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So you have a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter Account what do you do next?

If you have a large brand or company and a lot of activity on from your network of friends you need to leverage what CRM provides to every other interaction your company receives online – automate the process!  So, here are some things you should look at doing to improve the efficiency and improve the social experience a client or potential client of yours has with your social site (Facebook, Twitter).

1. Capture all messages initiated through a social site into your CRM.
2. Enhance your CRM contact information to include social site user identifiers (Facebook username, twitter account, etc).
3. Create or match the contact so that you can retain all history for that individual in your CRM
4. Get the message to the right people – route support and service requests to the appropriate staff while product or other requests to the appropriate sales or marketing supports staff.
5. Track each interaction so you can quickly get an idea of how big of an effort your “Social” experience will take to support (are you getting 20 messages a day or 2,000)
6. Respond QUICKLY this is a general rule but in the Social world your clients, prospective clients and competitors can see how long it takes you to respond to questions or postings.  So, if it takes too long bad things can happen control the message.
7. Be human in responses – don’t just reply with a cut and past link to a support or product page to your site.  Have all posts include the human touch as Social networking sites are about personal one-to-one conversations and should be treated as such.

There are many things you can to do start this process but as we all in the commercial sector we are trying to find the best way to keep the social sites fresh, friendly and personable at the same time ensure we are capturing, tracking and routing the information to the appropriate people.  If you have any ideas let me know.

Keep trying because Social CRM will only get bigger and will no doubt take us to places we never expected!!

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Video Chat taking the face to face to online Sales & Service

So, are we there yet where video chat can now be used as a piece of your online sales and service model?  A new article by AdAge discusses how brands can use video chat for their sales branding exercise.  From my view its just the next step in the evolution of everything we do for sales and service from instant chat, on demand video, demos, tutorials and automated email response systems.

I’m not going to speculate when the video chat will be readily available to companies but we already know that there is a large community of users that have the personal hardware and bandwidth to support video chat technically.  The use of Internet powered telephony services are enough to know its possible and throw in Skype and how large a user group it supports makes video chat seem like a viable solution.

So, your sold now what do you do?  Where do you start how can you implement this?  Well if you just want to test the waters you can go open source route by using Google Chat or Skype and just post your contact/user information on your site.  Both services provides easy to use scripts you can plug and play into your site to discover if your web site has an audience receptive to it.

So who’s first to try this out?