Social Networking and CRM Make Poor Bedfellows
Social networking is the new black.
It's huge, and it's not too surprising that it has already been exploited by commercial interests.
This is a shame.
It seems that every time someone comes up with a new site to "make friends and chat" it gets taken over by commercial interests keen on finding a new way to make a buck.
A whole new raft of "Social Networking Marketing Consultants" has sprung up like the little fleas on the bigger fleas to help businesses sell more though this medium, whilst at the same time developing their own careers.
There is no doubt that a great deal of business will be done through this route.
At its simplest level the premise is that customers will make buying decisions based on recommendations offered by the social networking community.
The idea is that a "personal" recommendation is more persuasive than the conventional sources of information from advertising and promotions alone.
This new fad has not escaped the providers of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software who are now rushing to see how they can integrate the social networking sites into their business sales and marketing software.
Can I be the only person on the planet who sees this as a largely pointless exercise in the Business to Business world? If I look at my own customer database less than 5% of the contacts are Jo Public, the rest are Businesses.
The reality is that I can now go to a named contact in my database and have it automatically pull related information from social networking and other web sites.
Now updating my contact records with qualified, meaningful data such as stock market price, business news, or such-like can undoubtedly add value, but linking social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter is unlikely to bring much to the table.
I may be fascinated to know that Tania of Manchester is having cornflakes for breakfast, or that Stephen Fry is currently walking through Horse Guards Parade (he actually is, apparently) but unless I'm planning to sell Tania cornflakes or Stephen Fry an A-Z map of London the information is of no value to my business and frankly I want it nowhere near by carefully developed and lovingly maintained CRM database.
Let's face it, most of what is written on social networking sites is banal twaddle.
I'm sure there is money to be made out of exploiting the social networking sites, but for those of us in the B2B environment they are of little more than a distraction to the real work in hand.
It's huge, and it's not too surprising that it has already been exploited by commercial interests.
This is a shame.
It seems that every time someone comes up with a new site to "make friends and chat" it gets taken over by commercial interests keen on finding a new way to make a buck.
A whole new raft of "Social Networking Marketing Consultants" has sprung up like the little fleas on the bigger fleas to help businesses sell more though this medium, whilst at the same time developing their own careers.
There is no doubt that a great deal of business will be done through this route.
At its simplest level the premise is that customers will make buying decisions based on recommendations offered by the social networking community.
The idea is that a "personal" recommendation is more persuasive than the conventional sources of information from advertising and promotions alone.
This new fad has not escaped the providers of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software who are now rushing to see how they can integrate the social networking sites into their business sales and marketing software.
Can I be the only person on the planet who sees this as a largely pointless exercise in the Business to Business world? If I look at my own customer database less than 5% of the contacts are Jo Public, the rest are Businesses.
The reality is that I can now go to a named contact in my database and have it automatically pull related information from social networking and other web sites.
Now updating my contact records with qualified, meaningful data such as stock market price, business news, or such-like can undoubtedly add value, but linking social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter is unlikely to bring much to the table.
I may be fascinated to know that Tania of Manchester is having cornflakes for breakfast, or that Stephen Fry is currently walking through Horse Guards Parade (he actually is, apparently) but unless I'm planning to sell Tania cornflakes or Stephen Fry an A-Z map of London the information is of no value to my business and frankly I want it nowhere near by carefully developed and lovingly maintained CRM database.
Let's face it, most of what is written on social networking sites is banal twaddle.
I'm sure there is money to be made out of exploiting the social networking sites, but for those of us in the B2B environment they are of little more than a distraction to the real work in hand.
Source...