The Intersection of Business Intelligence and Social CRM

This past week analysts at the Altimeter Group released their study titled "Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management" The study outlines 18 use cases for putting the customer first and the technologies that you need to get that job done. Authors R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang did a great job creating what will become the play book for social media integration in the enterprise. In the report they discuss the 5M's of Social CRM as a framework to guide your processes and strategy as you integrate Social CRM into the seven key categories (Customer Insights, Social Marketing, Social Sales, Social Service and Support, Social innovation, Collaboration and Customer Experience) that connect you to your customers.

 

Enterprise business intelligence tools play a key role in successfully integrating and measuring the unstructured and semi-structured data that drives the social space. SAS, SAP Oracle, Purisma, IBM, DataFlux, Information Builders and others are already addressing the challenges that Social CRM delivers. Its still very early in the adoption process but BI vendors are starting to see the growing opportunity. The interesting thing will be to see who puts a clear end to end offering together first. Monitoring is the popular technology for now but as companies gain better access to the social landscape they will demand integration and measurement. The Social CRM market is moving so fast I can't help but think that the larger slower moving "big stack guys" may be at a disadvantage and susceptible to an innovative upstart. 

Gartner Says the Social Enterprise is a Reality

In December Gartner released its "Predicts 2010: Social Software Is an Enterprise Reality" report. In it we learn at least one thing that won't surprise most of us. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail. Ouch...that hurts. 

Thats an ugly prediction but understandable when you consider that much of social media and networking is driven by the business and the platforms that support these initiatives and strategies are not yet enterprise class. IT is well suited to run servers and business applications but they fall short on the skills needed to support social solutions. 

Gartner goes on to say that through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 30 percent of IT-driven initiatives.

I agree with Gartner's position on this. If your looking to bring social media solutions into the enterprise allow business to have the first and final say on spec's and features. Executives need to fight for a piece of the technology turf on this type of project and take the lead in providing the right solution to fit the strategy of the corporation.

Shift Happens - Onsite vs Offsite Engagement

Smart companies consistently monitor the success of their social networking and social media investments. In the past many of us relied on the metrics of trackbacks, comments, forum posts and other onsite interactions to determine the level of engagement we have with our online community. Over the past 3 years there has been a noticeable shift in these numbers. For many companies and content publishers the drop has been in excess of 50%. PostRank has recently completed research that indicates that while onsite engagement is down offsite has jumped by over 30%.

So where are the conversations going and is this necessarily a bad thing? As you may suspect Twitter, Digg, Facebook and all the rest of the major social platforms are hosting your readers and the conversations that used to go with them. This may equate to a loss of traffic but I don't think it equals a loss of engagement. It does however shed light on the need to expand your analytic scope with regards to engagement. The days of relying solely on your website analytics is fading into the sunset. Companies that are serious about seeing the entire landscape need to monitor the offsite conversations and participate on multiple platforms to achieve the engagement goals they have set. 

I'd urge you to take a quick test drive of a couple of the leading social monitoring tools and see how much of the conversation you have been missing out on.

Social Network Search Terms are at the Top of the List

Hitwise® has announced its top search terms for 2009 and and it comes as no surprise to most that Social Network terms lead the way with Facebook on top and another 3 variations of the term in the top 25. According to Hitwise® this is the first time that a social networking term has taken the top honor accounting for 0.67 percent of all searches.