The Semacraft Blog

Speaking at a conference in Switzerland in September of 2000, Doc Searls commented that “The most important market place in the history of civilization is designed to value the man on the street. The individual human being.” See the speech here.

In our approach to Social CRM, are we thinking of customers as individual human beings. Are we showing them how much we value them or are we using social technology to treat them like targets? It may be important to determine this early because whilst talking to human beings is normal, talking to targets is just plain weird.

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Customers are having authentic and meaningful conversations with each other, in spite of the ambient noise and the ever increasing signal to noise ratio. Staff are having authentic and meaningful conversations with each other too via the intranet, instant messaging and post-it notes. Customers are staff and staff are customers. The wall that separated them is subverted by the click of the mouse.

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Listening and engagement. Very common terms in the ‘sociosphere’. We may have gotten listening right for the most part but engagement still has a ways to go. Unlike listening, real engagement seems to mean different things to different people making measurement all that more difficult. And probably futile. I do stand to be corrected on that though.

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Apparently, not many brands are. I have long argued (ok, maybe only for a year or so) that brands that have a presence in the social media space aren’t necessarily social. Many of them just use social tools to do marketing or PR the same old way.

This article confirms (at least in the UK) my non-scientific research. Setting out to ‘do’ social is not authentic. We have to set out to BE social. Not responding to someone who is obviously talking to you is just plain rude but apparently that hasn’t stopped 43% of the top brands from ignoring tweets completely.

Have a look at this post, very insightful.

Makes me wonder whether brands that aren’t social in social spaces have the cultural capacity within them to deploy Social CRM technology. What do you think?

PS. #scrmpioneer is a great place to join a conversation around Social CRM.

Social CRM is a fairly new concept. I love Paul Greenberg’s definition of it because it allows me to evaluate vendor offerings. He says (tweetable version) that it’s “a company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation”.

Any CRM system that still attempts to put customer data in a silo and generate a company-side-only view of the data is obviously a traditional CRM. Read the rest of this entry »