Social CRM and Automated Relationship Building

I have just been reading @scorpfromhell’s blog ‘Is Social CRM about automated relationship building?’ with great interest.

The whole article reflects the authors horror that marketing departments are looking at ways of mining the social web to find better ways of targetting push marketing. Sending coupons to people who say they don’t like stuff and thanking people who say they do for example.

The author rightly claims that there are dangers of Social CRM becoming a set of tools for stalking. Checking out people’s needs and then just bombarding them with offers. I certainly agree with @scorpfromhell’s views.   This is a very old fashioned mix of methods which are guaranteed to annoy the hell out of pretty much everybody. I have included the clip below from the article as it illustrates some points I will make.

PeopleBrowsr's Campaign Builder for Twitter.

If I happen to post on the web that I am not overly keen on Product X, the last thing I want is a bunch of money off vouchers for even more Product X. I might be prepared to accept a single request for a reason why I don’t like the product of course. But that would depend on my reason for not being happy. This strikes me as similar in some ways to the attempts by outsourced service providers offering service credits for service failure. My question has always been, ‘Why on earth would I want even more of what doesn’t do the job for me?’ Now let’s follow my example using the example I have lifted shamelessly from @scorpfromhell’s article. Suppose I receive my tweet from the product company offering me vouchers. I then tweet again that I really would rather not get any vouchers as I REALLY HATE PRODUCT X, well unless there is some clever monitoring, the key words ‘HATE’ and ‘PRODUCT X’ pop up again against me and I get another message offering me…more vouchers. So, because I am getting a little annoyed I post again with a little more venom…I think you see the chain before I reach biblical levels of wrath and righteous fury. This technology certainly has its place but I guess we need more information before it becomes truly useful. Automating this stuff is riddled with pitfalls.

Social CRM is, as a set of technologies, pretty new to the world. As I have said in previous blogs though, there is nothing really new about the concepts. Solid listening, understanding, maintaining currency and being interactive are all as valid as they ever were.

What we do have now, however is the ability to mine social media for the reason people buy stuff. The need, the compelling event, call it what you will.

Perhaps we need to turn a little of what is being said by those marketers who hunt and push into greater analysis of who is actually asking for things that you can provide; need based selling and Social CRM are built for each other.  Automating relationship building is a tricky step.  Automating the process of knowing who your contacts are, knowing your data is up-to-date because people maintain their own profiles and using the social web to populate real sales leads in your Social CRM capability are all here today.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::