Social Media Listening (a.k.a. "Do You See What I See?)

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ED: The following is a guest post from Kristy C. Cartier. She manages marketing and communications at AMG/AHAA. One of the harder things I’ve found in social media is monitoring, especially if you can’t afford a nice SMMS system such as Radian6. It’s especially important when you’re trying to build up… More»

Writing Your Social Strategy

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Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here. This installment continues Chapter 13: Social CRM Strategy. Adam lays out the creation of a social CRM strategy. Now that… More»

Choosing Your Social Management Team

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Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here. This installment continues Chapter 13: Social CRM Strategy. Adam discusses the components of social CRM strategy, and looks at… More»

Social Media Strategy 101

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Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here. This installment begins Chapter 13: Social CRM Strategy. Adam discusses the importance of a social media management system. Now that… More»

Metz Methodology Explained

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Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here. This installment begins Chapter 12: The Methodology. Adam shows his roots via Li and Bernoff. The Social CRM methodology all… More»

Know Your Social Web History

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Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here. This installment continues Chapter 11: Metrics and Rationale. Adam reviews the history of the social Web, with a glimpse… More»

The Rationale for SCRM Analytics

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Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here. This installment begins Chapter 11: Metrics and Rationale. Adam begins to explain how to interpret your organization's needs for… More»

The 23 SCRM Use Cases: Wrap-Up

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Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here. This installment finishes up Chapter 10: Seamless Customer Experience. Adam shares some thoughts behind the concept of the 23… More»

Provide VIP Service

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Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here. This installment continues Chapter 10: Seamless Customer Experience. Adam goes upscale with the service model. VIP EXPERIENCE (NUMBER 22) What Is… More»

Achieving Seamless Customer Experience

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Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here. This installment is the start of Chapter 10: Seamless Customer Experience. Adam discusses something every company wants to say… More»

This Ain't Mad Men: Collaboration Insights

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If you watch the TV show Mad Men, you can see the “old” way companies collaborated with their customers. In one episode Dr. Faye Miller, a consumer psychologist, ushers a group of secretaries into a conference room to discuss makeup and their “beauty routine”; Dr. Miller asks focused questions, and… More»

How Much Crowdsourcing Pays

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Some would say that crowdsourcing is the most “mature” of the Social Customer Management use cases, because, in this one, the brand actually creates products and services with their customers. You’ve got to trust and love your customers to do this. The concept is not really that new. European automotive… More»

The Case (& Cost) For Social Support

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RAPID SOCIAL RESPONSE (NUMBER 14) What Is It? This one is sort of the customer service “cousin” of Rapid Social Sales Response. If you do one without the other, there’s a pretty big risk factor involved: your sales team will appear highly engaged, but the customer service team behind them will seem… More»

The Financial Rationale For Social Support

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Let’s take a step back in time to 2000, when customer support as we know it today was pretty different. For example, say you received your first cell phone bill, and it was $100 too high. You’d call the phone company’s call center, and be put on hold for five… More»

The Purple Sweater Problem: Social Supply Re-Allocation

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DYNAMIC SOCIAL SUPPLY REALLOCATION (NUMBER 11) What Is It? This is where we begin to explore the notion of the “social supply chain.” The idea is that brands will be able to reallocate products that are in the supply chain, dynamically, based on customer conversations on the social Web. I call it the… More»

Rapid Social Sales Response: Are You Using It?

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There are some Social CRM sales solutions in this chapter that will make you want to go out and start using them tomorrow. The cool thing is, you actually can do that. Take, for example, the Sales 2.0 software InsideView. If you really wanted to use it, you could put… More»

Rapid Social Marketing Response: What Is It?

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RAPID SOCIAL MARKETING RESPONSE (NUMBER 3) What Is It? I know, this sounds just like social marketing insights, but it’s actually the next logical step—defending the brand in a short response time (around five minutes). This is the use case that really validates Social Marketing Insights. For example, let’s say you sell all-natural… More»

Social Marketing: It's Not What You Think It Means

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When most people talk about “social media,” what they’re really talking about is social marketing—the “tip of the iceberg.” This is quite possibly the most fundamental misunderstanding of Social Customer Management and social business. Often, senior executives will hire a strategic consulting team, specializing in social business, then hand them… More»

The *Other* 22 Use Cases of Social CRM

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So now you’ve got the foundation of what you can do with Social CRM. In the next six chapters we’ll look over the “smaller,” more granular use cases, so you’ll understand the finer points of what your team can do with Social CRM. You’ll probably want to write all over… More»

The Five Ms of Social CRM, Part 1

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BREAKING DOWN SOCIAL CUSTOMER INSIGHTS: THE FIVE Ms OF SOCIAL CRM Before we get into granular specifics use cases, and what each of them looks like on a day-to-day basis, let’s break down the foundation, the Five Ms of Social CRM, so you understand Social Customer Insights and the baseline use… More»

The 23 Use Cases Of Social CRM

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I’ve had many an executive ask me, “What exactly can we do with social CRM, besides field customer complaints and solve problems?” I usually tell them they’ve already discovered the two key use cases, but there are about 21 more to go, and we better keep moving if they ever… More»

Your Conversations, And A Little Systems Theory

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  How Visible Are Your Conversations? Here’s another example on the visibility of the conversation when your brand manages the social customer. (See Table 3.1.) Let’s say you’re selling mobile phone service and an unhappy AT&T customer, who we’ll call Jane, is frustrated because her Apple iPhone contract ended in June 2010… More»

The Social CRM Process, And How Tropicana OJ Didn't Use It

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  Case Study: Tropicana Orange Juice Tropicana Orange Juice, part of the PepsiCo brand family, learned the hard way, in January 2009, that not engaging the social customer could be very costly. The brand launched a full-scale package redesign, replacing their decades-old “straw in an orange” packaging with a minimalist, sans-serif design.… More»

A Definition Of Social CRM That You'll Actually Understand

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Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) is something that the “godfather of CRM,” Paul Greenberg, first defined in his groundbreaking book, CRM at the Speed of Light, a few years ago. The way he wrote the definition was true to the social Web: he gathered a bunch of CRM consultants to… More»

Why You're Still Not A Successful Social Object

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Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here. This installment continues Chapter 2: The “How” and “Where” of Engagement and the Four Social Customer Scenarios. Adam discusses… More»

Social Customer Engagement Models That Don't Suck

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Before we can examine the Four Social Customer Scenarios—where your brand is, currently, in relation to your social customers—we must look at the Social Customer Engagement Models, the “where” of the social customer, within your organization. These five models were developed most thoroughly by Jeremiah Owyang, of the Altimeter Group.… More»

How To Be An Unsuccessful Social Object

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This installment continues Chapter 2: The “How” and “Where” of Engagement and the Four Social Customer Scenarios. Adam answers the cliffhanger question from last time, and expounds on unsuccessful social brands. “What you’re going to see is that right now social media is very separate, basically to make it an integrated… More»

The Social Customer: More Roots, and a Promise

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Ed. note: This is the second in a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to modern marketing by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here. While using social media and becoming a social customer is hardly an act of rebellion, at some point it was. My Yelp.com… More»

The Social Customer: Born of Punk Rock

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Ed. note: This is the first in a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to modern marketing by Adam Metz. Here, Adam discusses the influences that shaped his view of business. It’s possible that many of the readers of this book will understand how I grew up,… More»

How To Project The ROI For Marketing Lead Generation

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I had a wonderful conversation with my friend, international sales trainer Will Crist, from Sandler Training a few weeks ago on his radio show, Sales Lead Management Association Radio. We chatted for the better part of an hour on how to Project The ROI For Marketing Lead Generation, especially when you're… More»

On Selling Social Business, From A Veteran Management Consultant

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I had an email chain with my dad, Phil Metz, a veteran management consultant (and now a VP-level solar energy executive), and here's what he had to say on the state of social business, in late 2010. Here's some super-sharp insight. Thanks, Dad.   My impression -- definitely anecdotal but I'll… More»

The Metz Guide To JiveWorld (Sold out!)

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We’re very excited to be attending JiveWorld this year, because it’s the big Social Business conference for enterprise-size brands. We’ll be filing dispatches from the conference here on our blog, as well as with CRM Magazine , and perhaps even with our friends at Selling Power . Here’s how I’d… More»

Who To Follow In SocialCRM

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I get asked this question all the time: “Who should I follow in Social Customer Relationship Management (social CRM)?” So, I created a Twitter list, SocialCRMMasterminds . I took the name from Napoleon Hill’s “Think And Grow Rich,” from his master-mind group. Well, the other night, I took a moment to devise… More»

From The Vault: The ROI Of The Social Customer

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Here at the social concept, we decided, a few weeks ago, to open the vault, giving away every presentation we've done in the last two years. This week, we're posting our second and third presentation, complete with all notes, on Slideshare. [The only reason we're not making the… More»

7 reasons Why Salesforce Doesn't Really Work On The iPad

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Christina and I went down to the Apple store last week. Her PC laptop is dying – she’s after the MacBook air. Me, I’m just sick of carrying a laptop, period. I picked up a great Jack Spade bag in Venice (similar to this one ), and it’s big enough… More»

SugarCon 2010: The Wrap-Up - Big SocialCRM, Stolen iPads and Good Vibes

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I’ve been attending CRM conferences for three years, but I’m hardly a veteran in the space. I was, however, introduced to SugarCRM very early on by one of my very first consulting clients, Fred Schoeneman, over at Elmwood Realty & Investments , in Berkeley. What sold Fred on the product… More»

Sales 2.0 Chat: Miller Heiman's Richard Blakeman on Strategic Selling & The Social Customer

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“The behavior that [a consumer brand like] Abercrombie wants is ‘who’s gonna want it where, by when’ If [they] don’t have that framework, then all of the social data is noise.” – Rich Blakeman, Miller Heiman About a year ago, I lost a consulting bid proposal that I made to a… More»

Sales 2.0 Chat: Salesforce's Brett Queener On How SMEs Might Have To Embrace Social Cust Mgmt

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bq. "If you have a screwed-up customer process and you deploy Salesforce, all you do is screw your customers _faster_," he said. Brett Queener is, admittedly, not the "guru" of social customer relationship management at Salesforce. He bestows that title on SVP Product Marketing Kraig Swensrud and "Chuck Ganapathi":http://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckganapathi… More»

Sales 2.0 Day Two: The Notion Of Social Enablement

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“Sales 2.0 is still reactive – we need to go into a proactive mode.” – Gerhard Gschwandtner, Selling Power. The Sales 2.0 Conference kicked off its second and final day at the Four Seasons San Francisco today, with a rock-solid keynote by OracleCRM’s Mark Woollen . I’ve packed my Sales 2.0… More»

What To Read Before You Hit The (Sold Out!) Sales 2.0 Conference Tomorrow

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I’m about to head to Chinatown for an afternoon of chilling and reading, but before I take off, I wanted to share a quick reading list for what you’ll want to digest before heading over to the Sales 2.0 conference. If you can’t print out and read these bad boys… More»

Why The Social CRM Strategies For Business Seminar Is A Lot Like The Velvet Underground's Albums

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Brian Eno once said that even though hardly anyone bought the Velvet Underground’s albums at the time they first appeared, almost everyone who did formed their own band. The sCRM Summit in Washington DC had a similar vibe. The small conference took place at a snowed-in Westin, a few blocks from… More»

Social ERP: What is it?

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I was sitting in front of Stacks, a Burlingame, California pancake house, this past Sunday morning, with my dad. We were talking about the notion of social enterprise resource planning, and what it might look like. He works for a big solar company that sells solar facilities to gigantic businesses… More»

Why Facebook Has No Incentive To Care About Your Privacy

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Facebook is a medium-sized global company based in Palo Alto, California. It’s got about 1000 employees, and now has offices in New York and Dublin. The company is the world’s largest social network, and, in the last year, it has been valued at amounts ranging from $6.5 to $14 Billion.… More»

Why 1200 Meeting Planners Want To Dance On A Volcano

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Last Thursday, I gave my first double-Keynote, ever. I’ll spoke at Moscone West in San Francisco at Meeting Planners International’s (MPINCC) Annual Conference, Do The Hustle. I’m giving two talks, “Socializing the Sale: How to Never Cold-Call Again” and “Dance on a Volcano: How to Drive Millions in Revenue from… More»

Why We're Getting Certified By Salesforce

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Yes, you read that right. Next week, I'm going down to Salesforce's San Mateo office for the week to take my "ADM201":http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=2&ved=0CBQQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.salesforce.com%2Fassets%2Fpdf%2Fdatasheets%2FDS_ADM201.pdf&ei=j59US_DWOZOuswPA4MH-Bw&usg=AFQjCNFG5tV116Cvcs5rOE0-CPFvvHWGUw&sig2=es4WXjf9HBP0ldSj-dzRAQ training course and exam. The reason we're doing this is simple. Most of our clients are in the $100-$500M range, and we typically work with medium-sized consumer brands.… More»

Making Money In The Gourmet Food Industry With Social Media

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There was one vertical market that was a real bright spot in the recession last year - gourmet food. Although the '08-'09 recession casualties included Gourmet Magazine and a handful of smaller gourmet food brands, overall, gourmet food (especially the types that are prepared at home), tend to do really… More»

Interview: The Social Customer's Mark Lazen

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While SocialMediaToday launched a couple of years ago, never before has there been a site or a portal/aggregator explicitly dedicated to improving the knowledge base on social customer relationship management. Although a few great blogs have tackled the subject (Chris Carfi’s Social Customer Manifesto comes to mind as… More»

Awesome WEBINAR 1/28: The Future of Customer Service

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Although the social concept doesn't have any webinars scheduled until March, there's a great one coming up late next week. (I'll be in meetings with Salesforce all week, but I'm definitely going to sneak out for this one!) "The Social Customer":http://thesocialcustomer.com/ is presenting a webinar on The… More»

How To Raise A Ton of Money For Haiti Using Social Customer Managment

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The Red Cross has raised over $5m for the Haitian earthquake in the last 36 hours. Everybody’s talking about and writing about it. If you want to manage your social customers and raise a bunch of money for Haiti too, here’s how to do it. 1. Triple-Donation Model For New Customers,… More»

Five Email Marketing Companies That Will Help You Drive Revenue With Social Customer Management

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In almost every consumer-brand implementation we do, the question gets asked, “Which email marketing solution should we use.” Since we’re a vendor-agnostic team, our answer is always, “any one that shares well to the social web and features solid social proofing . It’s also best that it flows from your customer… More»

What Wine, Booze & Beer Brands Should Do Since They Can't Comp Booze On The Social Web

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With Direct-To-Consumer Symposium (big wine conference) quickly coming, I have had dozens of conversations with our wine client and other alcohol-related brands about the challenges of direct outreach to customers on the social web. One of the biggest challenges they face is that they’re simply not legally allowed to give… More»

MetzMash is Back On SocialMediaToday

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When MetzMash launched nearly two and a half years ago, in Summer 2007, it was my third blog. I'd previously had a music blog, Megalomania (2003-2006) and a mobile technology blog, Viper Education (possibly my worst-named project, ever, even if the content was pretty good). The very first aggregator that… More»

Accidentally Like A Martyr: Twitter Advertising & How To Prepare Your Consumer Brand For This Sub-Strategy

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Last week was a big week on the social web, especially for large consumer brands. Last Friday, 72 hours after the announcement of Salesforce’s groundbreaking "Chatter":http://thesocialconcept.com/metzmash/salesforce-launches-chatter-full-scale-social-media-for-smbenterprise product (in-house social customer management for SMB/enterprise), Twitter COO Dick Costolo "announced":http://scobleizer.com/2009/11/20/twitter-to-turn-on-advertising-you-will-love-heres-how-supertweet/ that Twitter will turn on an advertising model. According to "TechCrunch":http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/20/twitter-ads/… More»

Live-Blogging: Social Innovation In The Cloud #DF09

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I’m sitting in my first workshop of the day, Social Innovation In The Cloud (yes, I slept through my two 7:30s, but I’ll catch the replay). This session is largely populated by non-profits who are using cloud-based applications, workflow and CRM (for fundraising). We began with James Bullard, the director of… More»

Salesforce Launches Chatter: Full-Scale Social Media For SMB/Enterprise

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If Pink Floyd ran an enterprise software company, it would be Salesforce. If Pink Floyd’s crazed fans ran a social sales and customer service platform, it probably look something like Salesforce Chatter. At about 11:30 a.m. this morning, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff announced Chatter, a social collaboration platform.… More»

Social Customer Management Quiz For Hospitality Brands (eHotelier)

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We just published our first article in eHotelier, and it’s a quiz on social customer management. To see how much your hospitality brand knows about managing customer data from the social web, click here .

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