CRM platforms contain only some of the information pertaining to business contacts and customer prospects, and so those tasked with business development spend an inordinate amount of time searching for information that will give them the "big picture". The newly published report "Social Search & Analytics" questions if social search and analytics can come to the rescue Ovum believes it can certainly help.
Richard Edwards, Principal Analyst, comments:
Ovum believes that organizations must revisit their information management, privacy and governance policies if they are going to capitalize on the "social web", as these clearly have a bearing on the extent to which information pertaining to specific groups and individuals can be used.
According to Trampoline Systems - a company specializing in business social analytics - some corporate customer relationship management (CRM) platforms contain useful information on less than 25 percent of contacts in a customer database. Although this figure is somewhat worrying for those tasked with delivering business value from CRM solutions, it probably comes as no surprise to a significant proportion of account managers and sales executives.
Social discovery uncovers the business relationships that matter the most
Accessing the "missing" 75 percent of actionable information is vital from a competitive and business survival perspective, and so organizations must consider the option of information discovery tools alongside traditional enterprise search solutions. An increasing percentage of "real customer intelligence" is to be found on the Internet and social forums in particular, and so enterprise search and social analytics solutions must have both reach and range, i.e. the ability to crawl, catalog, index, and analyze unstructured information from a plethora of sources.
The economic downturn has resulted in many organizations restructuring their businesses, and as a result client contact databases are no longer up-to-date. Winning new business through cold calling was never easy, and today's economic climate has made it a whole lot harder. According to Nigel Edelshain, CEO of Sales 2.0, "social calling" (or a "warm introduction", as traditionalists might call it) is 8-10 times more effective than cold calling, and so the business value of social connections is there for all to see.
Being able to determine a "connection route" to a company is both useful and valuable
There are products on the market that offer useful ways to explore and exploit the connections that we all have, but it is more useful to determine the "connection strength" of a relationship or business link. Social analytics products are starting to help sales and business development executives to identify useful business relationships and connections that already exist within the organization in order to generate leads and opportunities.
In the world of B2B sales and marketing relationship management, developing and fostering relationships with the right people is incredibly important, and so by analyzing the information held in an organization's email system, existing CRM platform, and corporate directory a more useful insight into the strength and nature of a customer relationship can be obtained.
Search technologies enable social network analysis solutions to reach into corporate messaging systems from which strengths and weaknesses pertaining to business relationships can be determined, but this only provides part of the picture. An increasing percentage of the workforce is using online social websites to broaden and deepen their social networks. Networking has always been important in business, but some organizations are rightly concerned about the information that employees are sharing on these networks.
Sales and marketing executives are well placed to champion corporate investment into social analytics.
Discussion groups and forums belonging to online sites are not under the control of the corporate marketing manager, and so CIOs and those responsible for information governance must consider ways in which they can at least gain an insight into what is being said about the organization in these "obscured networks."
In the past, reputation management systems tended to monitor news outlets and financial databases for information pertaining to a particular company, but this is now giving way to search engine reputation management (SERM). Using SERM, organizations can manage their brands more effectively and, through the adjacent technology of search engine optimization, target corporate messages to important constituencies.
Ovum believes that organizations must revisit their information management, privacy and governance policies if they are going to capitalize on the "social web", as these clearly have a bearing on the extent to which information pertaining to specific groups and individuals can be used.
SOURCE: OVUM
