Social media are now part of every business and consumer activity, joining telephone, Web, broadcast, and face-to-face interactions as primary communication channels. This means that all marketing, sales, and service organizations should include social media as part of their basic activities. Yet social media are still new enough that many organizations are still struggling to learn how to use them, while others are learning how to use them most effectively. This How-to-Guide provides an overview of social media applications and emerging best practices for deploying social media at your company. Read this 8-page guide to learn: - The definition of social customer relationship management (CRM) - The main functions needed for social CRM - The vendor landscape for social CRM - Social CRM best practices To obtain this document, visit us at http://www.demandmetric.com/register

1. How-­‐To Guide
Social CRM Best Practices
By David Raab, CEO at Raab Associates
November 2013
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Social media are now part of every business and consumer activity, joining
telephone, Web, broadcast, and face-­to-­face interactions as primary
communication channels. This means that all marketing, sales, and service
organizations should include social media as part of their basic activities.
Yet social media are still new enough that many organizations are still
struggling to learn how to use them, while others are learning how to use
them most effectively. This paper provides an overview of social media
applications and emerging best practices for deploying social media at your
company.
WHAT IS SOCIAL CRM?
Social media includes every type of content that is generated by or shared
with individual consumers in a public or group setting. This includes
social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, where people
connect each other directly and have at least some control over what
information is shared with the public. It also includes more open forms
such as blogs, forums, and user-­written reviews, even though many of these
are hosted on corporate Web sites. Content sharing sites such as Reddit,
StumbleUpon, and Pinterest are yet another version. Social media
tracking systems now often extend to traditional media, such as the online
versions of newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, less because those
are truly social than because the technologies to monitor both types of
content are so similar.
But even though social media are now as common as other
communication channels, they play a different role. Specifically, they
allow companies to initiate relationships with people who are otherwise
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2. How-­‐To Guide
inaccessible, because they are not paying attention to conventional mass
media and are not responsive to untargeted direct messages such as bulk
emails. Social media can also provide an opportunity to deepen those
relationships through one-­on-­one interactions, while at the same time
letting observers see how a company treats its customers. Finally, and
perhaps most important, social media allow consumers to share their own
experiences with a company, providing a more credible source of
information than the company itself.
These benefits are accompanied by risks. Poorly executed communications
can annoy potential customers, driving them away from relationships
instead of towards them. Public visibility of formerly private transactions
can illustrate problems with products and poor treatment of existing
customers. Consumer reviews can be negative as well as positive, and even
enthusiastic advocates can provide incorrect information about products or
pricing.
This combination of threats and opportunities means that no company
today can afford a hands-­off attitude towards social media management.
Prospects and customers will be discussing you in social media at every
stage in the marketing, sales and service process, so the only choice you
try to shape it, or will
ignore it and let it be shaped by others. And that is really no choice at all.
SOCIAL CRM FUNCTIONS
Every customer-­facing department within your organization can make some
use of social media. Here is a look at the main functions needed for social
customer relationship management:
Monitoring: Finding relevant conversations is the first step in
working with social media. Monitoring systems listen in social
channels for company or product names, product categories, or
buyer needs. This listening is usually done through parsing for
simple keywords, but may also be further refined through rules that
filter out irrelevant posts and classify the relevant ones based on
topic, urgency, sentiment, author, and other attributes. Some
monitoring systems specialize in a single source, such as Twitter, or
single type of activity, such as comments on review sites. Others
scan social networks, blogs, Web sites, discussion groups, or
traditional media. Coverage may be limited to text, video, images,
or sound, or may cover several of those. There are often limits
© 2013 Demand Metric Research Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

3. How-­‐To Guide
based on language or geographic region. Coverage may include
previous conversations or be limited to current streams. Systems
that go beyond keywords and rules may apply natural language
processing to extract concepts, sentiments, intentions, or problems;
the natural language systems themselves vary in their techniques,
accuracy, and ability to learn from past mistakes. Analytics may be
limited to simple mention counts or show results and trends for
individual terms and broad topics; break these down by sources,
Responding: Some monitoring systems are simply designed to find
and tabulate mentions. This is especially true for systems that
specialize in monitoring media outlets. But customer service
departments also want to respond to at least some items, and
marketing and sales often do as well. Response-­related functions
include presenting messages from different sources in a unified
stream; classifying, prioritizing and routing messages based on their
nature; issuing alerts for urgent situations; converting messages to
cases that can be managed over time; maintaining a library of pre-­
approved responses; and recommending responses based on rules
or language interpretation. Some systems provide auto-­response
and auto-­follow features, although these must be deployed carefully
mechanically.
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© 2013 Demand Metric Research Corporation. All Rights Reserved.