Social CRM Virtual Summit

[#1]

When considering how to engage your customers I think the first step is to lay out a complete social business strategy. In the context of that strategy, choose a platform that will allow you to engage your customers on several levels and through several channels. The idea is to meet the customer "when, where and how" they choose which means that you will need to broaden the "how" to include different options. For example if you're building out social support you would perhaps want to build a customer community but also add some social network channels like Facebook and Twitter. Over time and if you're listening your customers will tell you which ways they want to engage with you, if not explicitly, at least through their actions.

[#2]

There are a lot of tools and channels to use but it really depends on what you are trying to accomplish. The first step in any move towards becoming a social business is to work out a strategy. It doesn't have to be complete at first and can build off of your successes and failures over time, but having objectives set and aligned with your business goals is essential. It's also important from a business perspective to have a CRM backbone that can work with the social channels you use and allow you to scale. From that backbone you can engage through communities, public social networks, etc. Rich media like YouTube is a good outlet for broadcasting your message (marketing) and starting to draw customers in but for conversations to happen you will need to engage in bi-directional channels like communities, blogs, Facebook, private social networks, etc. 

[#3]

Problem solving across an organization can take several different directions. The first thing, in my opinion, that needs to happen though is very simple but fundamental to this process, the business culture has to encourage employees to get involved. In other words the business has to encourage employees to be engaged and join in. From there you could use several tools to facilitate engagement and the problem solving process. Basically there are two things, 1. you want everyone to be empowered to solve little problems that come up in their job on a regular basis and 2. you want a way to apply collective intelligence to larger problems. One simple way is to deploy a customer community based on one of several social platforms. You might also use an internal microblog, sort of an internal Twitter that's secure and private. Most of the social platforms available today can also deploy a microblog or there's a tool called Yammer that's the same concept. The next level of collective intelligence could use a tool for ideasourcing like Uservoice or BrightIdea. While these tools are mostly focused on use by customers the same principal can be used for employees, suggesting problem solving ideas and having the community vote on the "best" ideas. The most sophisticated approach uses a concept called prediction markets, which uses collective intelligence to forecast key business metrics. Crowdcast has a prediction platform based on these concepts. 

[#4]

Attendee, Rebecca A., asks:

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How do you advertise that you have a social networking site for your company?

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[#5]

Attendee, Shari O., asks:

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In this Social Tools slide, can you explain the difference between a Collaboration platform and Community platform?

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[#6]

The basic concept of the semantic web is an evolution of the current Internet where the meaning (or semantics) of information and services on the web is self defined so that the web and the computers on the web could understand the content. This leads to all sorts of possibilities, not the least of which is that computers (or intelligent agents) could perform the work of finding, sharing and combining data to form useful information for people.

[#7]

This is a fairly common fear but in reality, as long as a few things are done correctly preceding the introduction of social tools, the risk is manageable. First, every business needs to build and get executive buy in / approval for a social business policy. There are a few good templates available for free on the web to use as a starting place and there is a post on my blog talking about what the policy should address. The idea is to set guidelines to help employees understand how to use social tools, what is proper business behavior on the web and what restrictions the business is placing on their use. The second thing that a business should do is build a social business strategy to define what the business wants to get out of the use of social tools (aligning social goals with business goals) and how the business plans on accomplishing its social goals. Next it is very important to train employees on the social policy, the social business strategy and on the practical use of the social tools in their job. Reward publicly your successes in accomplishing your social goals and deal with any issues that arise quickly and fairly. The whole process is a cultural shift and changing culture takes time.

[#8]

Advertising a company social site is pretty much like any other marketing campaign. First I'd make the site very prominent on your main web site, probably on the home page and also links on other pages as appropriate (for example if you are using your community for customer service / support I'd have a link on your support page as well). You can also effectively use social networks for raising awareness of your company's social site. If you have people on Twitter, for example have them Tweet about interesting content on your social site. You could also put up a company Facebook page and use that as another entry point for your company social site or maybe set up a company YouTube channel with some engaging video content  that takes customers back to your social site. There are probably a lot of business specific ideas too, like if you're a retail store have the social site address on your store receipts, or if your do email marketing put the address on email marketing campaigns, etc. 

[#9]

Well, that is becoming harder but there is still today some difference. I think over time social software just takes in what we now call collaboration but we're not quite there yet. Today when we talk about collab platforms there are basically two types, 1. a generic collab platform that is used to encourage employees (and maybe customers or partners, though not as much) to exchange ideas or share content (like Microsoft Sharepoint) and 2. industry or trade specific collab tools, like product design collab tools for facilitating remote design teams to share and work together on projects (for example Dassault ENOVIA). Community platforms, or social platforms, enable the business to build, deploy and manage communities, blogs, wiki's, ideasourcing tools, and microblogs for internal or external use by employees, partners and customers.