About one-seventh of the planet has a Facebook (News - Alert) account. Half of Americans are on the social networking service. If you exclude infants and small children and the very elderly, this means the majority – the vast majority – of active American consumers are on Facebook. If you run a business, by now you'll know...you need to be there, too.
While enterprises know they need to be on Facebook, they've have had a harder time figuring out just where to put social networking within the confines of their customer support infrastructure. Many, logically, have settled on the call center as the right place (after fruitlessly trying to get the marketing department to be the go-to people to track social media). Next, the challenge has been how to support social media technologically: as in, what kind of solution to use to integrate social media into the enterprise. Many (also logically) have settled on the customer relationship management (CRM) solution.
According to a new article in InformationWeek, this makes the most sense. But, it cautions, the work doesn't stop there.
“For business technology organizations, the challenge is figuring out the intersection between social and everything under the customer relationship management sun. CRM broadly covers the software systems companies use to serve customers, generate sales leads, manage marketing campaigns, and analyze and segment customer data. Making the connection between the people in CRM databases and their social media personas will require companies to build a new level of trust with their customers, based on the promise of better service and value. This social connection is the key to unlocking a deeper understanding of customers and making more cost-effective use of sales, service, marketing, and IT resources.”
In other words, by all means use the CRM databases you have, but your work isn't finished, and this “last step” toward making social media connections with customers isn't something a solution can help you with: the success or failure of your venture will be entirely on you to craft the right kind of process within your organization.
While you may begin the process in the call center with the help of the marketing and sales teams, it's critical to let IT into the process. A new social marketing process will need to be linked and networked throughout the departments that can boost it by adding new, relevant data and customer interactions to it. And not only do you need to link social media into your core processes, you need to link the various kinds of social media together: focusing on only one media (i.e., Facebook) isn't going to help.
While there are a number of socials that can assist with the process (the InformationWeek article outlines them), it's still largely going to be an internal effort to pull together the departments, processes and data required to make the most out of the plethora of social networking information that is available on your customers.
Edited by Stefanie Mosca