Social Media has evolved beyond a series of platforms that enable content publishing, sharing, and discovery into a genuine, peer-to-peer looking glass into the real world conversations that affect the perception, engagement, and overall direction of the brands we represent.
Socialized media didn’t invent “conversations,” it simply organized and amplified them and established an opportunity for learning and collaboration.
Twitter and Twitter Search have ushered in a new genre of not only communications and associated search technology, but also dedicated ecosystems that transform and support how we as consumers share and discover relevant information in real-time.
Online discussions, rants, and observations are either alarming (and motivating) brand managers or fooling them into unforeseen enthrallment. But the reality is that real-time dialogue is fueling connections and perceptions in the statusphere, blogopsphere, online communities, and the social web in general. It’s this swelling tsunami of chatter that will only intensify and heighten as it forces a new genre of Social Customer Relationship Management (sCRM). Social CRM is no longer an option. It necessitates brand involvement to proactively share answers, solve problems, establish authority, and build relationships and loyalty, one tweet, blog post, update, and “like,” at a time.
In the world of business, social media, led by Twitter, is forcing companies to augment the offshoring of reactive customer service with the nearshoring of proactive customer engagement. The conversations that power social media are sparking a sense of urgency to identify influential voices and talk to customers in a place and time of their choosing (generally, in public and online).
For example, on Friday at during a panel at the CrunchUp on Real Time Business, Porter Gale, vice president of marketing for Virgin America, made it clear that Virgin America understands the promise, prospect, and value of listening and responding to the social stream.
Erick Schonfeld, who was moderating, asked Porter how her team mines Twitter for the perception of the brand and also for determining how they contact customers.
Porter revealed that the Virgin America team is small and applies roughly the equivalent of 1.5 people to monitoring and engaging on Twitter and other social networks. To her and the team, social media is representative of not only a listening system, but also a complete engagement channel. The word “marketing” doesn’t even enter the mix.
With more than 20,000 followers on Twitter, Virgin America is galvanizing a vibrant and active community of people who will respond in “Twitter time,” thus alleviating the modest team from having to engage in every discussion, whether it’s positive or negative.
The most common example Porter shared was a response to the question, “Should I fly Virgin?”
“The community closes the sale,” exclaimed Porter.
She also shared a story of how Virgin America invests in the good will of customers, simply by publicly acknowledging and supporting them in the same channels where they’re communicating.
During one flight, a woman who just graduated medical school to become a doctor, had tweeted her excitement about graduating and also flying @virginamerica. Instead of simply responding with a congratulatory Tweet, Porter and her team retweeted and asked someone on the flight to buy her a drink (the benefits of offering inflight wifi).
To her surprise, Porter triggered an immediate response, “Row 11 is going to buy her a drink.” And, to her further astonishment, the person who sent that Tweet was live in the audience at the Real-Time stream event.
Alexia Tsotsis, tech writer at the LA Weekly, shouted from the first row, “That was me!”
Everyone in the audience was a witness to a vivid demonstration of how interaction online extends into real world experiences.
More impressive is Virgin America’s use of the social Web for real-time customer service. They’re actively monitoring issues, frustrations, and recommendations to solve challenges as they arise. In several such instances, Virgin America has used Twitter as a real-time guest service recovery system in flight to address concerns and problems by contacting service staff in the air to alert them to issues – again, the perils and associated benefits of offering inflight WiFi.
Earlier in the day, Peoplebrowsr (disclosure: I am an advisor) showed a demo in which airlines were ranked by the sentiment expressed about each brand on Twitter, and Virgin America was on top. Peoplebrowsr highlighted the ability to analyze conversational sentiment by industry through the alignment of positive, neutral, and negative conversations and perception by brand.
Ross Mayfield, CEO and founder of Socialtext, discussed the nature of the social dialogue enterprises are being pulled into and how conversations require more than one person or department to engage. SocialText offers a dashboard for enterprises that wish to collaborate internally with coworkers and externally with customers and stakeholders.
Ross referenced the engagement iceberg, where he observes only a small portion of customer conversations and engagement as truly visible, with most occurring beneath the water line and thus, out of view.
He’ s right. In my research and experience, we’ve identified that every online conversation worthy of response directly matched specific divisions within an organization and usually rank in this order:
1. Support
2. PR
3. Marketing
4. Sales
It highlights the reality that every department eventually needs to socialize.
Ross then asked his fellow panel members as well as the audience, “Who’s going to own Social Media and the process of responding?”
My answer: No one.
Social Media is, for the time being, tuning-in new channels of influence to incorporate into the brand and marketing mix. While it takes a station manager time to receive the signals and in turn, coordinate outward broadcasts, it is the divisions within each organization that will need to shift from an introspective support mode to an extrospective group of proactive collaborators.
But as Ross cautioned businesses and eager social media teams, “Before they collaborate with the community, they have to collaborate with themselves.”
If responsibilities and workflow isn’t established and most importantly, if guidelines aren’t drafted and disseminated company-wide, the intention of helping influential customers and advocates can quickly transcend into social, and very public, chaos.
We need rules of engagement.
As Erick pointed out in the discussion, “It used to be unhappy customers who would call into customer service lines to express frustration. Now if businesses don’t immediately respond with a resolution and nip these issues in the bud, they have the potential of spreading and getting out of control. At the same time, companies need to identify and amplify praise as it happens.”
Virgin America’s Porter Gale is trying to rally her team as well as the other departments that are affected by real-time conversations and the issues they raise. She hosts brownbag lunches, where PR, customer service, and other teammates discuss what’s happening with Twitter and other social networks. They also share and review strategies and tactics to teach and learn from each other based on their experiences.
There are social networks, and there are tools with which to identify conversations and facilitate interaction, but everyone agreed, that in the world of new service and marketing, we need to improve the literacy and education among the teams who occupy the front lines.
The “now” web is powerful. It’s building new bridges, networks, and channels. It’s absolutely changing the way people communicate, research, and ultimately make decisions.
Yes, the real-time Web is powered by conversations. But, what’s important to remember, is that conversations are personal and therefore sacred.
Broadcasting messages, or even worse, sponsored messages as a form of resolution or participation is foolhardy.
Companies such as Pizza Hut that relegate Twitter interaction to a summer “Twintern” will indubitably get what they pay for. We’ve already witnessed the public backlash when a twintern abuses Twitter on behalf of an unsuspecting brand. #habitat
The point is that it’s not whether or not an intern or junior staffer on the marketing and communications team is competent or incompetent. The reality is that businesses should view the role of engaging with customers, prospects and influencers as a strategic competitive advantage as well as an earned privilege.
As panelist Maynard Webb of LiveOps pointed out, “A brand can get damaged faster than ever nowadays.”
The true shift represented by the social and real-time Web is not simply the ability to surface relevant conversations as they happen, it represents the opportunity to learn from public sentiment and create a more aware and adaptive organization that leads communities through action.
Monitoring the conversation is not enough. Brands need to jump in, but in a professional way.
Ross is not CEO of Sociatext anymore Eugene Lee is, though I believe he is still the head of the board (and is of course a founder).
Thanks Bushi…
I wonder how many of these “real life experiences using social media” are stagged. If not, it’s a damn good idea
Twitter is making VA waste a ton of money, they probably hate them. The “old days” unhappy customers were basically told to F themselves.. How the tables have turned
Times has changed indeed.
This is a truly great story to retell – bringing together stories and numbers. It will help more brands understand and get with the programme. This exciting era we are living through is in it’s infancy and set to continue.
This organizational question is interesting. Remember when we 10-15 years ago discussed about who owns company domain. And we have a similar question around social media from a bit different perspective.
Best piece of writing this year, it clarifies a whole host of points.
It’s a very exciting time to be at the forefront of a change – not only in work practices and the web but of the change the “social CRM” will have on society at it’s core.
Transparency will be the best side effect IMHO.
N
Pearls before Swine (Sermon on the Mount, © JC).
Excellent post, Brian. There is so much here that needed to be said, including the Pizza Hut / Twintern / get what you pay for.
I’m already sharing with friends, family & clients.
Great to see focus being put on this discipline as it is the next major integration point for digital marketing.
Here is a draft slide deck I pulled together defining, explaining & outlining the benefits of Social CRM – http://www.slid...by-martin-walsh
There was also a great Webinar a couple of weeks ago hosted by Radian6 with Chris Brogan and others on Social CRM and it was great.
This was a long, yet engaging blog post. I try and shay away from long blog posts. They lose my attention quickly as a direct result of the length, however here we have not only a brilliant piece of writing.. but writing that keeps you reading..
I do have one question though.. Is social CRM and Online Reputation Management not the same thing?
See my SlideShare deck above which explains Social CRM.
I would like to see how these concepts can be applied to small businesses rather than just brand names that everyone knows. For example, the Bantam demo at crunchup showing a new side of the social CRM was very inspiring and a good use of the openness of social sites. I think integrating locality and finding people interested in keywords (rather than brand names) will be more important for more businesses.
good point, i’m interested to see how small biz, and soho/microbusinneses, incorporate social crm
What happens if and when a majority of a company’s customers start using social media services for customer support? The volume will get unmanageable with the indicated level of staffing. How will they handle it? Hire a customer support department (or rehire one if they eliminated/pared it down to the bone)?
Brian: This is a great, colorful post on social CRM. Thank you for sharing it and some of your research on which functional departments can respond to social media conversations. I’d add that the laughter and spontaneous applause of Alexia’s “That was me!” exclamation about the Virgin America flight really brought the whole point humorously home for everyone at that great Real-Time Stream Crunchup event at the Fox Theatre.
If I may add my own 2 cents: In the Bantam Live demo/beta-launch presentation I gave at that Crunchup, I attempted to keep the definition of the emergent yet vague term “social CRM” to include not only of what I call the “farmers” of social CRM who tend to the brand in a large company (support, PR) but also extend it to what I term the “hunter-gatherers” of social CRM, those being the sales and biz-dev professionals often in smaller companies who have no popular brand to tend to. Now, with a service like Bantam Live, these hunter-gatherers can on a one-to-one basis engage people in conversations (acting upon John Borthwick’s term of “spontaenous content”) and prospect for industry peers and partners, forage for leads, and create collaborative workflows published in the real-time stream of Bantam in the ultimate hunt for business opportunities initiated via conversations on Twitter and across the social web.
To be sure, as your research points out and I articulated on stage, the early success stories about social CRM are mostly in customer service (Virgin America, JetBlue, Comcast Cares, etc.). Yet I dare say that deeper social “relationships” (in the human bonding sense of the term) between two people will increasingly flourish in small and midsize businesses (without the restrictions of the large enterprise) in the sales and biz-dev end of the social CRM spectrum, more so than in the ephemeral and transactional nature of a customer service relationship with a brand and its on-duty rep. Indeed, social CRM research on larger companies – who have established brands – will inevitably yield the rankings you published for various “divisions” in a company to use social CRM. But what about all the sales stars, biz-dev guns, and entrepreneurial managers of free-wheeling small business teams (the engine of economic growth) out there who have no popular brand yet who will increasingly use services like Bantam Live to discover people, engage in conversations, and build relationships with social CRM? I recognize apps like Bantam Live are just hitting the market, but I think the very preliminary stories of social CRM usage are skewing opinion and the definition of #SCRM. And while I see as you do huge opportunities for Twitter and “brand monitoring” customer service uses, I do wonder about the scaling of labor for customer support using 140-character communications and the suitability of 140 characters to handle most customer service requirements. It could be argued that to date, the biggest ROI to a brand using Twitter for customer support has been the resultant media publicity it gains. Again, I’m bullish on the entire spectrum of social CRM (and I’m a big fan of CoTweet and Radian6) yet I’m raising my hand to gain attention in our community for uses of social CRM beyond PR and customer service departments. (And of course I’m indirectly promoting Bantam Live, which is another cultural dynamic of the “Now” web that doesn’t get much attention. Social media, especially services like Twitter, evidences not only digital narcissism by some but a pervasive digital hucksterism of many – like me with this reply – based on economic motivation, the most effective of which is subtle, which this isn’t, so I’ll end this digression and this run-on sentence, but maybe Stowe Boyd would be interested if this topic were a Crunchup panel discussion.)
Again, thanks for your interesting post on social CRM. If I’ve gotten the attention of you, Chris Brogan, Brent Leary, Paul Greenberg and other promoted “rockstars” of social CRM to consider that the future of social CRM will also fully encompass sales and biz-dev in small companies without big brands, then it’s been worth replying. I believe it will turn out that the sales and biz-dev end of the social CRM spectrum is the most richly social of all. Thar’s gold in them thar tweets. Bantam Live is initially for sales and biz dev teams, and we’ll be increasingly adding marketing functions in the future, for all the little splintered brands out there, which brings this reply full circle and recognizes the broad spectrum and value of social CRM in all functional areas.
Lastly, perhaps my concerns about a narrow definition of “social CRM” should be assuaged with TechCrunch’s July 10th post about Bantam Live entitled: “Bantam Live: The Ultimate Social, Real-Time CRM”
Brian, fantastic insights. I’ve long been a CRM user and the evolution of Social CRM capabilities is going to change the way everyone conducts business. One thing that has been troubling me lately though are some recent statistics that state Twitter has very little broad usage. But, from everything I hear through examples like those used in this post, this doesn’t seem to be the case. As an industry I really think we are missing some great opportunities because of the poor job we do clearly identifying the power of Social CRM and Social Media in general.
Social CRM promises a lot, even to small B2B businesses whose “brand” isn’t being discussed on Twitter.
Imagine running your CRM but with current customer records supplemented with information they wouldn’t share with you, but are happy to post on social networks (what they like, what they hate, their interests etc.). Then imagine the problem of data currency — CRM’s most frequent downfall — solved through linking their record to a specific online profile which they keep updated.
Even at this modest level it promises a big advance over what CRM delivers today. It needn’t be something that can only benefit companies in the public eye.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Well written, but I think the piece that I’m personally missing is the sCRM software component. Not only how do you track the pieces of the conversation to respond and engage quickly and appropriately – but how do you tie that back to your business and existing customer databases? For example I’m responsible for social/emerging media at Ruby Tuesday (http://rubytuesday.com) – ideally to provide the best service possible to a guest I’d love to be able to know if they’ve talked about us online, if they’ve eaten with us, where it was, if they used a coupon, which one, etc. Is there an CRM solution that provides that currently?
Gavin Baker
Ruby Tuesday
Great post – thank you so much for enlightening us.
What happens when every company catches on to this concept? When you ask “should I fly Virgin?” You’ll have every major airline shouting out at you, giving you a reasons to not fly Virgin. What happens then?
- Ricky