Social Media and CRM’s and Surveys : Welcome to Converged Customer and Market Intelligence
A lot has happened this week in terms of social and metrics and surveys. Actually … ‘a lot’ has been going on for some time but a couple of key announcements this week really cemented this blog together.
First, Webtrends and Hootsuite announced that they were teaming up. Good moves (like Jagger). Hootsuite has been expanding for a little while now, recently adding features like post scheduling, analytics (which weren’t great) and tools for teams to collaborate. With the Webtrends partnership, Hootsuite adds web analytics to its feature-set.
Yesterday, Nielsen (market research behemoth) and Twitter announced that Twitter would now offer (really short) survey tools for brands. The announcement is hot on the heels of the Google survey offering that recently launched, giving brands a very cheap way to run a survey across the Google network and get some top-line data.
And everyone’s favorite, privacy troubled social network, Facebook, recently partnered with Datalogix for advertising targeting and measurement data.
Then there’s the recent Marketing Cloud announcement by SalesForce that combines the publishing tools and analytics behind BuddyMedia with the social media monitoring features and data from Radian6. All of that will eventually sync up with a businesses SalesForce deployment, bringing marketing data a lot closer to CRM (customer relationship management) and sales funnel data.
These examples point to a huge convergence of social media, CRM’s, sales funnel data, market research and analytics. That is, a centralization of data and intelligence where marketers and managers can act on very targeted data.
What that means is an unprecedented level of customer and market understanding. You’ve got sales revenue data, next to customer data, next to digital analytics data, next to marketing data.
Social networks or social media dashboards collect a wealth of intelligence, sentiment and customer verbatim comments as we all become more social and more mobile. That makes them a great place to also collect survey data and link all of this information to CRM knowledge and sales results. And you can only imagine social networks becoming more of an intelligence source as tools like team collaboration, crowd-sourcing and location-services all become more socially-enabled.
Ultimately, it’s a full-scale convergence of data and information about your customers and the market from different sources. It’s customer feedback. It’s suggestions and crowd-sourcing. It’s customer service. It’s market research data. And it’s the sales and revenue figures.
All in one place. All converged bringing the benefit of cross-channel learning and opportunities for action.
Big Data is a glimpse at the start of this but it goes beyond just data. Tools like social media publishing and customer service interaction are also at the center of the convergence, taking advantage of the possibilities from using data in real-time.
Now all we need to do is crack the nut on holistic marketing attribution.
