Customer Relationship Management

Interestingly, he has put an impressive list of corporate social strategists for 2011 that you can refer to if it excites you. I guess these are going to be one of the most 'sought after' professionals, none lesser than celebrities I suppose. If you want to have more fun, you can find some very very interesting insights from the scrape of the social networking data by technology journalist Marshall Kirkpatrick here. I was amazed to see the diversity and creativity of the analysis that Marshall has been able to pull up. Sharing two examples here:

• maximum# of tweets done by any  strategists - 45K+ tweets in 3.5 years, almost 30 tweets daily (what a zeal!)
• max# of people that someone in such a role is following on twitter - 40K (I'm not sure if I could even imagine what it takes to look at tweets from 40 thousand people; I won't dare to think about responding to tweets..)

So getting back to the main track, this social media manager / social CRM director business is on the move now, it has taken a fairly formal shape and it is likely to be most publicized role in 2011-2012. Apart from being 'cool', this role is going to put the social customer strategists at the stretch of their imagination to deal with lot of uncertainties, non-standard scenarios as well as rising complications of doing social business (let alone the stress of 'tweeting' and responding to ever-growing list of followers). One of the key responsibilities of the social customer strategists that is going to separate the men from boys is their ability to sense the direction of the overall ship amidst all distractions of the social noise and deploy high-speed response to protect against the risks that could materialize rapidly. As a social customer strategist, here are some grave danger signs that I would be on constant look out for:

1. You get busier in 'talking' and don't spend time in 'listening' - it is very tempting for organizations to get themselves busy with all social talking tools and go all over the place for marketing, branding etc. If in the process your organization is sidelining what your customers say, feel and want (or don't want), its less likely that show will go on for long. Power of social customer lies in listening; listening with genuine intent and respect for the customer's space. Don't be surprised otherwise to find later that your customers are not listening to you either.
2. You are overexcited with sharing and forgot about the information privacy - well, as I write I sense that whole issue of information privacy is going to turn big sometime soon, not just for the organizations but for the individuals as well. Real repercussions of the uncontrolled information sharing on social networks are still being discovered. Information privacy and security has to be guarded without any compromise. Feel free to check my previous blog for more insights into risks.
3. You are using the 'social platform' but not actually 'social' with your customers - I can see it happening already with number of companies. Many organizations are busy rolling out social platforms but they haven't changed their attitude and customer engagement value system to bring more 'social' into it. This is not going to work. Mushrooming of social technologies without a soul of the 'social engagement' is going to be a re-play of the dotcom bubble burst. It's good to experiment with the social technologies but make no mistake of missing the opportunities to enhance the social experience for the customer through these technologies. Social CRM needs to enhance the organization's capability to see the 'human faces' behind their customer identities. Companies that are just creating the illusion of the social CRM are at risk of being exposed sooner than later. So my advice will be not to 'pretend' social business or social enterprise; next-gen customers may not be good at forgiving.
4. You are on 'social technology' power booster but have not cured 'CRM' disability - it is extension of the previous danger. Adding social technologies will actually add to the stress and chaos if the existing disabilities of the CRM are not treated ahead of the SCRM deployment. This specifically includes system and process related issues in the enterprises.
5. You have opened the social pipe but have not prepared to manage the information explosion - social web is an information landmine. Once you get plugged into it, your enterprise can easily be lost into collecting, analyzing, filtering and processing gigabytes of data going all over the place. There is unbelievable amount of unstructured data out there without good handle on the context meta-data. If organization is not prepared to deal with this information flow in planned and structured fashion, it is going to take a lot to manage the chaos. Needless to say, unmanaged information stream is going to further intensify the issues of data privacy and security.

All in all, executives with the responsibility of the 'social customer engagement' have lot of hopes pinned on them to show the way forward, navigate through the evolving scenarios and protect the enterprise from risks of blunders from short-sighted actions. These socual customer executives will definitely need a good sense of the customer connect, smart and fast forward thinking and an attitude of continuous learning...and I probably a good sense of humor too....can anyone guess why?