As Jeremiah Owyang states, “as internal and external demands mount, companies become mostly reactive, relegating themselves to a ‘Social Media Help Desk’.”

With strategy, planning and communication you can ensure that your company won’t be caught off guard. If the day hasn’t come yet when your social media team is thrust into fielding customer-service problems, it’s fair to say that it’s just a matter of time before they will be.

In this post, the seventh installment in the A-Z guides published here on Social Media Examiner, I’ll discuss the importance of developing an integrated social media and customer relationship management program for your company.

A to Z Guide for Integrating Customer Service Into Your Social Media Strategy

#1: Allocate your resources

Assign a number of team members the responsibility of managing social networking profiles to ensure they’re all covered throughout the workday.

Provide coverage when staff isn't around to monitor social networking profiles.

#2: Bridge the gap

Bridge the gaps in customer-service coverage during staff breaks and vacation times. Don’t risk missing important messages.

#3: Create a center of excellence

Jeremiah Owyang advocates for creating social media centers of excellence described as “a centralized program that provides resources, training and strategy to a variety of business units that are deploying social media in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and provide standardization. This team is often run by the corporate social strategist, who’s the business stakeholder and program champion.”

The social media center of excellence has four major duties: planning, resources, processes and vendor selection and management. Image source: Altimeter Group

#4: Deliver

Deliver on your customer communication as promised. Whole Foods, for example, lets users know what time and days they can expect to hear back.

Whole Foods lets users know the hours they monitor their Twitter page.

#5: Evaluate

On a regular basis, stop and take a look to see how your social media pages are doing. Monitor reports and keywords and determine how much of your time is spent fielding customer issues.

#6: Food for thought

A couple of good mathematical equations to remember are contained in this food for thought offered by Seth Godin: “My rule of thumb is this: every person you turn away because your product or service isn’t right for them turns into three great customers down the road. Every bad sale costs you five.”

#7: Guerilla marketing techniques

Ann Evanston offers five guerilla marketing techniques to improve customer experiences in the social sphere:

• Set up search phrases for issues that your target market faces, like “slow Internet” or “Internet connection.”
• Also set up search phrases for your business name. Searches are easy to set up in Twitter, MarketMeSuite, HootSuite, Social Mention and will search blog posts as well.
• Watch those mentions and respond to them! Offer empathy, help and make a suggestion. Show them you heard.
• When people use your business name positively, saying “thank you” creates a way to keep in touch as they’re becoming fans and referral sources (or potential customers, if they’re not already).
• If something negative happens, deal with integrity and good communication. Don’t delete it; that’s like putting your head in the sand. You can show others how gracious you really are.

#8: Hub and spoke

Jeremiah Owyang suggests that the hub-and-spoke model provides centralized resources to business units. And Drew McLellan recommends that clients build the web of content creation in a hub-and-spoke model. “You need to have a core—or hub—for all of your social media activity. One place that’s the repository for your core content.”

Create a hub-and-spoke model for social business. Image source: Altimeter Group

#9: Interface across functions

The Community Roundtable suggests in their report, the 2010 State of Community Management, that community management is “increasingly a distinct and separate role that’s explicitly responsible for interfacing across many functions to ensure continuity of care for community members.”

#10: Justification

Heed the advice of the Community Roundtable : “Measurement is NOT about justification. It’s about understanding the data so that you can do a better job.”

#11: Key stakeholders

Remember, key stakeholders will care about different aspects of your social media and will need access to different types of social media metrics. In Forrester’s white paper, “Social Media Marketing Metrics That Matter: Communicating the Right Data to Internal Stakeholders,” Nate Elliott points out the focus of the company’s various internal stakeholders will differ. “Create frequent reporting of digital metrics to community managers and social media strategists, per-campaign or annual reporting of branding and trial metrics to other marketing team members, and quarterly or annual reporting of financial metrics to executives.”

#12: Listen

Set up a good listening strategy and be sure to not only listen for customers’ compliments, but also keep your ears tuned to hear their complaints. Heidi Cohen says, “With the help of social media monitoring tools, customer service can hear what consumers are asking, provide timely responses, and determine early warning signs of PR and other issues.”

#13: Mitigate problems

It’s one thing to listen to what customers are saying. In addition, we must also take precautionary steps and actions. As Heidi Cohen says, “In the current social media ecosystem, it’s critical to have a crisis management plan in place to mitigate potential problems.”

#14: Number of interactions and issues

Some businesses are heavily focused on the number of fans and followers they’re acquiring through social media. And while that’s all fine and good, we must remember to track the interactions staff are having and be able to report back the issues identified and how many were successfully resolved.

#15: Opportunities

Customer-service issues and complaints need not be seen as all negative. With the right mindset, we can view them as opportunities to learn more about what people want and expect from us. Use feedback as opportunities for improvement.

#16: Processes and policies

Customer service and social media needs must be addressed by more than the marketing department. Companies are encouraged to develop thorough processes and policies. Drew Kraus writes in the Gartner paper Emerging Technology Analysis: Social CRM for Customer Service that “one of the inhibitors for the adoption of social CRM customer service technologies is the lack of defined processes and policies… Many fitting the mainstream and late-adopter profile will look to hold off on bringing the new technology into their contact centers until optimized processes and policies have been vetted by early adopters. Instead, they will opt to allow their marketing departments—which have access to near-term budget for such investments—to take the lead in handling all social CRM interactions in the interim.”

#17: Questions

Answering consumers’ questions often ends up taking a back seat to responding to customer complaints. However, the timely response to a question will make customers feel heard and potentially can alleviate dissatisfaction.

Apologize for missed communication.

#18: Resolve problems

Try to resolve problems immediately. Stacey Acevero says, “Sometimes the largest protesters can become advocates with a little bit of love and attention. If you don’t provide some source of customer service or redirect online to someone who can help, you’re risking your reputation.”

#19: Structural hole

A structural hole can be seen as the person between two groups who has been taken away, thereby creating a disconnect between the two groups. Community Roundtable suggests that the “recognition may cause companies to rethink the outsourcing of their Twitter accounts to their PR companies.”

#20: Template for Social CRM

Gartner’s Drew Kraus offers actions for technology and service providers which includes developing a “template” social CRM for the customer-service delivery process for your customers. You may think of this as the standards by which you base all of your customer service, whereby all of your business reps deliver the same quality of care and the same services and messages.

#21: Unhappy customers

When we think about social media and customer service, there may be times when we find ourselves on the other side of the spectrum as the unhappy customer. Erik Deckers writes, “If you’re unhappy with a company, by all means, complain. It’s your right as a customer. But if you do it the right way, you’re more likely to get what you want than if you whine and gripe about their incompetence and failures.”

#22: Variety of functions

Heidi Cohen states that social media has changed how consumers and companies view customer service. Customer service fulfills a variety of different functions including enhancing your marketing. Heidi lists 12 ways social media enhances customer service:

• Gives business a human face
• Listens to what customers are saying
• Proactively engages with prospects and customers
• Provides additional product-related content
• Answers product-related questions
• Supplies alternative contact channel
• Gives customers a channel to talk to each other
• Shares customer feedback
• Celebrates your customers
• Shows customers behind the scenes
• Makes special offers
• Creates new purchase options

#23: Wisdom

There’s a lot of wisdom in this statement by Jacob Morgan from his post,

What is Social CRM? “Social CRM is about moving from fans and followers to customers and advocates.”

#24: (E)xposure

The MarketingProfs post Brands Undervalue Social Media for Customer Service points out that “when social CRM is done well, it provides the added benefits of increased exposure for your brand by helping to retain existing customers, acquiring new customers and driving brand awareness.”

#25: Why measure

For community management to be successful, we need to regularly measure our efforts. Dion Hinchcliffe writes, “If you aren’t looking at overall levels of participation, growth rate of new members, making lists of the recently disengaged and following up on them, etc., then you aren’t managing your social environment. Understanding the overall health and momentum in your community, directly responding to it, and doing it every day will be vital for the long-term success of your effort.”

#26: Zealous

Social CRM requires dedication and devotion. Be zealous about maintaining good customer relationships.

Have you integrated your customer service and social media efforts? What would you add to this list? Leave your comments in the box below.

This is not a post about social media marketing. I’m not here to give you hints on how to increase your friends, fans and followers.

Nor will I say that it’s time for your business to “join the conversation” and I promise not to overuse the word transparency either.

I believe that most brands (large and small) get it.

Friends, fans and followers are important, yes. And brands increase their social equity by engaging in two-way dialogue with their constituency, yes. And transparency is key to these external engagements, yes.

But there’s an underlying challenge that’s not being addressed as it should be.

You see, years ago when Facebook and Twitter exploded and there was an expectation from the “social” community that brands should create blogs and communities; the brands listened.

And what you’ll find today is that most brands are doing a really good job on these channels engaging with their customers.

They’re listening to the conversation using social media monitoring tools such as Radian6 and Meltwater Buzz. They’re hiring community managers to empower and interact with the communities. And, while many still make minor mistakes here and there, they’re becoming more intelligent at adapting to this changing landscape. Most organizations are well on their way to becoming a social brand if they aren’t one already.

Social business is not a trend; it’s a forced evolution.

A social business deals with the internal transformation of an organization and addresses key factors such as organizational dynamics, culture, internal communications, governance, training, employee activation and much more.

Organizations need to get smarter, acquire new technologies, intelligence, talent and motivation to become more open and transparent. They need to create processes and establish governance models that protect the organization, yet empower their employees.

I’ve been fortunate to witness firsthand how organizations are evolving from businesses that merely engage in social behavior into social businesses. There’s a huge difference.

Social business is built on three pillars – people, governance and technology.

The first pillar deals with the people of the organization. It addresses the need to drive organizational change in an effort to break down organizational silos and get internal teams to communicate. It’s also about activating the organization’s most import assets, its employees.

The second pillar deals with governance. This simply means that organizations need to put processes in place to manage the chaos that exists from behind the firewall. Training, social media guidelines and policies are imperative for organizations to monitor and roll out across the organization within different teams and geographies. It ensures consistency; it protects the organization and at the same time, empowers its employees.

The third and last pillar deals with technology. Organizations have to invest in platforms that facilitate internal collaboration. This is essential to ensure proper communication. External campaign management tools like Sprinklr are also essential to scale, especially if an organization has multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Social CRM plays a significant role within this pillar. My definition of social CRM is that it’s just one component that helps organizations fully evolve into a social business. It’s a strategic business initiative that considers technology, intelligence and process; so when organizations communicate with their customers they know what to say, how to say it and when to say it in order to provide a more relevant customer interaction.

What’s not visible to most, unless you’ve worked in the enterprise, is the anarchy, conflict, confusion, lack of communication and organizational silos that exist behind the firewall. This makes the process of becoming a social brand much more difficult and less effective. So this quest to become a social brand and a social business is one of simultaneous effort.

The conversation is happening.

A study back in 2008 showed that 55% of consumers want ongoing conversations with companies and brands. The study investigated how brands and consumers interact and how consumers want brands to engage with them. And the results were awesome.

In addition to the 55% of people wanting an ongoing interaction, 89% of respondents said they would feel more loyal to a brand if they were invited to take part in a feedback group.

A more recent study in 2009 (you can download here) found that 85% of Americans using social media think companies should have an active presence in the social media universe.

What’s even more interesting is that those users actually want interaction with these brands. Here are some other data points you might find useful:

Out of the 85% of people who want companies to be present in social media:

• 34% want companies to actively interact with them
• 51% want companies to interact with them as needed or by request
• 8% think companies should only be passively involved on social media
• 7% think companies should not be involved at all

This is all really good data. However, I believe that businesses cannot and will not have effective external conversations with consumers unless they can have effective internal conversations first. And when I refer to internal conversations, I mean much more than a few monthly conference calls and a collaboration forum.

Has your organization evolved into a social business? Please give us some examples in the comments box below.

Here are some important points to consider when thinking about social CRM.

• Social CRM is first a strategy that is often supported by various tools and technologies. The strategy is based around customer engagement and interactions, with transactions being a byproduct.

• Social CRM is still about CRM (but evolved), meaning a back-end process and system for managing customer relationships and data in an efficient and process-centric way.

• Social CRM will mean different things to different organizations. The key is being able to understand the business challenge you’re looking to solve, and then solving it.

• Social CRM is one component of developing a social or collaborative business, both internally and externally.

So now that we’ve laid some groundwork, let’s move on to a bit more context for both CRM and social CRM. To do that, here are some visuals from Chess Media Group. (Many of the concepts within in this article are from a joint white paper with Mitch Lieberman.)

Understanding CRM

You can see that CRM has traditionally consisted of one-way communication between a brand and the customer.

CRM is comprised of sales, marketing and service/support–based functions whose purpose was to move the customer through a pipeline with the goal of keeping the customer coming back to buy more and more stuff.

Traditional CRM was very much based around data and information that brands could collect on their customers, all of which would go into a CRM system that then allowed the company to better target various customers.

Understanding Social CRM

In this diagram, you can see many of the same elements as in CRM; however, there are a few differences.

PR now has a very active role in social CRM (in fact, PR typically owns budgetary control and authority of social initiatives ahead of every other department). In most organizations, PR departments manage the social presence of brands and handle the customer engagement.

The next change we can see is that advocacy and experience are crucial components of social CRM, which all revolve around the customer. In the first CRM image above, you’ll see that the customer is not really a part of CRM—there’s no collaboration, no relationship.

In social CRM, that has completely changed. The customer is actually the focal point of how an organization operates. Instead of marketing or pushing messages to customers, brands now talk to and collaborate with customers to solve business problems, empower customers to shape their own experiences and build customer relationships, which will hopefully turn into customer advocates.

It’s very important to keep in mind that social CRM is not a new “thing” that replaces CRM, it’s simply an evolution of what CRM has always been.

Why The Evolution Happened

This is just a small sampling of the available data on the web that shows how consumers are changing and evolving with the growth of social media.

The challenge for organizations now is adapting and evolving to meet the needs and demands of these new social customers. What’s shocking from some of the above stats is that many organizations still do not understand the CRM value of social media.

One of my favorite quotes from Gartner states:

“By 2010, more than half of companies that have established an online community will fail to manage it as an agent of change, ultimately eroding customer value. Rushing into social computing initiatives without clearly defined benefits for both the company and the customer will be the biggest cause of failure.”

Social CRM is about moving from fans and followers to customers and advocates.

Have you dabbled with social CRM? What are your thoughts? Please share your comments in the box below.

Plus, she looks at the Wibiya social toolbar and how it can create social buzz for your business.  Then Mari shares insights into three social CRM tools and how they can have a big impact on your business networking.

Share your feedback, see the show notes and discover how you can be part of a future show below!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mZ39KiwW9s

Can You Get More Visibility With Facebook Questions?

You may be familiar with LinkedIn Answers and benefit from it already.  Now Facebook has joined the party.  You can ask and answer any questions using Facebook Questions (rollout may not have hit all users yet).  Facebook has integrated the Questions feature right into the publisher.

Now when you go to write on the wall, you have to literally click “Write on wall,” whether it’s a profile, group event or Fan page.  Right next to that, it says “Ask Question.”

However, there are clear downsides to using Facebook Questions.  For example, if a fan on your Facebook page clicks on “Ask Question,” and proceeds to enter a question, he or she will actually be taken away from your Fan page and over to the Facebook Question section, moving the person away from your own Fan page.  Watch the video to find out if Mari thinks Facebook Questions is a game changer for businesses and her concerns about the new feature.

Wibiya Social Toolbar

The Wibiya social toolbar is a social media enhancement that adds a little bar across the bottom of your website or blog. You can see it in action on this very page below.

The reason why you want to have Wibiya on your site is because the visitors coming to your site can interact, do all of their social media chit-chatting and posting without leaving your site. The Wibiya social toolbar integrates fully with all of the different social network sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and YouTube.

When people click on the Twitter or Facebook link on the bottom of the toolbar on your site, they can actually see your updates, interact, reply to you and see the whole stream of all of the tweets about that page or post. Watch the Wibiya social toolbar in action in the video and to discover how it might benefit your site.

Social CRM: The Secret to Building a Strong Network

Mari introduces three social customer relationship management (CRM) applications that add social media insight to your email inbox. These tools pull information from all kinds of social profiles like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, right into each of your email contacts.

Thus, you have expanded information about each of your contacts that can help you build better relationships.  The three tools Mari reviews are Rapportive, Gist and Xobni.

Check out these social CRM tools, add one to your inbox and see if it works for you. Watch the video to hear which tool is Mari’s favorite and how they differ.

If you’ve enjoyed this episode of Social Media Examiner TV, make sure to tweet about it (use hashtag #SMEtv), share it on Facebook or even embed this episode on your blog.

We want to hear from you! Do you use Facebook Questions, Wibiya or social CRM applications? If so, what has been your experience?  Leave us a comment below. Also let us know what you’d like to see in future episodes.

Twitter’s role as a Magic 8 Ball for our shared culture is unrivaled, and it has almost single-handedly ushered in the era of real-time search and social customer relationship management.

But Twitter is the online equivalent of HBO – important more because of who uses it and the media’s infatuation with it, rather than the actual size and impact of its audience.

Don’t get me wrong. I advocate participating in Twitter, and I’ve certainly grown my own audience via that channel.  Twitter indeed should be part of almost every company’s social media tool kit. (See the great post here on how to methodically grow a Twitter following.)

However, Twitter alone does not constitute social media, and you’d think it does given all the disproportionate attention being paid to it at conferences and in trade publications.  Let me provide seven reasons why you shouldn’t focus solely on Twitter…

As an aside, I presented a half-day workshop at the Email Evolution Conference on social media strategy (slides here) recently with DJ Waldow and Mike Corak, and the majority of the questions were about Twitter. That got me thinking that perhaps social media types aren’t fully recognizing Twitter’s limitations?

So, fully expecting each of you to tell me I’m wrong in the comments, here are 7 reasons why Twitter is not the Valhalla of social media:

#1: Growth Is Slowing

The true size of the Twitter audience is a bit tricky to pin down because 55% of its users access Twitter via third-party and mobile applications. But new data from Compete.com shows a clear stagnation in Twitter’s runaway growth.

Has Twitter Peaked?

According to these numbers, the audience using Twitter actually declined from August to December 2009 (during the same period, Facebook went from 250 million to 350 million members).

#2: Young People Don’t Use It

Today’s marketing coordinator is tomorrow’s CMO, and younger Americans don’t embrace Twitter. A new Pew Research study shows only 8% of U.S. teens using Twitter, compared to 66% engaged in texting. Do young people not appreciate the m:any-to-many nature of Twitter, preferring the one-to-one paradigm of text messaging?

Regardless of the reason, as the current teen population ages, it threatens Twitter’s preeminence unless adoption rates soar.

#3: New Features Aren’t Being Used

Last Fall, Twitter rolled out the option for users to “tag” their location onto Tweets, to add geographical context. In true Twitter fashion, it wasn’t “rolled out” per se, it just appeared as part of the API that third parties access. Since then, .023% of all Tweets include location data, according to Sysomos. Not an overwhelming participation rate.

Twitter lists, while useful for categorizing people to follow, haven’t really taken off either. Nor has the new, integrated retweet capability.  With each new release of features being met with tepid response, Twitter users are making the statement that they like Twitter just the way it is. That’s great for keeping the existing user base satisfied, but further impedes growth potential.

#4: Facebook Sharpening the Knife

You may remember that Twitter refused Facebook’s $500 million buyout offer last September. So as expected, Facebook just added Twitter-style features and functions to its service, to evaporate Twitter’s competitive angle.

Updating Facebook from third parties like Tweetdeck? Check. Tagging people with @ within status updates? Check. Posting to Twitter directly from Facebook? Check. Stripped-down interface option, with status updates at the core? Check (Facebook Lite). Retweet-style sharing tools? Check.

Functionally, everything Twitter does, Facebook does just as well, with the exception of mobile usage. Because Facebook has so much more overall functionality than Twitter, the mobile experience is a bit more clunky than Twitter. However, it’s important to recognize that 3 times more people use Facebook from a smartphone every month than use Twitter at all.

#5: The Better You Are at Twitter, the Worse You Are at Twitter

Being a new user on Twitter is as lonely as Michael Boublé at a Green Day concert. “What’s happening?” it asks, followed by a box and a blinking cursor. Twitter success requires an understanding of the unique rhythms and cadences of the community, and a give first, get later mentality that is a bit counterintuitive at first. The site is exceptionally poor at welcoming and training new users, which may result in its high churn rate.

But a bigger problem with Twitter is that like CB radio, it doesn’t scale well. If you have a few hundred followers, you can semi-coherently keep them straight, and watch what they are doing via your public stream. But once you get into the many thousands of followers, that public stream is a cacophony at best. Twitter lists can help in this regard, but many Twitter power users lament that the way they use the service is forced to change significantly as their own Twitter connectivity increases.

Much less time is spent in the public stream, where discoveries occur, and much more time is spent answering replies, and monitoring relevant topics via Twitter search.

When your most popular users are the ones who have the hardest time using your service to its full advantage, you have some issues to consider.

#6:  FourSquare and Gowalla Go Back to the Future

The new location-based darlings FourSquare and Gowalla are stealing a lot of the place-based intimacy that originally propelled Twitter. The “original” Twitter contained a substantially larger percentage of tweets about the author and what he or she was doing in his or her own life at that moment. That type of status update has been migrating, first to Facebook, and now to the location services.

Because you actually know the people you are connected with in most cases, FourSquare and Gowalla feel a lot more like the original Twitter, with a sense of engagement that today’s Twitter can’t deliver.

#7: Measurement Lacking

Other than retweets and clicks – data that inexplicably is only available from third parties – Twitter provides no statistics to its users other than followers/following. Meanwhile, Facebook has been busy adding layers to its Insights platform, which provides a nuanced dataset enabling business users to test, optimize, and evaluate the efficacy of their time spent on Facebook.

The lack of integrated metrics on Twitter may not be a big deal for personal users, but for corporations looking to embed Twitter into an integrated social CRM approach, it’s a gaping hole that is currently being patched by inefficient, home-grown workarounds.

I love Twitter. It enriches my life every day. I hope it sticks around for a long, long time. But, figuring out what you want to do on Twitter is not your “social media strategy” – it’s just a short-term, tactical plan for a platform that survives despite its shortcomings.

What do you think? Are you still sold on Twitter? Please leave your comments below.