Thursday, February 4, 2010

Why social media outperforms customer relationship marketing... or does it?

No warm-up, just straight shooting - 6 reasons why social media marketing beats customer relationship marketing...
1. All the world's customers are yours to interact - no matter where they come from or reside
2. Always on - 24/7 process to collect ideas, have a dialog and influence customers
3. Fastest way to test new product/service ideas with all the people in the world
4. Enables customers self-segmentation - customers show their interest areas by themselves
5. Easy way to gain coolness to your company
6. Social media marketing is the sexiest thing what you can do in marketing in 2010 - No need to analyze customer data, "data mining", or other too scientific stuff

(7) Social media provides endless new opportunities for ad agencies and start-up development while CRM has too little to offer for ad agencies and world is already crowded with CRM applications... and IT people stole and destroyed once a great idea

and 6 reasons why CRM beats social media marketing
1. Customers exist in your database for you to gain insights, no need to go fishing outside (unless your customer base is attracting weird creatures)
2. Always on - 24/7 process to collect ideas, have a dialog and influence customers in your database and you can compare written feedback/comments/etc. to actual behavior
3. Fastest way to test new product/service ideas - no one says you couldn't do this with your own customers as well
4. Enables customers self-segmentation - customers show their interest areas by themselves... likewise
5. CRM is not cool anymore but great CRM approaches have created cool companies - no reason you couldn't do it as well
6. CRM is not sexy and will not become sexy so social media beats CRM 6-5

Hmmm... Sounds to me that smart managers will integrate their social media and CRM development - I don't even understand how and why they should be managed separately

3 comments:

  1. Customer Relations that turn into profitable Customer Accounts is the most important long-term goal for An Entrepreneur. Managing Customer Relations is done with various methods and tools (phone, email, Ads marketing,writing blogs, tweeting, web pages, pitching, etc.).

    Social Media in my opinion belongs to both methods and tools of my Customer Relations Management Arsenal.

    I hear you saying, that using separate CRM System (or SaaS) will be beneficial for a company?

    What, in your view, are the best tools to combine CRM and Social Media today?

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  3. Apologies for late reply - I was on leave.

    For me most important thing is not to jump using any tools or tactics before there is a strategic understanding how CRM and social media integrate in strategy level. Both are trying to develop interaction with customers (and potential ones) so the company is living in same ecosystem with its customers.

    What I have used as a best "tool" is conceptual design how company interacts and builds its experience with customers in different life-cycle phases. May sound theoretical but it gives a solid base plan to later utilize different tools and tactics... and not to be lost in space with narrowly focused technology based/enabled tools.

    Which technology tools - that has always been case by case narrowed by options you are given in different companies or situations

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