Effective social media strategy and execution starts with listening, as discussed on this blog and elsewhere. Last week’s Forrester report provided another substantive assessment of the tools available to do this, as did Nathan Gilliatt before that.
What strikes me about these tools is that even the richest of them ends at the start… that is, with the listening part. Once you’ve listened, it’s time to engage. And while engagement itself adds some value, commercial entities will likely want to convert some of that goodwill into things they can measure, like sales, customer satisfaction, product feedback, whatever.
First you Monitor, then you Participate, and finally you Activate.
Each of these steps has a big enough functional footprint to spawn a whole category of software, even though the focus right now seems to be almost exclusively on the first. There are a handful of cross-site Participation-enablers out there, including FriendFeed, AlertThingy, and the mighty new MightyBrand. (Have you seen other good ones? Please add in the comments below.) Nobody’s really tackled Activation yet, since we’re still trying to figure out the first two.
I believe there’s an opportunity for a product that cuts across these functional boundaries to deliver an end-to-end solution for brands – big and small – that want to manage their social equity online. In the same way CRM tools integrated a suite of previously disparate tools toward a common end, such a tool would need to accept the outputs of the best-in-class listening platforms, coordinate participation in monitored social networks by people distributed across the organization, and capture the data necessary to derive tangible commercial benefits from these activities over time. It would need to do all that in a manner consistent with the standards, social norms, and economic interests of participating networks.
Sound like CRM? It’s not:
- CRM is about managing a comparatively few relationships at the core of the business, not about managing a lot of relationships all around it.
- The nature of CRM relationships is comparatively intense, not casual in the way most social relationships are.
- CRM is all about comprehensive data collection and entry (anyone whose used Salesforce.com knows exactly what I mean here.) This is the opposite – a system that accepts what voluntary participants share with it, and asks nothing else to add value.
- Interaction via CRM is proscribed (e-mail, call, meeting…) whereas the interactions through the ever-growing list of social networks is variable and changing all the time.
- CRM is centralized and hierarchical, vs. a system that would need to be distributed, and flat.
It’s not CRM I’m talking about here. It’s something different.
I call it SRM, Social Relationship Management, and I’m going to spend the next few posts reflecting on what it means. Feel free to chime in as I go…
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The next installment in this series is here.
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[...] (This post is the third in a series defining “enterprise social relationship management” that starts here.) [...]
[...] posted a while back on the important distinctions among Monitoring, Participation, and Activation. Short version: [...]