Ten Ways Social Media

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December 15, 2010

Ten Ways Social Media is Changing Sales and CRM

By Jennifer Schiff

More and more businesses of all sizes are using social media sites, such as Facebook

and Twitter and Foursquare, as a way to better engage customers and increase sales.However, just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account is no guarantee of success.

So eCRM Guide asked Pamela O'Hara, the co-founder and president ofBatchBlue, themaker of BatchBook social CRM software, and Margaret Donnelly, the vice president of

marketing and business development at JitterJam Social CRM, how companies canleverage popular social media sites, as well as YouTube and Flickr and blogs, to

enhance and improve their customer relationship management (CRM).

Social Media Monitoring and CRM Tips

Herewith are 10 ways social CRM can benefit your business.

1. Social CRM can help you target your marketing to key segments. "Brands arelooking to see ROI from their social marketing activities," said Donnelly. "By using

customers' interests, conversations, location, demographic and other data gathered

from various social media sites, marketers can capture and utilize that intelligence tocreate very focused messaging and offers to motivate their contacts to act. This

enables the brand to see the entire cycle of customer development from their social

marketing efforts, from initial discovery to transaction and beyond."

2. Social media monitoring can help you uncover potential customers and find

out which customers are influencers. "People are talking about products, brands,product categories, wants and needs at a staggering rate [online]," noted JitterJam's

Donnelly. Monitoring the social web enables businesses to monitor the chatter andsentiment about their products and services as well as the competition's, she said.

"More importantly, social CRM enables businesses to identify current customers including the ones who are potential influencers and advocates for your brand as

well as prospective customers," said Donnelly.

That's why Donnelly advises business owners to monitor conversations around their

brand, their products and services and their competitors, using appropriate keywords."For example, a backpacking products company could search for people talking about

backpacking and hiking trips," she said. "Gathering these social conversations [in one

place like your CRM system] enables you to track the volume of conversations aboutyour brand or market over time," and then use that information to better engage and

interact with your customers.

3. Social CRM can help you monitor what customers are saying about yourbrand and your products (for better or worse). "Monitor your product name, your

company name, or just keywords for your industry, and then pull those bits ofinformation into your CRM system," said O'Hara. That will help you get a true sense of
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what customers (potential and existing) are saying about your products, services and

business, so you can adjust or target your marketing and development strategiesaccordingly.

4. Social media can be a wonderful customer service tool especially forcountering negative comments. Monitor those sites where people can leavecomments about your business, products and service, advised O'Hara. That way, if or

when someone has something negative to say, you will know right away and can

respond immediately. Responding online, in a public forum, in a sympathetic andhelpful way "goes a long way to showing that person that you're listening, that you

care and it also shows everyone else who's privy to that conversation that you'rethere and you care and you're taking the time to reach out to someone who had a bad

experience."

5. Social networks are like having a free focus group. When Kent Krueger, chief

dog spoiler at SitStay.com, a maker of "good for your dog supplies," needed help

picking a label for the company's new line of SitStay-branded dog treats, he turned toFacebook. Specifically, he turned to the (then) over 21,000 dog lovers (that numberhas since risen to over 25,000) who "liked" SitStay.com's Facebook page to help him

choose which one to use. Not only did SitStay.com's Facebook fans quickly identify afavorite, they made the label even better by pointing out that "Made in the USA" was

missing, "which is very important to our demographic and dog treats," Krueger said.

6. Social media can build community and lead to new opportunities. "We've run

a Twitter chat for the past couple years (we're actually evolving it shortly into a video

chat), where we invited small business owners to come once a week," said O'Hara."We talk about different issues for small businesses how to use social media, what

virtual collaboration tools people are using, how to manage your finances," and other

topics of interest to small business owners. As a result, there are now more than20,000 people following that Twitter account, and it's been a great way for O'Hara and

BatchBlue to connect with business owners and has even led to several businessopportunities the company might not have found otherwise.

7. Social media can be a great promotion and sales tool. JetBlue set up@JetBlueCheeps on Twitter to promote "great deals on last minute flights every

Tuesday." And the account has amassed over 150,000 followers (who have helped fillup planes). Similarly, many bricks-and-mortar businesses are using Foursquare, a

mobile social tool, to engage their mobile customers, offering them discounts andprizes like a free cup of coffee or a coupon for 10% off their next purchase when they

check in on Foursquare at their store or restaurant or business, which often leads toactual purchases.

8. Social media can help establish you as an expert people want to buy from.

For example, one real estate agent O'Hara worked with set up a Facebook page whereshe posted pictures, videos and information about events in her community, giving

prospective home buyers a real flavor of the community and establishing herself as akind of trusted friend and guide someone who people would want to buy a house

from.
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9. Use Facebook to let customers get to know your business and the people

behind it. Use sites like Flickr and Facebook to post pictures of your products, eitheron their own or being used by customers, fun events sponsored by your business, as

well as employees images that accurately portray your company culture and give

people a true sense of who you are and what you do. People tend to trust and buyfrom companies they feel they know and have a relationship with.

10. Use YouTube to educate your customers. Use video networks like YouTube or

Vimeo to post helpful how-to guides that show your customers how to set up or useyour products, advised O'Hara. This form of outreach and customer education

engenders loyalty and can help you attract a wider audience for your products andservices.

Jennifer Lonoff Schiff is a regular contributor to Internet.com and runs a blog for andabout small businesses.

Follow eCRMguide on Twitter
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July 19, 2010

Who's Hot in Social CRM

By Paul Shread

Gartner has published its first Magic Quadrant for the social CRM (customer

relationship management) market, and the firm's analysis suggests that the fast-growing market has a ways to go to reach maturity.

Gartner said there are more than 100 companies offering social CRM products, yet theanalyst firm ranked only 19 of them, and listed only two Lithium and Jive Software

as leaders. Three firms Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), Mzinga and KickApps were listed as visionaries, and the rest were dubbed niche players.

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) CRM On Demand wound up in the niche category, as did

Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Bazaarvoice, RightNow, Demand Media, Vovici, Radian6,

LiveWorld, Globalpark, Leverage Software, Thomson Reuters-Hubbard One, VisibleTechnologies, InsideView and Overtone.

"Interest has exploded in using social software for marketing and customer servicedepartments, and, to a lesser extent, in sales organizations," wrote Gartner analysts

Adam Sarner, Ed Thompson, Jeffrey Mann, Michael Dunne, Jim Davies, Chris Fletcher,Gene Alvarez and Michael Maoz. "Inquiry volumes on social software for CRM have

spiked well over 50 percent in the last 12 months. The number of social CRM vendorshas expanded rapidly; the market in mid-2010 has just over 100 vendors."

But few of the vendors address the whole social CRM market yet, Gartner said, andmost have annual revenue of less than $1 million and are not profitable. "However,

spending has significantly ramped up since 2008, and a few vendors grew revenue bymore than 100 percent in 2009," the analysts wrote, noting that the rapid growth has

led to a number of mergers and acquisitions.

One reason that the small social CRM space is growing faster than the rest of the CRMmarket is the natural affinity between social media and CRM. Gartner assessed more

than 240 social use cases last year and found that 80 percent of them were related to

improving customer relationships.

Gartner said social CRM vendors tend to start in one of four ways:

Hosting and supporting a branded or private-label community

Monitoring and surveying private-label or independent social networks Facilitating the sharing of common B2B or business-to-consumer (B2C) contacts

through the use of an internal community

Community product reviews to facilitate the online sales process

"Vendors that can assemble the full social CRM suite and make progress in two or

more of these areas will reap the biggest success," the analysts wrote. "Gartnerbelieves that by year-end 2011, these disparate approaches will combine to form social
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CRM suites. Moreover, we expect that by 2014, these functions will be integrated into

traditional big CRM applications from vendors such as SAP, Oracle, salesforce.com,Microsoft, Amdocs, ATG, SAS, IBM and RightNow."

The Gartner report costs $1995 and can be found here.
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July 9, 2010

EMC Moves into Business Analytics with Greenplum Acquisition

By Paul Shread

EMC (NYSE: EMC) has long been dominant in the data storage market; now the

company wants a hand in what companies do with all that data.

EMC this week announced that it will acquire Greenplum, which develops data

warehousing and business analytics technology. Greenplum will form the foundation ofa new "data computing" division within EMC, and will also likely become part of the

company's cloud strategy.

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CRM, Business Intelligence Go to College

In a statement, EMC storage division president Pat Gelsinger said, "The datawarehousing world is about to change. Greenplum's massively-parallel, scale-out

architecture, along with its self-service consumption model, has enabled it to separateitself from the incumbent players and emerge as the leader in this industry shift

toward 'big data' analytics. Greenplum's market-leading technology combined withEMC's virtualized Private Cloud infrastructure provides customers, today, with a best-

of-breed solution for tomorrow's 'big-data' challenges."

Greenplum is built on the open source PostgreSQL database and commodity hardware,

giving the company a pricing edge over competitors. It also developed its ownMapReduce technology after initially looking at Hadoop.

An EMC spokesperson stressed that the company isn't trying to compete with datawarehousing vendors such as Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL).

"Greenplum is a new approach to data warehousing and business analytics that bringstraditional data warehouse approaches along with it," the spokesperson said.

"Customers can integrate existing data warehouses as data sources into a Greenplumenvironment. EMC will also continue to partner with Oracle and others to enhance their

software offerings with storage, security, backup and recovery, etc."

Greenplum uses a "shared-nothing" massively parallel processing (MPP) architecturedesigned for analytical processing using virtualized x86 infrastructure. EMC saidGreenplum is capable of delivering 10 to 100 times the performance of traditional

database software "at a dramatically lower cost." Customers include NASDAQ OMX,NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax, T-Mobile and Fox Interactive Media.
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July 6, 2010

MicroStrategy Makes BI Mobile with iPhone, iPad App

By Paul Shread

MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) today announced the general availability of

MicroStrategy Mobile, a business intelligence (BI) application platform for Apple's(NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone and iPad.

MicroStrategy made the announcement today at its worldwide launch event and userconference in Cannes, France. The company has offered mobile BI support for

Research in Motion's (NASDAQ: RIMM) BlackBerry smartphone since 2007.

The app is aimed at users who need access to BI data anywhere, not just at their

desktops. Smartphones and tablets that include sensor technologies such as GPS,

cameras and multi-touch screens make mobile BI possible, the company said.

MicroStrategy COO Sanju Bansal said in a statement that the app "will allow insight tobe injected into every conversation and decision."

MicroStrategy Mobile lets companies extend graphs, grids, enterprise reports andinformation dashboards to the iPhone and iPad. The new app lets existing

MicroStrategy projects be extended to the iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry, typically withindays. MicroStrategy Mobile applications are assembled in point-and-click fashion and

do not require coding. Reports are portable between platforms, including iPhone, iPad,BlackBerry, Web browsers and Microsoft Office and Windows.

Integration with Google maps allows for easy visualization of geospatial data and rapid

location identification. The platform also takes advantage of a number of iPhone andiPad features such as multi-touch and data exploration features, and information canbe captured through on-device sensors such as a camera or bar code reader.

MicroStrategy also announced a number of customer implementations of the mobile BItechnology.

Alloso Technologies is using MicroStrategy Mobile to provide hotel general managerswith access to real-time information, including budgets, revenue segments, expenses

and links to guest reviews, while a number of other companies are using it to spotsales trends.

To get users started, MicroStrategy is offering a free Mobile Suite that includes 25perpetual named user licenses of MicroStrategy Mobile, development tools, online

training and technical support, available at www.microstrategy.com/freemobileBI.

The MicroStrategy Mobile iPhone app is available on the Apple App store, and includesthree demo data sets, including Restaurant Trends, Casino Management and Retail

Performance Management. It can be found at itunes.apple.com/us/app/microstrategy-

mobile/id376256699?mt=8.
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Ten Ways Social Media