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Social Media Marketing And Social CRM: I’m Not Anti-Social, I’m Pro-Business

People think I am anti-social. That I don’t get the social revolution.  Well I do.  I just don’t see any revolution.  For the last 100 years the companies that have done the best had strong evangelists, and great relationships with their customers.  The advancement of the social networks has just made the job easier not harder as all the social media “experts” say.

There may be a small part of business that it got harder for, because they had communities of people with out voice to complain about bad experiences who now have PR nightmares, but they are the minority.  There are also companies that did very well because they were able to leverage word of mouth campaigns in ways others in their niche never had, but both of these extremes are the minority.

In the 1950’s Tupperware was pioneering social media marketing.  Tweetups, and Meetups have nothing on the innovation Ed Tupper brought to the table with ways to sell Tupperware.  Local evangelists held parties where you could buy the patented “burp seal” products.  The first Mommy-Evangelists were Tupperware hostesses. Avon, Amway, Herbalife, were all using Social marketing long before Twitter and Facebook.  I even grant that some of the Diamond level Amway reps are true Social Marketing Experts, a term which has been diluted by everyone with more than 500 friends on Twitter.

Recently however I have been inundated with people telling me I need a Social CRM solution, and a Social CRM expert, and Social CRM strategy.  No, I don’t.  Social Media is just another medium that CRM has been managing for 50+ years.  While there are definitely new ways to do Social Media Marketing, the customer acquisition, tracking and relationship part hasn’t changed, and the example I would use to prove that is one most people would never have guessed. Microsoft.

When you think back on the world of Social Media, who jumps to mind as one of the Founding Fathers of the corporate evangelist? Robert Scoble.  Scoble was the first really big social front for a fortune 500 company.  But at the time Microsoft was already engaged in one of the most effective social media campaigns of all time. The Microsoft MVP Program.  The MVP Program was/is an amazing way for a company to leverage every one of it’s Fan boy, and Fan girls and use them to spread the word about their products, but more importantly Microsoft provides these evangelists the tools to really reach others.

When Reese’s told me they had 6.5M Facebook Fan’s I was impressed.  And as a candy you are somewhat limited in what you can do with those fans, how do you get those 6.5M to do something, or tell people about the product, or be a spokesperson?  Microsoft would give them recipes, training, access to the people inside Microsoft to give them a reason to tell others.  That is what Social Media is.  It is giving people the tools to promote your product for you.  Right now most companies are only worried about the follower count, the fan count, and the “like” count, as a result they forget that they need to be using their “friends” to be evangelists.

But this doesn’t work for every kind of business, and it doesn’t work for a lot of the businesses that try the hardest at it.  It also isn’t a replacement for all the traditional marketing methodologies out there.

James Corby just left a comment on the site about Email Marketing being dead.

“No you can’t buy 100k followers, and who wants 100k of lose emails and/or 100k of loose followers? What you would prefer is 5-10k of targeted followers or 5-10k of committed emails of existing clients or REAL advocates that will give you a great return on your investment. On social media, how many more targeted people can that 5-10k reach?”

I would prefer, both.  The problem with small businesses however is that they often have to choose one, or the other.  I would rather bank on 1% of 100k people from a paid list clicking through to hear my pitch, than spending a week trying to get 10 people from twitter to interact with me and selling them.  Certainly if you are selling UnDelete Software you will have better luck with a mass mail, than trying to build a network of loyal users.  The farther you get from “social” products the harder it is to leverage social media.  That isn’t to say that you can’t market Hemorrhoid Cream through Social Media, but it just doesn’t lend to it as well as TV, Radio, or e-mail marketing does.

Microsoft has the budget to make the MVP program success.  Small businesses can rarely bet the farm on that kind of social media outreach.  Like Ed Tupper of Tupperware, if your business model works for it, you should by all means grab it by the horns and run with it, but again once you start having interaction with the customer it is no different than working with any other qualified lead.

I have taken a long way round to getting there, but the point is that in business you have a potential customer base, that is the sum of all people who might buy your product or service.  With each point of interaction they people move through the funnel in your sales pipeline and become a more and more qualified lead until they become a customer, and possibly a repeat customer.  Where they enter that funnel doesn’t matter.  Your relationship with them is the same as it was 50 or 100 years ago.  Social media can be a tool to expand that reach, or reduce your cost of customer acquisition, but it is just another way into the pipeline.

I do both Social Marketing, and Search Engine Marketing, and don’t think either is “better” all of the time.  There are things you can’t market one way, things that you can’t market the other, and over all sometimes you just don’t have the audience in one that you do in the other.  Everything requires a holistic approach and a strong unified strategy.

-- Brandon Wirtz

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