Changing dynamics and a bright outlook.

Key excerpt...

These tools help sellers and marketers capitalize on social networks in a number of ways that boost their results, enabling them to:

• Listen to what customers are saying to discover trends and influencers
• Engage with stakeholders by participating in meaningful conversations
• Collaborate by connecting with colleagues across the enterprise and around the world quickly and easily, benefiting from the collective knowledge of your company
• Amplify product messages by stimulating conversations about them in social networks
• Take action on ideas, recommendations, and opportunities generated by customers in social networks
• Obtain real-time feedback and monitor hot topics to act promptly on concerns or measure the impact of marketing actions

Companies want to measure ideal customer profiles and lead behavior.

Excerpt...

New solutions are emerging to help companies harness the power of social identity data to add context and color to customer account records in order to improve lead generation efforts by marketing, and ultimately, shape follow-up actions made by salespeople.

"Social media gives you a whole new dimension on leads," says Amnon Mishor, cofounder and vice president of products of Leadspace, makers of a SaaS B2B social lead targeting solution. "You can understand the true story about who this person is, what [his] role is in an organization, and what [he's] interested in."

Similarly, at company scale, sales and marketing can begin to evaluate the interests of employees at an organization, the products and technologies that are already implemented, and whether or not there are pre-existing social media connections to the company.

Below are a summary of five tips to help guide your brand to sCRM success:

1. Obtain internal buy-in. Champion the benefits of sCRM—real-time customer insights, rapid response, the ability to identify segments and increased engagement and loyalty—internally. Find experts within your organization who are passionate about CRM to help you obtain buy-in from other key players.
2. Think strategy. Social CRM is a strategy, not a technology or a process. It's important to understand your audience and the social landscape to determine where you should invest and focus your efforts.
3. One size does not fit all. Social CRM cannot be looked at in a silo and it is not a silver bullet. Understand the role social media plays within the overall customer experience and ecosystem.
4. Social CRM is not just social. Social media cannot support a brand on its own. Integration is key to providing customized customer experiences. Social media, search, and email are closely related and should be leveraged in a complementary fashion. Social media, for instance, can help optimize search programs by using keywords, SEO, and link building and help identify questions being asked about your brand or product. Search can bolster social media by determining what questions are top of mind for your consumers, and can help drive traffic and new customers to social media platforms. Email can drive social media metrics by increasing traffic and fan count and encouraging sharing outside of the social ecosystem. In return, social can aid email metrics by furthering customer engagement, identifying hot topics or content themes for email messaging, amplifying conversations, and boosting acquisition and retention efforts.
5. The power of segmentation. Take inventory of your data and create social profiles to help drive your communications. Social data matched with your online and offline data can help you create profiles.