Is the S in Social CRM about Social Media?

I have pondered long and hard on Wim Rampen's (@wimrampen)blog of a couple of months ago ; 'The S in Social CRM is not about Social Media' and guess what, despite playing devil's advocate as much as possible I find myself drawn back to his inevitable conclusion – he is spot on!

Social Media is a channel, or more precisely a whole heap of them, in the same way that the phone, email, word of mouth or any other form of communication is. The big difference is that you have the chance to get involved and listen. I have read an awful lot about Social Media being the first time that the customers get their say and can broadcast to the world. I can refute that idea in two words – utter rubbish – people have always been able to communicate their dislike. I recall training sales guys long before the terms social and media were ever concatenated and capitalised. I used to tell them that if people like what you do they may tell a friend, if they don't like it they will shout it to as many people as they know and word of mouth spreads. I guess the big difference now is that that spread is magnified by the speed and power of the web. So, Social CRM and Social Media – yes, just a channel like any other but an important one which you ignore at your peril. We are, I believe in great danger of over-complicating something which is very simple. Looking for rule-sets and the 'right' way of doing Social CRM. I firmly believe that the whole process needs to be as fluid as meets your and your customers' needs and actually delivers something to both sides. I have said before that your customers won't care what you call it, it could be Social CRM, CRM or Albert for that matter. It doesn't matter to them. What does matter is that you are listening. Or at least, we have to believe that until sufficient of them tell us otherwise. I see a lot of companies jumping on the Social CRM bandwagon at present and there are some ubiquities out there. Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook seem to be at the forefront of most things I see. Training in how to 'leverage' those environments for business and instruction on how to set up accounts for people who don't have them. And not surprisingly businesses are making money doing just that. What I don't see...and maybe there is opportunity here is for someone to say, 'Ok, you've done all that....now what?' We at WeCanDo.BIZ of course have a little Social CRM tab on our home page and there is the wonderful Twitter Sales Leads Tool sitting next to it. These are both elements of Social Media hooking into Social CRM capabilities but without some kind of strategy, nothing is going to happen. I recall a Director in a company I used to work for talking about sales guys 'sitting there aggressively waiting for the phone to ring'. There is still a lot of common sense logic in that. Please have a look at our tools but don't make the mistake of thinking that all you need to do is sign up and wait. We are always happy to help you in any way we can. Original blog post from http://wecandobiz.posterous.com/is-the-s-in-social-crm-about-social-medi... reposted here at the request of Aina Neva Fiati (@ainaneva) Wim's original article here http://wimrampen.com/2010/03/23/the-s-in-scrm-is-not-about-social-media/... Please visit original Blog if links do not work from here.