Still wrestling with how you can utilize Twitter to foster relationships with your customers? Check out the following article by Brent Leary:
Posted Mar 1, 2009Can you imagine Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s reaction to Twitter? Credited with the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” in 1839, he might have chosen a different metaphor if he’d lived long enough to see what you could do in Twitter’s microblogging microverse with 140 characters. And who those characters can reach. And how far they can travel.
This isn’t Ed’s world. In fact, it’s not even the one we had just a few years ago. And if your CRM strategy was developed before Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube came to town, it’s time to upgrade: We’re living in the age of social CRM.
Social CRM is not a substitute for traditional CRM. Instead, what emerges is a new, outward-facing dimension that extends the operational areas of CRM. That new dimension is inevitably more successful if you’re building off a strong foundation in traditional CRM.
Social CRM is about joining conversations between customers and prospects while resisting the urge to control those conversations. Customers today have more power over who they do business with, and how that business is conducted. And the Web is totally entrenched in their buying process. So if you’re not on the Web in ways to capture their attention, you won’t be able to compete.
via destinationCRM.com: The Tweet Is Mightier than the Sword .
tboehm30 says
Absolutely right.
The problem is that because of the economy it’s difficult to change your system. Investment is required to change things, and investment requires money.
Now, however, is the time to get up to speed; because when the economy improves we’ll all be way too busy to fix it then.
brianvellmure says
The great thing about beginning to utilize the social media mechanisms is that there actually is no direct investment typically for the platform. Twitter http://www.twitter.com , Yammer http://www.yammer.com , LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com, and Facebook http://www.facebook.com only really require an investment of time and energy (which you could translate into time).
An investment of time and energy now could result in strategic social media initiatives well underway by the time things turn around, and a small investment to integrate them with traditional CRM packages could pay huge dividends down the road.