Don’t Simply Ride the Social Media Wave… Guide it with Strategic Intent!

Social media is hot, hot, hot, and it can be tempting to just dive in and ride the social media wave without any specific plan.  That’s a great way to guarantee misjudging the swell and getting tossed around underneath the wave.  That’s what social media marketing without strategic intent will get you– possibly a few lucky “rides” for your brand messaging, but also a predominance of mis-steps and wasted time and effort.

Now that more businesses are getting on the social media marketing bandwagon, it’s no longer enough to just include a generic “use social media for marketing” line item in your brand growth strategy.  You need strategic intent. Gary Hamel defines strategic intent as “An ambitious and compelling dream which provides emotional and intellectual energy for the company and defines the journey to the future.”

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Definition of Social CRM – Explained!

In one of my earlier posts, I defined Social CRM as follows:

Social CRM is the business strategy of engaging customers through Social Media with goal of building trust and brand loyalty
. Loyalty is defined as attitude towards a brand that inclines a customer to repurchase it and/or recommend it to others. Social CRM and Social Media are more about building trust and managing loyalty with customers than about managing relationships or transactions, which are focus areas of “traditional” CRM.

I received a lot of great feedback on this definition and want to elaborate further on it to answer some of the questions raised by readers of this blog.

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