While a traditional CRM is the best way to organize your contact information (companies and people) in a central location, SCRM will provide you with an additional organizational layer that addresses the social media activities within your small business. As a social business, you will be conversing with your customers and prospective customers on various social channels, and there are four main ways to do this. They are as follows:
Visit each network regularly. Go to the home page of each social network on a regular basis and look for messages and opportunities to engage.
Use a good social dashboard such as Hootsuite to monitor these networks from a single location.
Make use of analytical tools such as Google Analytics in order to monitor and track visitor activities (and social sources) on your website(s).
Deploy SCRM in your small business that may have the conversational capabilities of a social dashboard combined with the contact record-keeping abilities that are found in a CRM.
Why would you want to have the ability to track and monitor conversations? The simple answer would be for the same reasons that you maintain file folders for your accounts and you are loath to deleting messages from your e-mail inbox. Efficient and effective small businesses need to have some sort of a paper trail, a record of their activities, to refer back to.
As a long-time CRM user, I love that my e-mail conversations and my notes are a part of an electronic contact record. My memory just isn't that good. As somebody who is active on social media, it would be almost impossible to keep my conversations and communications, not to mention my engagement opportunities, separated and organized without an SCRM.
Regardless of where your social activities take place (smartphone, laptop, tablet, desktop), those relevant activities should be captured by your SCRM. This also holds true regardless of which platforms (the social networks or third-party applications) are being used. If it is social, it all ties back to the networks themselves which, in turn, feed these conversations to your SCRM and other third-party applications.
From the standpoint of effective use of your time and the ability to keep ALL of this information in one location, SCRM is the obvious choice. More so, engagements lead to relationships and relationships result in revenues. This is the long-standing formula that is found in real life, and the same equation is applied to social business.
SCRM is also largely about discovery. Every day, people are talking on the social networks about their needs and their pain points. While you may not be able to listen in to a conversation about your company that is being conducted face-to-face by your next-door neighbors, social monitoring will allow you to discover these conversations regardless of where they are taking place. You will then be able to create and assign tasks to follow up on these and then begin to build a relationship with that person which may result in a sale.
As social media itself is based on the law of attraction rather than interruption, you will also have the ability to draw others to you as opposed to you going out and finding them or having to walk into their places of business or personal lives, unannounced and unexpected.
In the article, "IBM Reveals Their Predictions About The Future Of Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM)," the author interviews Sandesh Bhat who is the VP of Web and Unified Collaboration Software for IBM Collaboration Solutions:
"We believe Social CRM – the integration of social media and analytics with customer relationship management strategies – is the next frontier for organizations that want to exploit the power of social media to get closer to customers, old and new. Social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn), micro blogging capabilities (Twitter, Jaiku), media sharing capabilities (YouTube, SlideShare), social bookmarking sites (Digg, Delicious), and review sites (Yelp, Trip Advisor) will play a crucial and important role in successfully transforming sales."
Now is a good time to begin thinking about what your goals for SCRM might be. While we will define these in more detail in our upcoming chapters, having a good understanding of your overall goals and the benefits that you would hope to achieve by reaching these will be critical elements in your discussions with your other team members.