One of the key things that came across is that there now seem to be a lot of entities who feel that brands can be made or marred online, via threads starting out from a simple 140 char string that goes “Product X is bad service, ppl, don’t touch it, #fail” or something like that. The people I met / interacted with over the last week all seem single-minded in terms of focusing on measuring the impact of such statements, and if possible, curbing or enhancing the impact that a negative or positive statement may have.

The key issue I keep wondering about is that of “monitoring” the impact of such statements. The tech aspects of collating or mining keywords related to a product / brand / service is not something that confounds me; anyone with half a grey cell can do it. What I really fail to understand is HOW such a statement and its impact on actual market spaces are measured. I can follow the threads of connect or discord around a product or service, but how do I actually check whether it has resulted in a SALE or LACK OF ONE.

One of the key posts that I HAVE to mention here in terms of its utter lucidity of thought and expression is Prem Kumars blog post on Social CRM. There seems to be a good thought stream out there, in terms of attempts to define spaces, approaches and potential outcomes.

Sugar CRM, the big daddy of all open source CRMs, in one of the versions I last checked, allowed you to run and track a (mailer or ad-serving) campaign online, as part of its offering. Now, while this cannot really be called “social CRM”, it does indicate a larger capability for a user to PUBLISH content to what goes collectively and even “loosely” under the garb of Social Media. Oracle, with their Social CRM App Suite seem to be prime, aggressive movers in this domain. As of now, it seems to be more of Sales prospecting and lead generation function.

So why has this become important?

It is kind of more or less accepted that 6 people out of 10 who spend at least 8 hours in front of a machine, are connected to a group / circle / network through a “social networking” site.

To most people, such sites serve as a connectivity platform, a “solidarity definition engine” or “recommendation engine” (I am buying X product, do you think I should go ahead?), a “Catharssis engine” (I HATE X or Y  services / person / product, and I think you guys should NOT use them).  And such innocuous posts sometimes show tendencies to spread, as the thread that permeates through venn diagrams that support inclusions or exclusions of people respond to it with myriad expressions of connect or disconnect.

Brilliant to do trending and checking.

But then, (as asked earlier) how do you actually monitor whether this has DONE  a sale or DENIED a sale ?

Social CRM and Reputation Engine Evangelists have their work cut out for them. The High Road for these people is not the trending and tracking, nor is it the mining of data and presenting an output.

Its the ACTUAL conversion to dollar matrices that are going to decide the KEY movers and FIRST players in the market that is BEGGING to be robbed.

Sanjeev Sarma

ps. I am currently exploring thoughts and concepts what SOCIAL CRM means to India and how Indian networks currently work in the digital space. I’ll share them soon as I’ve arrived at some gibberish I can pass off as intelligent.