Makaleler

Business at the speed of social media

The upside for social media success is huge, according to Gartner's predictions for 2015. By then, predicted Alvarez, 10 percent of the problems currently solved by customer service reps (CSRs) will be dealt with by communities.

One method that is growing in popularity is posting videos of unboxing a new product. As well as creating buzz, this helps provide insight into packaging pluses and minuses.

Other predictions, by 2015:

• Social marketing processes will influence at least 80 percent of consumer discretionary spending. Clearly, CRM vendors are on the right track by rushing headlong onto the social media bandwagon.
• 80 percent of businesses will be suffering revenue loss for lack of an effective web presence.
• Analytic applications will be one of the fastest growing areas of business intelligence.
• 70 percent of social media programs will fail due to lack of a well conceived strategy.
• 50 percent of web sales will come from social presence and mobile applications by 2015. Social presence applications provide services and serve ads based on a precise location.
• Context-aware computing will drive new consumer spending, and this will boost related ad revenues to more than $140 billion per year.

"Context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web," said Alvarez.

While huge potential is evident, one big problem is keeping Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) up at night, he said: Too many channels, and the number of them just keeps on growing. These have to be integrated, and that's where CRM and social media applications come into play.

Alvarez stressed that social media should be one element of an overall marketing strategy. The various channels within social media have to be integrated, and they in turn must be integrated with other forms of marketing. CRM systems can help facilitate this. In addition, he preached, social media is not necessarily the best channel for targeted marketing. He felt it was a better forum for listening to the customer, generating word of mouth and for advocacy.

Vendors push social CRM wares

The CRM vendor community was also beating the drum for Social CRM at the Gartner 360 conference. Jason Mittelstaedt, CMO of RightNow, said his company was experiencing a phase of explosive growth due to its approach to social media. The RightNow CX Customer Experience Suite comprises three parts: web, social media and contact center combined into one unified package. Following its acquisition of Q-Go, the latest quarterly release from RightNow includes natural language search. "This takes good service from the support page to the home page," said Mittelstaedt. "You type in what you need and you are taken straight to it."

He said he's noticed a proliferation of consumers accessing brands via social and mobile. Most companies, though, have satisfied themselves with monitoring these sites to tell what people are saying about them. The next phase, he added, is taking action on what was said, perhaps initiating a customer service ticket to address a voiced complaint. But more than that, action can be taken to convert social interaction into revenues. He gave the example of Drugstore.com's sister site Beauty.com. Anyone tweeting there about a skin rash, for example, is invited to chat with an expert on the subject.