Rendering a social experience to your Social CRM strategy
by Satyajit Swain
Each day brings another milestone in the constant evolution of Social Media. Recently, Google launched Google Buzz to give a social experience to its popular mail service and the other day I was going through OneYoungWorld(the world’s first global youth leadership summit ) forum website and was amazed to find that it was inviting registration/selection of delegates not through its own site but through an application hosted on Facebook. The last time I checked OYW’s Facebook campaign had 6619 fans and the One Young World Facebook application had 12,305 active monthly users; these statistics could indicate an emerging trend in the way Social Media can affect us in the coming days.
The One Young World Facebook application also encouraged the users to garner votes in their support by campaigning for themselves amongst their Facebook network and these days we have customized Facebook apps for conducting competitions, donation drive/fund raising. Recognizing the power of social media organizations have started using it as a platform to market themselves and reach out to their customers. We even now see companies having their own social collaborating forums such as Microsoft Answers or At&T’s Utalk; online communities such as these are proving an ideal way in controlling customer support costs, influencing public opinion and personalize/humanize the brand hence the rush to jump into this whole social bandwagon. Those who will make right use of it will flourish, but those without a proper understanding of it can invite bad PR for their company or products/services. The most popular social-networking platforms - Facebook, Twitter and blogs, deliver an experience of not just connecting with family, friends and people of similar interests but also a medium of expressing oneself, promoting events, ideas and opinions about anything ranging from national issues to products/services they recently made use of.
However a social-media solution for corporate as in online collaborative community support is a slight different from that of Facebook/MySpace. When a customer visits an online community support he/she is more interested in finding solution to her problem/issue rather than “enter into a relationship” with the site (as he/she would with Facebook). Corporates will need to consider this aspect and though social media & social CRM may not be the same it is however possible to lend a social experience to the whole Social CRM space. Erin Malone writes an interesting article on her blog (http://boxesandarrows.com/view/5-steps-to-building) where she has explained a step-by-step approach in giving a social experience to a site:
"Step 1 – What’s your social object? Make sure there is a “there” there. Give users a reason to rally. Why would someone come to your site?
Step 2 – Give people a way to identify themselves and to be identified.
Step 3 – Give people something to do.
Step 4 – Enable a bridge to real life (groups, communities, forums, chat).
Step 5 – Gently Moderate. Let the community elevate people and content they value."
Through the above mentioned steps as outlined by Erin Malone, one would be able to provide a healthy social experience to their site. Going ahead with these points in the framework of Social CRM one can also consider the following points:
a) In the social CRM context the social object would be the company’s product/service offerings and people would want to visit their social CRM space to find out the reviews of their customers, or if they are already an existing customer they would visit to find solutions to their problems (with specific product/service offering) or have their queries answered.
b) With the perspective of ‘giving people something to do’- Social CRM can also have a feature of rewarding points (which can be redeemed against a buy) to participants who are able to give a very efficient solution to a particularly difficult issue or participants who have been consistently rated highly by users/members.
c) In the context of ‘enabling a bridge to real life’- Social CRM strategy can consider inviting people to share their stories/wonderful experiences with a particular product/service. For example inviting people to share the experience of how elated their friends/loved ones upon receiving a particular product as gift from them on Christmas Eve or some other special occasion. The goal of all this is to encourage people engage in interactive exchange of information so that they innately feel it worthwhile spending time on the site or keep visiting it from time to time.
Companies can also include information and updates on their various CSR work or initiatives in the field of environment and education to humanize their social CRM strategy.
With the increasing influence of Social Media and it becoming a source of real time news & updates, companies can hardly choose to ignore Social CRM as a part of their communications strategy; however at the same time they need to take care of certain bare minimum necessities to render a wholesome social experience to it.
About the Author
Satyajit Swain is part of the Product Incubation and Engineering unit. He has experience working on the UI design for various products. His areas of interest are social media, Information Management and CRM.
