Facebook Deals and eCRM

Facebook Deals could be revolutionary, although the idea is an old one. In fact, it's more or less exactly what the Tom Cruise film Minority Report imagined - proximity recognition. In the film, our hero's eyes get scanned and every poster he passes makes him an offer he can't refuse. Facebook Deals is slightly more elective that that, and I believe there's a huge opportunity for brands who already do eCRM well.

When you log into Facebook on your mobile, and "check in" to your current location, the account shows you a list of local places, some of which will have offers. For exmple, you can check in to your local high street and see an offer from the local Starbucks offering you a free muffin if you buy a big coffee. Simple and neat.

Redeeming the offer by clicking on it (and showing the cashier) automatically updates your status with an ad to say you've done so. As a marketer you get someone who self-identifies as a customer telling likeminded friends about your brand.

One of the issues that marketers will have to grapple with is that of acceptability: will our customer’s friends feel irritated by the fact that what’s effectively an ad (“I’ve just checked into Starbucks for a free muffin”) appears in their friend feed? This will require testing to get to the bottom of it, but given the trend towards privacy-agnosticism I suspect it will turn out to be a non-problem.

In the immediate future, combining Facebook Deals with newly-possible Social CRM attribution techniques (see www.scrm.co.uk) you will be able to track customers in your email marketing database through to purchase and back, which means you can assign influence scores to specific segments. In turn this means you can target specific location-based offers based on what you already know about your customers. It's potentially hugely powerful. Handled with sensitivity and intelligence, it will be game changing.

A groundbreaking Social CRM tool from Underwired

Until recently driving traffic to Facebook pages was the equivalent to old-style viral or word of mouth marketing, using it as a venue for people to engage with a brand. The evaluation of a campaign’s success was based on inference rather than end-to-end tracking – indicated by click-through rates, sentiment scores, mentions, ‘likes’ or Facebook transactions. However until now there has been no simple way of linking prompted Facebook activity to an individual customer’s record.

My company, Underwired, has just launched an sCRM tool which allows address-level tracking, the holy grail of social strategies. It closes the loop between the outbound customer journey and subsequent engagement, bringing relevant data back into the eCRM database. Underwired sCRM allows brands to employ social as part of a fully tracked eCRM programme that never loses sight of an engaged customer.

Underwired sCRM enables brands to capture social data, including an individual’s clicks on ‘like’ and ‘comment’ buttons, external links and video content (including how long they watch it for), photo upload, post and share with friends functions. For example, this means that customers who don’t spend much but have huge social influence can be identified and messaged appropriately, leveraging their real value. For the first time marketers can add an Advocacy dimension to their segmentation.

Making address-level tracking a reality solves an epic challenge for digital marketers, allowing them to pinpoint exactly who is doing what in their brand’s social channels and identify – and properly target – their most active brand advocates.

Social behavioural insight will be critical for marketers in 2011. By building Underwired sCRM into Underwired’s four week audit process, we can now include Facebook as an intrinsic part of a brand’s eCRM and email marketing campaigns. It means we can remove the final remaining blind spots in tracking ROI for online campaigns.

For further information, please visit www.scrm.co.uk