Guest Blogger Denis Pombriant: Invert Your Thinking About Social CRM
I've been having fun quoting Stephen Covey's Habit 5 from The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People in relation to Social CRM. If it's been a while since you read this classic, Habit 5 says, "Seek first to understand, then to be understood". It's a good piece of advice that many of us learned before we could read; for me, it's something that I have to relearn almost daily.
Habit 5 is real gold for Social CRM, but it is also rather counterintuitive. One of the first things we think about when we think of social-anything is how cheap and easy it is to communicate with friends and almost perfect strangers. In her book The Facebook Era Clara Shi points out that social media makes it possible to keep up with a raft of people and relationships that none of us would have time to keep up with under other circumstances.
Shi is right. For the cost of the time it takes to write as few as 140 characters we can give many others a sense of ourselves and our thoughts. Social media is useful for maintaining a new category of casual relationships, as well as those we hold especially close. So it is natural for us to want to find a way to use this powerful relationship maintenance technology with a wide circle of customers. Why then is it so difficult?
I suspect that keeping up relationships with customers is harder because the original relationship is more tenuous to begin with. Seriously, there is little or no foundation for a social relationship with most of the people who buy our products and services. Even the casual relationship you struck up last year at your cousin's wedding a thousand miles away has more to it than the default relationship that exists between you and the person who bought your widget.
That reality notwithstanding, we think nothing of trying to sell another widget through the social channel, even though one of them might be a lifetime supply for most people. We socialize the relationship because it's free and the cost of missing an opportunity is larger than the cost of annoying someone. Or is it?
An economist might tell you that the only reason the cost is so low is that we externalize the downside -- we don't count or even contemplate the relationship damage we might be doing by spamming through social media. It's like not counting the healthcare costs from the increased incidence of asthma from a new power plant.
That's where Habit 5 comes in, and with that comes the other side of social media. I have been covering social networking topics since 2002, well before things like Twitter or Facebook were available but right when Linked-in, Plaxo, and other networking sites were coming to market. But the biggest game in town in 2002 was communities.
A community was where smart companies began to go to implement their own versions of Habit 5 -- the "seek first to understand" part. Before communities there were surveys and focus groups and they were expensive to operate and time consuming to administer, so much so that few companies bothered with them. A good focus group could take you six weeks to find out what happened yesterday, but I digress.
A corporate social media strategy shouldn't be exclusively about blogging or tweeting or having a storefront on Facebook. It needs to incorporate the inbound as well as the outbound, to seek to understand. Companies that know this have very successful social media strategies that usually incorporate communities in one form or another. Those that don't, have people in marketing running around trying to figure out what self-serving message to put on the CEO's blog post this week.
I love Habit 5. Seven years of research tells me it's right. It's simple, direct, and clear. Understand?
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About the Author: Denis Pombriant is the founder and principal analyst of Beagle Research. He blogs frequently on the Beagle Blog.
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Denis, I couldn't agree more with your point especially about communities. There is a major bank that began their social media journey by creating a closed community where they invited 300 clients and non-clients to see how their new brand was resonating. The result? The bank learned that people - clients and non-clients of the bank - LOVE to give financial and banking advice. Though these people have a social relationship, they actual trust and act on the advice. Trust and altruism is amazing even in the social/semantic web.
That said, the bank eventually established a storefront on Facebook and a Twitter handle - good for them. Recently, I was part of a call where an interactive marketing agency was "pushing" a bank to establish a community first and not a Facebook fan page. The sense of the dialogue appeared that it was not Habit 5 - seek first to be understood but rather the agency has a relationship with a major social community platform player. I wanted to jump through the phone and slap them!
Objectivity and trust is key. As you know as a client advisor, they way clients act on advice is if they believe or perceive that the person giving the advice is seeking their best intentions; not the advisors best intentions. It's an outside-in approach as it is with community if the unstructured information gleaned from those in the community is used to further develop products, services, key processes that will benefit those in the community.
That's right! We do this to get actionable insights or it's a waste of time.
This also brings up the important notion that you need to know who is in your community -- at least to the extent of knowing the demographic mix. If your target market is 18 to 24 year old men and they aren't represented in your community, or not to a great extent, then your data is suspect.
Thanks,
Denis
Hello Dennis,
Great post, that reminded me of my own a few months ago Social Media does not make a good listener .
One thing on top: Listening & understanding is only useful if you derive actionable insights from it. So no laying back, but hard work analyzing and correlating for improved understanding and then: action!
Without action, your social customers will let you and the world know just how great a listener you really are..
Thx
Wim Rampen
Passionate about Customers