Social Customer Relationship Management: Marketing – IT Marriage

While thinking about the latest social-crm-measurementdevelopments of social media as the holiday season and year end come upon us, I started thinking about how digital marketers, large or small, can truly measure the impact that social media is having on our organizations.

The only way for us to truly measure social media’s impact is through a coordinated effort of marketing and information technology to integrate social customer relationship management data into existing software. Realistically, we all don’t have time in our days to manually collect all the data points that align with our business goals. And quite honestly, we would all go a little crazy trying to do this!

Therefore, I propose (and I’m sure some of you will agree with me) that marketing and information technology will need to get friendly and hopefully get married someday :) Here is the process I suggest to establishing a working relationship between the two job functions:

  • Sit down in a room, so you get to know, like, and trust each other. Start informal conversations.
  • Ask questions about their job functions. Really find out what the people in both departments do on a daily basis
  • Armed with this newly budded relationship, present what your future plans are, and how it fits into each person’s job function. Find out the possibilities and challenges.
  • Come up with a plan and revise until both parties are satisfied with the compromise
  • Test, Reiterate, and Test some more. Focus on the little wins in order to reach your goals.

Using this process over a 6 month to 1 year period (depending on the complexity of the project, it might be longer than 1 year), should put you on the track to realizing your measurement ambitions.

Are you having problems measuring social media and general marketing data? If so, how do you propose we can better measure going forward?

photo credit: JMorgan

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