What Is Social CRM?
Respect The Tweet
Twitter, Linked-In, Plaxo and Facebook are all part of a savvy business-person’s life. So in a recessionary economy when you want to treat customers and prospects with additional respect, you read ALL their feeds. Social CRM is a buzzword describing software that makes that easier for you.
I Met Her On LinkedIn
I was at an election night party in New York when I first met “Lilly-Social-Responsibility-Lady.” She was reconnecting with our party host after 10 years of radio silence thanks to Linked-In. Lilly-Social-Responsibility-Lady was smart, motivated, powerful and charming in spite of sleep deprivation. So what next?
Your RSS Is So Hot
So I thought I would just read her RSS feeds and learn more about what she considered to be important. Tweets, blogs, Flickr’s and Friendsters were on my mind. And they needed to be consolidated in one place – and on one screen – so I could grok the gestalt. Alas it wasn’t that easy.
Top Links for Social CRM
I went on a wild goose chase trying to find this woman’s feeds. But it was slow going. Along the way came I across these links which promise to do in 2009 what I need done today:
- Oracle Social CRM – great demo, nice white paper, but no way to sign up. Vapor Ware?
- Batch Book – with this tutorial by Adam Darowski promises to integrate Twitter feeds with your contacts
- Social CRM by SugarCRM – Open Source solution available as a hosted service. These folks are my current favorite so I signed up for a free trial
- Social CRM Blog – best blog out there and no hidden agendas
Meet You At The Cocktail Bar
There is no such thing – yet – as Social CRM. It’s a new buzzword for an old industry. Customer Relationship Management goes 2.0 and gets a face lift. So for those of us who want it now, we will just have to relax into Alpha version software and read top-selling titles like Social Media is a Cocktail Party: Why You Already Know the Rules of Social Media Marketing.
Buzzword Status Score
- Hype: Medium and growing
- Value: Real
- Time frame:Q2 2009
- Caution: Vaporware, mostly
Brent Leary
Thanks for the shout-out Mark! We’re just at the beginning of what may finally lead us to the CRM we’ve been looking for all along.
Looking forward to seeing all of this play out!
Thanks again.
Adam Darowski
Hi Mark, thanks for including us!
Just wanted to update you on our Social CRM features. In October, we released a “Feed Reader” custom field for our SuperTags feature. So, you can set BatchBook up so that when you tag someone with a certain term, you can also enter their Twitter username, Delicious username, RSS Feed, Flickr username (or any other feed) and see the latest content right on their contact page.
You can see what it looks like in action here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/darowskidotcom/3082092531/sizes/o/
Or you can check out the blog post announcing it here: http://blog.batchblue.com/social-crm-feed-readers-shared-supertags/
We try to focus our CRM on the RELATIONSHIP part of the equation. Social media is huge in regards to that. Great to see what your contacts have been thinking or writing about before you pick up the phone or start that email.
Thanks again!