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.

What are your thoughts? You can login with your facebook, twitter or disqus account and join the conversation.

This is what I tell people when they ask me my name. Still, about a third of them decide that they like Mike better and start off with a “nice to meet you Mike.” This fills me with temporary wookie-style rage. Fortunately, I rule at suppressing my inner Chewie.

My mother named me Michael Schneider. If it were up to my father, my name would be Wolfgang. He thought that it would be cool to call me Wolf or Wolfy. This is probably the only thing my father and Eddie Van Halen, who DID name his son Wolfgang, have in common. Schneider is a name of German origin. It means tailor. So you can imagine that Michael Schneider is a fairly common name. There are some pretty interesting Michael and Mike Schneiders out there too.

Mike Schneider is a TV personality for ABC. I can remember watching him in the late 80s and early 90s anchoring the early morning news program: ABC World News This Morning. He also had a soft political career and now is with Bloomberg TV. I actually majored in mass communications for a semester. I wanted to be a radio jock. My dad convinced me that business was a better major. I should have majored in Computer Science, but MIS and Accountancy have served me well.

Mike Schneider is a quarterback for the Youngstown State Penguins. Interestingly enough, I was born in Youngstown, OH. This is a fact that I do not often share, primarily because Youngstown is one of Ohio’s 2 armpits. Anyone care to guess the other? Sorry @gregoryng, I think @chrisbrogan tweeted in first. Yes Chris, the answer is Toledo.

Michael Schneider is a TV editor for Variety Magazine. He claims to have taught himself to read the TV guide. I found that funny because I used to memorize the TV week in the News Herald every Sunday. I memorized the plot summaries for every show that was on before I went to bed. This Michael also created the “famous” Facebook “Michael Schneider Project”. He has friended about 100 Michael Schneiders and counting.

The first Michael Schneider in a Google search wrote A Beginner’s Guide To Constructing The Universe. “In this book you will find something that cannot be obtained elsewhere, a complete introduction to the geometric code of nature, written and illustrated by the most perceptive of its modern investigators.” Sounds really important and complicated Michael! This Michael and I share a love for Math. He seems to love it more though.

There is also Michael Schneider the concert pianist and Michael Schneider the Georgia Tech student and photographer.

Another Michael Schneider is a state senator in Las Vegas. He can participate in the moustache fighting league. His tag team partner would be the Easter Bell of France.

Michael T. Schneider is special effects wizards who works on some of Hollywood’s hottest movies like August Underground’s Mordum and The Wickeds.

Michael A. Schneider is an attorney who works on technology transactions.

This Mike Schneider is a professional poker player. He won a million bucks in a tournament. We both really love poker. I would join the World Poker Tour as well and win a million dollars of my own, but I do not want to cause confusion for Mike Schneider fans. I’m all-in when it comes to consideration.

There is a Michael Schneider who is a Major in the US Army. Another Michael Schneider is a film maker. This Michael Schneider is a clinical psychologist.

Which one of these am I? I am the computer geeking, strategic consulting, digital marketing, football (soccer) loving, hockey playing, Chinese speaking, social medi-ing, advertising, father of 3. I am THE Michael Schneider. Welcome to digital before digital!