One of the most fascinating things to me about social media, is the way that it is rapidly affecting internal structures and processes for businesses. As companies are growing communities online and successfully communicating with stakeholders through their social media channels, this begins to present it’s own unique set of problems. Namely – how are you managing these consumers? Many companies, and particularly bigger brands now have this whole other process that they have to think about, which many are calling social CRM.

What is social CRM?

The most basic definition, in literal terms is social customer relationship management. It is the management of this new type of customer – the social media customer. Paul Greenberg, who is widely considered an expert on the subject of CRM, often describes it as the company recognising that the customer now owns the relationship. And obviously accommodating for this. It is not as simple as keeping a spreadsheet of the people that sent you tweets and what their problems were. It is about accommodating this social customer and recognising that they will be active across different channels, and have different needs and wants depending on these channels. The video interview below with Paul Greenberg provides an interesting insight into the murky world of social CRM : The challenge or need for social CRM stems from the fact that while companies are creating ‘one’ social media presence, there is very rarely a complete ownership of that social media presence, nor is there one use-case for it. You don’t address a different Twitter account for example, depending on whether your query relates to a, b or c in a series of possible scenarios. You communicate with company X at one end, but on the other end you could be getting any person in the organisation who may or may not know your previous dealings with the company based on your Twitter handle. While you may find yourself as an organisation able to devote one employee to your social media activity, if they do their job well you may find it is so popular that it soon becomes unmanageable and something has to be done about it. One of the other difficulties with managing your customers online, is the fluid nature of social media.

You might have one Twitter handle, a completely different url and your real name on your Facebook profile but the user has come to expect a coherent experience from the brand they’re dealing with. Again, your personal knowledge of your online community can only go so far – it will reach a point where you’re not able to easily remember one Twitter user from the next, and whether or not they previously wrote a blog post deriding your service. You need to know the channels that your customer is using online and also be able to predict where they might go next, to pre-empt any potential crisis situation. When you start to think of it in this way, the potential for social CRM to transform your business is huge.

The terminology

While I agree with social CRM in principle, the one issue I have is with the terminology itself. It’s sort of taking an existing business process and sticking the word ’social’ on it, to make it fit online. For any of you who experience customer service through social media, or watch it very closely, you’ll likely find any notion of the term ‘management’ laughable. Your customers aren’t online to be managed, they are now the ones in charge. This is why I’d prefer to think of it as social customer facilitation, if we had to give it a name at all. This is more respectful of the way that customers and communities act online. You can hope to facilitate and provide the means to serve your customers, but you can’t expect to manage the experience.

This is definitely an area that’s growing and needs widespread industry adoption if online relationships with customers and stakeholders are to be looked after correctly. Whatever it ends up being called, this should be a big business

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