My colleague Peter Kim recently wrote about visualizing the Social CRM ecosystem - pointing out it’s the part of social business design that starts with customers. My colleague Dion Hinchcliffe has also written extensively on the idea of social CRM.
While much of the discussion around sCRM correctly begins with a focus on customers, there’s an opportunity to use social tools to focus on consumers. The distinction being that customers already pay your brand for a product, whereas consumers have yet to make a purchase. Put simply, consumers make up your pool of prospects.
But not all consumers are your prospects. So why do so many social media programs treat them as such? Why is the focus for many still on building the highest aggregate number of fans or followers or viewers and then attempting to appeal to all of them with the same content? You’ve probably been followed or friended at least once by a company you’ve never heard of, in a region you’ll never visit, in a category that you don’t shop in (this seafood restaurant in Georgia comes to mind for me). How does that relationship benefit the brand beyond boosting an arbitrary number?
Social nurturing is that idea that at the very beginning of a social CRM program sits the strategy for attracting the right prospects to your brand – and then nurturing them into customers through targeted social communications.
Companies should start implementing a social nurturing program to segment their social networks, identify potential customers, and create a strategy for interacting with the most highly desirable members of their community. In other words, they must actively seek out, engage with, and influence their actual prospects. Social nurturing can even help your efforts scale, since you’ll be focusing on a smaller – but more valuable – group of consumers.
Some simple ways that your brand can immediately start using social nurturing to increase the strength of your social networks:
- Actively spend more time interacting with consumers who have identified themselves as enthusiasts or influencers in your brands’ product category. If you can only respond to a limited amount of comments, engage with the consumers who matter the most to you and who are most likely to actually convert to customers.
- Use your already segmented email lists to search for your consumers who are active on the same sites that you are – then seek them out and engage them.
- Balance the content on your social site based on who you want your followers to be, not necessarily on who they are right now. If your product is geared towards 18-24 year old males, are you spending most of your time talking about topics that interest 18-24 year old males?
- Create an account that is geared towards specific consumers (i.e., regional, age group, etc) and invite them to join you there – similar to how Dell has approached Twitter. Yes, your follower count will be lower, but ask yourself what’s more valuable: 1,000,000 people who “like” your brand, or 100,000 true fans in your target segment who are actually interested in your content?
If you still need convincing, just think about Old Spice’s much heralded recent social campaign. They chose who to interact with based on the potential value of their fans – influencers, celebrities, and those whose responses would gather the most attention. Why should your day-to-day social campaigns be any different?
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Properly implementing social nurturing will take a coordinated effort between several departments and is dependent on committing resources to social media and social CRM for the long haul. What is your company doing right now to make sure it is attracting, keeping, and nurturing the right – not more – consumers?
Tom:
Thanks for tackling this subject. I would agree with you that “highest aggregate numbers” can be misleading. And interaction followed by engagement is necessary. But what does the engagement seek to accomplish? Amber Naslund has blogged [http://www.brasstackthinking.com/2010/05/all-social-media-roads-lead-to-rome/ ] about “reassurance points…non-commercial touchpoints” that create a situation such that the “eventual monetary transaction feels like a natural culmination and even a desirable one.” Is that what social nurturing could be?
And if indeed there are eventual moves to a “transaction,” who will shepherd the relationship from initial nurturer to business relationship manager? Or might they be the same person, moving from a more “public” sCRM world to a more traditional one-to-one situation, as conditions dictate?
Hi Bruce,
Thanks for the comments!
That’s a great post you linked to, and definitely along my same lines of thinking. The “webs of non-commercial touchpoints” are part of that nurturing along the way. You’re not saying “buy this, buy this”, but the eventual goal of the interactions is to increase the chances of that exact thing happening. It’s not interaction for interaction’s sake. But figuring out the right people to interact with along the way can increase your chances of an eventual sales.
As for who should shepherd the relationship, I think the answer is, “it depends”. If we’re talking a B2B company, the new business reps or account managers should be involved. But if we’re talking about a B2C firm, the responsibility could fall onto the market research and marketing departments until the consumer ends up in the store to make a purchase. There are also several other factors at play, including the size of the organization, the market segment, and who currently is in charge of these functions.
Tom: thanks for a thought-provoking post. These ideas certainly could fit into a broader strategy fairly easily, provided there at least is coordination between sales, marketing and public relations. The measurement aspects, too, fit in well — I love the “what’s more valuable: 1,000,000 people who “like” your brand, or 100,000 true fans in your target segment who are actually interested in your content?” — it’s the heart of seeking accuracy in measurement over merely large numbers.
You could compare the cost of acquisition of those 100,000 true fans through social media to other means of acquisition, back out your costs and arrive at one measure of value. Then look at revenue per true fan to deepen the comparison.
Well done.
Sean
@commammo
p.s., after reading Amber’s piece (http://bit.ly/9tyCQF) I got inspired and wrote one of my own on one aspect of her post… http://bit.ly/commammo26.
Hi Sean,
Thanks for the reply! You’re absolutely right that this fits into the broader strategy. The question is: how easily? We’ve already seen enterprise-wide coordination between sales, marketing, and PR to be more difficult than people first imagine, especially when it comes to “social” ideas (my colleague Kate Rush-Sheehy talked about it yesterday: http://www.dachisgroup.com/2010/07/thinking-beyond-the-usual-suspects/). It only gets more difficult when you have to bring in IT or whoever controls your current CRM database. It makes perfect sense to do it though!
I love the idea of taking it the next step further too. The more data you have, the better you can start comparing data, and the more you can start assigning value to your efforts.
Heading over to check out your post now