Social CRM is the black art of mashing up the blogshere with corporate data and seeing what comes out. Happily for IT pros, especially integrators, it’s not a plug ‘n’ play world yet. Their skills are needed to mine social data and then knit it together with a patchwork quilt of corporate systems.
XML is a hot integration skill, as data is often offered as a web service. But IT pros with esoteric skills in data semantics and mining are the real winners.
Why is data disconnected at present?
Lots of customers are asking questions about social networking data and what to do to take advantage of this flow of knowledge. People sit in their different offices and teams and access data in different ways. The CRM and analytics department and the head of social marketing have built up their own silos of data, for example, which would be more useful if connected.
Bjarte Vosseteig, product director, QuestBack
Where are we at with social CRM?
Most customers have experimented with social media such as Twitter or a with a Facebook page, but the data and experience is kept separately. They may have a community, but if all their users are on Facebook, what are they to do? Likewise, they may have a lot of hard customer data stashed away in their in-house CRM system. The next stage is to connect it up with other sources of in-house data.
Bjarte Vosseteig, product director, Questback
How to do the integration?
In-house tech teams have to web-enable social media data which can then be called up by the back office system as a web service. This calls for web standards such as SOAP and XML. Writing apps which can parachute tools into the social networking biggies is invariably done using t de facto language and frameworks of the web, C# and.Net
What the problem with Facebook?
The problem with Facebook is that you are playing in Mark Zuckerman’s garden so the party – and data - is somewhere else. The objective with social CRM has to be to get a 360 degree perspective on the customer experience. For example, how do you know if all - or any - of your Facebook friends are the same as the contacts in your CRM system?
Bjarte Vosseteig, product director, QuestBack
What’s good about Facebook?
The good thing about Facebook is that its APIs, routines and procedures are very well documented. Developers with the right knowledge are going to be in huge demand as business switches onto the new opportunities of mining and manipulating social networking data.
Bjarte Vosseteig, product director, QuestBack
What are the new opportunities?
To social media data from survey, events and forms used to be collated by dropping a link into Facebook, but tools have just got a little smarter. Developers are writing apps that are dropped into sites such as Facebook, so the returned data is extracted and stored and manipulated outside the Facebook walled garden. Even better, the data can be married and exchanged with back office data, enabling a fuller profile of customers and their activities.
Bjarte Vosseteig, product director, QuestBack
What’s tricky integrating social data with CRMs?
The sheer variety of CRM systems in use out there – the number of products is colossal. Questback did a survey of the European market and found no market leader. The lack of leader meant they couldn’t develop one vanilla plug ‘n’ play interface that would link CRMs to their latest EFM tools.
Bjarte Vosseteig, product director, QuestBack
What can you do with social CRM?
There’s the ability to track, monitor and mine thousands of sources of social data out there in the blogsphere, Twitterdom and other communities. Business users are looking for a mention of their product, a lead, or customer reviews: rather than a keyword match, they’ll probably want to look at the surrounding text and see whether this is a relevant conversation, so it’s pretty sophisticated stuff.
Andrew Yates, CEO of Artesian Solutions
What are the specific IT tasks?
Accurate blog and forum processing calls upon web search technology - crawling, spam detection, ad stripping, and ‘real’ content extraction. It also calls for structural metadata extraction - identifying individual postings, dates and authors. Then there’s semantic technology - identifying industry terminology, brand names, brand attributes, people, organisations, and domain-specific opinion/sentiment attached to this terminology. All clever stuff.
Gregory Grefenstette, chief science officer, Exalead
How is mined data made accessible?
Once semantic information has been extracted, then information unification platforms such as CloudView can link this social data to formal product data. The latter is extracted by connectors into enterprise data sources such as databases, emails and customer data. This last step requires a large engineering effort in creating connectors that seamlessly interface into Exalead’s indexing software.
Gregory Grefenstette, chief science officer, Exalead
Are there extra data protection considerations?
Once identified, we can strip out the information concerning the author of the blog post or the twitter post. We do not gather information about individual posters to the community, because our clients are more interested in what people are saying about their products.
Gregory Grefenstette, chief science officer, Exalead
What are the common integration mistakes to avoid?
Common errors are not recognizing spam and duplicate or mirrored postings; and thinking that simple string matching is sufficient for opinion mining. Another common error is to think that structured and unstructured data sources are unconnected.
Gregory Grefenstette, chief science officer, Exalead
What’s the next step in making data useful?
Rather than treating it as static data, the resource becomes more useful when it’s linked to activities such as sending an email or a survey questionnaire. Programming-wise, this means integrating it with workflow objects in the back-end CRM system. Rather than do this engineering in-house, vendors such as Artesian, have integrated with popular offerings such as Salesforce.com to provide ready-to-go tools as a web-services.
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