The Social Concept

The Five Ms of Social CRM, Part 2

February 23, 2012

To find the first part of this post, check out yesterday's post.

Middleware

Brands use middleware to automate work flows and apply business rules to events from the social Web. Also, if your brand wants to make things happen (book events, process returns) across multiple systems, middleware is going to be a must-have. ETL technologies (extract-transform-load) would also fit here. Middleware is simply a piece of software that exists between two other pieces of software, allowing them to communicate. Nothing fancy. It basically serves as the lettuce and tomato (middle layer) between the bread (the social data and metadata) and the meat (the CRM). Also, middleware can connect disparate databases (e-commerce, etc.) to your CRM.

A good example of this function are clothing brands that take return requests via Twitter (run through Salesforce Enterprise Edition), and then use a Talend integration to issue a credit through their ecommerce solution, Magento, and grant the return merchandise request through their enterprise resource planning system, Glovia. Three vendors that perform this duty well are Pervasive, Talend, and SAS Dataflux.

The caveat with middleware is that it is usually somewhat expensive, though incredibly valuable in terms of how much time it will save you. The question to ask is: “Can we afford to have a senior manager that makes $120,000 doing 72 cut-and-pastes, every day?” (Annual cost of that is roughly their entire salary.)

Management

Unless there’s a connection to a concrete business objective, you can’t really do anything with social customer data. This is where the “rubber meets the road,” in the words of Owyang, when business rules, work flows, and process meet the social data. Without these management systems, brands won’t know (1) which social customers to help first, (2) which macro solutions can help a majority of them, or (3) which micro decisions need to be made immediately (or who should make those decisions).

Dell Computers, for example, uses Salesforce Customer Portal to map customer support data from Facebook and Twitter all the way through to a closed-case (happy customer). Three vendors who perform management well are Salesforce, SugarCRM, and OracleCRM.

An issue that arises with management systems, like monitoring solutions, is that they need to be manned 24/7 in order to prevent social customer crises. Just because your work week ends at 5:00 P.M. EST on a Friday doesn’t mean that your customers won’t be triggering business rules that require “micro” (human) decisions at 9:00 A.M. Saturday morning.

Measurement

Measurement is a critical piece for all social customer engagement: without it brands can’t tell whether things are improving or worsening. Some brands call this “business analytics software.” These are basically fancy dashboards that translate everything the social customer says into actionable decision making. Sample metrics that you could calculate here include Net Promoter,8 trend forecasting, brand evangelism, customer sentiment analysis, customer satisfaction and virality (how far or how fast customers push the message). Pull-through social marketing is impossible without good measurement.

Three vendors that perform measurement well are SAP Business Objects, SAS Institute, and IBM Cognos Express.

If you’re thinking of trying to measure metrics across multiple brand extensions (i.e., five different brands under the same mother brand), a measurement suite is crucial. If you’re not holistically measuring, you may have one of the companies under your umbrella just going gangbusters, and another having severe problems; without measurement software, this won’t be clear, in real-time.

Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.

This installment continues Chapter 4: Social Customer Insights and an Introduction to the 23 Use Cases of Social CRM. We wrap up the five underlying concepts in the use cases.

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The Five Ms of Social CRM, Part 1

February 22, 2012

BREAKING DOWN SOCIAL CUSTOMER INSIGHTS: THE FIVE Ms OF SOCIAL CRM

Before we get into granular specifics use cases, and what each of them looks like on a day-to-day basis, let’s break down the foundation, the Five Ms of Social CRM, so you understand Social Customer Insights and the baseline use cases.

Monitoring

Brands use social media monitoring software every day, all day, to see what social customers are saying about them. On weekends or holidays this can be outsourced to an overseas team that can notify the brand in case of an emergency or high-sensitivity incident. This software collects all of the disparate data inputs from the social Web—social networks, message boards, blogs, microblogs, personal Web sites, video sites—then compiles it into an easily readable format (e.g., a few minutes per day) that can be automagically input into a CRM tool.

For example, the marketing team at pet treat brand Waggin’ Train gets e-mail updates from Lithium every morning at 8:00 A.M., and logs into their dashboard. Gatorade has a Chicago-based “Mission Control” hub from which they engage the social customer: it looks like a cross between Facebook, NASA, and ESPN Sportscenter. Radian6, Lithium, and RightNow are three vendors whose monitoring software works quite well.

The main issue with monitoring is that keywords need to be incredibly well tested for these solutions to be effective. Also, the monitoring clock needs to be covered 24/7 if you’re a big brand. If you’re unsure whether this is economically feasible, ballpark what a damaging incident on a Saturday morning would cost the brand if no response was made until Monday.

Mapping

These are the software solutions that identify relationships between customers, and they typically live on top of CRM platforms, although they can also exist in stand-alone environments (like Facebook profiles). Social CRM data (in the CRM tool) is enriched by adding this layer of social metadata (yup, data about data) that tells brands more information about who their customers really are (e.g., LinkedIn profile, Google profile, Facebook profile), what they really want, and how they’re related to one another. If the brand wants to know who the “influencers” are, this is where it’s calculated.

The team at my consulting firm uses InsideView to enrich lead and opportunity data as soon as they are contacted by a prospective buyer, making sales close time shorter, and making sales pitches more relevant to prospects. An early example of a mapping solution was Clara Shih’s Faceforce, which combined Facebook data with Salesforce’s CRM data. Salesview (InsideView), Facebook, and Xobni Pro are known for their solid mapping capabilities.

The catch with mapping is that if users don’t enter a lot of their data for you (i.e., Facebook profile information), your team is going to have a lot of work to do to manually collect this data. Make it easy for your customers or potential customers to enter data by enticing them with a special offer, faster service, or something amazingly cool (think of this data as highly valuable, so give a high-value perk in return).

Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.

This installment continues Chapter 4: Social Customer Insights and an Introduction to the 23 Use Cases of Social CRM. We start to look at the five underlying concepts in the use cases.

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The 23 Use Cases Of Social CRM

February 20, 2012

I’ve had many an executive ask me, “What exactly can we do with social CRM, besides field customer complaints and solve problems?” I usually tell them they’ve already discovered the two key use cases, but there are about 21 more to go, and we better keep moving if they ever want to sell the customer anything. They usually ask me to elucidate all 23 of them right there, in their office. To do this would take about five hours, and most executives don’t actually have that much time.

In early 2010, Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang, two sharp ex-Forrester analysts (if analysts in this space were rock stars, these guys would be Mick Jagger and Keith Richards), who were working at Altimeter Group at the time, wrote an amazing white paper called, “The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, the New Rules of Relationship Management.”

As comprehensive and wonderful as the white paper is, I think the authors actually missed five use cases that I would add. I also argued with, modified, and updated a number of their suggestions. What you’re getting in this chapter through Chapter 10 is just about everything you can do with Social CRM.

The key slide from that white paper is shown in Figure 4.1 (with my edits—the extra five cases), and it identifies what I think are all of the use cases of Social CRM—there’s a lot of them. To say that Owyang and Wang’s white paper is the first highly regarded and important white paper on Social CRM wouldn’t be fair to three or four other analysts or consultants who have also done great work in this area since 2008. This research is simply the best breakdown of the market demand and technical maturity of the use cases of Social CRM. If white papers were rock albums, however, Owyang and Wang’s would be the Rolling Stones’ Out of Our Heads—everything before it laid out the tools, but this one shows you exactly what you can actually do with them.

In fact, my only minor criticism of the entire white paper is that the use cases lack anecdotal examples. (Probably to make it seem more impartial—not a bad thing!) What you see in Figure 4.1 is a listing of the 23 use cases of Social CRM. We’re going to begin by analyzing Social Customer Insights—it’s the first of the 23 use cases, and it’s a big one, so big it has five different parts: Monitoring, Mapping, Middleware, Management, and Measurement. This is the numero-uno high-level use case of Social CRM. The other ones (numbers 2 through 23) are definitely valid and completely useful, but they’re more street-level, as they’re the ones that would actually be executed by the members of your company’s departmental teams. (Technically, yes, you can use 2 though 23 without doing number 1, but I wouldn’t recommend it.)

As you can see in Figure 4.1, Social Customer Insights is the core foundation of all Social CRM use cases. It’s the top-level use case, and it breaks down into five categories (the Five Ms mentioned above), that form the baseline use cases. These are the use cases that can cut across multiple departments or even business units. Use Cases 2 through 23 are much more discrete, and will usually be executed by smaller teams within each business unit. Often, more than one use case is happening at once. What we saw in Jane’s AT&T example in Chapter 3 was one use case from the Sales category, (8, Rapid Social Sales Response) and one use case from the Service and Support category (14, Rapid Social Response).

Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.

This installment comes from Chapter 4: Social Customer Insights and an Introduction to the 23 Use Cases of Social CRM. Adam reference checks another seminal document in SCRM, and another rock band.

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Why 39,000 Social Media Consultants Are Underpaid

February 15, 2012

I used to have no money, too. It wasn’t that long ago.

I’m 34 now, but when I was 28, back in 2006, I had, well, no money.

When I started my life as a social media consultant, back in 2006, I was charging $40 per hour. (I mean, seriously, even if you’re going to charge by the hour, $40 is a pretty dumb amount to charge.) 

A lot has changed in the last 6 years. Today, big agencies and consulting firms sell social media to big companies. There’s about 39,000 people going around calling themselves “social media consultants”, last time I checked.

And they’re all making minuscule salaries. We’re talking “pizza guy” wages, like $17 bucks an hour. Even their big agency counterparts are making, like, $32/hour. (That’s you, Mr. Six-Figure Social Media Guy).

The sad part is that they’re delivering some of the most timely, most revenue-driving information out there.

So, why are they barely able to make rent? It’s simple. They’re selling their time and their services, when they should be selling a blend of time, services, information and expertise.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to dive down into how all 39,000 social media consultants can escape from the per-hour billing trap, and reach out to help even more people, and make even more clients happy. Stay tuned.

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Why Most Social Media Consultants Make Less Than My Pizza Delivery Guy

February 14, 2012

What I’m about to tell you is not shocking. It’s just simple math. 

Most social media consultants charge about $80-100 per hour. They then sell about 20 hours of their time per week, which means that they are “successful” by consulting standards. They then gross $7560 per month, or about $87.2k per year. After taxes and very basic expenses, they are left with $39,203, or $3266 per month

That comes out to about $18 an hour. 

That’s what the guys who deliver pizza near my house make. I called them to check.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to talk about how this does not have to be your reality, if you work in social media.

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