Technology tools that support your social CRM strategy

Last week, I blogged my thoughts on definitions of CRM, social media, and social CRM and the impact that social CRM may have in your organization, and today I want to introduce some of the leading technology vendors in this space. If you do research on social CRM, you will most likely find a dozen different definitions and models that have been laid out. Many of these are being defined and brought to market by technology vendors. While these vendors play a significant role in supporting your social media needs, we must be cautious when allowing the technology to define our strategy.

I defined social CRM as the blend of identifying and capturing the social conversations that are occurring around your brand, led by consumers, and converting these conversations into an experience with your company. These experiences then become relationships in your organization in which either support is provided or additional revenue transactions are nurtured.

It is your social strategy supported by tools which will enable you to monitor the market and react as necessary to the needs of your buying community. So what can you expect to look for when researching social media tools?

vendors are getting into the game by tightly building integrations into social media feeds such as Twitter and LinkedIn. Salesforce has gone to a new level this year by introducing Salesforce Chatter.  Chatter is a new way to collaborate with people at work. Like Facebook, you keep up to date with status of colleagues, but also have status feeds of important projects and deals automatically pushed to you.  Chatter is a secure way to collaborate, gaining insights that allow you to make smarter decisions.

are the locations where social conversations are occurring. Vendors such as Lithium Technologies offer a Social CRM Suite including features such as Community Applications, Reputation Engine, Actionable Analytics, CRM Connectivity, and Social Web Connectivity. Their reputation engine claims to be able to identify the Superuser, the 1% representing your strongest brand advocates, which will drive 40-50% of your user-generated content.

is one of the most important areas of Social CRM. It is much more than listening however, having the ability to listen, distill and create the insights on what business action to take next is the true identity of a strong brand monitoring strategy.  Radian 6 offers brand monitoring tools that allow tools to discuss (Conversation Sidebar), triage, and manage disparate conversations.

The final social tool category I am going to highlight is around

t. Having the ability to manage multiple user accounts to create content and respond to conversations specific to your brand is a critical item in your social strategy. CoTweet offers a variety of features that allow teams to monitor, manage, and triage conversations in Twitter, see features page. CoTweet was recently acquired by ExactTarget, an email provider, proving that the convergence of CRM, social media and email is happening at a quick pace.