An Intro to Social CRM

In nutshell, Social CRM adds the 'social' angle to traditional CRM. 'Social' means use of web 2.0 concepts such as blogs, wikis, social networking, twitters etc. Social CRM does not replace existing CRM efforts – instead it adds more value. In fact, Social CRM augments social networking to serve as a new channel within existing end-to-end CRM processes and investments.

For a company, it means -
1. How it intends to participate in the ongoing conversations taking place in the industry.
2. How it embrace non-traditional influential people like popular industry bloggers, and social sites on the web frequented by audience.
3. How it engages in discussions on social networks to help build the kind of reputation needed to become a valued member of the online communities important to the business.
4. How it adds information from the social network to find out how successful a campaign is running and/or the chances of an account success.
4. How a company uses customer feedback to improve existing products and find innovative ideas on new ones.
5. How to respond to customer tweets in real time and also incorporate them into the knowledge base as well as share them with partners

A more formal and high level representation of social CRM is explained in this diagram from Deloitte.

In the long run, I believe, social CRM will likely just become part of CRM and no distinction will be necessary.