Social CRM For Dummies

Chapter 1

Implementing the New Social Business

In This Chapter

• Defending the new social media model
• Looking at the history of CRM
• Defining what it means to be social

Welcome to the new social business. Many of you may read this opening line with surprise, thinking, “What do you mean the new social business? We've been talking about being a social business for years. At least a decade!” Yes, businesses have been talking about being social for decades, but technology has finally reached a point where implementing social media is now part of the overall strategy. We can discuss the idea of being a social business until we're blue in the face; however, it's time to act, time to take charge!

The new social business represents a fundamental shift in business management that impacts both a salesperson who keeps track of consumer information using a technology and the management of customers’ Facebook profiles via a database.

As a business owner, marketing executive, or professional, you're just now jumping into the world where you can connect the data, interactions, and customer information between sites like Facebook and your customer database. That's the new idea behind a social business. It's what this book is about: social media data and interaction married with business data that has been collected for years within different software and management technologies.

See, that is cool.

In this chapter, you look at what makes the combination of social media, marketing communication, ...