Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps to combine all information pulled from social media. Using CRM analytics, a company can determine how to best use this information by tracking, measuring and analyzing audience behaviour. Adams (2018) explains that social CRM flips the script by building systems for customers to interact with and choose the way they interact with the organization, which ultimately gives the customer more flexibility. There are many benefits of CRM such as:

• More meaningful engagement
• Creation of brand advocates
• Collection of useful data
• Construction of brand image

Companies can add social CRM to their strategy from 4 main approaches:

1. Marketing – social listening to learn about online audience behaviour

• Sales – understand where prospects are online and what they’re discussing
• Customer Service and Support – real time, multi channel support
• Customer Experience – understand customers needs and wants and create unique experience for them

Adams (2028) explains that “a social CRM platform gives your organization all the tools it needs to grow, all in one central location.” Using a social CRM platform impacts sales by automating and boosting sales, marketing by engaging with customers and prospects, and customer service by delivering outstanding and responsive customer support. When deciding on a platform, many things need to be considered and evaluated. Support for social media platforms, brand monitoring, social CRM analytics and integration with other platforms are all key components that should be included in the platform you choose. Most platforms will offer trials as a way for businesses to test drive their platform, which Adams (2018) advises businesses to take advantage of since you don’t want to be stuck in a bad option which halts company growth.

Social CRM success depends on organization support and the allocation of resources. There are various areas in a business that need attending. These areas include:

• Leadership Support – includes top level support. Key components include identifying decision makers/influencers and creating your business case.
• Organization Strategy and Culture – ensure alignment with organization strategy and goals.
• Budget – need to invest in growth.
• Building a Social CRM Team – staff team with early adopters, determine roles and invest in a social team.
• Training – look to social CRM provider for training opportunities while supporting the social CRM team.
• Monitoring – evaluate performance. Monitor all social CRM activity and give additional support when required.

Develop Your Strategy

Adams (2018) explains that social CRM can be used to create a more personalized experience for customers. Using an effective CRM strategy increases organization’s brand while creating fans. A brand is the overall impression a consumer gets from the communication and marketing methods a company uses. These organizations want to ensure brand consistency in the mind of the consumer and achieve this through offering advanced humanization and personalization. Humanization focuses on the connection of personality and people connecting with people. Personalization focuses on customers having the ability to choose and share their own experiences with a brand, basically allowing them to choose how they experience the brand.

                Social media optimization is crucial towards many companies social CRM strategies. Offering customer service through social media is an easy way to support your customers while tracking brand consistency. Adams (2018) lists the rules of engagement that organizations should clearly define in order to set the standard for every customer interaction. This includes:

• Tone and voice
• Setting responses to specific situations
• Personalized responses
• Guideline for communications

Businesses need to communicate with customers how they can be reached. This could include a brief description in a social media bio including customer support numbers and email. This introduces the idea of creating a social media account based on your business. Creating dedicated support accounts help centralize social CRM activity. Being proactive in responses on these support accounts is essential, so make sure you communicate issues that will affect the customer base (outage), give consistent updates until the issue is resolved and make sure to demonstrate you are on top of the issue. Adams (2018) recommends the use of a social media monitor tool to help quantify your brands sentiment and avoid a negative reputation.

Adams (2018) states that the use of social CRM says goodbye to one size fits all marketing. This allows companies to use a focussed targeting approach that involves highly individualized messages that strongly appeal to the customer. These businesses use segmentation to divide customers into groups using factors such as behaviours. This allows the business to personalize their content by individualizing and tailoring directly to the customer. Adams (2018) suggests to closely monitor the effectiveness of these personalised messages and to tweak them when necessary in order to find what works best.

Manage Social CRM

Identifying influencers is an important act in the management of social CRM. Influencers have power in affecting others and drives action, not just awareness. When identifying potential influencers to build a relationship with, look at their audience/advocacy, relevance, reach and engagement. You need to make sure they are a right fit for your organization. If you have trouble finding influencers there are various tools to use to aid in your search. There are social media monitoring sites such as Klout.com and hootsuite.com. When you finally find influencers that fit in your social CRM strategy, it is time to start working with them. Adams (2018) encourages content creation through photos or videos of the influencer using the product/service. She also advises to provide giveaways and discounts, which will make consumers more interested. A strong partnership with your influencers is important so make sure to take care of them!

Engaging with prospects is a bit different when compared to an influencer. To engage successfully with prospects, Adams (2018) suggests painting a complete picture of the prospect and figure out exactly who they are. This painting should include where they are in the sales cycle, previous interactions with the organization and other valuable data. Lastly, it is time to connect with the prospect. This can be done through social media but make sure not to be too pushy and DO NOT provide a sales pitch. Allow them to investigate on their own time and provide exceptional value. This builds credibility and trust within the prospect.

Adams (2018) states that integrating customer service with social CRM is the ultimate way to support the social customer. This way you can monitor what is being said about the brand, identify the problems, contact consumers instantly and acknowledge loyal customers. Negative feedback is a given, but it is all about how you handle it! Adams (2018) states that every customer issue that arises in the social space is a marketing and public relations opportunity. She offers a brief, step by step plan on handling negative feedback. Here it is:

1. Monitor internet for activity
2. Bring posting into customer support que
3. Facilitate employee collaboration
4. Kickoff resolution with customer

Your Toolkit

Taking time to involve process documentation in your social CRM strategy relates to long term success. What exactly is process documentation? Adams (2018) defines it as documents that support a process, the activity of process discovery, process mapping software and procedure templates. Businesses should start this process by creating a roadmap. This roadmap should create a new standard for optimising customer relations, build connections with customers and leverage new channels to create more personal communication. Adams (2018) lists 7 main factors in business process success criteria. This includes:

1. Ownership
2. Goals
3. Metrics
4. Interfaces
5. Documentation
6. Integrity
7. Alignment with business vision

In order to execute process documentation properly, understanding your organization’s needs is critical. With this information, you can choose the right tools. Choosing tools that support where work is being done is key. You can use wiki, a shared google documents, an internal portal or even a social CRM platform.

My Conclsuion

 Megan Adam’s (2018) video taught me about developing a social CRM strategy and how to manage it by using certain tools. If I was starting a business, I would add a social CRM strategy to my marketing by social listening to learn about online audience behaviour. Using this information, I would be able to know certain behaviours of potential consumers and what exactly they are interested in, and market my product/service based on those needs. Since public relations and customer feedback is so important, I would set up a twitter account to handle customer service. In order to utilize my social media account to the fullest, I would use Klout.com to help monitor my account. In the case of handling negative feedback, I would use Adams 4 step procedure which I defined earlier in the summary. Like Adam’s (2018) stated in her video, we all want to be seen and heard, why would your customers be any different?

References

Adams, M. (2018, April 11). Social Media Marketing: Social CRM – Welcome. Retrieved March 9, 2020, from LinkedIn website: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/social-media-marketing-social-crm/welcome?u=2109516

CRM With Social Media Integration. (2019). Retrieved from http://www.crmscore.com/crm-strategy/crm-social-media-integration/

Wignall, C. (2019). Strategy Lies. Retrieved from https://catalystfoundation.ca/strategy-lies/

Your Toolkit. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.yourtoolkit.com.au/

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Create a LinkedIn Profile

In his video “Learning LinkedIn for Students”, Oliver Schinkten (2018) explains how to utilize a LinkedIn account. With over 500 million members and over 1 million company accounts, LinkedIn offers many benefits to users that help with:

• Finding and applying for jobs
• Researching companies and industries
• Building professional networks
• Creating a strong digital footprint

When setting up an account, Schinkten (2018) recommends creating a quality password since personal information will be shared on the account. Ten or more characters should be used with the inclusion of uppercase letters, numbers and special characters.

Adding a photo and background image can liven up a profile. When choosing a profile picture, a recent, professional photo should be used as staying recognizable to the picture is important. To add a background image, simply click the pencil icon in the top right corner of the profile page. These photos should help the profile stand out.

The first thing seen on other users’ profiles is their headline. This should state what defines that person and what their career objective is. Changing a headline is easy as Schinkten (2018) directs the viewer to simply click the pencil icon on the top of their profile and click headline. Before posting, ask for feedback from a friend or family member, as they can add insight into the new headline.

While a headline is short and brief, the summary should have much more depth with lots of time and effort going into it. This is an opportunity to share mission statements, goals, aspirations and personality. The first part of the summary should draw the viewer in to convince them to read on. This is an “opportunity to show passion”; something a resume cannot do, says Schinkten (2018). He continues to explain that many students do not have a summary, which is a big mistake.

More options when creating a profile include:

• Work experience or Volunteering – list experience, jobs and internships. Can enter title, company, and location.
• Education – add school, awards, GPA.
• Skills – list what specific skills are in your skillset (ex leadership, excel, public speaking).

These skills can be endorsed or recommended by other LinkedIn accounts.

To configure a public profile, click the tab “edit public profile and URL’s”. Three options will appear:

1. Edit URL – this allows personalization of the URL for a profile. Can make it easier to share/remember the profile.
2. Edit Content – this allows editing of the public profile.
3. Edit Visibility – this controls profile appearance for certain viewers. Can make a private account which will not show information in the profile.

Build your Network

Schinkten (2018) says “connecting with other professionals and creating a solid network is one of the most empowering things you can do.” Providing value to your network and creating win-win relationships is important in building a valuable connection with others. A strong professional network can bring:

• Insight and advice
• Knowledge and ideas
• Collaboration
• Resources
• Opportunities

There are three main types of people targeted when building a personal professional network. The first type is “the advocate”. This person should be known at a personal level, such as a classmate or family member. Their role is to act as a soundboard for advice and ideas. The second type is “the strategic in”. They are well connected and willing to make connections on your own behalf. They are usually known on a professional level such as a professor or alumni. The last type is “the subject matter expert”. They have insight in the industry and can give their unbiased opinion. They are usually people in a similar industry or job.

It is easy to connect with others on LinkedIn. Users can connect to people and businesses. Schinkten (2018) advises not to abuse connection requests and suggests connecting with others only if there is a win-win relationship. To accept a connection request, click the “my network” tab and proceed by clicking “see who you know”. Here users can see pending invitations in which they can ignore or accept.

There are many ways to improve a LinkedIn search. Users have access to powerful search filters where they can narrow down a specific search such as:

• Boolean modifiers – includes quotations and parenthesis
• Search operators – incudes name, title, school
• The alumni tool – includes people of similar education

To learn more about using these search operators, go to the help center in LinkedIn.

A great way to make an account relevant by the users’ interests is through LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn groups are trusted communities, where professionals ask questions, share insights and build connections. To join an appropriate group, search keywords and filter by groups. Make sure to review group rules and purpose before requesting to join.

Using LinkedIn Day-to-Day

Exploring the feed is a typical action that LinkedIn users do daily. The feed will present content based on the users interests as well as content posted by followed groups, people and schools. Users also have the opportunity of following companies and influencers. To follow a company, Schinkten (2018) directs the user to simply search the specific company in the search bar. To follow influencers, go to www.LinkedIn.com/feed/follow. LinkedIn will automatically suggest people to follow.

The newsfeed allows the chance for users to share content that provides value to followers and connections. There are different ways to share content such as through an article or video. Schinkten (2018) recommends new LinkedIn users to try writing their own article to share on the feed. He advises to write on something relevant to their followers. When choosing pictures for the article, make sure to have the rights for the image, otherwise it is illegal. Some recommended sites to get safe images from are www.unsplash.com or www.spitshire.com.

Everything someone does online contributes to their digital footprint. Employers often investigate potential employee’s social media accounts and review their digital footprint. Some things to avoid that improves one’s footprint include:

• Reference to drugs and alcohol
• Bad mouthing others
• Discriminatory behaviour
• Poor communication skills

Building a positive digital footprint can be accomplished by:

• Conveying a strong professional image
• Being well rounded
• Having a wide range of interests
• Having great communication skills

Schinkten (2018) believes that LinkedIn Learning is a valuable tool, users should use. He states that innovation and change occur at an alarming rate, all the time. This means that lifelong learning is needed in order to adapt to new industry trends and practices. LinkedIn learning offers those with premium accounts, courses and classes on all types of different subjects. Schinkten (2018) suggests there is something for everyone on LinkedIn learning.

Job Search and Company Research

Exploring potential careers is a handy tool for students with LinkedIn accounts. Schinkten (2018) advocates how easy and efficient students can research company insights and search for jobs. There are three main stages in the job search:

1. Find the job
2. Research the job
3. Apply for the job

LinkedIn also offers job alerts, which notifies members when a relevant job posting arises.

Manage Your LinkedIn Account

There are some key benefits in using LinkedIn Premium. This includes:

• Sending in-mail
• Viewing company insights
• Moving up on job applications
• Seeing who is viewing your profile

LinkedIn offers a free trial of their premium version to basic account users. There are four types of premium accounts: career (find jobs), business (grow network), sales (unlock sales opportunities) and hiring (find talent).

LinkedIn users can back up their data. Schinkten (2018) advises users to do so before deleting their LinkedIn accounts as once the account is deleted, it is gone. To backup data, go to settings and privacy and click download data.

My Conclusion

After watching Schinkten’s (2018) video, I realized badly my LinkedIn profile needed a complete rehaul. Before the changes, I had no profile picture, background picture, or work experience. I took the time to find two appropriate pictures, one for my profile picture and one for my background. In my background photo, I wanted to showcase a bit of my personality, so I chose a picture of me playing goalkeeper for the Nait Ooks soccer team. Also, I added past job experiences such as working for Titan Glass and Costco. In the coming days, I plan to implement more ideas learned through Schinkten (2018) as he recommends staying active on LinkedIn.

Your Ideas

What did you take from the video? Did i leave any topics or ideas out? Please feel free to add to the conversation without hesitation

References

Bray, M (2019, Dec 27). Why Network Segmentation is essential to Creating a Secure Enterprise Environment [Online Photo]. Retrieved from https://www.information-age.com/why-network-segmentation-essential-enterprise-123486552/

Schinkten, O (2018, Oct 18). Learning LinkedIn for Students [Video File]. Video posted to https://www.linkedin.com/learning/learning-linkedin-for-students/next-steps?u=2109516

Yublosky, M (2018, May 2). Your LinkedIn Profile [Online Photo]. Retrieved from https://www.diywebjem.com/2018/05/02/your-linkedin-profile-and-the-default-background-image/

Facebook Advertising Overview

In her video “Advertising on Facebook”, Megan Adams (2019) explains how to utilize Facebook advertising. She states that the audience is already engaged, therefore making it easier to connect to the target audience. With every advertising campaign comes a different objective. Adams (2019) breaks down these objectives into 3 main categories: awareness (generate interest in product), consideration (think about product) and conversion (purchase product).

The author believes there are many ways to target the right audience. This includes targeting based on:

• Location – cities, countries, neighborhoods
• Demographics – age, gender, education
• Interests – hobbies, pages liked
• Behaviors – purchase habits, device used, recent life events

How Facebook Ads Work

There are 3 main components to Facebook: personal profiles, Facebook pages and advertising accounts. All advertising efforts come from the advertising accounts. Adams (2019) describes that Facebook organizes ads into 3 separate levels:

• Campaign – what is the objective?
• Ad sets – who is being targeted?
• Ads – how many ads?

Choosing an ad campaign objective is an important part of the advertising process. To do so, simply go to the add create tool and choose a fitting objective. Adams (2019) advises to bookmark the tab, as the tool is used often. Ad sets define what audience is being targeted while the ads tier focuses on how many ads are made and the differences between them.

How to Create Facebook Ads

Once the objective is selected, it is time to identify the appropriate audience. Using the ad create tool, Adams (2019) describes how to utilize specific settings such as location, age, gender, behaviours, ad placement and interests to target the correct niche audience. Every setting changed affects the audience size and reach which is displayed by a fuel gage. She advises to view the fuel gage after every change, to see what its impact is.

          It is difficult to decide how much money should go into the advertising budget. For this reason, Adams (2019) advises new advertisers to:

1. Start small
2. Analyze results
3. Make changes based on results

When choosing an ad creative, the advertiser must use an appropriate format as well as image to fill their ads’ potential. The text needs to be exactly like a normal post, with a clear call to action. Once the advertisement is created, Adams (2019) suggests viewing the ad preview. This will show exactly how the ad will be displayed on each device.

View Your Advertising Data

The Facebook ads dashboard helps advertisers keep tabs on their advertisements by producing data for each ad. Adams (2019) recommends checking each ad report daily in order to fulfil each ad’s potential by making the appropriate changes.

          Facebook offers an in depth look at finances using a billing summary found in the Account Overview. This is a useful feature for several reasons:

• See amount spent
• See advertisement spend broken up for objective
• See all transactions
• See exactly what has been billed

Implement Best Practices

Adams (2019) offers tips to creating a powerful advertisement that connects to the audience. A clear call to action is important as this gets the viewer involved in the product. Choosing an effective image that resonates with the audience is crucial. As Adams says, “Don’t underestimate the power and importance of the right image.”

My Conclusion

Adams (2019) successfully introduces Facebook advertising in her video. She notes important concepts and sets up the viewer for success in advertising through Facebook. A marketing team could easily transform Adams’ (2019) ideas into their own business plan by:

1. Creating a campaign objective. This will give their campaign direction and purpose.
2. Target the right audience. This will produce the best results for the campaign.
3. Analyze Data. This will suggest which ads need changing and which are working well.

Using these 3 ideas taken from the lecture, a business can set themselves up for success.

Your Ideas

What did you learn from Megan Adams video? Did I leave any topics/ideas out? Please feel free to add to the conversation.