Page 69 - Social Media Marketing

BuzzStream: Who Matters and Why 47

BuzzStream offers a set of tools that automate the process of building a relationship with blog- ■ OUTREACH AND INFLUENCER RELATIONS
gers and influencers:

• When you find someone who’s writing about the topics you care about, BuzzStream crawls
their social graph for you, discovering the other places they write or create content.

• BuzzStream keeps track of your communications with the people you’ve identified and does
so for you and for other members of your team.

• BuzzStream provides tools that make it easy to manage the people you are most interested
in—e.g., “all food bloggers assigned with more than 500 Twitter followers.”

You can find out more about BuzzStream here:

http://www.buzzstream.com

Social CRM and Influencer Relations

Influencer relations extend the basics of blogger outreach one more level, taking your
outreach and relationship management efforts to the individual level. In an AdWeek
post covering the release of Accenture’s 2010 Global Content Study, columnist Marco
Vernocchi summarized one of the key findings this way:

“Target individuals, not audiences. The days of thinking about audi-
ences in broadly defined demographic buckets are over. As consumers
abandon analog and consume more and more content on digital, con-
nected platforms, media companies have been handed an opportunity—
an obligation, even—to engage with customers as never before.”

This is again where the power tools come in. You don’t have to “meet and greet”
every single customer: Instead, you need a way to identify them individually when they
need or want your attention—a capability of a traditional CRM program—and you need
a way to engage these people and connect them into your business so that the collabora-
tive processes they’ll engage in have a chance of taking root. This is the Social CRM
component on your overall social business program, and this is what you are after.

The Social Web is open to all comers: there is a place for everyone in your pro-
gram. Today’s one-off customer interaction may just turn someone into tomorrow’s
evangelist. In addition to known customers, bloggers, and enthusiast influencers, your
Social CRM program will identify and help solidify relationships at a near-grassroots
level with large numbers of local or small-network influencers. Added up this can be
significant, and it is well worth your effort.