By Zach Hofer-Shall, Analyst, Forrester Research

March 12, 2010

Social media has forced companies into reactive mode. Brands suddenly want — or think they need — to know two things:

• “Who’s saying something bad about me?” and
• “How do I track the negative fall-out?”

But the real power of social media is that your customers voluntarily share a wealth of data that can drive improvements to your business strategy. Right now, your customers, without any prompting, openly share information that would have taken months of surveys — and lots of money — to collect. As social data continues to pile up, it’s time to start taking these online conversations seriously and use them to inform your customer intelligence.

The concept of monitoring social media might sound obvious, because most data-hungry marketers understand the value of their customers’ social data. But based on my research, even though most marketers may collect this data, far fewer actually use it to inform an enterprisewide view of their customers. As any analytical mind knows: collecting data is only the first step.

[The subsequent steps revealed after the jump...]

Read on… »

Nestle's Facebook Page — Note the current status message: "Social media: as you can see we're learning as we go. Thanks for the comments."

You may have already noticed this or heard about it, but Nestle’s Facebook fan page is currently witnessing an uprising — or a meltdown, or some other chocolate-themed pun I didn’t already use in the headline of this post.

I’ll update as things unfold, but it seems that a Facebook “fan” modified a Nestle logo to use as an avatar — and the Nestle corporate communications people or social media staffers (I’m not sure which — I have a note out to Nestle and am awaiting a reply) responded about 10 hours ago — well, in a very 1.0 kind of way:

Nestle To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic – they will be deleted.

The community — as you might imagine — responded in a very 2.0 kind of way. Some selections:

I’m one of those people who loves watching movie previews and trailers. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again: I could watch an entire movie filled with just previews. (I’m also one of those people who eats her an entire box of candy before the movie even starts, but I’ll save that tangent for another day.) The preview lover that I am, imagine my anxiety when I went to the movies the other night and was faced with a 30-person-long line to purchase tickets. Luckily I’m a self-service genius so I headed to the touch-screen kiosk to purchase my ticket with the easy swipe of my credit card.

The machines (all five of them) were out of order or out of the physical tickets… Maybe both. To make a long story short, I had to wait in that monstrous line and missed my precious previews.

This week, movie ticket Web site Fandango launched something that could have come to my rescue in that sticky situation — mobile movie tickets. According to Fandango FAQs: Rather than printing at home or collecting your ticket from the box office or theater kiosk, you can have your ticket delivered on your mobile device in a text message. The text message, delivered through either SMS or MMS, will contain a unique barcode and accompanying details for the movie you are going to see. Once you receive your Mobile Ticket, simply take your mobile device with you to the theater and have the barcode scanned right at the ticket podium. There’s no need to wait in line or print anything!

(Photos and more after the jump.) Read on… »

Allow me to introduce myself: I’m a CRM Magazine editorial assistant by day and a fiction writer by night. Most of my work experience has been done in or around the publishing industry. I spent four years at Pen American Center working with authors, agents and editors. I spent 1.5 years at Publishers Weekly where I served as an Editorial Assistant.

I’ve been with CRM Magazine for exactly two weeks and, while I’m completely exhausted and overwhelmed, I can already tell that I’m going to enjoy being around all the analysts, journalists, and tech-junkies. I’ve spent most of my two weeks learning all the jargon: leads, microblogging, contact center infrastructure, interaction platforms, etc. (When did my tweets and status updates become microblogs? I’m still confused.) And I feel as if I’m starting to catch my stride.

My beat is going to be marketing so that’s what most of my posts will focus on. I’m sure I’ll venture off topic occassionally. I hope to be reading your comments for a very long time.  Lets get to business…

Last week MaaS Impact, pioneers in Marketing-as-a-Service, announced the availability of Lead Impact and Sales Insight on AppExchange from Salesforce.com. According to the press release, the applications facilitate Demand Generation Automation, which will allow companies to better “create email nurturing campaigns triggered by lead score and behavioral demographics.”

The press release quotes MaaS Impact client, John Schaeffer of Interactive Data, LLC as saying,” “MaaS Impact allows us to see what prospects are hot and how our marketing is engaging leads in real-time.  For us, that translates into more revenue with fewer in-house employees.”

What I’ve learned thus far about how marketing and CRM mesh is that companies want to engage with their customers and leads in real time. They want to know what consumers are telling each other and they want to know how to improve a relationship that might be floundering. The faster they can engage leads and customers the higher the likelihood of meeting their needs.

So for any company looking for a way to improve their ability to guide leads from finding the product to being interested in the product to actually buying the product, Lead Impact and Sales Insight might be what you’re looking for. I’m interested to hear what your thoughts on the product might be.