The growth rate of adults using social media has quadrupled in recent years, and is now at dizzying new heights. Twitter alone reported almost 24 million unique visitors in September, a year-over-year increase of 1,170 percent. The numbers demonstrate that a company's customers can assemble in social communities with astonishing speed and quickly become an influential force for change.

Past experiences have painfully proven this a fact. Consider the controversies over the "Motrin Moms" ad and Dell's customer service. In each of these cases, customers formed social communities online that voiced criticism and exerted influence. In Dell's case, the result was transformational. In Johnson & Johnson's case, the reaction to the Motrin Moms outrage on Twitter is still being debated.

Each case illustrates how crucial it is for companies to connect with their customer communities in new ways and to rethink their definition of CRM. The central tenet is not just understanding social media, but integrating its philosophy, utility, and importance into a corporate culture.

Until now, the corporate culture has been etched in stone: R&D creates the products, marketing positions them, communications gets the word out, and customer service fields calls from consumers, delivering feedback back up the line. This is a factory-oriented model not far removed from how Henry Ford revolutionized automobile manufacturing a century ago.

But today, because the social conversation is real time and the channels are widely accessible, cultures need to change. The process of finding, watching, and engaging with customers needs to be integrated across the enterprise and be more dynamic. Corporate departments increasingly must gather around their customers and subsequently, social channels to optimize core talents, be it development, marketing, communications, or customer service.

 

The new culture

Traditional work culture is dominated by a siloed approach to customer service, with each department handling their assigned task and nothing more. Today companies need to collaborate internally to communicate externally with customers—or they risk alienating their user base.

While sales and marketing have always known what the customer is saying, the opportunity now also exists for R&D, which, in the past, had received filtered customer feedback.  

Today, R&D can monitor what customers are saying directly, analyze the unfiltered comments, and interact directly to develop a co-innovation process that drives product development and cements customer loyalty. If this benefits R&D, it also can benefit accounting, supply chain, human resources, and customer service.

If, for example, customer service has served as a call-fielding and complaint-routing function, today savvy CS departments use social media to monitor and manage feedback immediately, answer questions, and solve problems before the situation escalates. And because thousands of other customers may subscribe, say, to the company's Twitter feed, one response from the company can satisfied hundreds of the same queries—creating a process that brings new efficiency and cost reduction to CS operations.

This type of cultural change, however, isn't just an academic exercise that picks a social media channel and plays around with it. Companies need to design their programs with a business objective in mind.

 

What's working?

Though it may be counterintuitive, many big companies are embracing social media more quickly than others and tying its use tightly into business goals.

• Intel wanted help evolving its social media outreach strategy, so it reached out to social media experts for help on strategy and tactics. It created The Insiders advisory group, including Brian Solis (PR 2.0) and Tom Foremski (SiliconValleyWatcher).
• Computer maker Dell endured a baptism by fire in social media in 2005 when bloggers began complaining loudly about customer service. The company moved quickly to set up a process and philosophy for engaging in social conversations that took into account 20 years of experience doing customer outreach in traditional ways and morphed the practice into 21st century means. The transformation has helped Dell improve overall customer service and product design.
• SAP, which believes social media thought leadership is imperative, has legions of bloggers creating and engaging in conversations around the globe. The company believes so deeply in its role here that it sponsored an ambitious survey of social media strategies and tactics, using noted blogger Shel Israel. The result is the SAP Global Research Report, 276 pages worth of interviews and insight from around the world on how companies are working diligently and creatively to tie themselves closer to their customers.

Building community is more than simply implementing the tools; community ultimately starts at headquarters with cultural change and understands the dynamic, self-assembling utility that social platforms give customers. While companies have made and will continue to make social media mistakes, the platforms are here to stay. It's time to use them to treat customers not as just customers but as partners—the public extensions of marketing, sales, and R&D. This approach serves everyone well and ushers in a new era of more effective CRM within an enterprise. 

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About the author: Blake Cahill is senior vice president of marketing for Visible Technologies.