly successful” with their fan page and you hear about brands as social media success stories who don’t even use social media but just have an agency running some activities.

Why do you think is that?

1) Because social media didn’t do what it was supposed to do? No.
2) Because the customers are not using it as so many people try to convince you? No.
3) Because it’s all too early? No.

To the contrary we see enough cases where customer or consumer are actually happy with the companies social media engagement. They appreciate the service, the connections, the dialog and the engagement. Ask customers from Comcast, WholeFoods, BMW, Zappos… and hundreds from even tiny little companies.

That second group has an interesting pattern in common: They don’t do social media marketing – instead they focus on a better customer experience. None of them “outsource” the social relationships.

You may outsource a lot but giving your social customer engagement to an agency is like telling your kids:

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Republished with author's permission from original post.

My tire dealer (Western Tire) and my local car dealer are using social media in an innovative way - different from what people may think and very successful.

First what they didn't do:
- No fan page
- No online community
- They have both no blog or any major "presence"

Now what they do:
- The majority of their team mates have an account in Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace
- They asked their clients if they are in the social web and if they may connect. In order to make it easy for all parties to exchange the sites and networks they asked them to share their Xeesm (a little free tool to keep all your social sites).

- The car dealer sales people start in the morning and visit all the clients they have so far and visit their profiles to know what is going on in their client's lives. Some chat about vacation photos or whatever is appropriate. They do that until a client enters the store and then often get back to their laptop and again meet clients in the social web. It shifts the "image" of the ugly car dealer sales guy to a much more caring person. They use our Social CRM system to visit on average 50 contacts a day. With 4 sales people that is about 4,000 customer touch points a month. Is the social car dealer a new chance for the car dealer guild? This one certainly is.

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The social business is rising and it is rising fast. Social media itself has changed dramatically in the last 7 years (see my review) and the business challenge is changing too.

While the “social media marketing” consultants from the last 2 years are stuck with building fan pages, evangelizing to their clients “you need to listen”, “you need to be in the social web”, “you need to do this or that” the social enterprise passed that point long time ago.

The early “blue socks consultants” (an internal term ;) are still where social media was 3 years ago. Having built a few cool campaigns no longer help an enterprise to do a cross functional customer engagement model. It doesn’t help to rearchitect a customer experience strategy and it doesn’t help building a framework and organization model that helps company leaders to engage thousands of employees in a homogeneous social strategy.

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Republished with author's permission from original post.

#SCRM Empower sales teams 2 strengthen relationships, understand needs, collaborate across company boundaries 4 predictable mutual success.

A lot has been said about Social CRM and what it may be. For some it is just a strategy, for other just some social features to traditional CRM. For some it is about business rules, workflow, processes with social characteristics and for some it is just a reaction to market changes, and then it includes attributes like trust building and loyalty. Do we need yet another definition?

Well, once we decided to build a S Y S T E M to S U P P O R T any of the strategies, philosophies or processes and more importantly include the social and collaborative aspect, we need to make some sound considerations:

First off I have to say “Engaging a customer in anything” feels still like a definition from the past. Today the customer is more engaged and the producer has a hard time to keep up with the customer.While trust and loyalty are very important attributes – no system and no process can create either. Trust and loyalty in our opinion is the result of the respective company’s culture.

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Republished with author's permission from original post.

The Xeesm team and their partners do about one Social CRM implementation per week right now and here is their experience:

1. Who owns social CRM (It’s easy for all of us to say everyone does, but that’s not reality quite yet; even for basic social media marketing)

We developed a co-ownership model. The actual application (which ours is) is owned by the sales team to operate. But the way the product structure is (contact information is contributed and managed by the customer), all the actual contact information is owned by the customer. The actual opportunity information is owned by the sales team but can be shared with the customer. The actual “social relationship” is co-owned by the sales person and the customer person. So if a sales person leaves the company, he or she still keeps the social relationship, but the opportunity of course remains with the organization. Now there is a lot more to it – but it may give you a first idea how it can be orchestrated.

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

Social CRM in Great Details
Sorry it's a bit long but the topic isn't that simple either.

You find two types of Social CRM:
1) You find community software, social media monitoring companies and other tools vendors calling themselves Social CRM. Some people would call Twitter the new Social CRM system.
2) You find dedicated Social CRM systems like Xeesm/Edge! that leverage all the social sites and tools and are from ground up designed with one specific purpose: reunite sales teams and their customers and prospects.
The New Sales Processes
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