The Social CRM panel at Social Media Week London: a roundup

As someone with a personal interest in CRM (I grew up, career wise, in the world of database and direct marketing and used to lecture on it for a while) I was really looking forward to this panel session at Social Media Week.

Traditional CRM vs Social CRM

Old CRM was pretty much (though not always) a one way process. You captured customer data, profiled your customers, targeted more of the same types and started to talk to them, developing and learning what offers/messages/creative worked best. ‘To them’ being the operative phrase, because ‘with them’ would involve technology (and sociological/consumer) behaviour that wasn’t actually around at the time.

If CRM isn’t your main thing, you can gen up with a definition on Wikipedia – interestingly, there isn’t one for SCRM, as pointed out by @willmcinnes, one of the panel at the event.

Out with the old, in with the new

With the advent of ‘Web 2.0’, social media, people to people Q & A/review sites and the post-Groundswell, consumer-centric world, things have changed, so I was looking forward to hearing views from agency and client practitioners heavily involved in this area about what’s working and what’s still developing right now.

It was a really good panel. Like the fully booked room itself, it was a mix of client, agency and technology platform folk, giving us a nice mix of broad insights, strategic watch-outs and advice. As well as some nitty-gritty examples and stats of what works when you use the broad choice of social tools and channels to interact, with integrity, with consumers.

The Social CRM panel

Vikki Chowney from Reputation Online did a great job chairing and set the tone for a relaxed but in-depth debate. The panel itself was informative and straight-talking about where they thought we are at with SCRM. Will McInnes discussed how he sees us at just the start of the Gartner Hype Cycle, i.e. lots of excitement and buzz about what ‘Social’ plus CRM could mean inside and outside the organisation, but plenty of scope for wider adoption and understanding.

The other panellists were Eliza St.John, Online Marketing Manager for The Body Shop, Mark Squires, Director Communications & Media Relations at Nokia and Claire Kavanagh, CRM Manager for giffgaff.

Some Social CRM nuggets…

The panel all had great insight and you can now watch a video of the whole Social CRM panel event at Livestream, for in-depth coverage.

In the meantime here’s a little taster of the event, with some nuggets I captured (in no particular order):

> Whilst everyone aspires to interact with customers across the channel/s of the customers’ choosing, the issue of single customer identity aggregation across multiple channels remains. In simple terms: how do brands identify and talk to one customer across Facebook, twitter, the blogosphere and so on, when that individual’s identity may vary from platform to platform, channel to channel? It’s a challenge!

> Claire explained how giffgaff nurtured a prospect who had tweeted once about them and with good service and a genuine dialogue ‘grew’ them to an advocate. Because they had a good SCRM framework in place, they were able to capitalise on what could just be a one-off interaction otherwise.

> Eliza St.John provided a solid statistic that Body Shop customers who read a peer product review will go on to purchase 40% more online.

> Mark from Nokia explained that different types of customers congregate in different social spaces, some prefer Facebook (although they have a repertoire of channels/platforms they use) some prefer communications via email or via commenting on the Nokia blog etc. The point being that you, the brand, should cater for how customers / prospects want to interact, not base it on the channels you think are ‘strongest’ or are best for you. You may have put a lot of time and effort into your Facebook page – but don’t ignore those people who prefer email as a channel for updates and interactions, or vice versa.

The panellists hinted at what SCRM could be but, as the Wikipedia exercise shows, pinning down exactly what it is now it is still proving hard to agree on. I’m watching this space with interest and it’s events like this that provide tangible insights and successes that are really welcome.