The way we use and develop social channels is key to its success. If we just focus on the no of fans and followers and not the quality of dialogue our social media efforts will fail. I have now seen enough abandoned facebook pages to know how easily efforts can flag and staff slip away if they are not supported or trained to have quality conversations and focus on really understanding who they are communicating with. If your business is just focused on “fans” then stop and think through how “social” your aims really are.

Are you just involved in “Social” because everyone else is or is it because you can see how it can help you to get much closer to your customers? Do you use it to better understand your customer preferences, niggles, wish lists and other things that build insight and help you to meet their unmet needs. My view is that we are drawing close to the meeting of Social and real time Customer Relationship Management (CRM). At this interface are a myriad of issues, competing channels and egos who all think their channel has the best plan so should get the biggest chunk of budget. I’d love to hear how amicably ecommerce and social teams are working together when they are operating separate budgets.

The key to lasting success is making sure that the culture of your company is “Social”. This means more than the occasional outing to the pub but that you trust your staff enough and have given them enough freedom to resist using facebook to keep up with their friends whilst at work but have given them enough scope to use social media to draw in the support of friends if they are battling with a work issue and need some help or advice or information. Tonight I was lucky enough to have a friend who sent me a great link to help me with a client project completely unprompted as they knew what I would really appreciate – I then went on to tweet the link to my Twitter followers as I realised that it could really benefit them too.

So what does building a “social” organisation mean when we sit in front of a PC or staring at a tiny smartphone screen? Firstly it means ensuring that everyone in your organisation can have an online conversation and share information seamlessly across the company and I don’t mean just having email. I mean sharing documents and working on them collaboratively using for example the myriad of social tools such as Google Docs and other free web platforms. It means if you are a large organisation having a way you can recognise every staff member personally in your organisation and know a bit about them. If your company intranet is ridiculed by staff then you know you have a tough challenge ahead.

Being social means knowing your customer preferences and their history when they contact you and having one view of their relationship with your organisation. Unlike most banks where you have to go through security for the upteenth time for each different type of request because you the customer has to be passed from one department to the next. Brands and our reputation will be shaped not by what we say but what our customers say about the quality of their relationship with our organisation at every touch point. Does it all add up for your business? Are you listening to customers as they share their insights? Are you sharing these seamlessly with the people that can put things right and are they ready to listen and act? Make sure you have a good sponsor when the brown stuff hits the fan and the housekeeping or stroppy invoicing clerk yells “What’s this got to do with me – Social Media- that’s a marketing thing isn’t it?”

OK so why does being “Social” really matter? Some of you may have read about the recent launch of Facebook Groups and the tie up between Bing and Facebook which means that even “Search” is about to turn “Social” which means that with about 2 million websites already using social sign ins where you can “like” or “join” the site, “likes” from your network and website are going to start appearing in your company and brand search results. Imagine how much more powerful that will be for companies wanting to stand out from the crowd if your friends have a good word to say about them when searching online. If you’ve ever done a search for a company in Facebook recently you will notice the Bing search results coming up at the bottom of your search results. Give it a try and you can see where all this is heading – it will start to build momentum after the recent Fast Company initiative to find the most influential person on the internet. My prediction is for Facebook Groups to flourish over the next few months and blossom into powerful buying communities.

Next week I’d like to share some learning on social media metrics and what to measure and why? What do you want to hear about?

I read with interest the story in Mashable¹ today on Virgin America’s offer to encourage families to send in their Awkward Family Photos in partnership with this US blog site. What struck me first about the story is that brands are waking up to the power of blogging communities. The beauty of these niche communities is that they may have already hosted several discussions about your brand if they have your target demographic. This promotion creates a fun way to interact with this community and is a great example of finding a community that has a close fit with the fun values of the Virgin brand.

The difficult part is how you target these communities and start to engage with them. Without a monitoring tool it will be difficult to target them and the work requires one to one conversations rather than any broadcast messages which many marketers are not yet accustomed to. There are however a growing raft of players enabling advertisers to market within these communities and Facebook and others will be challenged by them over the next few years as communities of interest flourish and we become more prolific bloggers.

You may argue that these communities are unlikely to want to be sold to but if you have a smart engagement strategy and think of them as corporate clients that need some careful account management then you are likely to be on the right track and early trials I’ve seen have already pointed to success in reaching into online communities. This brings me to the topic of “Social CRM” and what does this really mean? I decided to tap this term into Google and came across an interesting Facebook community on Social CRM with a great article from Jeff Bulla on the 40 top tips on how to be a Social Media Rockstar² . The article had already been retweeted 226 times which is a good indicator of a good read and helps his site to move up the search engine rankings. He has also learnt the importance of using Twittercounter stats on his website to keep his visitors up to speed on his 41,000+ Twitter followers.

Amongst Jeff Bulla’s blogs³ there was another interesting story about a ski company Vail Resorts that had decided to ditch 80% of their print marketing budget and reinvest it in social media as they realised that video was a more powerful tool to engage their target customers. Their customer booking period had collapsed from 6 months to 2-3 weeks and they now work on a week by week messaging calendar. This is a sign of things to come as we have to tweak our campaigns to the rapid market changes around us.

So what does all that have to do with Social CRM you may ask? Well for those brands running Facebook pages their "Insights" stats package is giving them a richer seam of information on their fans (age, sex, demographics) and enabling them to track the engagement impact of each posting that they make. They are also able to look at how each wave of customers invited into Facebook by email is responding and quickly understand who their advocates are.

There is often an initial fear from brands that they must control their Facebook presence by having customers land on the wall with only their official posts but this then does not encourage participation from other fans if they cannot immediately see other fans participating and not all Facebook users are aware that they can click on different views of the wall.

The ultimate end goal is to enable your customer champions to become your admin users so they can help to respond to posts. For some Marketing Directors this is seen as a step too far. Levels of trust are still low in social media even though the days of the broadcast only marketing model are drawing to a close. Social CRM is here to stay and there are already brands working with Social Sign Ins to their websites. OK that topic will have to come in a future blog. Watch this space….

¹ http://mashable.com/2010/09/29/virgin-america-orlando-promotion/

² http://www.jeffbullas.com/2010/09/28/40-tips-on-how-to-be-a-social-media-superstar/

³ http://feeds.feedburner.com/JeffbullassBlog