Social Engagement with CRM

On a typical day, more than half a billion tweets are sent. Chances are that most of your customers, prospects, competitors and stakeholders are among those swarms of individuals posting, tweeting and blogging whatever they’re feeling right now. Are you listening?

If it were a country, Facebook would now be the second-largest in the world in terms of population, with more users than India has inhabitants. And these people are talking all the time amongst themselves, sometimes about you and your organisation. People will talk about you whether you want it or not, and whatever they say, good or bad, will affect you.

It is impossible for anyone to constantly monitor what is being said online. The conversation never stops, and most of the time it doesn’t include you, meaning that people are not actually commenting on your Facebook page or tweeting to your account. Most of that conversation happens in random corners of the internet, where you would never think of looking.

With such a large amount of information, organisations often feel they’re fighting a losing battle, so they prefer to bury their collective head in the sand, pretend the conversation is not happening and go about their business as usual. But fortunately technologies are now being introduced to monitor social media; these technologies are being referred to as ‘Social Listening’.

Social listening can go through three stages, each corresponding to a level of maturity reached by the organisation:

Social media monitoring has been around for some time and utilises tools such as TweetDeck to provide analytics about what is happening on social media. This can of course inform marketing and branding efforts but does not allow the organisation to react in real time to what is being said. Although a degree of drilldown is possible, with the identification of specific social media accounts that can then be interacted with, this remains essentially a reactive approach, answering questions or reacting to complaints. The goal of social monitoring is not to improve customer engagement but to provide information.

Effective social listening, whether passive or active, means being able to track social media activity against specific customer, prospect or stakeholder records, who can then be interacted with in a much more fine-tuned manner. This requires the integration of “Social Engagement” with Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

These are some of the functionalities now available through the “Social Engagement” capabilities of leading CRM products:

Patrick Rousseau