It is a question of visibility. Highly visible people and companies will find Web 2.0 to be an important platform for image building and marketing. For this group attention to CRM will also mean attention to what is going on with Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn and other social sites.

However the vast majority of companies are not in this highly visible group but would like to get there. For these actors in the great commercial game, virtual contacts do not replace real live contacts until they have reached the tipping point. The tipping point is the point at which the company or product becomes “in”. The only way to reach this point is by having enough people recommending your company, product or services and if possible in having socially visible people doing this.

You will not get people to recommend you just be writing blogs like this one or by twittering as much as you can. You will need to create an emotional relationship and not just a link in XING or LinkedIn. Take a look at an organisation such as BNI – this could be your first step in the right direction.

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have generated considerable hype and this seems to have given CRM Product Managers an opportunity to produce new ideas, not without reason.

 Not only the number of users, but also the average amount of time spent per user on social networking sites has climbed substantially in the past year. So it is not surprising that Social CRM is being pushed as one of the top ten technologies for 2010! We have however seen a number of hypes which have not had the expected results, so let’s look at the situation more carefully.

What is Social CRM? Certainly nothing new, since Customer Relationships have always been relationships whether based on person to person contacts, on telephone calls or print media. What we do have is a new set of tools, though unfortunately no-one in the CRM Software industry seems to know how they should be used.

There are two ways of looking at the situation, one from the point of view of a sales organization looking for information on prospects or customers and one from the point of view of the prospects and customers. For B2C sales and marketing, the relevance of social media is self evident, here I am more concerned with B2B.

Sales people will be interested in gathering information on the contacts they know or in finding new contacts. A surprising amount of information is out there to be found in facebook, xing, youtube etc., so it is to be hoped that CRM software will soon offer tools which gather information from these sites more or less automatically. Ideally this information will include any posts relevant to the suppliers products or services.

To quote from Siebel (http://blogs.oracle.com/socialcrm/)

 Sales users are able to get a quick view of activities in their social networks such as recently published content and posting from other members

Prospects and customers will (hopefully) wish to have access to product and other information. Whether or not suppliers provide this information by their web site, in blogs or other social sites is in my opinion not an issue for CRM software. The software should provide however for capturing any access to this information for lead generation.

To quote from Siebel ()

To date, the number of qualified leads coming from social media seems to be low, but this will change as the new media come to be used for more than chat and self-expression.

Social networks as a platform for B2C sales and communication are well established, the drift from print to online marketing demonstrates this clearly. A recent study by Outsell shows that online marketing now accounts for over 30% of the total marketing budget. In facebook and youtube, companies selling to consumers (Coca Cola, BMW or apple for example) are well represented while suppliers of ingredients or parts are hard to find.

B2B customer relations differ from B2C in a number of ways.

• Relations are built to individuals, but these individuals act as members of an organization, not as consumers.
• Decisions to purchase involve a number of individuals, each with their own aims and motivation.
• Requirements may be influenced by personal egos and emotions, but will largely depend on business demands.

This makes the use of social platforms for B2B CRM more of a challenge but is certainly a challenge which cannot be ignored. In the business as in the consumer world, people use the internet as a primary source of information and communication. For CRM applications, new installations tend to build social functionality into the company CRM application.  However, existing public platforms do have a place for some activities at least on the basis that individuals involved in a B2B purchase may base their opinion on consumer information. The following table may help.

This week’s theme is the use of Web 2.0 features for CRM  for B2B sales and marketing. The following topics will be covered.

1. The relevance of twitter, facebook, youtube and other platforms for communication between individuals
2. The relevance of networking platforms such as linkedin and xing
3. The advantages of a forums and discussion groups
4. Guerilla Marketing

Watch this space!