Social Relationship Management and Social CRM are terms that are now being thrown around for new technology platforms that are enabling multichannel execution. Companies like Lithium Technologies have created platforms that allow companies to run hosted communities, listen across a variety of social media channels, and manage content to and from social networks in one integrate tool. While marketing has steadily evolved from "one to many", to "one to one", Social CRM is now creating the opportunity for "many to one." For example, a customer tweets a question about a product (e.g. is it worth the money) on Twitter, a customer advocate brings that comment into a company's online forum where another customer answers it. The customers response to the question is then tweeted by the company to promote sales of the product.
The promise of Web 2.0 has always been about customers selling to customers. New Social CRM tools are now enabling that by consolidating platforms. But this has the potential to raise issues over who gets credit for the sale. If the true ROI on social media is revenue, which many research studies are now suggesting, then who gets credit for the sale by a customer to a customer? Does marketing get credit for creating the customer advocate who convinced the customer to buy or does the sales person who "owns" the customer? And what about the customer who made the sale...what do they get?
One thing is certain: social media is blurring the line between sales and marketing interactions and dialogues. And given that, we may have to rethink our traditional views of customer coverage and relationship management. Perhaps in the future, marketing will be responsible for managing customers online relationships, and sales for the offline experience.
Someone call HR and give them the heads up. Territory planning, revenue crediting and roles and responsibilities might need a refresh soon.
