Talk:Social CRM

Trend to Social Media Features in CRM Development

Vendors which develop CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms are investing resources to add social media features to marketers which will provide them with increased abilities to engage their communities. These social media features not only allow a user to manage their customers data and communication strategy, but to enegage, monitor, and develop a user-centric focused methodology. Connections that are registered into the CRM are now able to be connected to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to add a one touch sharing tool that expands the opportunity to reach the relevant customer base.

This is one of those areas where trying to craft a new category creates more confusion than clarification. Check out Gartner's social CRM magic quadrant to get a sense of some of the confusion around this space. Some factors to consider are how a platform 1) contributes social data - as opposed to traditional CRM data; 2) creates multiple paths of dissemination - consistent with open platforms offering UGC and user choices around dissemination; 3) provides a reporting/analysis environment to facilitate business insights; 4) provides social networking integration for marketing initiatives; and finally 5) offers some form of contribution to the user's social experience or ability engage in social networking or an external persona. While some of these points may raise additional questions (e.g., what constitutes "social data") I think this discussion needs to occur if social CRM is to be a valid and useful category. I suspect all of the platforms or companies referred to in the entry and the notes fall well short of the factors mentioned above - which suggests that the category as it stands today is at most an analyst's "catch all". For purposes of full disclosure I have recently joined Bazaarvoice, and was formerly an employee of Microsoft and Gartner.