Social CRM Article for the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management Magazine

Effective online networking requires you to do more than simply
collect contacts.  In this article in the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management’s Winning Edge magazine, I give my views on its true potential.

Visit the ISMM’s website here.

We welcome your comments on the article below.

Corporate Attitudes to Social Media

This morning I happened on a great set of survey results from Mack Collier who shows that whilst a lot of companies recognise that there are huge benefits to be had by using social media for marketing that they are pretty unsure how to go about it.

Selling Socially – why make it so hard!

I have just read a blog written by Brian Vellmure called The 5 Stages of Customer Acquisition for the Social Business (Part I)

As I read I found that I really had to comment.

Twitter – Social or Business?

A set of conversations happened this morning that prompted me to ask this question. I was online participating in Nick Tadd’s (@nicktadd) Twitter show, #thentshow. A great format where people pop in and undertake a Q&A session with a variety of social media people. this morning it was Steven Healey (@stevenhealey) answering the questions.

PRESS RELEASE: Free Social CRM launches to help SMEs win more business from social networking

WeCanDo.BIZ Limited, the online sales leads and business referrals network, has launched a Social CRM addition to its established website to assist small business owners to turn their social networking contacts into customers. Called WeCanDoCRM, the service is free to all businesses

Sales Leads from Twitter Straight to Social CRM

I don’t often get this excited but it has been a very exciting day so far!

Today we launched the Live public BETA of our Twitter Sales Leads toolset within WeCanDo.Biz. The buzz that this seems to have created had far exceeded our expectations which is fantastic.

What has really excited me though are the sheer number of people using the tool in its BETA form and writing some wonderful things about it:

“Just checked it out and i have to say its brilliant, you simply add keywords and it lists all twitter posts that are related to or contain your chosen keywords” (G. Lasagne, UK Business Forums)

“Software that does this for me will be a huge from me” (Adventurelife, UK Business Forums)

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.

Corporate Resistance to Social CRM

So, imagine you are a sales manager. You walk into your office and you find all of your team ‘messing about’ with social networking sites. What would your reaction be? I have managed sales teams and managed sales managers and I guess that my historic reaction would have been pretty much unprintable.

I know why too. Social networking has very much been seen as, well, social. Not very business-like. A bit matey.

The world is changing and changing rapidly but are opinions at the coal-face of the business world also changing?

Social Networking – Do Numbers Matter?

So is social networking a numbers game? I suppose it depends entirely on what you want to achieve. I have never been one for measuring success by how many people hang on my every word. In fact, I would be a little worried if the rest of humanity had little better to do than listen to me.