Social CRM
Host: Ajay Ramachandran
Note taker: Scott Dodds

Opportunity & problem: How do we manage customer relationship as they get more fragmented?
How do you then create a unified framework across these domains?

• mine the conversations
• find and influence the influencers
• and how to do that in an authentic and respectful way.

1. What are the key questions and topics we want to address?
1. WOM advocacy - how to measure it, how do we facilitate that?
2. Tools for syndicating content
3. Measurement is a general problem, and how we can measure the business impact and ROI
4. How can we do this on a one-to-one basis to see how the business is impacting the individual user.
5. How does market awareness brand affinity affect profit gain? Does that participation translate into improved revenues.
6. Social identity - people have different identities in different places: who is the consumer, and where are they?
2. What types of technology tools and solutions we are trying to use?

Comcast is the leading example, started in a rogue way with the twitter ComcastCares. Just one example, but he raised the bar.
One issue that shows, though, is the problems of scale, as the one-to-one interactions are very resource intensive. One of the benefits of social media is the opportunity to leverage your brand advocates to influence others and gain the network effects. Then the issue is how to capture the advocates attention span.
How does this work in a B2B environment?

• Getting a snapshot out of what is bubbling up across all networks
• utilizing social media monitoring to measure activity and buzz and mapping it back to the profile of that user and report on it.

Reframeit: Monitor sentiment through comments syndicated out.
Tone, sentiment and analysis tools - participants who looked couldn't find one that works. "We have budget but vendors can't show a working model today."
Tough to keep up because the minute a tool 'jumps the shark', then the crowd goes and finds another way to communicate.

Can you keep the conversation going?

• Keeping the information alive in one place and then starting up new conversations.
• Mine these conversations to get insights on tone or topics
• Today its all manual, you need to automate it and scale.

There is an underlying problem - when you are monitoring something, it is not tied to objectives or business goals. ROI is the underlying tone, but it is possible to prove business impact. For one participant, they have set it up so that everything funnels into a partner community now that replaces the old static portal.

Ultimately, the tools are not there yet - are you trying to track individuals, or the communication about your product. And once you have those things, what can you do with it?
There was a report out recently that 80% of social media traffic is unreported - only 80% click the link, the rest is follow-on traffic that isn't measured.

One of the key values of community is Customer Relationship Management, which bottom lines to two things: revenue and margin

• WOM and engagement & product improvement (revenue building)
• cost savings: self-service, help desk (margin building)

You can target users using the knowledge and awareness to action.
NetApp uses a business to business site, you must sign up with a real name - no anonymity. The quality of conversation have increased, as the audience is all professional - has had to remove just one post in a year. They have 18000 people in the community, 120 sales engineers answering questions - 60% of the users are customers & prospects. Anyone can join, but partners can access specific places. They changed partner portal to the community, and all messaging has 'to discuss it more' link to the community. Content started out mostly by employees, now is starting to be created by users; but NetApp doesn't distinguish between customers and employees - they are all end-users.

Product ideas from the community are also being added to the product - shows business impact. And they are trying to define a customer lifecycle within the community. They also have a separate, paid support community where content is then uploaded into the KB. One problem today is conversations are not able to go across different platforms. They are using Jive as the platform, with multiple instances.
Ajay noted that Netapp seems to be ahead of the curve in terms of broad-scale engagement with their customers, most companies are not engaging at that level. Many of Ajay's customers have forums, communities, twitter accounts - but how do you get a 360 degree view? And how do you understand the individual contacts and mapping those contacts to your CRM records? We seem to be a the beginning of this in the industry with social media monitoring solutions like Network Insights that are very targeted, around specific campaigns. The metrics are evolving and going back to the social behavioral modeling.
Other social media monitoring platforms out there:

• Relevant noise
• Radian 6

Problems we've found with these tools - a little too fuzzy, give you a general directional signal, and you can drill down into the post. But they don't do the social graphing. The tools are very poor in identifying a single person across multiple personas, and the context of the organization they are participating in. You can measure twitter traffic, facebook traffic, and link them back, but to measure across the different domains. Its hard to tie traffic together across external sources - you know where they are coming from, but they don't extend to facebook, etc.
One problem is the lack of a consistent personal for users to be able to track them from place to place. One way that social identity is being addressed is via reputation - the data needs to be reciprocated, and they will let you spread the data if they get some value from it (via reputation). Another way is through social equity from your relationships to others. People are willing to give a lot of their data in limited social contexts if they have group equity.
A question asked was "What is the percentage of people who care about privacy of data vs those who don't?" - hard to measure since the people who care about privacy don't respond.
Key success of the Netapp community is the relationships they've built - putting out more information can build respect and relationships. Netapp sets the example by being open, and they are able to leverage their existing reputation.
Best strategy Ajay has seen is to ask people for their data - "we'd like to converse with you on Twitter/Facebook". They then come online and share everything about themselves in exchange for an incentive - to know and hear about the products and some small amounts of free stuff. This gains you:

• free focus groups and product feedback
• Identifying who the influencers are
• amazing word of mouth marketing through syndication

Problem is they may users falsify the information to get the gift - the importance is to leverage the reputation system to prevent that.
"Is there any interest in allowing community members to share with each other?" They can if they want in the Microsoft communities, but not forced. The focus is on the consumer's benefit to getting the information they want, and the brand monitors the conversation to get the insights - extracting topics from user feeds based on their conversations to forms a more complete user profile in the CRM about what topics they are interested in.
Users asking questions in a forums is a demand signal - can identify a prospect in a forum 10-15 weeks before they trigger a demand event on your site or contact your sales team.
Swarm Marketing: influencing the crowd to move and act together. The intent and desire starts to turn into action. They socialize together and act to together, and you can coalesce the intent into and desired action. Seeing in movie we can see how the intent of going to see a movie can turn into box office sales, and we can start to measure that.
Surround Marketing: if you know the user's identity, you can surround market them through multiple channels that is respectful - the right place, channel and time that they want to engage on.