Social CRM has been making the rounds lately, and I think many practitioners are missing the point about social networking and its place within CRM.

Whist it’s always fun to use new tools to connect with others. Accessing the information generated by these online relationships to generate a measurable return is a valid aim. But giving this practice a label and suggesting it’s a new concept that has never before been put into practice devalues our past efforts pre Twitter.

The fact is, “Social CRM” describes nothing more than what CRM vendors and their offerings have been providing users from the get-go: a method for managing and growing profitable business relationships.

Most of us want to have conversations with many people on both business and personal levels, and to manage some separation between the two. Indeed, the plethora of tools and social networks now available allow us to connect in more convenient and, sometimes, more personal ways. It’s vacuous, however, to put a new label on natural human behaviour and call it “cool.”

If the label “Social CRM” somehow helps companies understand that people are people, it should be treated as such. However, please don’t tout it as something new. This has been the intended benefit of CRM all along. Social CRM is about conversations, not technology.

The bazaars of ancient civilisation are an early example of direct vendor and customer communication without a technology solution. These were real, immediate and loud conversations. People gathered and shouted aloud to promote their offerings, or exclaim what they were seeking, and in best-case scenarios a mutual benefit resulted.

Over time, the technologies we now take for granted came about and let vendors believe that spamming customers with more information to encourage them to buy more was the same as communicating. Not surprisingly, consumers grew tired of this and began to clamour for a means to better filter all incoming social and business communication.

But think about it: Our human nature isn’t hardwired to make this separation. We force ourselves to modify our natural communication style in business situations. This adjustment usually causes contention, as is evidenced by the number of customer hang-ups logged by contact canters.

It’s really no surprise that the emergence of social networking finds us gravitating toward companies that use web technologies in interesting ways to engage us as customers.

Successful companies that use social networking to manage conversations and aid their sales efforts exhibit common characteristics. These are…

Monitoring
Successful companies look for and listen to the social networks and online communities that are talking about them. There they find honest, unfiltered comments about their brands. They prioritise which topics to address, problems to fix, and advantages to leverage.

Participating
Once they know who’s talking, where, and what the rules of engagement are within each community, successful companies start conversing online in a transparent fashion. More often than not, this shows customers that the organisation “gets it”, cares, and is approachable.

Creating
When a successful organisation is comfortable with information exchange on social networks it creates meaningful content to share across them; not sales slicks, but helpful content that people will seek out and share. They may even create their own communities and steadily drive conversations there.
Innovating or Imitating – It’s ‘s always more interesting to innovate with the web than imitate what has already been done, but if there’s a best practice out there that fits, a successful company follows it, and saves innovation for another day.

Turning the virtual into reality
Successful organisations come full circle with their Social CRM initiatives. And they do it by turning their online conversations into real ones. This may be in person or by phone.

This last point is the most meaningful. I’ve experienced it firsthand, picking up the phone and calling customers who have voiced a product or support concern within one of our communities. In these instances, I find that customers are so pleased with the personal attention they receive that we not only resolve their concern quickly, we also build a lasting bond. They become customers for life. That’s what Social CRM is really all about.