Once we understand were the conversations are we can then come up with the Social CRM use cases such as integrate Facebook with Salesforce.com, manage communities to collect ideas, manage customer service forums, manage Twitter for customer service, implement a knowledge base, manage influencers and/or create cases from Radian6 in Salesforce.com among many other use cases (crisis management, public relations, marketing, sales, prospecting, etc).

These use cases are mostly divided into 4 main components:

Facilitate the Conversation. Using Radian6, agents of the command center and/or the community managers are able to understand the conversations and be the advocates for the consumers. The problems are not solved but they facilitate the conversation to understand the problem. The Engagement Console is configured with macros, workflow, stacks, chatter, tagging and extensions to manage the conversations. For example, you can call the Salesforce.com's knowledge management solution from within the Engagement Console and use the Bit.ly extension to communicate solutions and content.

Community Collaboration. Once they understand the problem, agents seek ways to engage the community to solve the problem. With the knowledge management solution from Salesforce.com and/or communities such GetSatisfaction, agents can re-direct the consumer to the appropriate content to resolve the problem.

Solve the Problem. But if the community cannot solve the problem, or your company has no content in the knowledge base or forum, agents can then manage the problem in the Salesforce.com (using the Service Cloud) with processes that create contacts and case directly from Radian6 (i.e. Social Hub). This implies that not all conversations on Facebook or Twitter should reach Salesforce.com. The command center should have business rules and workflows that will filter these conversations to the appropriate areas of your organization and/or community. Salesforce.com (Service Cloud) is configured with queues, cases, fields, workflows, knowledge base, email to case, chatter, web to case, views and custom fields/objects to mirror the Radian6 Engagement Console configuration.

Listening, Monitoring and Metrics. But the most important thing is the power of real time information to analyze the conversations in the different social channels and communities to learn from trends and metrics. Radian6's Dashboard is configured with the proper metrics to measure conversations. Reports in Salesforce.com are created to manage and analyze the social media cases. The Dashboard and the Salesforce.com can also be configured to meet COPC standards.

Our implementations could take from 4 to 12 weeks after a 30 days analysis using our conversation map methodology. We use Agile/Scrum to implement the Social Command Center with the plan to have a customer up a running with the basics of the command center in 4 weeks.

We have been able to empower large organizations in Latin America in different industries such as telecommunication, banks, universities and airlines. Some of these companies are working directly with their call center outsources and marketing agencies or they just have their own social media team, where we just facilitate the creation of the Social CRM strategy along with the implementation of the technology.

We are back in Bogota, Colombia with our 2nd Social CRM. This is a limited attendance seminar with 15 to 20 participants. You will learn the basic steps to start integrating your CRM strategy and social media plan. You will learn how to listen to social media conversations, how to measure this conversations, how to establish a community and most important how to integrate people, processes and technoligy with your CRM strategy.

This presentation showcases a few of the topics that we will teach during the seminar.

For more information about the seminar go to this link.

From Community Managers to Community Management

By Jesus Hoyos (original post)

In the recent few months I have seen a noteworthy progression of social media command centers in Latin America in industries like CPG, telecommunications and banks. The Latin American market is changing from having just a community manager to monitor Facebook to forming command centers with monitoring tools and community platforms. Some of these companies are early adopters eager to take the risk of failing and to quickly overcome any social media hurdles. 

Some are just using social media tools, others are incorporating forums and knowledge bases and others have a CRM system somehow integrated to the command center and social media channels. The good thing is that these companies are learning to listen and to validate social media metrics to then start a Social CRM strategy in phases. Based on what I have seen in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina, I have come up with 4 different levels to manage a social media command center.

1) Facilitate the Conversation. Using social media tools like Buzzient, Next Principles, CoTweet or Radian6, we can monitor and have an engagement where agents of the command center and/or the community managers are able to understand the conversations and be the advocates of the consumers. The problems are not solved but they facilitate the conversation to understand the problem.

2) Community Collaboration. Once they understand the problem, they seek ways to engage the community to solve the problem. With a knowledge management system and/or communities such as Open-source forums, blogs, UserVoice, GetSatisfaction, Fuze Digital, Yahoo Answers and/or Lithium they can re-direct the consumer to the appropriate content to resolve the problem.

3) Solve the Problem. But if the community cannot solve the problem, or your company has no content in the knowledge base, they can then manage the problem in the CRM system with interfaces and processes that create contacts and cases from the social media-monitoring tool and/or from the community platform. This implies that not all conversations on Facebook or Twitter should reach the CRM system. The command center should have business rules and workflows that will filter these conversations to the appropriate areas in your organization and/or community platform. Some tools used are ZenDesk, Desk.com and CRM software integrated to social media channels.

4) Learn from Metrics. But the most important thing is the power in real time to analyze the conversations in the different social media channels and communities to learn from trends and metrics. The command center metrics should also be part of your customer analytics and BI strategy.

As you can see this involves a "community management" approach and it is more than just having ONE community manager. The command center must have Social Media Director, supervisors or community managers, agents, analysts, a knowledge management administrator, and a community platform administrator, among other roles (internal or external) such as the members of your communities

These 4 levels of community engagement have different management flavors: a) marketing departments, b) customer service, c) call center outsourcer, d) marketing agency, and, c) a combination of the agency with the marketing department. It is still an evolving process and these companies are still learning as the move from one phase of the implementation to another.  The interesting fact is that they now understand that it takes a community to manage a command center.

Note: Many of these companies are still under a stealth mode with their Social CRM strategies, some are just doing customer service, others are gathering ideas and feedback and others are just building communities outside Facebook and Twitter. They are still learning and are not yet using their social media success or failures for any public relation goals.