Social Media and your customers (CRM), your business. Avanade (tm).
Is anyone on the social media bus?
This post reviews a study that seems to shows that major
companies are not participating in online communities. After my enlightening
interview with William
Azaroff this week, I have to say that there are many on the social media path
and not just early adopters. But this study seems to imply that it is only the
early adopters.
A key point William made at his own blog after my post caught my attention.
Here’s what he said, "I love the term Community Engagement. This always happens
with technology, at first we refer to the tools and not the action we want to
accomplish.
The task is engaging community; the new toolset is social media. Social media,
while a handy way to refer to it, doesn't so the action justice."
This new study entitled, CRM
and Social Media: Maximizing Deeper Customer Relationships, from Avanade
(tm) seems to show that many don’t get there is a financial value to social
media. But other points in the study, see last bullet, may give you some
negotiating leverage:
- Approximately 60 percent of respondents say
integrating social media technologies is not on the agenda.
- Only 18 percent of respondents have any kind of
strategy in place to integrate these technologies within the company for
employees.
- 2 in 5 companies can directly associate an
increase in sales with the move to using new forms of media.
So, let’s take Williams thoughts on Community Engagement and
pull in the reasons from Avanade’s study.
Why increased sales? Improved feedback at 78% cited this as
number one reason they were seeing better sales. Greater customer satisfaction
(66% and no doubt tied to feedback). Reduction in time to resolve support
issues (71 %).
These companies engaged their customer and won. That’s what
social media will do for your company. Now is the time to get on the bus, while
others are deciding if they want to ride, so you can build your brand and presence
online.
Quick aside: As a small company owner, I’m often looking for
ways to connect what I’m doing on one client project to parlay that into
something that benefit another project (non-competing, of course).
The research study in this post is one such example. I am
working on a project involving social media and happened upon a press release
alerting me to this research. The double benefit is: it helps my client, but it
also helps my work as research editor of SmallBizTrends and its new
section filled with timely reports.
We are compiling research reports to help the business owner
and entrepreneur community -- while there are certainly others who do this, we
do think we have a unique experience base and user lens through which to weigh
the tons of research out there. So take a look here, if you’re working on a
biz plan, a presentation, or something where you need to put your hands on a
statistic or two.
