Why Your Customers Don't Want Your Marketing Anymore
Social media platforms have fundamentally shifted how businesses connect with their customers. The old model of one-way communication through ads and press releases is dead. Today's customers expect to be part of the conversation, and they're not waiting for permission to share their opinions.
When Customers Became Community Members
The word "social" in social media means more than just technology or networks where people share photos and write reviews. It's about understanding how, why, and with whom people connect online. These connections create what experts call the "social graph" – basically a map of who you know, who you follow, and what you're doing.
Think about Yelp as an example. On the surface, it's just a directory with reviews, ratings, and restaurant hours. You could use it like any basic website to find a decent dinner spot. But Yelp becomes genuinely social when users build profiles and connect with other reviewers. Instead of asking "What should I eat tonight?" the question becomes "Who do I want to hang out with tonight?" That shift from transactional to relationship-based thinking changes everything.
This collaborative approach drives better information sharing within customer communities and works just as well inside companies connecting different departments. The key ingredient is building real relationships and creating meaningful opportunities for people to interact.
The Foundation: Making Friends Online
Online friendships – where two people acknowledge their connection – form the backbone of social interaction. Just like in real life, different types of relationships create different expectations. Following someone on Twitter feels different from connecting with a coworker on an internal company platform like SocialText. People form these connections because they expect to get something valuable in return.
Without these relationship links, social platforms become pretty basic. People can still post content and rate things, but there's no real collaboration happening. YouTube demonstrates this perfectly. Despite massive traffic and tons of content, most interaction happens at the individual level rather than through genuine shared experiences. Compare that to Facebook, where most sharing involves actual conversations between people who have established friendship connections.
In business settings, these "friending" behaviors drive knowledge creation because they connect people and help them work together. When people recognize they have shared goals, collaborative behaviors naturally emerge. Group projects almost always produce better results than individual efforts – think about those corporate survival training exercises where teams consistently outperform individuals.
Content communities benefit from this too. When members rate and recommend photos or articles, they improve the overall quality for everyone. This public refinement process creates stronger outcomes and builds reputation among friends and colleagues in the network. That sense of shared ownership is what makes social technologies successful inside companies and in customer communities.
Setting Community Standards
Managing online communities requires clear rules and active moderation. Cyberbullying, flame wars, and harassment of new members will destroy any community effort. The policies that define acceptable behavior – often called Terms of Use – are critically important for any social interaction.
Effective Terms of Use typically cover several key areas:
Participation expectations might include reputation systems that reward frequent, high-quality contributions. Staying on topic keeps discussions valuable and searchable for the broader community. Zero tolerance policies for bullying, hate speech, and spam are obviously necessary for most business environments.
Moderation goes beyond just enforcing rules. Good moderators warn members about inappropriate behavior, help newcomers understand community norms, and provide escalation paths for serious issues. They also make expert community members feel comfortable staying engaged by keeping discussions organized and productive.
IBM's social computing policies offer a solid example of how to govern social media use within organizations. These policies function like internal Terms of Use, covering who can participate, what's appropriate for social channels, and proper disclosure practices.
Your Online Reputation Matters
Just as photos get rated, community members get rated too. People vote each other up or down based on the quality of their contributions and overall value to the community. This mirrors how personal reputations develop in real life.
Reputation systems are essential for business communities. Without them, unreliable posts get treated as facts, and bullying behaviors can kill the community entirely. Remember, you can't directly control conversations on social media the way you control advertising campaigns. Social media conversations belong to the collective group, which includes you but isn't owned by you alone.
Authority and reputation must be earned rather than declared. Calling yourself a "guru" means nothing without community recognition. Intel's Developer program uses a martial arts belt system that clearly shows members' skill levels and contributions. It's an easily understood point system where achieving higher levels becomes a genuine badge of honor.
The importance of reputation systems can't be overstated. Without them, participants have no way to judge their own value or that of others around them, which rarely creates satisfying experiences. Rather than rigid rules, dynamic reputation systems provide real-time feedback that guides members toward behaviors that support the entire community.
CRM Goes Social
Traditional customer relationship management relies on historical transaction data to predict what customers might need next or when they're ready for upgrades. Social media is changing this by making customers active participants in the sales process rather than passive recipients of marketing messages.
Think about brand ambassadors and advocacy programs that play out on social platforms. There's a clear progression from casual browser to loyal customer to brand advocate that can be tracked through social media posts and interactions. Social analytics tools can provide real insights into where someone sits in that journey at any given moment.
Social CRM borrows ideas from traditional CRM but extends them across your entire business and includes external influencers. Instead of just looking backward at past purchases, Social CRM invites customers into future-oriented collaboration by asking "How can we make this product better?"
This forward-looking approach involves all stakeholders – employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. It's a whole-business strategy designed to delight customers rather than just sell to them.
Understanding Influence Paths
Consider a typical social media conversation: someone reads a product review and discusses it with friends on Twitter. That review was written by a real person with identifiable motivations. Understanding who that person is and why they wrote the review provides crucial business intelligence.
If you can decode the motivation and viewpoint behind reviews, you can assess their real business impact and adjust your processes accordingly. Knowing who is talking about you, not just what they're saying, helps you optimize the business processes that create customer experiences in the first place.
Social CRM connects traditional customer relationship management with social interactions and relationship lifecycle analysis. Traditional CRM tracks past transactions – what was purchased, returned, or renewed. Social CRM adds the social layer by tracking relationships and conversations happening around your brand.
Here's what makes Social CRM different: it's used by Operations departments, not just Marketing. The same people who deliver actual customer experiences can use this data to estimate staffing levels, spot design issues, identify innovation opportunities, and much more.
Mapping Customer Experiences
Kira Wampler from Intuit points out that most organizations know where their next "Dell Hell" or "United Breaks Guitars" situation will come from, so why not fix problems before they explode online? She outlines a practical approach:
Audit existing customer feedback channels. How many are you using? What are people saying? What's your process for analyzing, responding, and following up with solutions?
Map complete customer journeys. Understand every step customers take when using your product or service. Create cross-functional teams to connect what you learn to each point in your process that impacts customer experience.
Identify gaps in feedback coverage. Where are the blind spots? Which channels overlap? What feedback shows how you're performing at critical moments?
Establish baseline measurements. Align improvement efforts with business objectives and create a clear plan based on what you've learned.
Create regular reporting processes. Use metrics from each step to keep cross-functional teams updated. No surprises is the best surprise.
This approach lets you understand which customers are influential, who's driving specific conversations, and how to build relationships with these people. You can use this information proactively rather than reactively to drive innovation and shape conversations that benefit your business.
The Social Graph in Action
Just as you track communication with existing customers through relationship lifecycles, you can track customers and influencers as they create content and have conversations on social media. This information becomes incredibly valuable when integrated into product design processes.
Tools like BuzzStream demonstrate how this works in practice. BuzzStream includes influencer dashboards that monitor conversations based on keywords and convert source data into manageable contact databases. The profiles and connections of people contributing to conversations you're following become contacts in an influencer database that integrates with other customer data.
The social graph – essentially a map of who's connected to whom – powers these tools. Social influence platforms work by "crawling" personal and profile links in online conversations to find information about conversation sources, similar to how search engines crawl page links to find related content.
Starting with a comment or blog post, BuzzStream looks for associated websites, email addresses, or social media handles. As contact information emerges, the social graph crawler organizes and presents potential connection points through an easy-to-use dashboard.
Real-World Applications
The Women's Fund of Miami-Dade County worked with The Cunningham Group to implement Social CRM for donor relationship management. They created easy-to-consume content like podcasts and videos, invited participants to rate and comment on content, and connected this engagement to real-world impact from grants and donor programs. The "Real Women, Real Voices" campaign resulted from this approach.
Internally, they extended their Social CRM system to connect staff with donors, board members, and supporters. This comprehensive approach demonstrates how local nonprofit organizations can apply Social CRM strategically.
SoHo Publishing launched Sohobiztube.com, a multimedia platform for marketing small businesses. Rather than focusing on business founders' personal brands, they highlight company brands, products, services, and employees. Publisher Cd Vann created Sohobiztube as a Social CRM platform that pulled customers into content creation, helping small business owners recognize their customers as sources of business direction.
Beyond Customer Relationships
The concept extends to Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), applying social tools throughout supply chains and delivery channels. For businesses with complex supplier networks – think vacation packages involving multiple partners – VRM extends collaborative experiences across the entire supply chain.
This philosophy builds on The Cluetrain Manifesto's idea that the best marketing is conversational, based on interactions between businesses and customers, and between customers themselves. Social CRM ties conversations, not just transactions, into business processes.
Blogger and Influencer Outreach
Effective blogger outreach goes beyond A-list influencers. While top bloggers have earned their reputations and matter to your program, focusing only on them misses the bigger picture. A-list bloggers are few, easy to find, and write according to their own professional standards. Develop relationships when your product deserves their attention, and look for ways to help them without expecting favors in return.
More important initially is identifying B, C, and D-list bloggers who reach 10, 100, 1,000, or 10,000 people in your market. These bloggers want the information you have and would write about you if they knew about you. Tools like BuzzStream, Sysomos, Scout Labs, and Alterian's SM2 platform excel at finding conversation sources and connecting enough information to initiate and develop relationships.
Individual-Level Engagement
An AdWeek post covering Accenture's 2010 Global Content Study highlighted a key finding: "Target individuals, not audiences. The days of thinking about audiences in broadly defined demographic buckets are over."
You don't need to personally greet every customer, but you need systems to identify them individually when they need attention – traditional CRM capability – plus ways to engage and connect them to collaborative business processes. This Social CRM component powers your overall social business program.
The social web welcomes everyone. Today's one-time customer interaction might create tomorrow's brand evangelist. Your Social CRM program should identify and build relationships at grassroots levels with large numbers of local or small-network influencers. The cumulative impact can be significant.
Consumers increasingly make purchase decisions based on information from "people like themselves" rather than traditional advertising. The Edelman Trust Barometer provides convincing evidence for both social media listening programs and extracting actionable insights from conversations about your brand and industry.
This shift represents a fundamental change in how businesses must approach customer relationships. The old model of talking at customers has been replaced by a collaborative model where customers expect to be heard, valued, and included in shaping the products and services they use.
Companies that embrace this change and build genuine social business capabilities will create stronger customer relationships, better products, and more sustainable competitive advantages. Those that ignore it risk being left behind as customers migrate to brands that make them feel like valued community members rather than anonymous transaction sources.
