Social Media is a crap term. Always has been. Certainly for the purposes of business and certainly increasingly as we understand the social landscape better.
The term “Social Media” is a mere label that is too focused on the tools. And because of that it is imprecise and insufficient for our purposes in the world of business. It doesn’t really fit what we are trying to achieve. What does it mean for us? Community management? Facebook marketing? Twitter offers? YouTube videos? Social PR? Content marketing? More? All of them?
It’s too broad and fails to get to the heart of the matter.
Businesses are out of the loop.
In today’s commercial landscape we need to recognise that our customers have adopted (at astonishing rates) social networking practices and are carrying on conversations about us, our products, competitors and industries. Without us. Happily without us, actually. In fact, after years of being fed a load of marketing crap (who believes that that soap powder really is “new and improved” anyway?), consumers are disinclined even to trust us. We need to pay better attention.
Today we as businesses are presented with an opportunity to use the social networks to help us truly service our customers; to truly follow the old cliché adage that “the customer is number one”. We have an opportunity to actually put the customer at the centre of the business; to give them the involvement that they increasingly demand.
Social CRM
Customers control the conversation. How does the company respond? Social CRM (or becoming a social business) means moving beyond listening and engaging with customers to gleaning real, actionable insights that will help a business make their customers’ experiences better – better customer service, better communication, better support, better marketing, better products.
Social CRM is about creating organisation-wide processes and structures to:
- take in all the data (unstructured, raw, semi-structured) from our listening and interaction
- analyse that data for what’s important and meaningful from the customer’s point of view
- feed those insights into the organisation to create better outcomes (or to enhance the successful existing outcomes)
- and then deliver those better outcomes.
It’s a cyclical process that demonstrates to customers that we value them and are paying attention.
The best marketing strategy is to deliver a remarkable customer experience. Why not let our customers tell us what that is?
