Many companies today are trying to understand Social CRM and integrate it into their marketing activities. The way they do this is by optimizing their existing campaigns for social media, or sometimes by creating wholly new campaigns revolving around the viral character of social media. These companies are present on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and MySpace; they send their marketing messages nicely wrapped through all channels, they reach a large audience of fans and followers. Just like they did before Web 2.0.

What is common to most of these companies is that they understand social media as another channel for campaigns. They fail to grasp the totally new character of social media, the one that justifies calling it Social CRM. By including social media in their channel mix, enterprises are giving up traditional outbound one-to-many communication to their customers. Instead, they are inexorably entering into a continuous multidirectional conversation between not just one but many customers and the enterprise that occurs permanently, that is driven by customers, and that takes place irrespective of the enterprise. The enterprise can opt to participate, but the conversation will continue regardless.

Continue reading "Customer Strategist Martin Förster:
Social CRM Requires a New Marketing Skill:
Having a Conversation" »

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Anyone have any ideas for this newspaper publisher? He runs a state-wide newspaper for a religious denomination, and every two weeks they mail about 16,000 32-page newspapers out to subscribers. Paid advertising makes up about 10% to 15% of these pages. They have a modest e-zine as well, and they have all their news on their Web site, too. Every state has a similar church-denomination newspaper, and he has teamed up with the editors in two other states, with whom he shares news tips and stories. There is no central newspaper organization for the whole country, however. A typical story in his newspaper might be one that covers a controversial resignation or organizational dispute occurring in one of the state or national religious organizations, or maybe a report on missionary work, and so forth. But this newspaper editor's question to me was, what more should he be doing, given the dramatic new technologies available?

Continue reading "What should newspapers be doing?" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (3)

Should you or shouldn't you let your own customers review your products and services on your own website? Only about 50% of online retailers currently do. This is the question we'll explore in this post.

In Part One of this story, we pointed out how deceitful Nero Software is in the way it cons money out of unsuspecting customers. My feeling is that making money off of customer mistakes or customer naivete is never a very good business strategy, in terms of creating long-term shareholder value, and I predict that as long as Nero follows this strategy, we'll never see it amount to much more than a non-US-based peripheral player in this category.

Continue reading "Trustability and its Opposite - Part Two" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (2)