Insights for Running Better Business

People belong to different organizations, and older CRMs would never allow you to record those relationships properly. BlueCamroo deals with the real world and gives you tools to manage those relationships properly--but how can you do that without first capturing the relationship?

Social CRM is CRM software that lets you engage customers and potential customers anywhere, including social networking. Bringing a lead into your CRM should be no different if that lead came from a phone call, a business card you got at a trade show, someone visiting your site and requesting more information, or a Twitter user.

Is a hammer a bad thing? You can use it to build someone a home or you can use it to clock someone over the head and invade their home. Tools are only as good as the people wielding them and the limits placed on them by their own moral conscience and laws. Using any kind of service, notably ones provided free online, usually come at a cost of giving up some amount of privacy. Everyone has their comfort level. What's important is decide how much of your personal life you're willing to let into the hands of a service provider and the risks of that information being sold or stolen.

So, are you racking up large number of Twitter followers or Facebook? Slow down. All that effort might not be doing you any good. Spreading a message is not the same as affecting people with the message. Unless you have the ability to reach thousand or millions of people with empathetic talents of Oprah, re-think your strategy. It's better to build smaller number of high quality online relationships versus thousands of low quality associations. Target users who likewise seem to use their Twitter of Facebook accounts to maintain high quality online relationships.

The strategy is what I like to call "build a circle of trust" around potential clients. It's a passive strategy, maybe not one Type A sales people are used to, but one I think works best within the context of social networks. It's a strategy where you nurture your reputation and skill and let users find you on within virtual communities they trust. This week, let's see how we can turn that "circle of trust" strategy to Twitter. Unlike Facebook, Twitter does not have any central communities people can join and view persistent wall-type posts.

It would seem the way Facebook is used by the vast majority of those half billion people is not always how you'd want to use Facebook as a business person. More challenging, Facebook is the most sociable of the social networks. That is to say, a direct business pitch will probably not read well when most people are using Facebook to post pictures of family and friends and acquiring enough Farmville cash to buy a pig for their farm.

Don’t limit yourself to what you currently assume a CRM system can do. If what your business really needs is a solution that integrates customer data, email marketing, travel planning, event bookings and managing your complete iTunes collection all in one place, write that down. You may not find everything in a single CRM solution – you may even find what you need and discover the vendor doesn’t call it a CRM solution at all – but knowing what you want is a great place to start from.