The Challenge Social Crm Presents To Medium-sized Businesses

Social CRM promises to give small but creative companies the opportunity to develop the same sorts of CRM capabilities that once only larger companies could afford to create.

Where is social CRM's sweet spot? That's tough to say. It seems that those businesses at the ends of the spectrum have it best right now. Small businesses may speak to or even see their customers in a one-to-one scenario regularly, and large businesses usually have sufficient manpower and money to create intimate relationships through the use of the right technologies and processes.

The companies in the middle may have a hardest time with social CRM - and they may also provide the best blueprint for getting social CRM right.

Most medium-sized businesses don't have manpower enough to assemble committees to look at ways to combine online and offline marketing channels. For example, they may have one person who handles all of marketing - social media and otherwise. But they still have too many customers to allow relationships to take care of themselves through ordinary personal interactions. An industrial-strength approach to the issues of making their CRM efforts more social isn't available to these people.

Many marketers in this in-between space become paralyzed at the thought of trying to handle all the aspects of social CRM. Others flail about frantically dealing with them all, only to find that approach unsustainable over time.

Roles for monitoring and acting on social media are expanding far faster than resources, so for medium-sized businesses it has become necessary to stop and think hard not about adopting a comprehensive set of tactical social CRM activities, but to pick the ones that best fit into your business's overall CRM strategy.

When you're a one-man band, you can't do it all. However, you can appropriate some of the strategies intended for the big boys and put them to work. For example:

Measure everything. It's a mistake to think your content is so impressive that you can use its creation as an excuse not to do the hard work of determining the proper metrics for your efforts and then keeping a vigilant eye on how well the efforts you're pursuing are paying off. This is even more important for smaller, more resource-constrained businesses than for large businesses; a big budget can justify limping along with an imprecise effort that a smaller organization can do without.

Listen hard. Customers will tell you where you need to devote your time and attention. Again, smaller businesses are compelled to do this by their limited resources; large businesses may simply start with a broad list of channels and expend budget on them before they start to listen.

Create great content. Your ideas will set you apart, so it's imperative that your participation in the channels you select is authentic, on target and informative. It's better to deliver excellent content to a limited number of channels than it is to deliver so-so content all over the place. In the social era, good content can be a force multiplier and get your presence in front of more eyes than the ones you initially targeted, while poor content can rapidly brand you with a negative public impression.

CRM champions at smaller companies are forced to do the things that any business has to do to be successful with social CRM. To be successful - and even to survive in their jobs - they need to be the most disciplined at listening, selecting channels and acting efficiently on communicating back into those channels.

So, if you want to see how social CRM works, don't look at the Fortune 500, or the small shop down the street. Keep an eye on the companies in between that need to execute precisely to wring the promise out of social CRM.