Ending the Battle for Social Media

Posted by schneidermike on Monday, June 29, 2009 · View Comments 

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.

battle_crm

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.

PR_BATTLES

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.

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  • Mike, great post. Must have been something in the air in Boston yesterday. At Edward Boches good talk about social media online for 4As, the first question he asked was "Who owns social media?"

    It's funny that on the one hand, we talk about how brands have lost control or have to give up control to consumers. And on the other hand, we argue over who controls social media within an organization.

    We have to walk the walk internally, as Michel Lebrun implied. No one "owns" social media just as no one "owns" the conversation. Or, rather everyone owns it at needs to act accordingly, customer service in its way, marketing in its way and PR in its way.

    The big challenge, as with all communication, is making sure everyone's on the same page. That's where things like social media policy, or your segmentation strategy, come in.

    Great discussion topic!
  • In most organizations, all of the above should have access to social media. Social media is, as said, a communication tool. A telephone is also a communication tool. Would you leave your marketing, PR, sales, or IT people without a phone (or email)? No way! Neither, most likely, should they be locked out of social media.

    The challenge of this is that it means sales, IT, marketing and PR have to have open communication with one another to make this effective, too. For many companies this is an enormous change, but it's necessary for maximum effectiveness.
  • Mike, the problem seems to be that who owns social media is not fading as an issue but instead just heating up. Early on the debate was between marketing and IT, which was really a debate about enterprise technology. Now we are beginning to see a debate between marketing, PR, customer support, sales, and any number of other departments, which is a debate about who owns the customer relationship. As different groups within the business wake up to the fact that social media has value to them the battle will only get more violent.

    Now, despite the esteemed panel's hopes, my belief is marketing comes to own social media. It is clear that someone needs to "own" it, since the same tools and communities are used for multiple corporate objectives -- no one needs to see a corporate marketing Facebook group right next to a corporate customer support group, right next to a sales group, and so on. But in most firms the marketing department has a distinct advantage: they know the tools and, most importantly, executives believe marketing knows the tools. If you are looking for an owner marketing becomes that group 4 out of 5 times; it already has the first mover advantage.

    All things considered this is a great opportunity for the CMO to become more powerful and grab control of more customer initiatives, more budget, and more decision-making authority. But even if the CMO loses, you can be sure the battle is just getting started.
  • Social media is the consumer interacting with the media, which goes way beyond customer service, of course. Just look at PTwitty TV, for example. Diddy has almost 1 million Twitter followers of which thousands tune into his late night live stream. From there the users interact with Diddy via chat and he ultimately promotes his upcoming tours and the musicians he reps. And he continuously drives traffic to his site where he sells tickets and movies to the tune of millions, no doubt.

    That's one example of many SM pushes in the entertainment field; and they are just getting started.

    Huggies just launched a campaign on a popular mommy blog, using all the predictable SM tactics: forum, polls, etc. This is not about damage control, but about branding and building trust. Huggies is walking the consumer through the front doors, not the decrepit, falling down, leaky basement.

  • Hi Mike,

    Customer service is certainly not the ONLY social media touchpoint - not by a long shot. I don't think anyone on the panel would hold the viewpoint that social media is the domain of customer service (or any single discipline), although I do understand that customer service was a central part of the discussion on Wednesday. Of course, we did have Frank (from Comcast) whose focus is on customer support as this is the team he leads AND it was a panel discussing the concept of social meets CRM, not a generic discussion on social media.

    To be clear, today's reality is that social media is in greater use by PR and marketing professionals in most companies. Yes, there has been some interesting discussion over the past couple of years about "who owns social media", but I think this debate is fading as more recognize - as you say - that the social web is a multi-purpose communications medium. I like to dub it, the "social phone" just to make the point.

    The interesting point about social media entering into the realm of CRM is to make the very point that social media is expanding deeper into the enterprise and becoming integral to multiple business functions. PR and marketing were the first. Now we have companies expanding their listening & engagement to customer support, sales, community management, etc.

    There are, however, some interesting characteristics to the social web which make it unique. In fact, I believe the medium's public nature means that the skills of public communicators are in greater need throughout the enterprise. The social web's nature is actually driving the need for increased collaboration between PR/marketing, customer support, sales and online community management. You make this point well in your post and I couldn't agree more!

    The truth of the matter is that - in most companies - customer service isn't there yet and PR/marketing is leading the way. The point we are driving with the panel and illustrating with great examples like Comcast is that customer service needs to join in and become a key part of a company's online listening & engagement. But this isn't "taking over" from PR - quite the contrary.

    I do appreciate your feedback and I appreciate hearing how the panel came across to you.

    Cheers,
    Marcel
    CEO, Radian6
  • albrocious
    I agree with Mike, Customer Service is not the place for any form of pre-sell communication. The damage control case studies has overwhelmed common sense. Relationships are what makes sales close, they buy from and because of sales people. It is the customer service they provide not the customer service department. As stated if a customer calls the customer service there is an issue. Guess who else will be getting a call....
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