Q&A with Radian6′s Lauren Vargas from our Recent Webinar

Social CRM has just gone from being a buzz word to being an official software solutions category: Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant for Social CRM!

On that occasion, let me post the Q&A from our recent webinar with Radian6′s Lauren Vargas below. The replay of the webinar is available to Web Analytics Association members from the webcast archive.

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Which kind of organizations are ready for social CRM?

Lauren: Any organization willing to listen and participate in a two-way dialog are ready for social media engagement.

Social CRM has just gone from being a buzz word to being an official software solutions category: Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant for Social CRM!

On that occasion, let me post the Q&A from our recent webinar with Radian6′s Lauren Vargas below. The replay of the webinar is available to Web Analytics Association members from the webcast archive.

——-

Which kind of organizations are ready for social CRM?

Lauren: Any organization willing to listen and participate in a two-way dialog are ready for social media engagement.

Social media is another business channel, but the thought process to accept this conflicts with many organization cultures. Invest in education, time and resources for your social media efforts and ensure your success and lessons learned go from campaign to program commitment.

Akin: Additionally, there is a side to social CRM that is about marketing automation. E.g. registered site visitors who are not only readers but contributors on a company’s branded community site could be prioritized for special offers. Going to this step requires an organization where the customer marketers have built up expertise on marketing automation (often the case) and where they are cooperating with the web and social media team (not as often the case as should be).

Can your “Social CRM” work on an environment or organization where the original “CRM” methodology/tool didn’t work or was not really used to its potential and expectations?

Akin: By corollary from the previous question it would seem that such an organization is not yet ready for automating social CRM. They may nonetheless be ready to listen to customer tweets and respond manually to provide customer service and encouragement.

What are the most important metrics for social media marketing?

Lauren: There are no cookie cutter social media metric solutions.

Your organization must determine the correct social media metrics that align with measurable business objectives and company culture. Answer this, what do you want your community to DO after engaging with your organization online? The answer will point you in the right direction to determine relevant metrics.

Akin: Unica also recommends our short paper on this exact topic: “Align social media metrics with your (true) business goals.“.

I am doing a SMM report for gaming website. What should be the metrics for it? The goal is selling games .

Lauren: Only you can determine the proper metrics. If the goal is sales, you may want to look at metrics around revenue and business development, such as: speed of sales cycle, number/% of repeat business, % customer retention, transaction value, referrals, net new leads, cost per lead and conversions from community.

Akin: As Lauren says, you must also decide what the contribution is that you expect from SMM for selling games, i.e. reach and brand awareness? Click-throughs and conversions? Measure accordingly.

What do you think of John Lovett Social Media Measurement Model? What do you like? What you don’t like about it?

Lauren: This report is a great launchpad for building a social media program around sound measurable objectives. Do not use the report as a cookie cutter approach, but make it your own.

 Akin: I like especially that strategy is at the center of it and that it raises measurement to the level of key performance indicators, i.e. KPIs to start with. Great way to avoid drowning in chasing too many tactical metrics. There is also room for creating their next release of the model, I believe. Namely, it doesn’t go very far into the opportunities from social CRM yet.

 How is this new “RFF” new model really different from the traditional RFM model? Can we not translate this new “F” to some sort of “M”?

Akin: The Recency, frequency, friends (RFF) model is very similar in its purpose to the traditional RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) model. However, friends cannot be translated directly into Money for each individual. This is because an individual may not be a big direct customer but they may be a big influencers helping sell others on buying more. That should still translate into “M” eventually, but just not directly. The point of RFF and RFM is to score individuals’ for prioritizing in marketing efforts.

What sort of social data can be integrated with web analytics?

Akin: Depends on the channel. E.g. if you are running a Facebook application you may want to include data about the kinds of users (and their friends) that are taking a liking to the application. For Twitter and the blogosphere you may want to include how many people are following the Tweets and posts of your promoters to rank by their influence.

In terms of adding tracking codes to inbound links, do you drop cookies as well?

 Akin: Yes, when people click through on inbound links a cookie is set by the web analytics solution per the usual web analytics best practices. More interesting scenarios arise in tracking cross usage of for example a Facebook application vs. website. For such purposes Unica has a technical paper for its customers that can be requested from your favored Unica’n.

Does Unica have the capacity to influence conversion? if yes, how?

 Akin: Customers are using Unica’s OnDemand and Enterprise solutions to conversions at every step of the life cycle.

• Unica Search helps manage the PPC budget towards the ads, keywords, and engines that convert best.
• Unica NetInsight is the web analytics solution that helps identify bottlenecks in the conversion process, decide where to make adjustments, and evaluate the success of those adjustments.
• Unica’s Interactive Marketing solutions help design and test landing pages, and target visitors with relevant content and offers based on their behavior.
• Re-marketing, cross-sales, or retention campaigns (e.g. via email) can be configured and automated for registered visitors based on their behavior and customer data

My co. uses unica. I would like to test how this can work for a multilocale program.

Akin: Great. Within the web analytics solution social media and other data can be incorporated through the data integration framework. When it comes to automating Social CRM, we would recommend the other direction for data integration. Namely plugging data from Unica NetInsight into the other products from Unica (e.g. Unica Campaign and Interact) for behavioral targeting.