Customer Relationship Management; CRM

Social Crm Is Growing Up Fast

Is Your Community of Customers Sustainable?

Sustainability is the up-and-coming issue for business, and CRM is no exception. When people think about sustainability, many of them think about some form of conservation -- maybe something "green" -- and that's not a bad place to start. The software that everyone uses to manage sustainable business processes looks a lot like conventional CRM but there are important differences. Vendors have performed many experiments over the last few years with tactical additions to their suites that inclu...

Postcards From the Edge

It's become an article of faith that online social communities have the ability to improve the relationship between consumer and company, so the author's thesis for today may border on the heretical. Here goes: Not all companies really need to engage with their customers via social networks or online communities, even if those companies could demonstrably benefit from such engagement. To illustrate his point (and to ground it in the real world of commerce), he'll offer up the obligatory perso...

5 More Community-Prep Steps

In this article, five preparatory steps in launching your customer community are presented. They are: 1. Write and post official guidelines. 2. Think beyond warn and swearing. 3. Encourage members to help each other, but respectfully correct bad advice. 4. Respond to suggestions and questions even if you can't give the members what they want. 5. Enforce these policies consistently.

What Is Going On Down There?

In a survey conducted in August 2009 by Kimberly-Clark (K-C), the maker of Kotex feminine-hygiene products, 70% of the more than 1,600 female respondents said they believe ifs time for a change in how society talks about vaginal-health issues, according to Aida Flick, K-C's director of feminine-care marketing. The result is K-C's "U By Kotex" marketing campaign, launched March 15 and profiled that day in a New York Times article titled "Rebelling Against the Commonly Evasive Feminine Care Ad....

Crashing the Community

Organizations see an average value of approximately $3.60 for each fan they have on Facebook. Community-based damage to your brand's reputation will make retaining the fans in that community quite costly. Manufacturing giant Nestle may have learned that lesson in the wake of an episode on its branded Facebook fan page in March. The kerfuffle began when a Nestle "fan" used a pejoratively modified version of the brand's logo as her Facebook photo, and others did likewise. Nestle's Facebook comm...

Facing Off with Social Media

Hockey often gets the cold shoulder when it comes to generating heat among fans. A 2008 Harris Interactive Poll shows that only 5% of respondents list hockey as their favorite sport, but that's a three-percentage-point increase over the past 25 years -- a triumph compared to Major League Baseball's seven-point slide during that time period, and pro basketball's seven-point drop during just the last 10 years. Like any business, the National Hockey League is utilizing social media to connect wi...

Measuring Your Social Marketing

In an interview, Jim Sterne, author of Social Media Metrics, talked about the value -- and common misconceptions -- of social media marketing. According to Sterne, social media is a group of technologies that people have embraced in an enormous way very quickly because it makes communication easier. The misconception is that it's a single form of communication that solves a single problem when actually it's a whole new way to communicate. He said that social media is an addition to customers ...

Crafting a Community

Although forums and message boards have populated the Web since the mid-1990s, enterprise use of organized communities is more nascent. Matthew Lees, a consultant and VP at the Patricia Seybold Group, studies communities and likens their evolution to that of the Web. At the start of the dot-com boom, Lees says, it was the technology people in companies who dabbled with HTML and put up then-static sites. They may have had permission from corporate, but until companies began seeing the business...

Marketing to a Community

As more consumers connect to the social Web -- and as their connections deepen and their interconnections multiply -- they grow more powerful. A company pushing weak merchandise is far less likely to be able to hide behind catchy advertising and attractive packaging. According to research conducted by the industry trade group Word of Mouth Marketing Association, the average consumer mentions specific brands more than 90 times per week in conversations with friends, family, and coworkers. Bran...

Employing a Community

An excerpt from the new book How Zappos.com Became a Billion-Dollar Company -- by Delivering Happiness, by CEO Tony Hsieh, is presented.

Learn Before You Leap

Leapfrog, a provider of children's educational toys and games, is no stranger to the online space. In fact, Jaeme Laczkowski, the company's senior community relations manager, says LeapFrog has spent years developing online communities, engaging in social media, and embracing bloggers to foster its brand. With 30,000 fans on Facebook, another 4,600 on Twitter, and a vibrant blog and discussion forum powered by Lithium Technologies, LeapFrog has puddle-jumped ahead of most other toy companies....

A Community in Crisis

With a database of more than 23 million records compiled from more than 1,200 federal, state, local, tribal, and proprietary databases, Environmental Data Resources (EDR) is the world's largest repository of environmental information. After watching its business fall off by a precipitous 70%, the company decided to increase its focus on superior customer service and on ensuring that its information was the most-accurate and up-to-date available. In June of 2009, as part of its initiative, EDR...

Wax On, Wax Off

In an interview, Marc Okicich, former director of marketing for Turtle Wax, talked about his company. According to Okicich, Turtle Wax is a globally recognized brand of car-care products, based just outside of Chicago. To get instant customer feedback, he talked to a number of different companies and then found Communispace, a provider of private communities serving the needs of market research. He said they wanted input from consumers and the retailers they sell their products to, and set a ...

Analyzing the Workforce

The year 2009 was a surprisingly good one for the workforce optimization (WFO) market, which includes quality management and liability recording. The WFO market continues to deliver compelling solutions and results, despite tough economic times. The winning formula for 2009 was a combination of low prices and a high level of responsiveness to customers' needs. The primary theme for contact center innovation in 2009 was analytics; this trend will gain momentum during 2010. The WFO vendors have...

Pint of View

Spring's about to breathe its last for 2010, and school's out for summer (cue Alice Cooper). It puts the author in mind of his youth as the calendar crept slowly toward vacation each year. Kids today have smartphones, computers, and more social networking options than the author can easily count. Communities and social networks are driven by those who choose to be active in them, whether people are talking about traditional or technology-enabled versions. Most of them are lazy leeches, and ev...