December 15, 2010 Ten Ways Social Media is Changing Sales and CRM

By Jennifer Schiff
More and more businesses of all sizes are using social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare, as a way to better engage customers and increase sales. However, just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account is no guarantee of success. So eCRM Guide asked Pamela O'Hara, the co-founder and president of BatchBlue, the maker of BatchBook social CRM software, and Margaret Donnelly, the vice president of marketing and business development at JitterJam Social CRM, how companies can leverage popular social media sites, as well as YouTube and Flickr and blogs, to enhance and improve their customer relationship management (CRM).

Social Media Monitoring and CRM Tips

Herewith are 10 ways social CRM can benefit your business. 1. Social CRM can help you target your marketing to key segments. "Brands are looking to see ROI from their social marketing activities," said Donnelly. "By using customers' interests, conversations, location, demographic and other data gathered from various social media sites, marketers can capture and utilize that intelligence to create very focused messaging and offers to motivate their contacts to act. This enables the brand to see the entire cycle of customer development from their social marketing efforts, from initial discovery to transaction and beyond." 2. Social media monitoring can help you uncover potential customers and find out which customers are influencers. "People are talking about products, brands, product categories, wants and needs at a staggering rate [online]," noted JitterJam's Donnelly. Monitoring the social web enables businesses to monitor the chatter and sentiment about their products and services as well as the competition's, she said. "More importantly, social CRM enables businesses to identify current customers including the ones who are potential influencers and advocates for your brand as well as prospective customers," said Donnelly. That's why Donnelly advises business owners to monitor conversations around their brand, their products and services and their competitors, using appropriate keywords. "For example, a backpacking products company could search for people talking about backpacking and hiking trips," she said. "Gathering these social conversations [in one place like your CRM system] enables you to track the volume of conversations about your brand or market over time," and then use that information to better engage and interact with your customers. 3. Social CRM can help you monitor what customers are saying about your brand and your products (for better or worse). "Monitor your product name, your company name, or just keywords for your industry, and then pull those bits of information into your CRM system," said O'Hara. That will help you get a true sense of

what customers (potential and existing) are saying about your products, services and business, so you can adjust or target your marketing and development strategies accordingly. 4. Social media can be a wonderful customer service tool especially for countering negative comments. Monitor those sites where people can leave comments about your business, products and service, advised O'Hara. That way, if or when someone has something negative to say, you will know right away and can respond immediately. Responding online, in a public forum, in a sympathetic and helpful way "goes a long way to showing that person that you're listening, that you care and it also shows everyone else who's privy to that conversation that you're there and you care and you're taking the time to reach out to someone who had a bad experience." 5. Social networks are like having a free focus group. When Kent Krueger, chief dog spoiler at SitStay.com, a maker of "good for your dog supplies," needed help picking a label for the company's new line of SitStay-branded dog treats, he turned to Facebook. Specifically, he turned to the (then) over 21,000 dog lovers (that number has since risen to over 25,000) who "liked" SitStay.com's Facebook page to help him choose which one to use. Not only did SitStay.com's Facebook fans quickly identify a favorite, they made the label even better by pointing out that "Made in the USA" was missing, "which is very important to our demographic and dog treats," Krueger said. 6. Social media can build community and lead to new opportunities. "We've run a Twitter chat for the past couple years (we're actually evolving it shortly into a video chat), where we invited small business owners to come once a week," said O'Hara. "We talk about different issues for small businesses how to use social media, what virtual collaboration tools people are using, how to manage your finances," and other topics of interest to small business owners. As a result, there are now more than 20,000 people following that Twitter account, and it's been a great way for O'Hara and BatchBlue to connect with business owners and has even led to several business opportunities the company might not have found otherwise. 7. Social media can be a great promotion and sales tool. JetBlue set up @JetBlueCheeps on Twitter to promote "great deals on last minute flights every Tuesday." And the account has amassed over 150,000 followers (who have helped fill up planes). Similarly, many bricks-and-mortar businesses are using Foursquare, a mobile social tool, to engage their mobile customers, offering them discounts and prizes like a free cup of coffee or a coupon for 10% off their next purchase when they check in on Foursquare at their store or restaurant or business, which often leads to actual purchases. 8. Social media can help establish you as an expert people want to buy from. For example, one real estate agent O'Hara worked with set up a Facebook page where she posted pictures, videos and information about events in her community, giving prospective home buyers a real flavor of the community and establishing herself as a kind of trusted friend and guide someone who people would want to buy a house from.

9. Use Facebook to let customers get to know your business and the people behind it. Use sites like Flickr and Facebook to post pictures of your products, either on their own or being used by customers, fun events sponsored by your business, as well as employees images that accurately portray your company culture and give people a true sense of who you are and what you do. People tend to trust and buy from companies they feel they know and have a relationship with. 10. Use YouTube to educate your customers. Use video networks like YouTube or Vimeo to post helpful how-to guides that show your customers how to set up or use your products, advised O'Hara. This form of outreach and customer education engenders loyalty and can help you attract a wider audience for your products and services. Jennifer Lonoff Schiff is a regular contributor to Internet.com and runs a blog for and about small businesses. Follow eCRMguide on Twitter

July 19, 2010 Who's Hot in Social CRM

By Paul Shread
Gartner has published its first Magic Quadrant for the social CRM (customer relationship management) market, and the firm's analysis suggests that the fastgrowing market has a ways to go to reach maturity. Gartner said there are more than 100 companies offering social CRM products, yet the analyst firm ranked only 19 of them, and listed only two Lithium and Jive Software as leaders. Three firms Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), Mzinga and KickApps were listed as visionaries, and the rest were dubbed niche players. Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) CRM On Demand wound up in the niche category, as did Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Bazaarvoice, RightNow, Demand Media, Vovici, Radian6, LiveWorld, Globalpark, Leverage Software, Thomson Reuters-Hubbard One, Visible Technologies, InsideView and Overtone. "Interest has exploded in using social software for marketing and customer service departments, and, to a lesser extent, in sales organizations," wrote Gartner analysts Adam Sarner, Ed Thompson, Jeffrey Mann, Michael Dunne, Jim Davies, Chris Fletcher, Gene Alvarez and Michael Maoz. "Inquiry volumes on social software for CRM have spiked well over 50 percent in the last 12 months. The number of social CRM vendors has expanded rapidly; the market in mid-2010 has just over 100 vendors." But few of the vendors address the whole social CRM market yet, Gartner said, and most have annual revenue of less than $1 million and are not profitable. "However, spending has significantly ramped up since 2008, and a few vendors grew revenue by more than 100 percent in 2009," the analysts wrote, noting that the rapid growth has led to a number of mergers and acquisitions. One reason that the small social CRM space is growing faster than the rest of the CRM market is the natural affinity between social media and CRM. Gartner assessed more than 240 social use cases last year and found that 80 percent of them were related to improving customer relationships. Gartner said social CRM vendors tend to start in one of four ways: Hosting and supporting a branded or private-label community Monitoring and surveying private-label or independent social networks Facilitating the sharing of common B2B or business-to-consumer (B2C) contacts through the use of an internal community Community product reviews to facilitate the online sales process

"Vendors that can assemble the full social CRM suite and make progress in two or more of these areas will reap the biggest success," the analysts wrote. "Gartner believes that by year-end 2011, these disparate approaches will combine to form social

CRM suites. Moreover, we expect that by 2014, these functions will be integrated into traditional big CRM applications from vendors such as SAP, Oracle, salesforce.com, Microsoft, Amdocs, ATG, SAS, IBM and RightNow." The Gartner report costs $1995 and can be found here.

July 9, 2010 EMC Moves into Business Analytics with Greenplum Acquisition

By Paul Shread
EMC (NYSE: EMC) has long been dominant in the data storage market; now the company wants a hand in what companies do with all that data. EMC this week announced that it will acquire Greenplum, which develops data warehousing and business analytics technology. Greenplum will form the foundation of a new "data computing" division within EMC, and will also likely become part of the company's cloud strategy. MicroStrategy Makes BI Mobile with iPhone, iPad App Data Mining with Cloud Computing Microsoft, Salesforce Battle in CRM Cloud Space Oracle Takes Business Intelligence to New Level with BI 11g CRM, Business Intelligence Go to College

In a statement, EMC storage division president Pat Gelsinger said, "The data warehousing world is about to change. Greenplum's massively-parallel, scale-out architecture, along with its self-service consumption model, has enabled it to separate itself from the incumbent players and emerge as the leader in this industry shift toward 'big data' analytics. Greenplum's market-leading technology combined with EMC's virtualized Private Cloud infrastructure provides customers, today, with a bestof-breed solution for tomorrow's 'big-data' challenges." Greenplum is built on the open source PostgreSQL database and commodity hardware, giving the company a pricing edge over competitors. It also developed its own MapReduce technology after initially looking at Hadoop. An EMC spokesperson stressed that the company isn't trying to compete with data warehousing vendors such as Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL). "Greenplum is a new approach to data warehousing and business analytics that brings traditional data warehouse approaches along with it," the spokesperson said. "Customers can integrate existing data warehouses as data sources into a Greenplum environment. EMC will also continue to partner with Oracle and others to enhance their software offerings with storage, security, backup and recovery, etc." Greenplum uses a "shared-nothing" massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture designed for analytical processing using virtualized x86 infrastructure. EMC said Greenplum is capable of delivering 10 to 100 times the performance of traditional database software "at a dramatically lower cost." Customers include NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax, T-Mobile and Fox Interactive Media.

July 6, 2010 MicroStrategy Makes BI Mobile with iPhone, iPad App

By Paul Shread
MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) today announced the general availability of MicroStrategy Mobile, a business intelligence (BI) application platform for Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone and iPad. MicroStrategy made the announcement today at its worldwide launch event and user conference in Cannes, France. The company has offered mobile BI support for Research in Motion's (NASDAQ: RIMM) BlackBerry smartphone since 2007. The app is aimed at users who need access to BI data anywhere, not just at their desktops. Smartphones and tablets that include sensor technologies such as GPS, cameras and multi-touch screens make mobile BI possible, the company said. MicroStrategy COO Sanju Bansal said in a statement that the app "will allow insight to be injected into every conversation and decision." MicroStrategy Mobile lets companies extend graphs, grids, enterprise reports and information dashboards to the iPhone and iPad. The new app lets existing MicroStrategy projects be extended to the iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry, typically within days. MicroStrategy Mobile applications are assembled in point-and-click fashion and do not require coding. Reports are portable between platforms, including iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Web browsers and Microsoft Office and Windows. Integration with Google maps allows for easy visualization of geospatial data and rapid location identification. The platform also takes advantage of a number of iPhone and iPad features such as multi-touch and data exploration features, and information can be captured through on-device sensors such as a camera or bar code reader. MicroStrategy also announced a number of customer implementations of the mobile BI technology. Alloso Technologies is using MicroStrategy Mobile to provide hotel general managers with access to real-time information, including budgets, revenue segments, expenses and links to guest reviews, while a number of other companies are using it to spot sales trends. To get users started, MicroStrategy is offering a free Mobile Suite that includes 25 perpetual named user licenses of MicroStrategy Mobile, development tools, online training and technical support, available at www.microstrategy.com/freemobileBI. The MicroStrategy Mobile iPhone app is available on the Apple App store, and includes three demo data sets, including Restaurant Trends, Casino Management and Retail Performance Management. It can be found at itunes.apple.com/us/app/microstrategymobile/id376256699?mt=8.