Social CRM Best Practices How-To Guide

How-‐To Guide
© 2013 Demand Metric Research Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Social CRM Best Practices

By David Raab, CEO at Raab Associates
October 31, 2013

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Social media are 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
are learning how to use them most effectively. This paper provides an
overview of social media applications and emerging best practices for
deploying social media at your company.

WHAT IS SOCIAL CRM?
Social media includes every type of content that is generated by or
shared with individual consumers in a public or group setting. This
includes social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, where
people connect each other directly and have at least some control over
what information 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 Web sites. 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, magazines, 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 are now as common as other
communication channels, they play a different role. Specifically, they

How-‐To Guide
allow companies to initiate relationships with people who are otherwise
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 allow 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 potential 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 advocates can provide incorrect
information about products or pricing.
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
will ignore it and let it be shaped by others. And that is really no choice
at all.

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:

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, Web sites, 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

How-‐To Guide
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 themselves 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; nt 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
treated mechanically.
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 relationships.
Posting features nearly always include 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 workflow for managers to review and approve contents,
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

How-‐To Guide
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
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,
itself may be measured on different dimensions including reach,
authority, frequency, engagement, or
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. Integration 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.
Other: In addition to the common features described above,
some systems support specialized functions. These include:
Sharing buttons embedded in content such as emails,
blog posts, and Web pages. 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.
Advocate relations such as registration, activity tracking,
badges, rewards, and special access. These are designed to
build special relationships with advocates and influencers,

How-‐To Guide
which encourages them to promote the company and its
products.
Community management such as maintaining forums,
rating contributions, building and searching knowledge-
bases, moderating discussions, maintaining profiles,
supporting interest groups, and providing workspaces.
There 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.
Best of breed generalists: These are systems that provide most
or all of the main social CRM functions listed above: monitoring,

How-‐To Guide
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 functions 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.

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:

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 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.
Organization: Responsibilities for each social media task
(monitoring, responding, posting, audience management) must be
clearly assigned to departments and to specific individuals within

How-‐To Guide
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 representatives 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
organization 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
same information and can see what everyone else has been doing.
Deployment: Adequate training is critical. Ensure that all staff
understand their responsibilities, 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 most popular single
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.

How-‐To Guide
Identify and engage the most important influencers, taking time
to understand their own needs as well as yours.
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
respond within 24 hours will yield much happier customers if the
actual response comes more quickly 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 (audience 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.

BOTTOM LINE
Social media must be integrated into every type of customer interaction,
from advertising to prospects 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.

How-‐To Guide
ABOUT THE RESEARCH ANALYST
With an MBA from Harvard, David is an expert in both B2B
& B2C marketing strategy & technology. He has advised The
Gap, JC Penney, Lowe's, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Williams-
Sonoma, Scholastic, Unisys, Sprint and Verizon Wireless.
He also publishes the Raab Guide to Demand Generation
Systems and the Marketing Performance Measurement Tool-
Kit.

Social CRM Best Practices How-To Guide

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