Page 63 - Social Media Marketing

The Social Graph 41

Just as you are able to track your communication with an existing customer through ■ ╇ C ustomer R elationships : C R M G ets S ocial
the relationship life cycle, you can track customers and other influencers through that
same relationship as they create content and converse on the Social Web. This can be
very enlightening and is really useful when pulled into the product design process.

Social CRM helps you understand and apply the significant points in the con-
versations happening around you. It helps you tie this information into your business,
where you can use it to build relationships with influential customers and with influen-
tial bloggers, critics, and others who follow your firm or track your business or industry.

You can apply this same discipline internally, too, and connect customers and
external influencers to your employees, to the Customer Service manager, to brand
managers, and to others. Once connected in this way, your customers and employees
can bond further, moving toward collaboration. It’s collaboration that drives customer-
centric product and service innovation, and collaboration that leads to the highest
forms of engagement with your customers.

If you now add to this your data around customer registration or similar informa-
tion that you may have collected separately—remember, like any other form of CRM,
Social CRM tracks specific profiles and contacts, so it can be synched with existing
customer data sets—you can begin to track what the people who matter to you, your
current and prior customers, are saying about your product or service, or about your
brand, firm, or organization in the context of actual purchases and experiences. You can
use this same process to bring other influencers—bloggers, for example, who may not be
customers—into the Social CRM pool as well. All of this adds up to information you can
use to drive change and innovation, just as Starbucks, Dell, IBM, and others are doing.

How do you do it? Consider a tool like BuzzStream, a representative tool with
basic Social CRM and social graph capabilities centered on influencer identification and
contact management. Figure€2.3 shows the BuzzStream console and the social linkages
identified for a typical discovered influencer and the corresponding profile of interest.

BuzzStream and similar tools include “influencer” dashboards that allow the
easy monitoring of conversations based on keywords and the conversion of source data
in much the same way as basic social web listening tools works. With the influencer
monitoring tools like Buzzstream, the profiles and links of people directly contribut-
ing to the conversation you are following are converted into contacts in an influenc-
ers database that can be managed alongside your other customer data. Note that
BuzzStream provides one component of a larger Social CRM effort: Combined with
your business data, deeper social analytics and an internal collaboration platform,
BuzzStream’s contact information provides an easy way to manage subsequent con-
versations with the influencers around your brand, product or service as you track
issues, look for opportunities and introduce innovations driven in part by these same
conversations.