Social networking and CRM: Are you engaging with your customers correctly?

As social networking becomes more commonplace, it is steadily creeping into the business environment. Companies have their own Facebook networks, MySpace groups, and use LinkedIn and Plaxo for recruiting and business networking. However, linking together social networks and managing business relationships is still a work in progress.

Previously, we talked about how to better serve customers in our blog by segmenting them better, and building relationships. Today I wanted to explore how to handle this in a new environment created by current technology trends. In a recent article, the O’Reilly Radar called “Release 2.0,” by Jimmy Guterman (here’s a link to his blog post on it) he describes the increasing need for a “universal inbox” to bring together all of a person’s separate lives, including aspects like email, contacts and personal and professional social networking profiles.

The future of CRM is in bringing together all of these seemingly disparate areas and giving users tools to separate and control their data as much or as little as they would like to. Concursive recognizes this trend and its importance to the customer. Web 2.0 and social media features such as blogs, wikis and RSS make CRM more collaborative and more in tune with business growth. The end goal would be to simplify users lives professionally, to make it easier for a company to get and grow customers by building closer relationships with customers and interested parties and to fuel as many one-to-one relationships as possible; in other words, to both turn friends into sales and sales into friends.

Other recent articles in support of using social media and Web 2.0 tools in business are Paul Greenberg’s piece “Everything is Social” in destinationCRM, as well as “Web 2.0: Just say yes” by Sandra Gittlen in Computerworld Australia.

Jeff Hershey