Originally published by: MediaPost | MarketingTools: CRM on 2012-03-20 11:56:49
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, punish me with telemarketer calls! Forget everything you have read about CRM needing to be a tool you install, a program that you launch, or a team of “experts” you need to hire. After watching the Facebook “fMC” webcast and the new FB tools launching, Facebook is likely your best investment for CRM. Before the guys in white coats haul me away, hear me out! Your customers are on Facebook telling you so much about what they think, what they like, love, hate, what they listen to and even what they want to share. Managing that customer has actually never been easier. Most Facebook users edit and prune their own data such as location, life milestones, changes and even Pinterest favorites. Your Customer Relationship Management DNA is gift-wrapped for you and ready for use. Are you un-wrapping that gift? Getting customers to just “Like” you or your brand is easy; those are the “admire from afar” customers who like you, sort of care about you and say “let’s keep in touch” in some sort of a distant-uncle kind of way. But there are those customers who not only like you, but comment on stories you post, like the comments by others and even occasionally will share out what you post in case someone else might want to know. These are your “Friend” customers who are along for the ride and will likely hang around. Then there are the “Fanatics.” These customers post every day, will ask questions, make their status about you, share, comment, like, disagree and even debate with other customers. No matter what you post, they will “Love it” and will shower you with so much attention it gets frightening in sort of an Amy Fisher-stalker kind of way. Now, thanks to the new timeline and OGV (open graph verbs) and new “stories” integration into FB, your “Distant Uncles,” “Friends” and “Fanatics” can now co-exist on your brand without you having to do much except keep it fresh and interesting. Here is an example; if a customer likes your brand and then writes something about your brand in their status, their friends and friends of those friends will see it as advertising, as a “story” on your brand page and will even have it incorporated into other areas of FB. Unlike the old days of figuring out how to pace your contact to your customers and the “how” and the “why” – now all you need to do is spend time on Facebook and let the perpetuity of Facebook “virility” spread far and wide. Chances are if you “feed” your fanatics a little harder with compelling content, offers, and info, like pollinating bees that virility will boomerang around the social media sphere like screaming preteens near Taylor Swift. Investing a little extra time to study up on your fans can also shed some light, too, such as gender, median age, location, likes, interests, education, networks and other handy info. No magic wand, needed just a little time and elbow grease. True, some users keep a lot of that info tightly locked away from non-friends; however, the new timeline function out now actually reveals a little more than previous “locked” walls that were more like Fort Knox. Again, a treasure trove of CRM DNA awaits you behind every fan and fanatic alike. Matching that DNA back to your database patterns and personas could be some of the most significant yet “free” investment to date! Will you give it the thumbs up?
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