Download the PDF: https://www.demandmetric.com/content/social-crm-best-practices Social media is now part of every business and consumer activity, joining telephone, Web, broadcast, and face-to-face interactions as primary communication channels. This means that all marketing, sales, and service organizations should include social media as part of their basic activities. Yet social media are still new enough that many organizations are still struggling to learn how to use them, while others is learning how to use them most effectively. This how-to guide provides an overview of social media applications and emerging best practices for deploying social media at your company.

1. SOCIAL
CRM BEST
PRACTICES
HOW-TO GUIDE

2. 2 Social CRM Best Practices How-to Guide
Social media is now part of every business and consumer activity, joining telephone, Web, broad-
cast, and face-to-face interactions as primary communication channels. This means that all
marketing, sales, and service organizations should include social media as part of their basic activ-
ities. Yet social media are still new enough that many organizations are still struggling to learn how
to use them, while others is learning how to use them most effectively. This how-to guide provides
an overview of social media applications and emerging best practices for deploying social media
at your company.
Socialmediaincludeseverytypeofcontentthatisgeneratedbyorsharedwithindividualconsumers
in a public or group setting. This includes social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter,
where people connect with each other directly and have at least some control over what informa-
tion is shared with the public. It also includes more open forms such as blogs, forums, and user-
written reviews, even though many of these are hosted on corporate websites. Content sharing
sites such as Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Pinterest are yet another version. Social media tracking
systems now often extend to traditional media, such as the online versions of newspapers, maga-
zines, radio, and television, less because those are truly social than because the technologies to
monitor both types of content are so similar.
But even though social media is now as common as other communication channels, it plays a
different role. Specifically, it allows companies to initiate relationships with people who are other-
wise inaccessible because they are not paying attention to conventional mass media and are not
responsive to untargeted direct messages such as bulk emails. Social media can also provide an
opportunity to deepen those relationships through one-on-one interactions, while at the same time
letting observers see how a company treats its customers. Finally, and perhaps most important,
social media allows consumers to share their own experiences with a company, providing a more
credible source of information than the company itself.
These benefits are accompanied by risks. Poorly executed communications can annoy poten-
tial customers, driving them away from relationships instead of towards them. Public visibility of
formerly private transactions can illustrate problems with products and poor treatment of existing
customers. Consumer reviews can be negative as well as positive, and even enthusiastic advo-
cates can provide incorrect information about products or pricing.
HOW-TO GUIDE
What Is Social CRM?
Social CRM Best Practices

3. 3 Social CRM Best Practices How-to Guide
This combination of threats and opportunities means that no company today can afford a hands-off
attitude towards social media management. Prospects and customers will be discussing you in
social media at every stage in the marketing, sales, and service process, so the only choice you
face is whether you'll be aware of that conversation and try to shape it, or you will ignore it and let
it be shaped by others. And that is really no choice at all.
HOW-TO GUIDE
Monitoring: Finding relevant conversations is the first step in working with social media.
Monitoring systems listen in social channels for company or product names, product
categories, or buyer needs. This listening is usually done through parsing for simple
keywords, but may also be further refined through rules that filter out irrelevant posts and
classify the relevant ones based on topic, urgency, sentiment, author, and other attributes.
Some monitoring systems specialize in a single source, such as Twitter, or single type of
activity, such as comments on review sites. Others scan social networks, blogs, websites,
discussion groups, or traditional media. Coverage may be limited to text, video, images, or
sound, or may cover several of those. There are often limits based on language or geographic
region. Coverage may include previous conversations or be limited to current streams.
Systems that go beyond keywords and rules may apply natural language processing to
extract concepts, sentiments, intentions, or problems; the natural language systems them-
selves vary in their techniques, accuracy, and ability to learn from past mistakes. Analytics
may be limited to simple mention counts, or show results and trends for individual terms and
broad topics; break these down by sources, customer segments, geography, or time of day;
or show "share of conversation" for different terms or brands.
Responding: Some monitoring systems are simply designed to find and tabulate
mentions. This is especially true for systems that specialize in monitoring media outlets.
But customer service departments also want to respond to at least some items, and
marketing and sales often do as well. Response-related functions include presenting
messages from different sources in a unified stream; classifying, prioritizing and
routing messages based on their nature; issuing alerts for urgent situations; converting
messages to cases that can be managed over time; maintaining a library of pre-approved
responses; and recommending responses based on rules or language interpretation.
Some systems provide auto-response and auto-follow features, although these must be
deployed carefully to avoid annoying people who don't want to be treated mechanically.
Social CRM Functions
Every customer-facing department within your organization can make some use of social media.
Here is a look at the main functions needed for social customer relationship management:
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4. 4 Social CRM Best Practices How-to Guide
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Posting: Beyond responding to individual consumer messages, many social media groups
want to post their own original content to attract new customers or deepen existing relation-
ships. Posting features nearly always includes an ability to create new content and to post
to multiple accounts from the same system. Systems differ in the formats they support—text,
HTML, video, etc.—and the specific systems they can feed. Posting also often includes work-
flow for managers to review and approve content, libraries of preapproved comments, and
scheduling of future posts. Some systems can help to optimize posts for search engines
by checking whether they include targeted search terms and providing other SEO-related
ratings. Some support curation of externally-generated content, including discovery of
relevant items, classification, tagging, and queuing for republication. Most systems can do at
least some tracking of content consumption and sharing, although they differ considerably
in the amount of information provided, ranging from simple view counts to reports on traffic
sources to detailed profiles of individuals.
Audience Management: Many social management systems can read the public profiles of
individuals and present them alongside that person's messages. The systems may also build
permanent profiles of individuals, storing and classifying their messages based on tone and
content, and loading whatever profile data the social networks permit. Systems also may look
at external databases that provide richer profiles with location, demographics, interests, activity
levels, and "influence," which itself may be may be measured on different dimensions, including
reach, authority, frequency, engagement, or their own followers' behavior and influence. Profiles
created in the social management system may be shared with marketing automation or CRM, or
those systems might be about to read the profiles within the social management database. Inte-
gration with marketing automation or CRM may also extend to creating new customer records
in those systems, adding alerts or tasks in response to social actions, and opening customer
service tickets. Some systems can manage and send messages to lists of social contacts based
on geography, interests, behaviors, or other attributes.
Sharing buttons embedded in content such as emails, blog posts, and webpages.
These may repost, recommend, or rate content to social networks. Most include
tracking features so users can see how often the content is shared, who does the
sharing, where they send it, and how often the shared version is read.
Promotions such as coupons, surveys, contests, sweepstakes, and referrals these
are designed to attract new followers or encourage activity among existing followers.
They often require technical features beyond standard social media posting, and are
often tied to a particular social network. Nearly all are tied to a customer database.
Other: In addition to the common features described above, some systems support special-
ized functions. These include:
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5. 5 Social CRM Best Practices How-to Guide
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Advocate relations such as registration, activity tracking, badges, rewards, and special
access. These are designed to build special relationships with advocates and influen-
cers, which encourages them to promote the company and its products.
Community management includes elements such as maintaining forums, rating
contributions, building and searching knowledge-bases, moderating discussions,
maintaining profiles, supporting interest groups, and providing workspaces. These
communities may be public or private.
Social advertising. As social networks accept more types of advertising, marketers
increasingly need systems to coordinate their placements, manage their budgets, and
monitor results. These features may be available in stand-alone systems or built into
other advertising or marketing automation platforms. Some will be limited to a single
social network, but marketers will eventually want systems that can manage programs
across multiple networks.
Vendor Landscape For Social CRM
The vast scope of social media has resulted in hundreds of applications to help use it. Applications
may be targeted at different functions, social networks, or types of users. Making sense of this
landscape to find systems that meet your particular needs is a major project. One way to begin is
to divide the vendor universe into the following broad categories. You can then dig more deeply
into whichever category makes the most sense for your organization:
Suite components: Many enterprise software vendors have built or purchased social media
components to add to their suites. Examples include Oracle, which purchased Vitrue and
Collective Intellect, and Salesforce.com, which purchased Radian6 and BuddyMedia. Other
vendors with prominent social components include Marketo, Infusionsoft, Adobe, SAS, and
SDL. Suite components make the most sense when your company is already using the suite
for other purposes. If nothing else, this simplifies your purchasing process. In some cases, the
social components are also more easily integrated with other suite elements than external
software. But this is not always the case, especially when the social components were
purchased by the suite vendor. So be sure to check on the actual degree of integration before
making a purchase.
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6. 6 Social CRM Best Practices How-to Guide
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Best of breed generalists: These are systems that provide most or all of the main social
CRM functions listed above: monitoring, responding, posting, and audience management.
They aim to be the primary social management tool for the company, or at least for a single
department. There is great variation among members of this group, which includes Hootsuite,
Spredfast, Sprout Social, Lithium, and Argyle Social. The variation includes the specific func-
tions provided, the targeted user group, and which social media networks and sources are
managed.
Specialists: These are systems that focus on a niche social management function, such as
sharing, promotions, advocate relations, community management, or social advertising. Such
systems will usually supplement a general-purpose product, although direct integration may
not always be necessary. Buyers need to identify their specific operational requirements and
compare these directly to system capabilities. This is best done by crafting scenarios based
on expected programs and working through these scenarios with system staff before making
a purchase.
Planning: Your social CRM program needs to start with specific goals that support a larger
business strategy, such as customer intimacy, superior quality, or low cost. These goals
should be expressed in reportable metrics, such as customer satisfaction ratings or brand
awareness. Narrower goals, such as number of followers or audience reach, can also be
included, but should be related to something larger rather than independent objectives. You'll
need a plan that describes the specific tactics or programs you intend to apply to reach your
goals, again with measurable objectives that tell whether the programs are working. These
programs and tactics should target specific audiences, such as prospects, customers, social
influencers, or traditional media, and should be deployed in the social channels that your
research has shown are most effective for reaching those audiences.
Social CRM Best Practices
Simply purchasing a social management system is no guarantee of success: in fact, if purchasing
a system is all you do, it pretty much guarantees a failure. Social CRM requires careful planning,
organizational arrangements, deployment, execution, and analytics. Here are some best practices
for each area:
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7. 7 Social CRM Best Practices How-to Guide
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Organization: Responsibilities for each social media task (monitoring, responding, posting,
audience management) must be clearly assigned to departments and to specific individuals
within each department. Processes must be defined to pass cases from one group to the
next, such as from monitoring to customer service. A governance board including represent-
atives from legal, marketing, sales, and service organizations should define social policies
covering topics, opinions, escalations, and any legal constraints. These policies must be
disseminated through the organizatio,n and someone must be responsible for ensuring they
are observed. The governance group should meet regularly to review social activities and
make policy adjustments. Each department should ensure that the people assigned to social
tasks have the right skills, attitudes, and judgment for their job.
Technology: Vendor selection should be based on a careful evaluation of current and future
requirements. Beyond this, you should look for systems that can integrate all social media
channels so users have a comprehensive view of social activity, and to minimize the number
of products they must work with. Similarly, the technology should provide a shared view to all
departments within the company, so everyone is working with the same information and can
see what everyone else has been doing.
Deployment: Adequate training is critical. Ensure that all staff understand their responsibil-
ities, company policies, and hand-off processes. Provide training in how the mechanics of
system use and in creating and reacting to content. Plan the deployment itself to run in
stages, ensuring that high-priority activities are deployed first. Design tests to find out which
activities and types of content are most effective, and work to make testing a regular part of
the on-going social management operations.
Marketing and Sales: These groups will be responsible for most posting and audience
management. Ensure there is a solid plan for creating the right mix of content, including a
schedule for specific items and well-understood workflows for approvals and deployment.
Encourage contributions from experts throughout the company by soliciting and rewarding
their participation—even if only with public thanks and recognition. Track responses so you
can learn which types of content are most successful, keeping in mind that a mix appealing to
different audiences is ultimately more effective than repeating the single most popular type.
Reuse and reformat successful content to gain the highest return on your investment. Build
social profiles of your contacts, including histories of their interactions with you, their sharing
of your content, and the size and profiles of their own contacts. Identify and engage the most
important influencers, taking time to understand their own needs as well as yours.
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8. 8 Social CRM Best Practices How-to Guide
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Service and Support: These groups will be responsible for most social responses and certain
monitoring. Ensure agents are trained properly in company policies and have a library of
preapproved messages they can send, or, better still, can modify to be more personal and
appropriate. Be sure to respond promptly and publicly to social complaints, even if the actual
resolution occurs in private channels. Set expectations for response time—customers' default
assumption today is that companies will respond immediately, so stating that you'll respond
within 24 hours will yield much happier customers if the actual response comes quicker than
that. Be sure that any problems are resolved before you switch to selling, and sometimes just
respond without selling at all.
Measurement: Track a mix of measures that cover activity (number of posts), results (audi-
ence reach), and effectiveness (awareness, retention, new leads). Set goals for each measure
and compare actuals to goal. Develop metrics that illustrate the incremental impact of social
efforts, such as retention rates of social followers vs. non-followers, while recognizing that
other factors may influence results; for example, people who become followers may be more
loyal customers to begin with. Report on trends as well as absolute numbers, and be aware of
seasonal and external factors (weather, competitive activity, news events, etc.) that may also
influence results. Work with your finance group to develop a credible value measurement,
such as Return on Investment, and then use it in your reports.
Social CRM Best Practices
Social media must be integrated into every type of customer interaction, from advertising to pros-
pects to support for previous buyers.
Companies may use multiple social management tools in different departments and for different
purposes, but all tools should enable the organization to work effectively and present consistent
treatments that support long-­term business goals. Careful tool selection and best-­practice-­driven
deployment will ensure that companies gain the most value possible from their social CRM
investments.
Bottom Line

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