Social CRM For Dummies
Social CRM For Dummies
Social CRM For Dummies
Emailvision is the worldwide leader in on-demand email and social marketing. The Emailvision mission is to provide excellence in technology and services for online relationship marketing. The company is majorityowned by Francisco Partners of California, and is led by the same visionary leaders who founded the company in 1999. With offices in 18 countries, Emailvision delivers four billion messages per month on behalf of more than 3,000 clients worldwide. The organization provides a pioneering technology platform, industry-leading deliverability rates, in-depth relationships with more than 150 global ISPs, and best-in-class client services. Emailvisions unprecedented quality of service is driven by 12 years of research and development and by the organizations 400 passionate employees who are dedicated to helping customers harness the exceptional potential of email and social marketing. Meet Emailvision on Social Networks: www.emailvision.com blog.emailvision.com www.facebook.com/emailvision www.twitter.com/emailvisionuk www.youtube.com/emailvisiontv www.linkedin.com/companies/emailvision Amita Paul is a bright entrepreneur of the Social Media generation, and brings with her over 15 years of product management and marketing experience from a wide range of industries including retail management, email marketing, direct marketing, and information retrieval. In 2008, Amita Paul founded a social media start-up called ObjectiveMarketer. Under Amitas leadership, the ObjectiveMarketer team developed an enterpriseclass marketing solution that manages and measures social media campaigns across all of the major social media channels. In 2011, ObjectiveMarketer was acquired by Emailvision. Amita is now working as a global Director of Social Media Marketing at Emailvision. Johanna C. Nilsson is the founder and principal of Herringbone, a San Francisco (California) and Stockholm (Sweden) based marketing communications firm specializing in social media marketing for clients who want their voices heard in the global marketplace.
FOR
DUMmIES
Introduction
irst the bad news: You and your company no longer control marketing, sales, support, or product development. Your customers have taken over. Theyve stopped passively soaking up sales pitches and buying only the products and services you choose to offer. Theyre now active participants in your business. Through the power of social media and networking, they can make or break you. The good news? Through social CRM (customer relationship management), you have the opportunity to harness the power of consumers to market your products and services, improve customer satisfaction, provide support, and even develop ideas for new and improved products and services. This book shows you how.
Foolish Assumptions
While writing this book, we made some assumptions about you, the reader:
Introduction
Chapter 1
eing competitive in todays global economy hinges on the ability to interact with consumers online via social CRM (customer relationships management). In this chapter, you discover what social CRM is, its potential benefits, and ways to approach it.
Table 1-1
Parameters Roles Function Approach Channel Value Model
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Generate leads
Providing relevant content that addresses consumer needs, offers solutions to their problems, and helps them make the most of your products and services is one of the most effective ways to generate leads. Current customers recognize the value your business offers, and they spread the word. Prospective customers who see what you have to offer become more receptive to your products and services. Focus on nurturing relationships, earning trust, and offering something of value. Social CRM is less about marketing and selling and more about offering real value and teaming up with customers to improve their experience.
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Mitigating risks
To reduce the potential risks involved, you can Establish best practices and guidelines that are in line with your corporate and brand (see Chapter 2). Implement procedures to establish a central plan for all your social CRM activities. Provide training to ensure that everyone is on board and aware of policies and procedures.
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Check out Chapter 2 for additional guidance in establishing a structure and process that makes social CRM more measured and efficient and less prone to risk.
Maximizing efficiency
Social media is not a part-time job. To prevent social CRM efforts from becoming a time and resource hog, online marketing managers or social community managers must Plan to be proactive in engaging with social communities. Automate communications through RSS-triggered or prescheduled campaigns to be as efficient and productive as possible. Prioritize activities with dedicated resources to make your social CRM program scalable and sustainable.
Justifying ROI
Knowledge and analysis of key measurements transforms the social web from a source of largely unstructured qualitative data into a marketing framework you can view and track quantitatively. Data collection and analysis doesnt need to be expensive, difficult, or controversial in respect to privacy issues. Combining and interpreting or trending relatively simple measurements provides very useful insight. Social media analytics make all this possible. (For more about analytics and estimating ROI, check out Chapter 5.)
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E-commerce
Global giants, regional chains, and small online retailers are all embracing social media to Drive traffic to their websites and online outlets. Obtain and use customer testimonials. Advertise special promotions, coupons, and giveaways. Distribute product information.
B2B companies
Business-to-business companies tend to use social media for Product innovation inspired by customers asking questions, suggesting improvements, or posting solutions to problems they or others have had with a product. Customer service and education through press releases, how-to video tutorials, slideshows, industry articles, white papers, quarterly statistics, industry trends, world news, and so on.
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Real estate
Tech-savvy real estate agents have a strong social presence, leveraging social medias power to Establish themselves as credible, trusted resources. Generate leads by offering valuable insight and information and free appraisals (depending on location). Connect with colleagues in other locations to help clients with long-distance moves.
Chapter 2
ocial CRM isnt a simple add-on to your current CRM strategy and system. Its fundamentally a new way of doing business that requires company-wide policies, procedures, technology, and training. This chapter explains how to gear up for social CRM with these four essential components.
Setting Policies
Social CRM success begins with policies and a system (see the next section). Policies ensure that all personnel know whats expected of them. Before anyone in your organization posts content or interacts with customers online, establish the rules of engagement. Be sure that everyone gets a copy of them, fully understands them, and grasps the importance of adhering to them. Your corporate rule book should cover the following policies: Whos authorized to represent the organization online and post content. How to identify yourself online. Limitations to making commitments on the organizations behalf.
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Listening Tool
Blogs Online News/Reviews Message Boards
Community
DEMO
PR Sales
Multi-Channel Distribution
Other
Team
Marketing
Response Manual
Corporate Policy
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Cross-functional team
Interdepartmental communication and collaboration are essential in forming favorable relationships and a common view with customers and the community. Departments include but are not necessarily limited to the following: Public relations: The PR department often has the most control and responsibility of a companys social CRM efforts, although it ultimately depends on the organization. Marketing: PR and marketing must share information, shape consistent messages, coordinate efforts, and improve response time and outcomes. Sales: Sales must bring PR up to speed on products, services, and pricing; the sales/purchase cycle; and distribution channels to enable PR to shape responses and coordinate special promotions with marketing and sales. Customer service/support: Customer service and support personnel must provide PR with timely information on customer interactions, feedback, and complaints; the right people to tackle different issues; and the process to ultimately resolve issues. Product development: PR, marketing, sales, customer service/support, and product development must work hand in hand to identify and resolve problems with existing products and discover opportunities for innovations that meet evolving needs. Social CRM is not done in silos. Run social CRM as a crossdepartmental project, working towards clear, common objectives.
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Social media is a new field, so the best technology is provided by developers who are thought leaders and continually improve and grow their technology to adapt to this evolving market. Your social CRM software provider should be your partner in developing a social media strategy and adjusting it as your needs change. Consider working with someone who offers global support to make implementation and ongoing use much easier.
Technology capability
The first consideration to make is whether the software has the technological capability to serve your organizations needs. Your social CRM solution should be Reliable for serious business use. Choose a robust enterprise-class platform. Scalable to meet the ever-evolving and ever-growing needs of social CRM. Compatible with your existing system software or platform.
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Must-have features
Any social CRM software worthy of consideration must have the following features or capabilities: Monitoring: The ability to listen to conversations about your business and brand whenever they occur in the social settings you choose to monitor. Campaign management: The ability to handle many content types, including photo, videos, updates, and user-generated content. Advanced scheduling: The ability to schedule content ahead of time in various ways, including single post, repeated posts, spread of posts in different intervals, manual or automatic queue content creation, and bulk upload of large amount of content. Automated and multichannel: Automated multichannel content distribution optimized by user-response feedback. Productivity workflow management: User management features to organize, assign, and manage tasks.
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Activity
4 (+4) More
Engagement
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Blog Posts
Last Activity: 2011-03-09 09:14pm
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Reach 6230840
Clicks 44,515
Reports
Recent Posts
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Posts
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Browsers
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OS
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Channels 00:05:00 AM 00:06:00 AM 00:07:00 AM 00:08:00 AM 00:09:00 AM 00:10:00 AM 00:11:00 AM 00:12:00 PM 00:01:00 PM 00:02:00 PM 00:03:00 PM 00:04:00 PM 00:05:00 PM 00:06:00 PM 00:07:00 PM 00:08:00 PM
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00:09:00 PM
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Empower all employees to get involved, but train them first. A minor faux pas in the social space may cause major repercussions. If you want to start small, get one person involved, but choose the right person someone with a deep understanding of and passion for the company and todays technology. Assigning social CRM as a side project or hiring an intern to lead the effort in an unguided fashion may not be the best choice.
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Chapter 3
ith social CRM, the community controls not only the dialogue but also where it occurs your companys blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, discussion boards, texting, and even over the phone. In addition, dialogues are likely to transition from one communications medium to another, perhaps starting with an email message, progressing to a direct contact via telephone, and then moving to a social network, such as Facebook, where your customer discusses her experience with her Facebook friends. To respond effectively to each conversation, you must be everywhere it may lead and follow it from start to finish. This chapter explains how.
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FredCavazza.net.
Social media/networking
Social media/networking channels are online all the time. Following are several important social channels and how they differ: Facebook: Social network for interacting with people you know Twitter: Informational network primarily for spreading the word among people you know and dont know LinkedIn: Professional network
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YouTube: Video content and the number 2 search engine Message boards: Discussion forums Online news and reviews: Media, including online newspapers, magazines, televised video clips, and radio Blogs and message boards include any that your company sponsors plus others it doesnt sponsor, including your competitors blogs. Remain sensitive to differences in countries and cultures. A channel thats popular in one country may not be as popular in others as listed in Chapter 2. Cultural differences may also impact user expression on these channels. For example in Korea, users are more likely to share positive product experiences, whereas in Japan, users have a greater tendency to share negative product experiences, calling for a more attentive customer service engagement.
Direct channels
When focusing on the newer channels, dont forget traditional channels, which are just as crucial for your social CRM success. These traditional channels include telephone, email, surveys/feedback forms, letters, and face-to-face interactions.
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Create a compelling presence. Whether you create a Facebook page, YouTube channel, or Twitter profile, make it look professional and populate it with relevant, compelling content. Offer customers something of value to keep them coming back, such as Tips to optimize or get more out of your product Special offers and coupons Technical support Engaging games Competitions Humor Never promise more than you deliver. Manage expectations so everyone eagerly anticipates what youll do next and is never disappointed by what they get. As long as you provide what users are looking for and meet or exceed their expectations, theyll stay engaged. Provide official corporate contacts. Dont make your followers search for contact information. Add a personal touch by signing or initialing every post or message. On Twitter, you can create a list of people who post content, so your followers can approach them directly.
Combining Channels
A primary goal of social CRM is to stay connected with your customers, potential customers, and brand advocates at all touch points. Combining channels enables you to maintain contact as individuals skip around to the various channels.
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Dont use QR codes for traditional marketing or merely to link back to your organizations home page. QR codes need to deliver added value and improve the customers experience. Added value doesnt necessarily translate into special offer. It may mean educational, entertaining, or funny.
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Chapter 4
uccessful social CRM is part proactive, part reactive. Proactively, you deliver what your customers and community need and want before they ask for it. Reactively, you engage in conversations and address issues as they arise. This chapter explains how to do both and capitalize on the results.
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Repeat
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In addition to igniting community buzz and increasing your reach, social media campaigns enable you to Analyze performance of all social initiatives and activities related to the theme (aggregate analysis) to gain insight into whether your audience is more receptive to an informational or promotional theme, for example. (For more about this type of analysis, see Chapter 5.) Test messages with different content or tone (A/B testing) to determine which message has the most favorable impact on your audience.
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Promotional campaign: Promotional campaigns are best for spreading the word about weekend sales, limited offers, contests, signups, sweepstakes, and so on. Transactional campaign: A transactional campaign incentivizes users to make a purchase through the use of coupons (online or offline), promotional codes, and similar offerings.
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Revenue generation is not part of the lifecycle, but success at engagement and recruitment naturally leads to converting influencers and advocates into revenue opportunities. They become a mini marketing, PR, and sales force and often contribute or inspire ideas to improve your organization and what it offers. Social CRM isnt just about engaging in conversations. To make social CRM worthwhile for your organization, you must approach it as a revenue-generating lifecycle.
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Let em talk
People are going to talk about your organization and what it offers. For the most part, just step back and let em talk. To be more proactive, give them places to hang out and talk an official blog, support forums, Facebook pages, YouTube channels, and so on. As a community forms, users naturally converse with one another, answer each others questions, solve each others problems, and recommend other products and solutions. In some cases, peer support is nearly all the product support the community needs. Listen for positive comments and feedback and ask for testimonials. You may approach the person via email and ask something like, Because you like it so much, would you mind going to mysite.com/reviews and posting a review?
Correcting misinformation
The Internet has its fair share of misinformation and misrepresentation, especially in social media venues. Correcting the record is important, but do so tactfully: Dont correct a person in public. If someone posts something incorrect, contact the person directly, via email or a private message, so she can correct herself. If someone in the community posts something that misrepresents an issue or unfairly criticizes your business or brand, feel free to blog or post a rebuttal. Just remember to identify your company affiliation, stick to the facts (rather than engaging in personal attacks), and be diplomatic about it. Be honest. If you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and move on. Denials, coverups, and even avoidance dont work and only make things worse. When you correct yourself, though, format the changes, so people can see the mistake and your correction.
Chapter 5
avigating the social media landscape without analytics is like flying a plane without gauges. To stay on course to meet your social CRM goals, you must constantly monitor whats going on with your customers and in the community and make adjustments to your campaigns, when necessary. Integrating web analytics into your campaigns enables you to observe and evaluate online activities, including page visits and returning visits, conversion rates, and referring pages (where visitors come from). These valuable metrics (measurements) and numerous others enable you to track and analyze activity from campaign initiation all the way to lead conversion and evaluate your social media efforts to discover what works and what doesnt and fine-tune your system.
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The social CRM dashboard provides data and analysis to adjust and optimize ongoing and future campaign strategies. These optimizations include fine-tuning the content type, tone, frequency of sending messages, interval between each message, and campaign goals. A well-integrated social campaign dashboard offers complete visibility into the working of your campaigns. A key part of this analysis is integration with web analytics.
Typical metrics
Although the social CRM dashboard is unique to the system you employ, it typically provides access to the following metrics: Follower/fan growth for the reporting period Click-through or retweets Reach and extended reach how far the message spreads as followers retweet and their followers retweet and so on Influencers and amplifiers by number and identity Twitter mentions per campaign and account
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High-level metrics
Metrics for identifying trends and patterns may also be useful in spotting opportunities and adjusting strategy. These highlevel metrics offer insight into the following: Growth: The growth metric reveals which social CRM sources contribute most to growth in terms of customers, visitors, users, and fans. Analysis reveals how the results of your (paid) efforts compare to those from (free) organic sources, and viral outcomes (referrals). (Organic includes people finding you through searches, press coverage, bloggers, product directories, and other sources you dont pay for.) Engagement: The engagement metric reveals how long visitors remain on your site or on specific pages, how deep they go, and where they wander. Retention: The retention metric reflects the frequency at which recognized individuals return to your site or specific pages and the length of time they remain regular visitors before dropping off the radar. Monetization: Monetization metrics include average revenue per user (ARPU), average revenue per paying user (ARPPU), percentage of active users who pay, and so on. Think of monetization as the bottom line metric.
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Stages in Pipeline
Executive Dashboard
Campaign Specics
Measuring ROI
Lead Source
Conversion
Activity on Site
Segmentation
Benchmarking w/Goals
Channel Performance
Content Performance
Campaign (Execution)
Channels
Social
Direct
Web
Marketing Program
Visitor Behavior
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Chapter 6
e have helped numerous clients integrate social CRM into their business models to engage customers and community. Along the way, weve gained insight into the most common pitfalls and developed strategies for starting out on the right foot. This part offers ten suggestions to help you avoid mistakes and optimize success.
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Budget Carefully
Social CRM may be less expensive than traditional marketing and advertising, but its not free, and it does take time. Budget carefully to account for staff, content creation, paid placements, hosting fees, social CRM tool fees, and any consulting and agency fees.
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Do Multichannel Campaigns
To maximize reach and impact, integrate your social media activities on all platforms, including your business blog, Facebook page, and Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Your social CRM technology solution should provide tools to facilitate and automated the process.
Appendix A
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social plugin: A feature that enables you to link your organizations website and blog to your social properties, such as a Facebook page or Twitter account. Plugins enable visitors to quickly access a social property by clicking the plugin, such as a badge that encourages the user to like a post or Follow Me on Twitter. social presence: An organizations footprint in various webbased social networks that makes the organization more available and approachable to customers and prospects. social properties/assets: Everything you have online in terms of accounts and content, including your business blog, Facebook page, YouTube channel, and Twitter account. social QR code: A dot-matrix bar code that can be scanned with a QR barcode reader or camera phone to obtain special deals or additional information about a product or service. (QR stands for Quick Response.) social ROI: Return on investment from social campaigns and activities. status update: A brief message that Facebook users post to let their friends know what theyre doing, how theyre doing, or whats on their mind. In addition to text, a status update may include a photo, video clip, link, or audio file. tweets: Text-based messages on the Twitter platform limited to 140 characters in length that can be accessed by other Twitter users whove chosen to follow and receive updates from that user. user generated content: Content created by the public via blogging, digital video, podcasting, forums, review sites, social networking, photos, and wikis. web analytics: Measurements of user activities on the website that allow you to evaluate a campaigns success and calculate your ROI for each campaign.
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Appendix B
o help you with the first step towards social CRM success, the following is an example corporate policy, a Social Media Rule book For Dummies style. This is addressed to your employees, for your organisation to start using right now. We encourage all personnel to engage with our customers and interact in social media circles that are relevant to our business, brand, and industry. While we dont want to stifle your creativity and self-expression, we do require that you adhere to a few dos and donts. By adhering to these policies and guidelines, you help protect our reputation, confidential information, and yourself.
Dos
Check and adjust privacy settings. Social networking sites typically have default settings. Check and adjust the settings so that you feel comfortable with what youre sharing on the network. Put relationships and customers first. Seek out ways to improve each customers experience. Listen carefully to their needs and, when possible, provide for those needs. Sometimes, a customer may just need to vent. Other times, we may need to make a change in the way we do business. Identify yourself. Whenever and wherever you post something, add your name or initials and, when appropriate, your role at the company.
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Donts
Dont engage in online disputes. Doing so exposes you to the risk of getting wrapped up in a no-win squabble that leaves a lot of collateral damage in its wake. Dont engage in inflammatory or inappropriate discussions about competitors. Although it may sound like fun, attacking the competition usually reveals deep-seated insecurities. Focus on making us look good, not on making the competition look bad.
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Dont post potentially offensive or insensitive content. This includes anything defamatory, offensive, harassing, rude, crude, or in violation of any applicable law or any of our policies. Dont cite or reference clients, partners, or suppliers without their approval. They have reputations to protect, too. Dont share financial information about our organization with anyone. If you want to talk finances, youre pretty much restricted to discussing your own personal finances and government spending. Dont post anything unless you want it to linger on the web forever. Removing information from the social web is nearly impossible, even if you remove or delete it from the original source.
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