Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Does your business engage in social media? Then you must have a social CRM strategy: How can you integrate social collaboration functionality with your existing systems? How do you staff your SCRM efforts? How do you transition from listening to engaging in conversations, and which ones should you engage in? How do you get the results of those conversations into your CRM system? Start with understanding the following.

1- Google Is Your Friend
One of the great CRM questions is, "how do I find out where my customers are talking about me?" The big social media standard bearers -- Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn -- are obvious first thoughts, but often customers congregate on smaller sites that are more narrowly focused on their vertical markets or their unique interests.

Discovering these rich niches of often-intense conversation could prove far more lucrative than relentlessly panning in the waters of Facebook or Twitter for a nugget of discussion about your business. So how do you find these smaller, specialized channels? Do you need to throw significant cash at it? Is there a tool you can buy that will magically reveal these social media mother lodes?

You can surely blow a lot of dough on technology to find them, but before you do, make your task easy: plug in the name of your company, the names of your competitors, or keywords that pertain to your business into Google Search. It'll return results for those terms and, with a little digging, it should reveal many of the significant smaller social media channels where people are talking about you.

2- Make Sure To Show Up At Your Own Party
These days, online marketing pieces and company websites have lots of little Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media icons strewn about their landscapes inviting customers to click on them to friend, connect or subscribe to them. It's remarkably easy for designers to add them to their pages, and it's also remarkably easy for marketing managers and other executives to tell designers to add them to their pages.

Unfortunately, it's not quite so easy to recognize that when you plaster an icon on company content, you're making a commitment to be part of the conversation -- not just when the content is published, but for as long as that standing invitation is open to the public. If you're going to tell people to follow you on Twitter or Facebook, then you'd better be there for them.

Don't start inviting people to your Facebook or LinkedIn page or to follow you on Twitter unless you plan on having a real, ongoing presence there. And, for heaven's sake, don't invite them to a customer community of your creation if you don't have a genuine commitment to maintaining and participating in that community.

Engaging haphazardly is worse than not engaging in the first place, because it asks the customer to do something and then fails to honor that action. Customers get the same level of non-communication, even though they have actively done something extra to get it.

3- Once You Go Social There Ain’t No Coming Back
One of the terrifying things about social media is that it takes control of the company message away from designated spokespeople and distributes it around the company. Especially when people love their jobs, their blogs, tweets and status updates may be chock-full of information that the company may not want in the public sphere yet.

This isn't happening because employees all over the world have decided to maliciously divulge important material or to sabotage marketing efforts, said Greg Gunn, vice president of business development at HootSuite. It's happening because most companies don't bother to educate their employees about how they should talk about the business on social media.

So tell them. Unless you include them in the company's understanding of how social media should be used in discussing the business, don't be surprised if they say things you don't want them to say.

For example, for competitive reasons, it's not OK for the engineers at a software company to blog about new, revolutionary features before they are announced. Do they know that? And do they know the date when the project they're working on will be announced? If they do, then you could effectively multiply your marketing efforts, with your traditional marketing being supplemented by the blogs and tweets of your developers.

Here's a non-technology example: Marketing creates a new, official name for an incentive program, but the sales department fails to get the word, and the socially active people in sales continue to use the old name, creating confusion among the customers and, ultimately, the impression that internal chaos reigns inside your business. Did sales get the memo -- not just about the name change, but about how the program needed to be referred to in all circumstances, including on social media?

Companies need to realize that everyone in the business is potentially a source of company information in the social era. You must help them deliver a controlled and coherent message about your business, and that entails keeping everyone inside the company informed about marketing and messaging plans. It also means making them aware of the importance of bringing things they learn through their conversations back to the business when appropriate.

So make sure you have a sound strategy in place before jumping into social media. Make sure all your employees are aware of the dos and don’ts you have put in place. Most importantly, make sure your internal communications are clear and followed. If you have any questions let us know.

What You Can Learn From Apple To Market Your Store

The Apple store turned 10 this past May celebrating a spectacular and surprising success. Back in 2001 when the first two stores opened in Tysons Corner, Virginia and Glendale, California, it seemed like a crazy and desperate idea, writes Peter Gorenstein, financial blogger.

Critics asked, "why would a technology company like Apple open a brick and mortar store when the future of commerce is moving online?"

"Literally half the store is devoted to solutions because people don't just want to buy personal computers any more. They want to know what they can do with them," was Steve Jobs' answer, in a video presented at MacWorld just days before the first grand opening. Like so many of his decisions over the last decade Jobs was right.



Today, with its 300 stores across the country, and more than $9 billion in retail sales last year, Apple is arguably the most successful retailer on the planet based on sales per square foot, says Peter Gorenstein, finance writer.

According to a recent MacWorld article Jeweler Tiffany & Company's $2,700 per square foot used to be considered the gold standard, but Apple has surpassed Tiffany, generating more than $4,000 in sales per square foot. By comparison, Best Buy's sales per square foot is about $1,000, and Walmart's is about $400.

Apple has been able dominate at a time so many other retailers are struggling or have gone out of business, due in part to Apple's iPod, iPhone, iPad, Mac and iTunes offerings.
Remember Virgin, Tower, and all those independently owned music stores? You might, but your kids may not. They've been buying music on iTunes and using their iPods for as long as they can remember.

Many suspected electronics giant Best Buy would benefit when its top rival Circuit City went under. That hasn't happened. Best Buy has reported three straight quarters of declining same-store sales, including a 5.5% drop in U.S. stores in the last quarter.

Borders filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last winter but Barnes & Noble isn't likely to see an increase in business, what with Amazon and the iPad and all the tablet copycats popping up. Meanwhile, direct competitors like Microsoft and Dell have had little success with their retail stores. It's unlikely fans of either will be lining up outside their doors when the next version of Windows is released.

The lesson Apple offers is to give customers a chance to interact with your product, test it out and ask questions. Going to your store should be an experience for your customers regardless of the product you sell. The more time customers spend in your store, the more comfortable they will be with your product and the more likely they will be to buy.

Green PR

Ever wonder how much energy you use every time you google something? Of course you have, says Greg Menken, VP of Sustainability at Beckerman PR. Google reports that the energy used by the company (not your computer) per average search is about 1kJ (0.0003 kWh). To put this in perspective, Google says the CO2 emissions of a newspaper is the equivalent of 850 searches, that of a glass of orange juice, 1,050 searches, and so on. But multiply that 1kJ by hundreds of billions, and you need a lot of energy.

In response to growing scrutiny of such high energy use by the tech sector, many companies are looking to economize their data center operations, hoping to save cash, ease criticism, and win customers. While it is true that an online search is greener than a trip to the library, it is also true that many technology companies, and their data centers, have developed reputations as energy hogs. Reports indicate that data center electricity use more than doubled between 2000 and 2006, and is expected to double again by 2011, climbing to as much as 10% of all energy use in the U.S. by 2020.

According to Greenpeace, if considered as a country, global telecommunications and data centers would have ranked fifth in the world for energy use in 2007, behind the United States, China, Russia and Japan. Kent Garber of U.S. News and World Report says that with increasing concern about greenhouse gases, server farms are attracting the same kind of "furrowed-eyebrow" examination as other major energy users. Environmental groups are applying pressure on data center-heavy technology companies to make their data centers as green as possible. Even Congress ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to study private and federal data center energy usage.

As reported in Distributed Energy, the industry is trying to improve its energy consumption reputation. Eaton, a power management company to data centers, has recognized that its customers are increasingly demanding that their centers be designed with maximum energy efficiency. Fairly or not, "Data centers have gained such a reputation as energy hogs. That's not a good thing to have, PR-wise," says Ed Spears of Eaton.

Greenpeace v. Facebook is a good example. Whatever your opinion of Greenpeace, this year it launched a "Facebook loves coal" type of campaign to pressure the company to use renewables to power its new data centers. The group claims that 500,000 of its own Facebook friends engaged in the campaign. True, Mark Zuckerberg is no poorer, but the company has been forced to address the issue.

Partly in response to consumer interest in green, many companies are beginning to green-up their data center operations, often as part as an overall sustainability strategy. Yahoo's new data center near Buffalo, N.Y., for example, is designed to maximize air circulation (important for cooling) and will get energy from hydroelectric facilities. Microsoft is using retrofitted shipping containers to house servers at its new Chicago data center. The container architecture requires much less energy to cool the systems. HP, ranked among the most sustainable companies in the U.S., recently built a data center in the U.K. in a cold climate that uses outside air to reduce cooling costs.

More than good PR, these innovations are being driven by economics. According to Eaton, energy costs for cooling and operating a data center have gone from about 10% to as much as 60% of some companies' entire operating budgets. Microsoft saves 30% in operating costs at its Chicago center and HP's U.K. center saves the company $8 million a year -- critical cash flow in a down economy.

Whether it's PR or economics that drive green, both will continue to play an important role in the energy and environmental decisions that technology companies make. Says Bill Kosik of HP, "The business case for green could just as easily include increasing market share by taking an aggressive stance on minimizing the impact on the environment as it could include tactical upgrades to optimize energy use." Sustainability will always be driven first and foremost by economics but, as Kosik says, tech companies would be mistaken not to realize the PR and marketing value of sustainability as well.