Think social media is just for teenagers? Ask Betty White.
The 88-year-old actress, who is perhaps best known for her roles on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Golden Girls, was invited to host Saturday Night Live, in large part because of a grass-roots campaign on Facebook.
It all began when she re-entered the public spotlight—although to be fair, she’s never really been out of it, thanks to syndication and recent roles in My Name Is Earl, Boston Legal and Ugly Betty—in January 2010, after an appearance in a popular Super Bowl commercial for Snickers. A Facebook group called “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!” began to snowball, eventually gaining over half a million fans—and landing White the gig. It was announced in March that she will the oldest person to host the sketch-comedy show.
This is the power of social media in action. Turning to the business side, how social media can help you grow not only your revenue, but also your customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives?
Facebook is perhaps the most formidable social media channel out there, with 40 percent of social media traffic and 400 million users. Twitter, the other social giant, is a valuable tool not only for marketing but also for staying connected with customers—either reactively, when customers tweet about problems, or proactively, by offering value-added content in the form of articles, videos, suggestions, humor or just plain conversation. According to a recent study, consumers are almost 70 percent more likely to buy from brands that they follow on Twitter.
Blogs are another great tool for promoting products and services, providing transparency into your company, and engaging with customers in a more conversational format. Don’t forget the other social networks, either; people still hang out on MySpace, and many people are discovering FourSquare, which is the latest social craze.
It may be difficult to stay on top of these channels, and the feedback and insight your company receives through them, without a solid social media customer relationship management plan in place. This can be provided through a cloud-based CRM solution, which will take care of the data capture, organization and automation part of the puzzle for you. There are applications that can collate the information gleaned about customers through social media, apps that can analyze that information, and apps that can help you share it with those employees who really need to use it in their day-to-day operations: the sales and marketing teams, particularly.
Lead capturing, analytics, and routing is perhaps one of the most important aspects of social CRM. Visitors to your blog, fans on Facebook, and Twitter followers are some of the best leads you’ll ever get. Additionally, marketing campaign analytics will allow you to see, at a glance, where business comes from: which initiatives are successful, which have flopped, and where you should allocate your marketing energy and advertising dollars. Conversion information can be easily captured by CRM applications, and since they run in the cloud, they are constantly updated—so that everyone in your organization is on the same page.
Perhaps the coolest thing about automating your data capture, storage and workflows using a cloud-based CRM system is that, by using these technologies to harness information, your employees can actually spend more time connecting on a personal and meaningful basis. Their administrative tasks are streamlined and simplified, so—whether they’re sales reps, marketers conducting focus groups, customer service agents who talk to real customers every day, or the fellow who’s answering tweets and posting links on the Facebook page—these employees spend their time where it really counts: engaging with customers.
Although we won’t blame them if they take a little time off to watch Betty White hosting Saturday Night Live.
