People measure the value of a product they acquire over their life with that product. Service after the sale is one way a brand maintains a relationship with the customer during this whole time, but this only occurs on initiation by the customer. Social also gives a brand an opportunity to maintain a relationship during this whole time by providing a means for the brand to monitor and initiate a conversation.. For a brand to respectfully initiate a conversion, it needs information that people would not normally provide to marketers.
Social media, customer service, and other sources are making more information available to CRM databases. Additonally and through newer technology, data is being added to CRM databases based on analysis of unstructured text sources. Should all this data become immediately available to the marketing team?
A history of negative exploitation of personal data has created a social phenomenon resolving into a concern for privacy. This is especially true in marketing where there are laws against invasive marketing tactics e.g. CAN_SPAM and Article 29. The practice of permission marketing has long attempted to provide a means for people to control what information is available to marketers and what means of communications are acceptable. With social, this is evolving into trust-based marketing.
When a person reveals a portion of their totality to another, they are revealing a persona. A great way to perceive an individual’s set of personas is through Venn diagrams. I have a working persona and a family persona. My skill as a chef applies mostly to my family persona, but occasionally to my work persona when we have pot-lucks. I may share with customer service that they have terrible zippers on a new jacket, but I can live with that until the jacket wears out and before considering buying a replacement, I would want to know that the new zipper is better. I would not want marketing to immediately start peppering me with ads for a new coat.
(side bar: interesting use of Venn and persona)
The current practice of CRM database marketing is to exploit all available information on a person and to make this information available to all groups. Customer service, sales, marketing product development, and loyalty all have a need for some of the data, but all desire all of the data, but only some have earned permission or trust to use the data. If a company allows access to all this data to every group within the company, they may violate the norms of permission and trust-based marketing. Marketers need to earn not just permission but also trust in order to utilize additional information about their customers. The more someone trusts another, the more information they will share. Customers will be quicker to trust a brand if every contact with the brand follows sustainable marketing techniques. A cross functional team comprised of the groups above is the ideal mechanism to ensure sustainable social interactions based on gaining trust of their customers. By participating in this team, Marketers will also earn this trust.
Information is information. The CRM analyst should be free to invent new ways to analyze the information using all sources but not be the decision maker of its use. The goal of persona management within CRM should be to only reveal internally the information the customer would want revealed. The arbiter of use should be a cross functional team that manages social for the company. The tool to visualize these choices is Venn.
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