Social CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the model for managing and understanding a companies’ interaction with their customers and potential sales prospects. Utilizing advanced software to organize and unify the practices of a business, CRM combines customer service, technical support and marketing into a single plan that can be executed to help a company fully reach its potential.

Why is CRM Important?

Most small businesses need access to enterprise level software, especially in terms of customer relationship management (CRM) software, but they don't have the budget. Therefore, business owners turn to cloud applications that offer useful technology for a budget friendly monthly rental fee. With the advent of cloud apps experts worried about security, and surely there have been a few instances where that fear proved correct. However, the truth is, a small business can enjoy using secure enterprise level software with cloud based business apps.

Check out this infographic from InsideView: http://cdn.insideview.com/images/social-media-infographic.png. It illustrates the growth of social media usage in the B2B space. Though the data is, well, dated, it’s less about the numbers and more about the overall trend.

Marketing offline and promoting through social media are two different things. Social media are a highly interactive two-way medium. This enables anyone to reach easy a global audience. It’s an equal opportunity for anybody to voice their thoughts, opinions, and share information at their disposal. The main point of social media is to actually be social.

There’s a new social media platform in town – and one that we should probably take notice of because it is owned and run by Google. If you have not yet heard about Google+ you have probably been on Planet Mars for the last few weeks (or maybe just on vacation). I thought that in this post I would try to give a brief explanation of what all the fuss is about: Google+ : The basics