Social Media Team with a strategic mandate for customer relationship management - Essay Example

Social Media Team with a Strategic Man for Relationship Management Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Introduction 3 Social Media and CRM 4 Developing a Strategy for Employing Social Media with Success 5 Conclusion 10 References 11 Introduction Social media is one of the most upcoming yet interesting concepts. It combines two most familiar aspects i.e. society and media. Society basically comprises of the association of human beings as they desire to become socially active persons. Media traditionally relates to newspapers, magazines, and televisions. Media all over the world has a massive influence on the society. Media is a very dynamic and mass appeal oriented source. Media has the power to influence a society with its news and contents. Media and people have a symbiotic relationship. Media helps to create social awareness of a product or other offerings of a business to draw the consumers to the business organization. Media thus helps a business organization to gather consumer base. Media also has the influencing capacity to make a product good or bad. People in the society generally have a strong faith in the advertisements and the displays of various offerings on a media source. In the present scenario, with the advent of newer technologies like internet, the term social media has been expanded to few other aspects also. These aspects include the use of e-commerce related tools like customer relationship management, forums, social networks, and social news. Social media related applications consist of Google, YouTube, and Face book. Customer relationship management has been a major addition to the business related marketing segment (Safko & Et. Al., 2009). Social Media and CRM Social media, as a medium of communication, has a huge amount of option and also a wide spectrum. Social media in the modern era has gained popularity with the advent of internet. People in different parts of the world have been able to share ideas, know about their culture and society by using the internet. Internet has brought the people of the world much closer. Internet has provided business organizations a different option of promoting and popularizing their products. Social media have expanded in its horizon with the innovation of social networking. As per the study of Nielsen in 2009, social networking and also blogs written by different people have been the 4th most well-liked online activity in the United States (Bonde, 2009). Social media along with social networking have changed the method of communication and connection among people. These technologies have caught the imagination of people in all the age groups throughout the world. It has enabled business organizations to reach out to a wider audience with their offerings. Internet and email are the two sources mostly used to connect and communicate with the consumers. Social networking has helped to connect as well as make new consumers. Web based techniques used in customer relationship management (CRM) have tried to incorporate the various new networks and also technologies in to the service they provide. The command of the cloud has been used to integrate and connect common customer relationship management tools along with various websites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. This has created a concept called social CRM. These sites provide a newer method for connecting along with the audience. This also provides an insight into the lives of the consumers along with their likes and dislikes, needs and wants. It also helps to connect along with a potential customer (CRM & Social Media Online, 2010). Customer satisfaction has become an integral component for an organizations success and growth. Customer relationship management (CRM) based system offers business organization opportunities to keep present consumers satisfied. CRM along with social networking helps in finding new consumers along with the existing one (CRM & Social Media Online, 2010). Developing a Strategy for Employing Social Media with Success Social media is a widely used method. In this process, suitable guidelines and standards has to be followed in on-the-job process. Social media policies help employees engaged in interacting process with the consumers. In the development process of a policy, three elements like accuracy and transparency, lawfulness, and accountability has to be followed. After developing social media policy in the next step of developing strategy, internal and external online communities has to be monitored. This can be done by conducting an online survey which would help a business organization to identify potential allies as well as threats. In this process, leverage tools like Google alert, Facebook’s lexicon, log trackers can help. In the strategy formulation process social media can be build up in such a way that people can interact with an organization. This process can be implemented by promoting the use of corporate blogs, face book fan pages, online forums such as Dell’s Idea storm and Starbucks Idea. Another very important aspect which has to be taken care of in devising a successful strategy is the first responder aspect (Kane & Et. Al., 2009). In social media based strategy formulation process, there are four pillars which have to be taken care of. These pillars are communication, collaboration, education, and entertainment. These pillars can help in ensuring the success of a strategy. Social media tries to achieve and enable conversation between the audience and the market (Safko & Et. Al., 2009). Balanced scorecard can appropriately help in the strategic management decision making process. Balanced scorecard was developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. It uses four different perspectives in analyzing the environment and internal-external factors under which an organization operates in. The analysis based on these perspectives helps to get a holistic view. In this process, the four perspectives are financial perspective, internal business perspective, customer perspective, and learning and growth perspective. This process helps in simultaneously monitoring the main strategic aspects of a business activity. This also helps to direct an organization towards future growth and progress. The balance scorecard approach can help in case of the strategy formulation for social media. It can provide logical and analytical view of an organization. This will also help an organization to communicate their business factors much better to a wider audience. Balanced scorecard can be in managing strategy by the following process like ‘translating the vision’, ‘communicating and linking’, business planning, and also ‘feedback and learning’. These strategies can be incorporated with social media. The vision’s of the organization can be suitably translated and transferred to the perspective consumers by using social media and social networks. Communication and education of the organizational goals can also help to attract consumers who are generally attracted towards a transparent business organization and their products. Business planning which relates to setting targets, allocating resources, establishing milestones and aligning strategy related initiatives can be further enhanced by utilizing the benefits of social media. In the feedback and learning processes, social media and customer relationship management can substantially help. Customer relationship management can help in collecting the feedback directly from the customers. This feedback can direct an organization towards preparing their service according to the needs and wants of the consumers. In building a strategic management system, the other aspects which have to be taken care of are that of refining and reviewing the scorecard related to a business unit. This will help an organization to constantly eliminate their drawbacks and prepare offerings according to the requirements of the consumers. It also helps to attract newer consumer base as a satisfied consumer automatically brings in more consumers. Balanced scorecard enables an organization to integrate companies’ financial revenues in the budget according to the needs of the strategic goal. In among the four perspectives of balanced scorecard, the customer perspective relates to customer satisfaction. Customer relationship management immensely helps in strategy formulation in this respect as it will help to devise a strategy according to the needs of the customers. Customer relationship management can help to interact with customers in various ways such as technical support, sales and customer service and marketing of a product. It helps in reducing the cost associated with a product due to its related promotional activities. One of the main goals of customer relationship management is to draw new customers. These goals are not too dissimilar with one of the major strategic goals of an organization which looks to increase its consumer base. Therefore customer relationship management can make the task of the managers of an organization much simpler by preparing a database of consumers (Kaplan & Norton, 2007). Customer relationship management operates in stages such as acquire, enhance and retain. CRM basically comprises of the elements such as people, technology and process. Social media can collaborate quite fruitfully along with the customer relationship management by using social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. This affects the process by which an organization manages a client. Social media network enables people to share their thought and views about a product with each other. They can share their opinion about a company’s products and services by using social media. Social media can be used to be a part of online communities. This will help in the strategy formulation further as the pros and cons of product can be gathered directly from a business source. It will enhance marketing communication process. Companies will also be able to manufacture customized products according to the taste and preferences of the customers (Destination CRM, 2009). The different elements of social media relates to openness, participation, community, conversation, and also connectedness. These elements can hugely benefit a company in understanding the customer perspective (Mayfield, 2008). Customer relationship management along with the advent of E-CRM has helped in further improvement of customer relationship. E-CRM strategy can be useful as it enables ‘customer self-service’. It also enables superior technological performance. Sales and marketing automation also can be achieved by using E-CRM. It provides real time information of customers, thus enabling an authentic strategy formulation (Ou & Banerjee, 2009). Conclusion In the modern hyper connected world, majority of the companies operates without any constraint of a geographical boundary. Therefore, social media has gained major advantage. The benefits acquired from it, which enables direct interaction with consumers and their needs and wants, have made global business organizations to engage in social media. Social networking and its communities have also contributed to the popularity as well as defaming of different products. Therefore organizations have to cleverly use customer relationship management related benefits to organize their business. They also can leverage benefits of social networking sites by gaining an idea about their products from the customers’ perspective. Social media augments the power related to online communities. Online community can enhance the knowledge acquired by a business organization. Social media can work massively in generating awareness. The reach and scope of social media has transformed it to be a necessity from luxury for the business organizations thereby confirming their involvement with social media. References Bonde, A., (2009). Social media and CRM -- The marketing perspective. Search CRM. Retrieved Online on August 04, 2010 from http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/news/2240015659/Social-media-and-CRM-The-marketing-perspective CRM & Social Media Online, (2010). CRM & Social media for business. Home. Retrieved Online on August 04, 2010 from http://www.crmsocialmedia.com/ CRM & Social Media Online, (2010). Social Networks and CRM. Category. Retrieved Online on August 04, 2010 from http://www.crmsocialmedia.com/category/social-networks-and-crm/ Destination CRM, 2009. Who Owns the Social Customer? Articles. Retrieved Online on August 04, 2010 from http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Editorial/Magazine-Features/Who-Owns-the-Social-Customer-54028.aspx Kane, G. C. & Et. Al., (2009). Community Relations 2.0. Harvard Business Review. Kaplan, R. S. & Norton, D. P., (2007). Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic Management System. Harvard Business Review. Mayfield, A., (2008). What is Social Media? icrossing. Retrieved Online on August 04, 2010 from http://www.icrossing.co.uk/fileadmin/uploads/eBooks/What_is_Social_Media_iCrossing_ebook.pdf Ou, C. X. & Banerjee, P. K., (2009). Determinants of Successful Customer Relationship Management. Journal of Information Technology Management. Retrieved Online on August 04, 2010 from http://jitm.ubalt.edu/XX-1/article4.pdf Safko, L. & Et. Al., (2009). The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success. John Wiley and Sons. Read More