Montag, Oktober 05, 2009

CRM for the facebook generation - an analysis of my personal habbits

Personally I really wonder what the CRM future of companies working with and for the facebook generation will look like. We will definitely see big changes in the industry and salesforce for twitter or salesforce answers give us a little bit of a flavour what to expect and how companies will build a wider knowledge base and new communication channels based on social media on the web. However this demo flash video of faceforge as a plug in for salesforce really got me thinking...

I concider myself to be a part of the facebook generation: I am 34 years old, I work in the internet industry, I use Facebook to stay in touch with my friends, XING to manage my business contacts mainly in Germany and LinkedIn to manage my international business contacts. Both Facebook and XING are running most of the time in my browser, when I am online, which is approximately 11 hours from Monday to Friday and maybe 2-3 hours on weekend days. I check LinkedIn twice a week for new contacts, messages or news. I also use twitter, but only to stay informed about industry news. Therefore I only follow mobile or web experts or companies that build innovative software. I also tweed about 5-10 times a week about new stuff I learned, my business, my thoughts on industry trends, gadgets and tech stuff. I also use the mobile versions of all of the sites named above, when I am travelling.

Looking at this brief social media profile of myself, which is more or less shared by most of the people I know here in Berlin and that I work with, I started thinking in which social media channels I would accept corporate CRM communication. Here are the results:
  1. XING - OK, since business related, but I would carefully look which personal data to share.
  2. Facebook - NO!, since strictyl private.
  3. Twitter - YES!, since business and knowledge oriented.
  4. LinkedIn - OK, since business related, but I would carefully look which personal data to share.
Conclusion:

As an end consumer it would be ok for me to connect with a manufacturer of a product I use via Twitter in order to communicate with a support agent of that company to get help. Maybe it would also be ok, if that company would contact me later via twitter to sell me an upgrade, ad-on or other products/services. However I would not use all of the other social media sites for customer services - not yet.

As a business men the situation is different, since I do sales activities myself on XING or LinkedIn. Therefore I would accept sales or service activities from other companies that want to do business with me aswell. However I never accept any linkedIn-request or XING-contact-requests of people that I haven`t met before... private messages on these platforms are fine, but I will not share contact details so easily!

And now the most important finding in analyzing myself: I do not want ANY marketing, sales or service activities on Facebook whatsoever, since I want to use Facebook as my private friends network! And if I become a fan of a company or product, this is only because I identify myself with it and I want to share this information with my friends.

Maybe google wave will become another appropriate CRM channel like Twitter is for me personally already today:

2 Kommentare:

Maciej hat gesagt…

Great soul-searching, but you are not alone... I think I am a part of the facebook generation too - the personal habbits sound familiar :o)

Service-Community hat gesagt…

Leseempfehlung

http://www.customerthink.com/blog/the_path_to_social_crm_do_you_have_a_portfolio_of_real_options