SugarCRM Social Media Survey Results: Implications for the Small Business
Many of you may have taken part, or at least seen the results of our recent Social Media Survey.
Some of the highlights of the survey were interesting, but not all that surprising. Among them, these points stand out to me:
- Only 26 percent of respondents said they currently integrate their customers’ social networking information with their existing CRM data.
- 72 percent of respondents said they plan to integrate their customers’ social networking information into their existing CRM data within the next year.
When you put these two together – it would seem that ideally EVERYONE would be undergoing social CRM initiatives in the coming months. That is a huge opportunity, but also a bit scary. There is an amazing propensity for people to overpay “gurus” and point vendors with no real solution in place, and thus not see results because they did not properly align business goals with the IT work underneath. (Really, there is not much difference between the potential social CRM miscues we could see and the high-level “CRM failures” of the Siebel era.)
The plus side? A lot of the tools needed to “get social” can be accessed (albeit in a more ad hoc or manual manner) for free. This certainly lessens a lot of the financial risk associated with a new IT initiative.
I had an online chat with InformationWeek’s Dana Blankenhorn and he gets it. In his write up on the survey, Dana points out that this need not be an expensive undertaking.
Overall, I think we can safely say that Social is here to stay…now, the real question is – how will you leverage social in your organization to better your business in 2011?