I despair when I hear people trying to “schedule a viral marketing campaign” into their marketing calendar, “build a community site in order to deflect calls from the contact center” or “do a bit of co-creation” to improve their products. Of course, marketing campaigns can go viral and of course online support forums can reduce customer service costs; but you can’t take the company benefits without giving customers the benefits that they want. You can’t have your social media and community cake and eat it.

The most dangerous use of social media & community is that which tries to apply old thinking to a new technology. It’s very easy to look at the benefits of social media and community from the company’s perspective and try and implement product reviews and ratings to generate “positive buzz” or an ideas site to generate customer-driven ideas. The temptation is to then believe that somehow implementing these capabilities alone makes the organization social, customer-...

 I often meet with clients who want to kill two birds with one stone; reduce customer service costs, whilst also increasing customer satisfaction. Many technology-centric CRM programs of the past did not share these aims. They attempted to design solutions inside-out from the company's perspective, rather than from the customer's perspective. In many cases these programs tried to control the customer; for example defining the channels that the organisation made available for customer service requests. In a drive to reduce customer service costs, expensive human interactions were blocked from the customer by customer service numbers hidden away on a little known web page, multi-level IVRs, voice self-service solutions, chat-bots and lists of online FAQs. In the main these solutions were designed to benefit the company, keeping customers away from call centre agents and therefore reducing costs but not necessarily improving customer satisfaction.

Mitch Joel, author of the must read "Six Pixels of Separation" wrote an interesting post recently that got me thinking about control. Mitch wrote:

"We're at this strange new intersection where the expectation is that every brand has relinquished the control over their messaging and that they're listening (and hopefully reacting) to this ever-growing chorus of feedback."

I agree whole-heartedly with his comments that in many ways "Control" should now be a  dead issue; something that was surfaced by the Cluetrain Manefesto over 12 years ago and has been discussed to death by leading marketers who have long accepted that their monopoly on control has been eroded (if not usurped) by consumers. As Mitch points...

I went to a Gartner CRM conference in London a few years ago where the theme was “Solid Foundations, Cool Innovations”. The theme stuck with me and I think it is even more relevant today given the rapid rise of Social Media, powerful real time Analytics and Mobile.

Those three topics combined put enormous power into the hands of Marketers. They can segment customers at an extremely granular level, send offers to their mobile devices as they walk into a store, enable customers to share those offers with their social networks…

But of course, powerful tools are dangerous in primitive hands. A fantastic personalized offer to one customer is irrelevant spam and an invasion of privacy to another. I often tell clients that 95% of Social CRM is in fact plain old CRM. That statistic is not supposed to be scientific – whether it’s 70% or 99% is really not relevant - the key point is that it’s easy to get caught up with flashy front ends and whizz-bang features and functions. It...