CRM, Social Media and Social CRM L0

What is CRM?

In three words : Marketing,Sales and Support

All the big names involved in developing CRM software, implementing CRM systems and using CRM systems play around these three words. Each activity, task, functionality in a CRM system touches one or more of these three aspects i.e. Marketing,Sales and Support

What is Social Media?

If your are reading this then probably you know this, so I am not wasting time on this one.

What is social CRM?

The integration pf a traditional CRM system with social media platforms is called Social CRM (Duhh.....)

So why do we need it? again the three magical words(Marketing,Sales and Support)  Brands can integrate CRM and Social Media to ensure better sales, marketing and support opportunities. How?

Customers are active on social media, companies can gain knowledge about them using social media sites and thus can offer them related products, offers, etc : Say a 19 year old would be interested in knowing venues for parties where as a 30 year old would be interested in knowing more about how can he reduce is car insurance cost. Targeted action can be taken using social media to focus marketing and sales efforts towards these individuals or demographics.

All brands need to provide customer support, no matter is you are a technology giant or a small coffee shop. Social CRM provides one of the quickest and engaging channels for customer support.

So again going back to the basics, social CRM stands on same three pillars : Marketing, Sales and Support

The mind boggling number!

As per the 2009 data 5.12 people out of every hundred use internet in India. The total population of India in 2009 was 1,166,079,217 as per CIA fact book. So the total number of internet user comes to 0.0512 X 1,166,079,217 which equals to a whopping 59703256 Or 59.70 million users!!


Another report on FT (Source) says that India’s 1.1bn people currently take just 0.03 flights per person per year so that brings us to a whopping 34.98 million flight tickets!!


Now if we want to see how many of these tickets are booked online, let’s multiply this number by 0.70 as 70 % of people say that they booked flight tickets online in last three months (Source).


This brings us to a number which is mind boggling. As you can see from above calculation, approximately 24.48 million people book air tickets online.


And this is just one sector we are talking about, what if we combine all sectors!

Social Media Market Overview

As per Forrester’s report on “US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009 to 2014” the spend on Social Media Marketing to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums. Forrester estimates that online advertising will grow from 12 percent of total marketing spend this year to 21 percent by 2014.

Number of people on social media platforms is increasing by the minute, if we have a look at the most popular social media platform i.e. Facebook®, it had 350 million users in January 2010 out of which 102 million were from USA and only 5.6 million users were from India where as if you compare the population of these two countries the trend is exactly opposite i.e. In 2010 India’s population has reached 1.18 billion and that of China has reached 1.34 billion where that of USA is 0.31 billion people.

Giants like IBM, SAS, Google and Accenture have jumped into the game with both feet and offer solution offerings ranging from SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench, Social Media Analytics to Social CRM. There are huge numbers of smaller player which offer more customized solution and number of such players is increasing exponentially.

Social media consulting as a career

Since now we have read about how to drive traffic to your blog http://madhurdhawan.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html and how can businesses generate sales leads using LinkedIn http://madhurdhawan.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html , lets now understand that if you have limitless passion for social networks and even tweet about what time you went to the loo today, you convert this passion to a career!

Just imagine how much fun it would be if you get paid for being on facebook or just for tweeting :p.

I am not kidding. In today’s internet active business environment, every business understands the importance of Social Media and the impact of web presence on the business. Management understands the importance of social media but on the other hand do not have dedicated experts to work on the same. Organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the fast paced social media scenario and the amount of time required to maintain their web presence.

You, yes you can be the solution! How? Just read along to know...

Businesses today look for one stop solution to maintain and upkeep their face on social media world, freelance consultants are best solution for this as organizations find it easier to hire them and get expert advice without taking them on their payrolls :)

So it does not matter if you are an internet junkie or are a master in business studies, you can choose to be a social media advisor or social media jockey for a business. This business might be your own college or a coaching class.

The only thing I would like to highlight is that you would have to prove your worth before you start earning on per hour basis, so don’t mind doing a couple of projects for free ;)

cheers!

6 Simple Steps to drive traffic to your blog!!!

This post is dedicated to all the effort I have made to make my blog attract more and more traffic. Here are some of the things which I have done to make my blog “FAMOUS” …well…or simply….how did I get more and more traffic to my Blog!

So here are the things which I did

1. Allow Blog site to list your blog: Allow you blog site to list your blog in its blog directory. For example If you use Blogspot, when you publish your blog , it would ask you if you want to publish the blog in its directory? You can select “yes” at that time. This would list your blog on the directory.

2. Associate appropriate tags: Tags are the list of words which you associate with your blog or posts. So in order to make sure that more and more people are able to find your blog if they search for a word that has been tagged with your blog then associate the same with your blog. For example: If your blog talks about “how to make sugar free cakes :P” then make sure you include words like cakes, bakery, sugar free, diabetes, diabetics etc in you tags.

3. List your blogs on various Blog directories: There are many blog directories which are available and which offer blog listing services for free. Ensure that your blog is listed. Here is a list to start with http://www.avangate.com/articles/blog-directories-95.htm

4. Submit your blog to Google and other search engines: Search engines like Google, yahoo allow users to submit blogs to be listed on their blog directories. Here is a link to submit your blog to Google http://blogsearch.google.com/ping . and here is a tutorial to submit your blog to Yahoo http://googlewebmasterblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/submit-blog-to-yahoo.html

5. Submit your Blog to news site like DIGG, REDDIT : You can bring more visibility to your blog by submitting your blog on sites like Digg ™ www.digg.com and www.reddit.com , these sites help you to publish your blog in front of world wide audience.

6. Publish your blog on other social media platforms : you can also post link to your blog on all the other social media platforms like face book, LinkedIn, twitter and so on. Also blog sites like www.Blogspot.com Allow you to link your face book account to your blog.

Ok, Enough of talking , now let me do all this with the post which you have been reading …
Cheers!
Madhur Dhawan