Is Social Media more so a function of e-Marketing or CRM?

(Reposted from the awesome Quora)

Depends on the goal, and who is spending the money.

CRM is (should be) about understanding where the customer is on their journey through life, with some appreciation of the trajectory they are on (in terms of behaviour, demography and attitudes, possibly defined momentarily by where they came from and how they are currently influenced); in turn this allows marketers to decide what to say next to influence their behaviours and attitudes to develop additional value.

With that approach, social media is or could be (ideally you should test several channels to see which one delivers the behaviour change most effectively) one possible channel to deliver that 'next message' in the intertwined customer journey and brand journey.

Looking at it like that it becomes straightforward to set KPIs and measure results. This in turn makes briefing experts and suppliers very easy – they no longer have to be particularly creative, nor do they have to compete for budgets against other channels, because their role is tightly defined and they have to recognise they are just one of many touchpoint executors with (sets of) defined goals.

The other way of doing it is to try and box some stuff into 'e-marketing'. If you're not yet at the stage of evolution as a business or as a marketer that you are able to think in strategic terms then social becomes tactical and is all about the creativity of the idea in creating competitive advantage for the supplier in increasing its share of the budget of the various other e-marketing activities.

I really hope the first approach is the one your firm is aiming for ;)

Neglecting Creativity

There is a tension between old and new. And it’s not a new story. Our new media age – the one started in 1994, not the venerable namesake we’ve been reading for (just) sixteen years – has always been predicated on a tension between the advertising and virtual paradigms. These elicited two different approaches to creative thinking: one founded on engaging customers in a simple comms journey (see the TV ad, then see the press ad, then respond to the DM pack), and one founded on the novelty of the medium. This was fertile ground for upstarts finding brand new ways to compel people to come to and then engage with online brand campaigns.

Over the past dozen years this grew and, some might say, matured, so that the kind of brand idea that works beautifully in interactive media could have a traditional expression – integrated campaigns reached back to TV and creativity started to have an holistic expression, when done well. When done badly the phrase “Like us on Facebook” was simply stuck on a poster...

Social media has arguably taken the place of the TV ad. The best of them – love them or hate them – have won rafts of awards at creative festivals, and some apply real imagination to addressing the problem of consumers’ passing attention to creativity. And of course social media campaigns are cheap – or at least relatively so in the face of TV advertising’s mountainous resource and financial costs – a fact that plays well in a prolonged recession. With social substituting for the TV spot we’re almost back where we started.

There is another movement encouraged by this recession, happening in parallel. Recession pushes marketers, or at least budget holders, towards accountable activities. The rise and rise of CRM (made sexy by renaming it to eCRM) is due to customer journeys based on the prevalence of both big and small data and delivery using fully auditable digital channels. There are citable cases where £1 spent generates £26 of revenue, and where £200k of spend has built loyalty programmes with a million participants. So brands have moderated their attention towards the trackable, towards ROI-based, evidence-based marketing.

And this is where the tension comes back into the equation. We run the risk of reducing marketing to a spreadsheet, to highly defined segmented customer journeys which lead consumers inexorably from first to second to third purchase and which increment customer value in ways which impact the bottom line fantastically well. No bad thing, in principle. However without creativity, the engagement of consumers is reduced to efficiency and effectiveness and loses the thing that makes brands sing. Process and data are the lubricants to making marketing work. But creativity is the glue that makes consumers adore brands. Feeding creativity back into the mix is the big challenge for all of us. If we can get it right – and believe me we’re trying – then I believe we can build the next media age, one that once again is revolutionary.

Making social media pay

There’s an apparent conflict between the pragmatic and the desirable. Marketers necessarily want to be able to justify every penny they spend on marketing - especially in a recession - so there's a strong emphasis on the accountable. And then there's social media.

Everyone’s talking about the importance of social media, including channels like Facebook, Twitter, Quora and LinkedIn. The buzz has been incredible. Clearly when movies are being made about the kids who got the movement going, making billions in just six years, that buzz becomes tantalising for brands. And of course nobody wants to play catch-up, no-one wants to be the one who gets the dregs of the success that a new and revenue-generating marketing channel brings with it. Arriving just before everyone else leaves the party is low risk but delivers a very low return.

So how can you reconcile the two things, this requirement for measurable return on marketing investment, and the need to catch the wave?

This is the thinking that led Underwired, already the UK’s leading eCRM specialist agency, to try and bridge the gap between CRM, which is utterly auditable, and social media, which isn’t. To go back to the party metaphor, eCRM is like the bit where you know exactly who you’re inviting to the party and why. Social is the bit after you’ve taken their coat and they’ve entered the room. Once they are in there, all you can do is measure the noise levels (and in fact that's what Buzz Tracking or Sentiment Analysis tools do).

The new Social CRM tool that Underwired has developed actually bridges the gap. It allows you to track an individual into, say, a Facebook environment (with standard functions including Like, Share, Comment, Upload content, watch a video) and see exactly what they do. You can tell if, responding to a call to action in an email campaign, John visits your page, Likes it, comments on it, only watched half the video but sitll shares it with his facebook friends. You can then append that data back to your database, which means that you can create sub-segments of people who respond in a certain way when presented with specific calls to action, offers, promotions or choices.

From a marketing perspective it provides you with a way to further segment your customers. You can assign advocacy scores (even types of advocacy) and use that to inform future campaigns just targeting people who share your content with their friends - real fan marketing. But more importantly, it gives you the means to extend attribution into social channels. And if you can identify precisely which routes your sales came from, without having a big grey area where you’ve temporarily lost control of your customer, it means you can improve your marketing at every single step of the customer journey. Finally, it means you can assign a real value to social media - though of course while it means you can dive in with confidence, you do still of course have to dive in.

Why my love of Ben & Jerry's isn't over just yet

Over the past couple of weeks there's been quite a bit of buzz about Ben & Jerry's dropping email in favour of social media. It stemmed from an email sent by their UK people to email subscribers, letting them know the monthly moosletter was being canned and asking recipients to fan them on Facebook. It's not quite switching off email (they'll use it still for special promotions) but it's pretty close. According to the quite rightly other-side-of-the-story article, Ben & Jerry's in Vermont isn't following this particular herd, and will carry on regardless.

I commented on the story as originally reported when it broke. My view is that a move to drop an entire marketing channel seems insane for a brand that appeals to people who like ice cream - kids, hippies, adults, old folk, squares alike. We all love Ben & Jerry's. Almost everyone out of their teens uses email. Indeed some kids and teens still use it (though the XML channels r00l increasingly). For instantaneous interaction between a brand and an audience there's nothing quite like social media. For longer-term, planned engagement based on deep understanding of behaviour/demographic/motivation-based segmentation, there's nothing (yet) quite like email.

Where email, and its grown-up cousin eCRM, comes in at its best is in shifting brand perception. A well-paced, well-segmented eCRM campaign over eight months can be persuasive in a way that an ad campaign cannot. You can make a case through demonstrating an experience and involving people in a journey that you cannot do by being interactive or sociable. I think social media channels are brilliant for maintaining and reinforcing a brand's positioning, adding a layer of openness for instance. And I think eCRM is exceptional for changing behaviours through understanding motivation and basing communications on that understanding. Email, SMS and the web can be segmented in a way that is invisible to users. The same cannot yet be said of the Facebook experience.

I am sad that ben & Jerry's has decided to focus entirely on the ephemeral in the UK, at the cost of a long-term brand engagement strategy. It's all gone a bit tactical. And when Facebook fades they'll have to jump on the next big thing. I think it's shortsighted. Customers are, or at least should be, forever. I'll be a Ben & Jerry's customer for as long as I remember its well-meaning roots. But as I'll never be a fan on Facebook it's going to be tricky for them to keep reminding me why I love their brand.

Acronymtastic – SCRM, ECRM, CRM and the death of DM

I work for an agency that’s made some sort of name for itself in eCRM. That’s Electronic Customer Relationship Marketing. It’s not CRM, which is Customer Relationship Management if you’re into sales management software, or ...Marketing if you’re a DM agency. If you’re a DM agency (that’s Direct Marketing), thanks for all the principles, but your industry’s buggered.

Why? Because the principles of segmentation, so beautifully applied to awesome effect in eCRM, which now generates millions through digital channels, are starting to reach social. And social media is about engagement in real time. Which is what the digital agency world has been practising for its entire history – I started an interactive agency in 1994, which makes me positively historical. Without digital provenance, when Social channels (gaggle shopping, live feedback and peer advice) meet eCRM and forms SCRM (yes I know), the DM world that gave us so much in discipline finds itself detached from usefulness.

Which is a shame. There are some amazing people and minds working in the industry. And while brands continue to send out three million mailing packs, it will survive. But slowly, those mailing packs that cost £1 each are being replaced by digital nudges, creating continuous contact even with the thinnest segments in the long tail. One day mail will be used for that special something. And SCRM and eCRM will have truly blossomed.