CRM Vendors Continue to Confuse the Social Media Space

I continue to spend time working on our strategy and product offering around social media for the B2B world. Having evolved our business from the CRM space, we keep a close eye on what some of the big dicks are doing and I continue to be profoundly disappointed at what I’m seeing. And whilst it dismays me that I have to mention SFDC twice in the one month, it is necessary as yet again, the propaganda from SFDC has hit the airwaves without anyone being critical of what it all means.

Firstly, this initiative is not ground breaking. I commented on this recently in another blog post and stand by those comments and this additional post.

The article in question goes to great lengths to promote the failings of the social media monitoring tools (even mentioning the thought leaders like Radian6 and Techrigy) creating in my opinion a Benioff-esque tone of “they’re not a CRM so clearly they can’t be any good” as well as promoting a “jump in with jack boots” approach to interacting with the community

Example #1

After all, monitoring a conversation is one thing, but responding to it is another entirely — the domain of CRM, something Salesforce knows better than almost anyone else.

Monitoring or listening is one of the most fundamental activities of any company wanting to harness the power of the groundswell (with due credit to Li and Bernoff).

SFDC’s strategy seems to not so much put them on a collision course with the community monitoring start ups but puts you the customer on a collision course with your own community. I can’t help but feel SFDC are rushing into this space with grand plans about how you can use their platform to “respond” to social media activity yet they haven’t given a second of time to understanding the strategy that MUST reside behind the use of web 2.0 tools.

These “monitoring tools” deliver far more value than they are given credit for. Tools like Radian6 and Techrigy have a rich set of features that if used properly will allow a company to quickly and easily tap into the true feeling of the community. And it’s not just the “I’m interesting” bit that you should be tracking. Why not use these tools to keep an ear to what the community is saying about your strategic customers. Can you imagine going to one of your major customers with a solution to a problem that you unearthed via Radian6 when they probably don’t even know the problem exists? How can you use this information to deliver innovation to a major customer? I’m sorry but SFDC isn’t going to do that for you…

Example #2

But monitoring thousands of conversations across Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and blog comments is only part of the challenge. You still have to respond to them.

Absolute rubbish. If anyone goes into this thinking they need to respond to every piece of social noise about their company or products then they will fail quickly (and spectacularly).

This is what you’ll be doing if you follow what the author and SFDC are suggesting:

Due credit to Marta Zagan

Let me repeat something else Marta Zagan suggests – “The goal is not to control the conversation”.

In simple terms, the goal of using social network analytics is to watch, listen, and share some information with your community.

Don’t ever think you can skip the listen bit. And without tools like Radian6 or Techrigy you won’t be listening properly. Brian Solis (Social Media Manifesto) commented – “It’s about conversations, and the best communicators start as the best listeners”. Think about that for a minute. Isn’t this suggesting we step back and listen, then contribute? Not jump in boots and all with a human-being charged with responding and controlling?

Don’t go jumping in thinking you can communicate. You will need humans involved, but more importantly you need to have everyone understanding what the strategy is and what effort and commitment is required. Because this social media stuff isn’t easy. Get your VP of Sales in and let them see the data, let the Exec’s see what people are saying, in fact, make it a priority to have non-sales and marketing people looking at some of this information so that you can gain insights into the information.

CRM will have a role to play in how you engage with your communities, but it can’t be the driving force behind this. You must have everyone understanding how you as a company will harness these tools to deliver a dialogue and engagement. And you must also confront the problem of whether you even want this data in the CRM in the first place.

And just so you know, there are some CRM vendors doing some far more interesting work in this space than SFDC. RightNow is really ahead of the curve when it comes to customer experience management and SugarCRM are miles ahead in terms of how they are harnessing the power of open source with these great new web 2.0 tools.

Gorilla in their midst – hardly…

Your comments are welcome as always