Topic 8 - Social CRM

Much of what I know about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) today comes from this topic. I plan to use the knowledge gained from it in the workplace. The main lesson I learned is that many of the customer’s questions are similar, so it is possible to create some sort of a database with ready-made answers, kind of “Frequently Asked Questions” – FAQs.
These FAQs will allow our call centre to focus on more complex questions that don’t have a canned response. For example, if a client asks, “How to unpack this product,” it makes sense to put that question in the FAQs section. However, if he inquires about, “Is it possible to use your product as a fertilizer,” the question will be much more difficult to foresee.
Another innovative idea that many firms use is to allow the social community to ask each other different questions, kind of “Yahoo! Answers” on a smaller scale. People who will answer questions will get points and thus improve their standing in the virtual community.

Topic 6 - Nurturing a Social community to build deeper relationships

Topic 6 covered how to nurture a social community to build deeper relationships. Even before I knew that what people think about your brand matters. Thanks to this topic, however, I now know that is social media it is even more important, as bad or good publicity spread very quickly as people interact with one another on a daily basis.
I also found out that there are many ways it is possible to make sense of what the social community is thinking about your brand. For example, the easies thing to do would be to perform simple searches on Faceook on Twitter of you company’s brand name or its product names. The results that will come on top of hte search results page will beindicative of the general mood of the public with regards to your brand or products. For example, if you see that most feedback about your brand is positive than things are going well. However, negative feedback should analysed more carefully as you need to determined what members of the social community are complaining about and what it the cause of their dissatisfaction.
Given the opportunity, I’d like to provide the research tools that can help us better understand our clients, as provided in the topic:
Research Tools - there are hundreds of research tools, these are a few examples -

Klout (http://klout.com/): This site uses analytics to track the popularity and influence of Twitte users.
WeFollow ( http://wefollow.com/): This site lists the most popular people in various categories – basically who the influencers are in news, music etc.
Twellow ( http://www.twellow.com/): Twellow is a search directory of public Twitter accounts with categories and search functions that help you find people who may be relevant to you.
TwitterSheep ( http://twittersheep.com/): This site makes a tag cloud out of the biographies of your
Twitter followers. It’s a great way to gain some quick insight into who is interested in your brand.
Profile Management and Reporting Tools
Hootsuite (http://www.hootsuite.com/): Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple Twitter and
Facebook accounts from one place, and offers tracking for the tweets you send out – how many people clicked on them and when they were most popular.
Cotweet (http://cotweet.com/): Targeted to businesses, Cotweet lets multiple people manage the same account and schedule posts, as well as aiding tracking.
TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/): Tweetdeck lets you manage multiple Social Media accounts from one interface.
TwitterCounter (http://twittercounter.com/): Provides statistics on Twitter profiles and use.

Topic 5 - Key Platforms

Social media is a rather new invention. However, there are dozens of social media platforms, many of which use similar business models.
Topic 5 helped me better understand the characteristics that would allow me to compare different platforms. They include the number of active visitors, how many contacts an average use has, how many users use the platform on a daily basis, what languages are supported, how many countries the users come from, what activates they engage in and how many apps are available on a particular platform. Some of these characteristics apply only to social networks, others are try of all types of social media platforms.