Ending the Battle for Social Media

schneidermike — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:26:27 +0000

An Epic Event / Themes of Social CRM

I attended Radian 6 and Chris Brogan’s the Rockstars of Social CRM event last night. The panel had some of the heavy hitters of Social Media and CRM. Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian 6, Frank Eliason who you know better as @comcastcares, Paul Greenberg, Author of CRM at the Speed of Light, President of The 56 Group, LLC, Brent Leary, Co-author of Barack 2.0 and Co-founder of CRM Essentials and Michael Thomas, National President, CRM Association. The key themes really resonated with me and I agreed with them.

Social CRM gets back to basics
a return to Helpful 1.0 not Sales 2.0
Good relationships = good sales
You must earn your right to sell.

The Land Grab

Then something weird happened. The panel made a comment about Social Media ownership. They poked fun at PR and Marketing trying to get their clutches on Social Media and suggested that the only real home for Social Media is with Sales, specifically Customer Service. Suddenly, all of the IT people in the room fainted because they were left out of the land grab! Marketers wept openly. PR folk made some calls.

With all due respect to the panel, folks have been drinking a ton of beer to keep this pissing contest going. The fact is that there are applications for Social Media across the enterprise. Look. Social (essentially) means communication. Media is a medium of conveyance. So Social Media is a fancy name for a communication tool. The organization needs to communicate in order to succeed. Your team or functional area does not need to be the Superfriends of Social Media, locking down the technology at the Halls of Social Media Justice. It is one thing to be a trail blazer and another to construct a fortress around the perimeter of a trail to ensure that no one else can even see the trail.

A Leaky Basement

Let’s look at audience. If customer service is the only social media touchpoint, it means that the people who are interacting with your brand have likely already bought your product and are having a problem. Customer service is trained to troubleshoot issues with the mind to retain. What about prospects? Do you normally bring people into your home through a leaky basement? That is what you are doing if your social media systems invite people to your product through an open book of its problems. These problems should form knowledge bases for product development and marketing teams who can craft workarounds and answers to questions while putting fixes on the roadmap.

Is Customer Service Taking Over?

Of course Marketing and PR can benefit from information delivered via customer service, but there are full brand experiences that can expand communities, get more eyes on the product and ultimately net more customers. Should their creation be owned by customer service? Does customer service want to worry about security issues and scalability? Should they be releasing the latest information on future product offerings, upgrades? No. They should be consuming them. The IT group is taken aback because they have been using social media technologies forever. Their original twitter was called IRC with the biggest difference that people had to opt into a group to talk to one another. They share technical information on blogs and in forums. Customer service is going to have a really hard time taking it from them, especially when they have the power to shut the whole thing down.

Working Together

Brand personification either requires participants from many functional areas to come together to form the brand’s voice, or a central point that represents the corporate voice and then routes people to the appropriate personas to handle their inquiries. I would recommend that most companies begin with a single point of entry until such time that it becomes unwieldy and the message becomes diluted or the conversations become too much for the team to handle. While the organization finds its voice, a segmentation strategy can be assembled and rolled out when needed. Let me know if you would like me to elaborate on this strategy.