Metz, The Social Concept

Interview: The Social Customer's Mark Lazen

January 19, 2010

While SocialMediaToday launched a couple of years ago, never before has there been a site or a portal/aggregator explicitly dedicated to improving the knowledge base on social customer relationship management. Although a few great blogs have tackled the subject (Chris Carfi’s Social Customer Manifesto comes to mind as the first), there hasn’t been a multi-voiced forum for the subject until now. A few months ago, the team behind SocialMediaToday launched, The Social Customer.

What follows below is my email interview with SocialMediaToday CTO Mark Lazen .

What was the initial goal of launching The Social Customer , and how was it meant to be different from Social Media Today?

Like many of our independent editorial communities, The Social Customer was created to meet the needs of a specific sponsor. In this case, the folks in SAPs CRM Solution Marketing group wanted to participate in a community where customer service executives were gathering to to learn from the thought leaders in the field and from each other how to stay ahead of the curve in this swiftly changing landscape.

We’ve worked with a different arm of SAP for about two years in another of our communities, MyVenturePad—a site that provides insight for the leaders of small-to-medium size enterprises. That project is a great and ongoing success from a branding, influence, and lead generation perspective. So the Social Customer is a reflection of their satisfaction with that earlier experience and designed to leverage our model again.

SAP is very evolved with regard to social media. Yes, they are eager to follow up on sales leads that will come out of the community. But they also really understand the value of thought leadership, and of simply being present in the conversation among key influentials on the site.

So The Social Customer is quite different than Social Media Today, a narrower, more focused segment of our flagship site.

Besides featured blogger-in-residence Brent Leary, who do you visualize will be writing at The Social Customer?

Brent has been a good friend to us for some time, and with his leadership, we’re already bringing in an A-list of analysts and bloggers. People like Jesus Hoyos, Maggie Fox from Social Media Group, former Gartner Analyst Esteban Kolsky, Vanessa DiMauro, “Chris Carfi”: http://www.socialcustomer.com/ — it’s a lineup of allstars.

But one of the most exciting aspects of launching something like this is that—if our previous experiences are any guide—we’ll wake up some mornings to find some new soon-to-be-stars have started blogging on the site.

Who is the typical reader (an enterprise CMO? a small business owner?

At the core, it’s the people who are tasked with making customer service hum, whether call center managers, CRM professionals, or the folks that provide and implement the software that makes it all go. But of course, the impact of customer service extends far beyond call centers. It effects PR, marketing and sales people too, and I expect we’ll have lots of readers from those departments as well, and there will be content to keep their interest.

What kind of role do you envision brands like SAP, Salesforce and Oracle taking in this conversation portal?

What SAP is doing is really just enabling this community. Of course they want the community to be filled with the kind of people that make buying decisions about enterprise customer service and CRM systems. But they understand that the way to make that happen is to not only accept but to insist that the community be authentic and open, that it’s built on trust and the integrity of the content that lives here. They know how to be present in a conversation without dominating it, they make their expertise available along with 3rd party experts for the creation of premium white papers and eBooks, to participate in webinars. And a few knowledgeable individuals at SAP have already started blogging on the site.

At some point, secondary sponsors will probably join SAP on the site. Most likely that will begin with SAP partners and other non-competitors,.

Is there any comprehensive plan for The Social Customer to link to LinkedIn, in a way similar to how SocialMediaToday has a group on LinkedIn?

That’s something we are always open to. We always like to meet our audiences where they live, at least to establish a presence. But we’re all about providing content to our readers, and LinkedIn isn’t necessarily optimized for that.

How can brands participate (i.e. brands that would implement social customer strategies)?

The Social Customer is a place for brand managers to learn, to share their own experiences, and—for those that have already become grand masters at the new art of customer service—to show others the way.

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