A Social CRM Manifesto:

How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle

By Bob Warfield, Helpstream CEO

 Table of Contents

The World Changed While CRM Slept… 1

The New Social CRM World Order 6
The Social Media Big Picture for Business 8
You Already Know How to Be Social 10
The Social CRM Virtuous Cycle 12
Social CRM Strategies for Customer Service 16
Social CRM Strategies for Marketing 19
Social CRM Strategies for Sales 23
Social CRM: 5 Steps for Getting Started 26

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield i
 The World Changed While CRM Slept…
Is Social CRM a paradigm shift or just another channel like email, chat, KB, kiosks, and the like?
If it’s just another channel, we can continue business as usual by just plugging that channel in
without any major change in our strategy for engagement. If it’s a paradigm shift, we need to
re-evaluate our overall strategy. Understanding this distinction is critical in laying our plans to
deal with our Social Customers.
Since it’s always good to begin with definitions, here is mine (hat tip to Wikipedia): a paradigm shift
is a change in a fundamental model.
Let’s look at a brief history of the CRM world and see if we can spot any paradigm shifts:
CRM originally came into being with a bent towards “Command and
Control.” It was all about ensuring that sales people were doing (and
reporting) on their jobs via Sales Force Automation (SFA), and ensuring
that customers’ problems were actually being tracked and dealt with via
Case Management. As these systems were coming into being, we had
what I will call the “Dinosaur” era of the customer.
In this era, most of the power belonged to the manufacturers, hence my
reference to Henry Ford’s original concept of not giving the customer
any choices at all on the color of their motorcars. The customers them-
selves were docile and thick-skinned creatures. The big ones could let
out a mighty roar, but they seldom operated in groups and most ac-
cepted whatever fates were dealt out to them by customer service. After
all, there weren’t too many manufacturers, and if you needed the prod-
uct you needed it.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 1
CRM originally came into being
with a bent towards “Command
and Control.” It was all about
ensuring that sales people were
doing (and reporting) on their jobs
via Sales Force Automation (SFA),
and ensuring that customers’
problems were actually being
tracked and dealt with via Case
Management.
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
The friction of information exchange about the consumer experience was at an all time high during
this era. Most of the information available to consumers was essentially the company’s marketing.
The press was reluctant ever to bash a vendor too deeply, because they relied on the advertising dollars
from said vendors. Customers themselves had virtually no mechanism to spread the word, whether
good or bad. Companies invested fortunes in one way broadcasting of advertising to build brands.
Inter-consumer communication was largely limited to brand signaling. “This is a good brand,” or
perhaps, “This brand is cheaply made or unreliable.”
Knowledge Bases were introduced during this era as a means of equipping agents with more (ahem)
knowledge with which to dispatch their cases (e.g. customer questions). Later on, the idea of self-
service came to forefront. If Customer Service organizations were going to hire agents who were so
ill-informed that all they could do was parrot their Knowledge Base, perhaps the customer themselves
could be prevailed on to answer their own questions by searching that same KB.
Note that self-service represented a major paradigm shift and is not just another channel:
 Users were helping themselves. The participants went from a 1:1 agent to customer, to 0:1.
 The economics of customer service were radically affected.
 The customer experience was (obviously) radically affected. When self-service is working well
and the customer gets an immediate answer back that is correct, it’s a beautiful thing.
 The organizational support and infrastructure were similarly radically affected. Having a customer
friendly KB required a different approach than just letting the agents sift through a private KB filled
with all sorts of garbage and old cases that might contain confidential information.
Organizing these KB’s is a whole discipline in and of itself.
 Self-service introduced a radically different strategy for how customer service was approached.
The goal became to avoid the phone call and all other channels, a strategy that came to be called
“deflection.”
Let’s stop for a minute and compare and contrast that to an alternate channel: E-mail. Does email
really radically change the rules of the game, or is it simply carrying on a conversation much as you
would on the phone (where it all started)? While email feels different to the customer certainly than a
phone call, it doesn’t seem to me that it rises to the level of difference that the self-service KB did. In
particular, it did not affect the economics, strategy, or organizational support and infrastructure in
nearly the way that self-service did. As such, it was an incremental benefit.
• Bob Warfield 2
The World Wide Web exploded
onto the scene and E-commerce
via the Internet was the ultimate
extension of all this. A lot of
information about price and
features was delivered over
the web, but we still lacked
credible ways for consumers
to communicate.
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
Towards the end of the Dinosaur Customer era and the beginning of the Neanderthal era a new
paradigm shift started to be born called “Software as a Service” or SaaS. I’ve talked at length about
why SaaS is a paradigm shift (it’s a major theme of mine!) as have many others, so I won’t belabor
that point. What’s interesting about the Neanderthal era is the shift in power from manufacturing to
distribution. Companies like Dell and Wal-Mart were happily disintermediating manufacturers from
their customers. The World Wide Web exploded onto the scene and E-commerce via the Internet was
the ultimate extension of all this. Suddenly, Customers had a lot more choices. Comparison shopping
could be done from the comfort of one’s own home. Competition over price and features were essen-
tial dimensions of the consumer experience. A lot of information about price and features was deliv-
ered over the web, but we still lacked credible ways for consumers to communicate. They simply had
more professionally-prepared content about products and more distribution possibilities to enable
them to purchase more easily. This is a time when CRM really did go to sleep for quite a while. As
good as SaaS is, it is ironic that it appeared in the distribution era and is essentially a new means of dis-
tribution.
The next era was the era of Guitar Man, so named in jest over the man whose guitar was damaged by
United Airlines. This is the era of the Social Web, and all things 2.0. This is an era where the very
dynamics of the relationship between customers and their vendors has changed radically. Finally, the
customer really is always right. Worse (from the vendor’s perspective), that customer is now equipped
with a mighty megaphone with which to tell everyone who is interested in hearing what they like or
dislike about their Customer Experience. That’s right, not just about the products, but about their
whole experience:
 How was their experience finding the product?
 What was it like to purchase (the part I hate about buying cars)?
 Was it everything they hoped for once they got it into their hands?
 How well has it held up?
 And most importantly for this discussion, how was the service?
We’ve gone from Command and Control, to a situation where the customer is firmly in control,
at least insofar as their ability to damage the vendor’s reputation out of all proportion to the
revenues received by the vendor. As I put it in a recent post, the Web makes even little ice cubes
into dangerous icebergs.
As Paul Greenberg has so eloquently put it: Social CRM is: “The company’s response to the
customer’s control of the conversation.”
• Bob Warfield 3
We’ve gone from Command and
Control, to a situation where the
customer is firmly in control, at
least insofar as their ability to
damage the vendor’s reputation
out of all proportion to the
revenues received by the vendor.
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
How can a response to something as game changing as the Customer taking control be any less than a
paradigm shift? No mere new channel can regain that control. It used to be said that a customer told
1.8 friends, and an unhappy customer told 10. No longer. Guitar Man told over 5 million about his
unhappy experience. That is so many orders of magnitude in change that we have to look at it as a
true paradigm shift.
Let’s look at what all has changed in the Social CRM era:
 The players: Customers now communicate frictionlessly with each other. These communications
are not 1:1, they are Many:Many.
 The playing field: These communications may go on in arenas completely outside the vendor’s
control such as Twitter or Facebook. It is in the vendor’s best interests to sponsor venues of their
own as well as to visit these outside venues.
 The qualitative nature of the conversation: Social is as much about collaboration as it is
communication. Traditional CRM in all of its guises until now had largely been communicative.
Social Collaboration involves much more sophisticated signaling mechanisms, such as the
elaborate expertise scoring and voting capabilities in these products.
 The concerns: Any loss of control brings tremendous concerns to the vendors, fear even.
 The economics: I have customers at Helpstream who say their agents are able to handle 3x as
many customers after installing our Social CRM suite as they could before with ordinary Case
Management and Self-Service. Those are paradigm-shifting economics right there.
 The opportunity: At last, we are shed of command and control and we can really start to have a
customer relationship to manage with our Customer Relationship Management system. We can
quit simply recording what happened after it is already to late to change and actually do something
about it.
 The strategies: Clearly, with so many other changes, the strategies have to be changed to deal
with the rest. Deflection was the watchword in the prior era. Systems and strategies were erected
that isolated vendors from their customers behind walls of IVR menu trees on the telephones,
call centers in far away nations, multiple tiers of tech support agents (so you had to escalate to
get someone who could actually answer a question), and self-service KB’s whose aim was to
avoid talking to you at all.
• Bob Warfield 4
Imagine being in a large audito-
rium filled with your customers.
You are up on a stage. There are
bright spotlights focused on you.
Everyone in the audience has a
microphone. Some of them are
very unhappy. Can you be silent
when they speak?
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
The new era demands engagement. Try being silent in a social situation the next you find yourself in
one. Imagine being in a large auditorium filled with your customers. You are up on a stage. There are
bright spotlights focused on you. Everyone in the audience has a microphone. Some of them are very
unhappy. Can you be silent when they speak? Can you fob them off on someone who doesn’t have any
answers while the rest watch? Of course not!
Given all that, and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet folks, one has to conclude that Social CRM is the biggest
paradigm shift the CRM world has ever seen. Do not try to look at it as just one more tool in the
toolbox that you can take or leave.
Welcome to the age of Guitar Man!
• Bob Warfield 5
 The New Social CRM World Order
Having awakened from a dearth of CRM innovation to discover the landscape radically changed
and worse, to discover that as vendors our customers now control the conversation, we’re behind
the eight ball!
The CRM world is in the middle of not one but two massive paradigm shifts:
Those two paradigm shifts are the shift to SaaS, already well under
way, and new massive shift to Social. The amazing thing about the
second shift is that our customers have already made the shift.
Many companies think of Social as the new shiny thing. Meanwhile,
their customers have been using Social for a long time now, and
they’re wondering why their vendors still can’t manage to connect
in the way that they’re already well accustomed to connecting with
friends and family.
Customer Think released a startling survey in June that said 2/3’s of
US consumers are ready to engage with Social Media for service and
support right NOW! Gartner says Web 2.0 will have transformative
impact (their most impactful category) on the mainstream within two
years. Let me say again, that is massive impact on the mainstream,
not some bunch of Early Adopters still in the experimentation stage,
within two years.
Some of the people hearing this asked me whether “Revolution” wasn’t
the more appropriate term than “Retooling.” My problem is we’re past
the Revolution. The Revolution ended and our Customers won the war. They’re waiting on us to catch
up and give them what they think of as table stakes these days. It’s a retooling problem in the same
sense that manufacturing plants retool when they are no longer competitive with the old tools. I’ll go
on record right here and now saying I can’t imagine any company that uses CRM today not having an
active Social CRM program in place within the next 5 years. It will become a matter of survival.
Your customers won’t tolerate anything less.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 6
No matter what you do sell—
product or service—engage like
you’re selling a service. Think
about the emotional response
customers will have to your
service. Figure out how to use
Social Media to facilitate and
personalize that engagement.
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
At the same time the web is driving a subtle shift in how we think about products. Everything is
becoming a service. It has to be when you look at the ramifications of frictionless communication
among customers. The old Product Think had us engaging up until the point of sale, and once we had
the customer’s money, engagement became optional. It was an exception handling mechanism for that
very small (we hoped) portion of the customer base that did not have a normal happy experience.
Customer Service was a cost center, and that cost was to be minimized in every way we could.
Mechanisms ranging from much higher quality control (so they wouldn’t have a problem in the first
place) to various means of deflection so customers would self-service and not make an expensive
call to an agent were tried. Companies got further and further from their customers, ultimately
entrusting that engagement far offshore and outsourced to entirely different companies.
Today we have to reverse that trend of isolating ourselves from customers. No matter what you do
sell—product or service—engage like you’re selling a service. Think about the emotional response
customers will have to your service. Figure out how to use Social Media to facilitate and personalize
that engagement.
Related Articles
What do Customers Want, and How Can Social Media Help?
• Bob Warfield 7
 The Social Media Big Picture for Business
Ok, from our first two chapters it’s clear that the world has changed dramatically. Customers are ready
to engage socially with their vendors, and vendors should understand they need to get on with that en-
gagement and do it well. But there is still a bit more groundwork to be laid before we dive in to how
that is going to work.
Presumably you’re out reading everything you can get your hands on about Social Media. It’s important
to provide some context and understanding at a big picture level about how it all fits together. For
example, what is the difference between Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and Social CRM?
Here is a handy reference to make the distinctions clearer:
Social Media started out in the broad web among consumers.
The term Web 2.0 was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1996. She wrote:
The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially
static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come.
While DiNucci’s concern was largely with Web design and aesthetics, I
find her commentary an interesting parallel to the discussion of how
Customers have insisted on increasing control. Back in the day, the
Web was a one-way trip from content creator/owner to the content
consumer.
The Web 2.0 term really took off in 2004 when O’Reilly Media hosted
the first Web 2.0 conference and the description of the term started to
get even closer to the parallel I have drawn. Consider Tim O’Reilly’s
comment:
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by
the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand
the rules for success on that new platform.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 8
The stage is set for Social CRM.
If we’re going to be having
conversations, one of the highest
value areas for conversation is
with our Customers, potential
Customers (e.g. Leads), and
Influencers.
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
Understanding the rules of the new Social CRM platform is what we’re all about with this series of blog
posts. In 2006, TIME magazine made the masses of users participating in content creation on the web
the “Person of the Year”:
It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.
Of course any force this powerful is one that business will try to harness to create value, and so
Enterprise 2.0 was born.
There are actually two different classic definitions of E2.0. One has it as any use of Social Media by
business. The second popular definition of E2.0, and the one I’ll use here is that of Social Media
used by business for internal collaboration among employees. I like that second definition better
for a variety of reasons, but primarily because it fits better with the story being told. It’s nothing to
be dogmatic about, just be aware that people may mean one of two things when using the term.
Business using Social Media to collaborate on producing content was a very logical extension of
the original Web 2.0 movement. Content was becoming cheaper and more plentiful almost by the
minute as this movement flourished both inside and outside the walls of Business. But at the same
time, something else interesting was happening.
The view that Social Media is about producing content was the original concept, but this was largely a
result of projecting paper and television content into the web medium. In fact, the web medium is ca-
pable of much more. It’s not just a place to broadcast created content more cheaply. It is a place where
it is possible to hold a two way conversation. We don’t need to watch passively. We can be Social, and
in fact the user of the Social terms is much more recent than the older concepts.
Once a two way exchange becomes possible, and indeed may be more critical than creating content for
the masses in many ways, a lot changes. The stage is set for Social CRM. If we’re going to be having
conversations, one of the highest value areas for conversation is with our Customers, potential Cus-
tomers (e.g. Leads), and Influencers. Yes, we can continue beaming content at them, but if we can en-
gage them in conversation, we’re much more likely to have a successful interaction.
In our next installment, I’ll start talking about how to go about being Social in ways that make those in-
teractions more likely to be successful. It turns out you already know how to be Social, you just have to
draw on that knowledge.
• Bob Warfield 9
 You Already Know How to Be Social
What are you waiting for? Your organization already knows how
to be Social, though you may not realize it.
It’s not a matter of the tools or finding people that are willing to use
them. Market research abounds that shows how pervasive use of Social
Media is. Larry Dignan recently wrote that based on Forrester’s Third
Annual Social Technographics Profile, only 18% of the population is not
using Social Media. That represents a striking up trend that went from
44% in 2007, to 25% in 2008, and now 18% in 2009. Clearly we’re well
past the tipping point. In fact, we’re nearly done with adoption.
Perhaps it’s more about understanding how to think about Social Media.
As we turn in the series away from the Why? of Social CRM and start
working on the How?, that’s the topic for this post. Let’s
get started by looking for analogies in the real world:
Take blogging, which is one of the easiest ways for businesses to get
started being Social. Blogging has a very good physical world analogy.
A blog post is like giving a talk to a group of people where you accept
and answer questions at the end. Pretty simple, right? Your business
would know how to give a talk to a group, and thinking about your blog as a series of such talks is dead
on in terms of informing your strategy and tactics for what to blog about, what sort of tone to use, and
so forth. It’s easy to see how to blog when you start thinking this way.
How about Twitter? For me Twitter is like being at a crowded, noisy, and oh-so-hip club or party.
There is so much going on that you can barely hear yourself think. You struggle to catch little snatches
of conversations, and they’re all around you. It’s hard to keep them all straight, but you’re constantly
being pulled towards one or another and you chime in with a few words of your own at the most inter-
esting ones.
I liken Facebook to Lunch Room cliques at school or the Water Cooler conversations at work. You’re
with friends telling them what’s going on, laughing together, and generally having a good time. The
pace is a little easier than at that crowded noisy club we call Twitter. It’s less dense but with more depth.
Still, it is the water cooler and you’re not allowed to hang out there for hours at a time getting really
deep, though people do.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 10
That’s what Social CRM is all
about, providing an extremely
leveraged many-to-many online
experience that can do the sorts
of things you’d never be able to
get to with one-to-one calls or
face to face meetings.
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
Paul Greenberg gave me a great one along these lines, and that is Yelp. My family loves Yelp,
because it helps us to discover interesting new restaurants wherever we go. But Yelp also has a
Social Review aspect. Paul says that Yelp’s Social Reviews are like being at a restaurant and hearing
about your company from a conversation over at the next table. It’s an awkward moment. They’re
not really talking to the company, they’re talking to each other. It’s hard to respond directly to the
individual, because all you can do is post your own review (e.g. talk about the business at your own
table and hope they overhear you).
It gets you thinking, doesn’t it?
What about Social CRM, which is really what we’re here to talk about?
The best face to face analogy I know of for Social CRM is that it’s like a User Conference that goes on
24x7. Any business that has ever had a successful User Conference knows the tremendous value they
have. Customers get a chance to rub shoulders with one another and with your experts to learn how to
get more value from your products. Contacts are made. A good deal of fun is had and comraderie
develops. Companies that invite their best prospects to the user conference will see the likelihood the
prospects buy go way up as they are immersed in your customer culture and get to meet people just like
them who are getting tremendous value from your products.
There are unhappy people too, who came to the conference looking for answers. But you’ve got such a
powerful confluence of happy customers and readily available expertise (both from your business and
your successful customers) that they usually don’t stay unhappy for very long. It’s not uncommon to
see total transformations in attitude take place.
That’s what Social CRM is all about, providing an extremely leveraged many-to-many online
experience that can do the sorts of things you’d never be able to get to with one-to-one calls or
face to face meetings.
I hope you’ve been able to see by now that you really do already know how to be Social in productive
ways. Now the question is how to be really good at it and how to maximize your effectiveness. To do
that, you just need a Vision, Some Tools, and a Strategy. Our next chapter will talk about the Vision.
• Bob Warfield 11
 The Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
In this installment of our Social CRM Blog Series, we’ll be turning
from “Why” you should be looking at Social CRM to “How” to think
about it for your own organization. For that purpose, Helpstream
developed a concept we call the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle:
The Virtuous Cycle is all about how to convert Social CRM interaction
into a variety of benefits that touch every part of the organization
concerned with customers and prospects. It all starts with Customer
Service, and it is a cycle that repeats and grows in strength with each
iteration around the circle.

Why start with Customer Service?

I wrote in my blog “You Already Know How to Be Social” that a lot of
what you need to know to be successfully Social on the web comes
from a basic knowledge of how to interact with people. That applies
here too. If you need to be massively Social, meet as many new people
as you can, and influence them, do you try to do all that alone? No, of
course not. You surround yourself with your friends and activate your
network to help out. You could view that as simply mobilizing all of
your employees, but in a world where people trust their peers and not their vendors, your efforts will
be much more likely to succeed if you start with your Customers. To do that, you need to create an
active and vibrant Customer Community, and doing that requires that you deliver a lot of value to
your Customers. What better way than through Customer Service?
Along the way, you’ll discover that Customer Service communities are one of the rare cases that
really are win-win situations. Our customers tell us they increase customer satisfaction, drive
increased efficiency, and enable them to Crowdsource help delivering Customer Service by
having Customers help other Customers. JoAnne Ravielli, VP Customer Service & Support at
InfusionSoft.com, puts it like this in a Forrester Case Study:

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 12
You need to create an active and
vibrant Customer Community,
and doing that requires that you
deliver a lot of value to your
Customers. What better way
than through Customer Service?
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
“Two years ago, we had approximately 1 customer service agent for every 55 customers and a 77% cus-
tomer satisfaction rating. Today that ratio is 1 agent to 172 customers-- and with a 87% customer sat
rating. Customers love to contact us when it’s convenient for them! And that’s the power of social media.
The answers are there for them 24/7. The net-net? InfusionSoft’s social media initiative saved
the company millions of dollars in overall support costs and produced a 10% increase in customer
satisfaction.”
It’s rare for companies to generate so much savings (a 3x increase in Customer Service Rep efficiency)
along with a commensurate increase in customer satisfaction, but JoAnne’s story is not unique for
Helpstream’s customers. These kind of metrics drive a very successful community adoption around
Customer Service, and that’s why we like to say that Customer Service is the On-Ramp for Social CRM.
Having established a successful Customer Service On-Ramp, organizations are ready to take the next
step on the Virtuous Cycle to Marketing. Once again, there are tremendous benefits to be had from So-
cial CRM with a comprehensive strategy. They range from getting the word of mouth going around the
Brand to hearing the Voice of the Customer in various ways to getting down to the bottom line
impact of being able to generate more leads and nurture them effectively. Let’s look at each one of
these a little more closely.
Understanding Your Customers and the Marketplace
Listening is an essential skill for every business function, and Social CRM gives you an unprecedented
opportunity to hear what’s being said both within your own Customer Community and on the broader
web through Social Monitoring tools. Hearing is the first crucial step, but Understanding doesn’t stop
with Listening and Hearing. Social is all about Engagement and 2-way Conversations. What better way
to Understand than to engage in those Conversations? Listen first, and then verify and refine what
you’ve heard through Engagement and Conversation until you achieve resonance.
• Bob Warfield 13
Getting the word out is always Getting the Word Out
Getting the word out is always high on the Marketing agenda, and Social CRM is a helpful vehicle
high on the Marketing agenda,
for doing that. Word of mouth starts with your Customers and making sure Marketing is delivering the
right words to the right mouths starts with your Customer Community, which is built on the
and Social CRM is a helpful
Customer Service Experience. If your Customers can’t tell your story, you’re lost. Also, don’t underesti-
mate the value of your customers in shaping and refining your story before you try to sell it to strangers.
vehicle for doing that.
It’s part of the Understanding feedback loop. Your Customers will tell you whether your messaging res-
onates with their experiences and they’ll give you real life stories (like JoAnne’s above) to put meat on
the bones of your pitch.

Translating it to Leads
OK, you’ve got your messaging all tuned up so it is potent. You’ve gotten some word of mouth going
through your Customers. How does all that translate to leads? The answer is that you can’t limit your
efforts at Understanding and Getting the Word Out to your Customers.
Find a role for other Influencers and interested parties to play in your Community. Invite them to
join your conversations. Make sure you have discussions and content available that will appeal to
those audiences. A proper Social Platform will give you all the tools you need to create a personalized
experience that differs for Customers, Prospects, Influencers, and even Competitors and other
naysayers, so you can minimize the downside and maximize the upsides.

On to Sales
Once you’ve got leads visiting your Community, it’s time to look for opportunities to close. A properly
configured Social CRM system and platform will have afforded you the ability to nurture the leads until
they’re ready to be sold to. It’s a process of monitoring their activities in the Community and across
your other Marketing vehicles until they’ve exhibited clear signs of interest before reaching out.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 14
In this day and age, everyone
wants References. They won’t
take the vendor’s word for any-
thing. Immersing prospects in a
Community of happy customers
is a fast way to deliver some
informal referencing type benefits.
This is a powerful sales tool if
you’re set up to manage it.
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
Remember, you’ve also got the opportunity to sell to your existing Customers, assuming you have
products or services they haven’t yet bought, so it pays to keep an eye on their community activity so
you can understand their needs. Towards that end , we use a concept we call “Customer Awareness”
to describe what needs to happen. To oversimplify, imagine if your salespeople could subscribe to
something like the Facebook Wall for all of their Accounts and any Opportunities. On this particular
kind of Wall, they’d see what each one is doing in the Community. What kinds of content are they
drawn to? What kinds of questions do they ask? What do they answer in response to other’s
questions? This kind of Awareness is extremely hard to come by in Sales, and very valuable.
Aside from Awareness, Sales benefits from the three “R”s that Communities can readily offer: Refer-
ences, Referrals, and Repeat Business. It’s easiest to sell an existing Customer, provided they’re happy,
so Awareness leads to Repeat Business. In this day and age, everyone wants References. They won’t
take the vendor’s word for anything. Immersing prospects in a Community of happy customers is a fast
way to deliver some informal referencing type benefits. This is a powerful sales tool if you’re set up to
manage it. Do you know who in your Community will give the best references of this sort? The Net
Promoter style surveys are one approach, but Social Platforms can collect all sorts of information that
can tell you in a hurry who the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic supporters really are.
Lastly, but far from least, Referrals are also extremely valuable. Do you make it easy for your Customer
Community to give you referrals? Do you incent them to do so in some way, or at least remind them to
think about it?
Conclusion
That’s the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle. It starts with Customers, and if you execute well, it ends with
even more Customers, from which to start the next Cycle.
In our next series of posts in the series, we’ll be drilling down with more detail on how each function,
Customer Service, Marketing, and Sales, can extract value from Social CRM.
• Bob Warfield 15
The prevailing sentiment is that
Social Customer Service is all
about having your customers
answer each other’s questions
so you don’t have to. This is an
important part of the process, but
that puts the cart before the horse
and does not tell the whole story
of how to optimize a Social
Service process.
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
Social CRM Strategies for Customer Service
I’ve always liked the definition of strategy one of my Board members gave:
Strategy is what you do to make winning easier.
Formulating a complete set of strategies for a Customer Service organization to use in Social CRM is a
long topic and one that needs considerable discussion with the organization. In lieu of that, I will out-
line the top level considerations and present a few of the real strategies that have worked with our cus-
tomers.
Clearly Define Your Metrics
The first step in defining and choosing a set of strategies for Customer Service is therefore to define
what exactly you mean by “winning?”
There are many different metrics by which Customer Service organizations are used to measuring
themselves. Some have to do with delivering a better Customer Experience. Some have to do with
managing and increasing the productivity of Service Agents. And some have to do with increasing the
overall efficiency of the Service Organization in terms of costs to deliver the level of service the com-
pany wants to invest in.
In a Social CRM world, we might add metrics around creating a happy and vibrant community of cus-
tomers where they are active participants who choose to help each other and to talk freely about your
products and services. In fact, it will be important to ensure that any metrics surrounding improved
Service Agent productivity do not reinforce behavior that discourages the community from growing.
For purposes of this discussion, let’s assume you’re trying to optimize a set of metrics around First
Touch Resolution and minimizing Agent contact through cases or trouble tickets. In other words, we’re
going to try to maximize the self-service characteristics of the community.
• Bob Warfield 16
 Make Sure They Are Measurable
It’s hard to optimize a set of metrics and tell if your strategies have made
it easier for you to win if they’re hard to measure. Try to line up a system
that makes it easy to measure the metrics automatically and in real-time
if possible.
For example, Helpstream’s “waterfall” dashboard displays a number
of useful metrics that might be part of your Social Customer Service
strategy:

Design the Support Experience to Encourage Social

Service as the First Step
One of the first things to look at strategy-wise is how we present the op-
portunity for Social Service. Customers can request service in a number
of different ways, some of which are more beneficial than others in terms of maximizing Social Service.
For example, when customers call in for service on a toll free support number, it’s pretty hard to do
good Social Service. We’ve already failed there and will need to file cases for anyone that calls. So we
need to think about how we’re going to communicate to our customers the best way for them to go
about getting service.
This communication should outline a path that emphasizes the Social Service. We’ll want to minimize
phone numbers and move self-service from the web to the forefront of the experience. Another
thought is email. Many organizations have a support@mycompany.com style email account where cus-
tomers can mail support requests. Often, these emails are directly turned into Cases. More sophisti-
cated Social CRM software may provide better alternatives. For example, Helpstream makes it easy
to create an email response system that will treat the incoming email as a search of the Knowledge Base
and Community. It will send back an email containing the top 3-5 search results and can include a
link to the online Support Portal. This has been a powerful tool for customers who told us that before
Helpstream they couldn’t get their customers to use a Web Portal. They insisted on either calling or
emailing cases directly.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 17
 Make Sure Self-Service is the Best Possible Service
Now that you’ve created a Support Experience that pushes your
customers to try Social Service, it is important to provide the most
positive possible experience. The Customer Service world pretty
well understands what that takes at a high level: we want our
customers to get great answers as quickly as possible with the
minimum of effort on their part.
There are a lot of very subtle issues surrounding this area. The
prevailing sentiment is that Social Customer Service is all about
having your customers answer each other’s questions so you don’t
have to. You’ll hear vendors talk at length about how to go about
doing this. At Helpstream, we believe this is an important part of
the process, but that puts the cart before the horse and does not tell
the whole story of how to optimize a Social Service process.
Consider the Service Waterfall in the diagram, which shows the results from the same service
organization as the one above after an additional set of Social CRM Strategies were implemented
to improve the results.
In a matter of a relatively few months, two huge changes took place:
 The First Touch Resolution through self-service is way up. Issues solved by Existing Content,
whether content in the Knowledge Base or content created by the Community, went from 30% to
79%. For reference, a well functioning KB-only system, without any Social inputs, will typically
peak out at 40%. We can see the “Articles” component, representing KB articles, is 39%. So the extra
performance is the Community content.
 Problems that had to be resolved by agents as cases went down from 56% down to a mere 11%
Clearly that is an account where a set of Social CRM strategies have really made the difference.
Next week we’ll go over what sorts of strategies led to this kind of improvement in the metrics.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 18
 Social CRM Strategies for Marketing
In the last chapter, we covered Social CRM strategies for Customer Service. This week will be about
Marketing. There are a lot of different benefits Marketing can gain from Social Media. On our
Virtuous Cycle, we list the following:
 Branding / Word of Mouth: The community can help spread the word about your brand.
Brand is a lot more than just names and logos. It’s a set of values that customers can rely on.
 Voice of the Customer: Social Media will quickly tell you what your customers and others are
saying about your brand. What do they like or dislike?
 Ideation: Ideation is all about asking the community for their suggestions (“Idea Storms”)
about how you can improve the Customer Experience.
 Education: Marketing spends a lot of time educating all sorts of folks about all sorts of subjects.
Enroll the community in helping you to get this valuable word out.
 Lead Generation: Use the Community as a source of leads.
 Lead Nurturing: Use the Community to nurture leads until they’re ready to be contacted.
A lot of these topics have been covered elsewhere. For example, the use of Social Monitoring and
Ideation to understand the Voice of the Customer is widespread. For this post, I want to focus on
Lead Generation and nurturing, which have not been talked about so much.
Lead Generation is the art of finding people who are interested in your story. Old School marketing
relied on PR and Advertising to do the job in various guises. The Social School can bring a couple of
new tools to bear: Social SEO and Social Monitoring.
First up is Social SEO, or Social Search Engine Optimization. The goal is to find people who want to
hear your story based on what they are searching for. As such, you will want to put as much content
as possible up in a format that is susceptible to indexing by the search engines. Content can consist of
both article-types (videos, white papers, Wikis, and so on) and Community-types (discussion threads
about your topics of interest).

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 19
The goal of Social SEO is to get
folks to read enough content
in the public portion of your
Community that they request
a full logon to gain access to
more content.
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
Try to avoid being too “slick” in your content. Social Media is all about authenticity, transparency, and
honesty. In fact, given where credibility lies, try to draw on your customers and other well-wishers to
provide as much content as possible. The best way to attract them is to start with a Customer Service
Community. It’s hard to be a Social Marketer until your own customers are happy and social too. The
purpose of your content should be to inform and educate, not to sell. Early leads are not ready to be
sold to yet. Use all of your traditional analysis tools to tell what sorts of content are attracting the most
incoming search traffic and produce more content along those lines.
The goal of Social SEO is to get folks to read enough content in the public portion of your Community
that they request a full logon to gain access to more content. When they request a logon, you can have
them fill out a questionnaire similar to what many marketers already use before giving folks a white
paper or webinar access. Be sure it’s obvious that they will need to request access, and tell them how to
go about doing that. Popup messages that aren’t too annoying are one approach, as is messaging in the
public part of the community. Give away a significant critical mass of content without requiring signup.
Remember: this is the content driving the SEO traffic to your site!
You’ll quickly find as we have that the opportunity to join a community of your peers that you can ask
questions of about the area you’re trying to learn more about is a powerful inducement. Conversion
rates to get people to request access are much higher than the typical White Paper because it’s a more
potent offer.
OK, that’s Social SEO. Now let’s look at another approach: using Social Monitoring to drive Lead
Generation. Social Monitoring is all about finding people who will be interested in your story based
on what they are already talking about using Social Media. Look for keywords with which to search
for conversations that will reveal those that are compatible with your story. For example, Helpstream
could use “social crm”, “social marketing”, and “customer service.” Cast your net broadly in terms of
which feeds you will monitor. Twitter is a great starting point, but you’re missing out if you stop there.
Having created a series of feeds that are filtered by keywords to ensure a target rich environment
(sounds like TopGun!), it’s time to start converting them to leads. Your goal is to expose them to your
Community content, and hopefully this will serve to invite them back to your Community for deeper
nurturing. I’ll just use Twitter as an example, but you could send individuals whose Tweets seem
promising a response inviting them to take a look at related content within your Community.
Consider also sending them an invitation to join the Community.
• Bob Warfield 20
Social Monitoring is all about
finding people who will be inter-
ested in your story based on what
they are already talking about
using Social Media. Look for
keywords with which to search
for conversations that will reveal
those that are compatible with
your story.
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
Beware of Spam! There will be a temptation to overly bombard individuals, whether in an effort to
get them to visit your community or in an effort to send them non-Community marketing messages.
Resist the urge! If your Social CRM strategy is too spammy, it will immediately be noticed and you’ll
be marginalized. You need to be offering valued content on a user-metered basis, not Spam. It’s all
about self-service in terms of content consumption. Leave your leads to graze at your Social Content
Buffet at their own pace. Initially, only they know if their projects are near-term or whether this is
just curiosity.
I say “initially”, because there is a way for you to know too, and it is crucial to successful Social
Marketing. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and in this case, the “pudding” is the leads
propensity to seek more information. Marketing Automation experts will tell you that a typical lead
needs to touch between 20 and 25 pieces of content before they’re ready to become an opportunity.
That’s a lot more than most people suspect.
With Helpstream’s Social Marketing module, it’s possible to send this activity stream of content
touches to your Marketing Automation software. Using the reports in that software, you will receive
a holistic view of every bit of contact your leads have with your content, whether that content is by
virtue of marketing landing pages, corporate web site, or Helpstream Community. Marketing
Automation software applies a concept called “Lead Scoring” to these content touches. Different
content receives different lead scores. For example, looking at a price list shows a greater propensity
towards buying than simply looking at a particular feature description. You can even apply negative
scores, for example, to reduce the scores if the individual goes away for 2 weeks without looking at
anything.
Your ideal candidates will absorb a lot of content in a very short time, indicating they feel a sense of
urgency in coming up to speed on your offerings. Ideally they will ask questions of your community
that will also give you insights into their individual interests. Once their Lead Score reaches critical
mass (you’ll determine that over time based on who buys and who doesn’t), it’s time to step away
from self-service and reach out to the Lead. There are lots of ways to do this including sending them
email or calling. One particularly smooth option that’s available is to use the Community itself.
• Bob Warfield 21
 Imagine a Community that monitors Lead Scores based on content
consumption. When the scores reach critical mass (as determined by
real closed sales cycles), the Lead is automatically assigned to a Sales
Rep. That Rep subscribes to the lead’s Activity Stream. Think of the
Activity Stream as being like the Facebook Wall. It tells the Rep what
the person is doing in the community. The idea is to look for a chance
to jump into a Community discussion that the lead is involved in. The
Rep will have considerable insights into the interests and motivations of
the individual by looking at their past history. It will be very natural to
answer a question, identify themselves as being from Sales, and ask
whether a deeper discussion would be helpful.
That’s the full Social Marketing Lead Generation Cycle.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 22
Providing a Social Business Social CRM Strategies for Sales
Process that facilitates the asking
Having implemented your Social CRM Marketing Strategies, it’s time to complete the Virtuous Cycle
by implementing some strategies around Sales. The Marketing to Sales handoff has always involved a
of the questions and the sharing
certain amount of drama in my experience:
of the answers is an excellent VP of Sales: “I don’t have enough leads!”
VP of Marketing: “You’re not following up on the leads I gave you!”
function for Social CRM.
A lot of this discord seems to relate to the definition of a “lead”. And no, I’m not going to dive into the
even more contentious definitional world of terminology over what we call these things we give to
Sales. That’s up to the individual organizations to decide, but unless Sales and Marketing are on the
same page, there’s going to be trouble.
Clearly, Sales is expecting the “lead” to have reached a level of discernible buying interest. We’ve
seen that tools like Lead Nurturing Communities with Lead Scoring can help identify that buying
interest before Sales contacts the Lead. I will suggest that in addition to having discernable buying
interest, there is another operational difference that comes into play when the lead moves from
Marketing to Sales: the lead is ready to receive more personalized information about the product
or services being sold.
What do I mean by “more personalized information?” The idea of question asking comes readily
to mind, but I am not talking about all questions. Many times leads will ask the same kinds of
questions because the information they seek is not readily available. Answering those questions
that are common across the entire market or at least across vertical markets should more likely
be the purview of Marketing.
But there will be some questions or information needs that are personalized. They go to the particular
combination of business problems the prospect wants to solve in the context of how they’re thinking
about things. When the need for information becomes sufficiently personalized that the answers are
less and less useful to a broader audience, Sales should take over.
Providing a Social Business Process that facilitates the asking of the questions and the sharing of the
answers is an excellent function for Social CRM, BTW. All of the strategies that relate to Social CRM
for Customer Service come into play for this application. After all, you’re trying to efficiently share the
expertise of your best Subject Matter Experts just as in Customer Service.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 23
Imagine a living Social “RFP
Answering” Community. What if
you took every question that came
with an RFP and put it into your
online Community as a question,
along with the answer, and the
ability for others to ask more
deeply about the question, or to
answer and discuss? You’d have
a powerful tool in your Sales and
Marketing process!
A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
Imagine a living Social “RFP Answering” Community. What if you took every question that came with
an RFP and put it into your online Community as a question, along with the answer, and the ability for
others to ask more deeply about the question, or to answer and discuss? You’d have a powerful tool in
your Sales and Marketing process! Ideally your prospects and leads could self-service this rich infor-
mation buffet, but even if you’re filling out detailed RFP’s, such a Knowledge Base makes your own peo-
ple that much more efficient at it.
Clearly some RFP questions would not be appropriate for this kind of treatment, others would be the
sorts of things you would make available only after you validated who was asking very carefully (don’t
want to give up too much proprietary information), and so on. But being able to rapidly gather and
disseminate the best possible answers would be a rich source of content. We follow similar practices
at Helpstream. For example, after holding our Geoffrey Moore Social CRM Chasm Crossing Webinar,
we published all of the questions asked, including many we didn’t get to answer during the webinar,
along with the answers, as part of our HelpExchange Community.
What to do about the more personalized information that doesn’t make sense to go into the
mainstream “RFP Answering” Community? Another concept we’ve used to good effect in our
Communities is that of the VIP Room. We create them for all our customers as repositories for the
work products of Professional Services engagements and Training. It beats the heck out of email, and
creates a nice personalized information store where each customer shares their Helpstream-specific
knowledge in a way that they can collaborate with us and any participating SI’s.
The same principle can be applied to the Sales process. Imagine delivering RFP’s, Price Quotations,
Professional Services SOW’s, Marketing Collateral, Contact Information for Key Players, and all of
the other materials that make up the personalized responses to a prospect’s information needs.
By gathering such information in one place, it becomes easier for everyone participating in the
buying cycle to share information. When the prospect becomes customer, the same VIP Room
can search for the ongoing needs of private collaboration I’ve already described. The Sales Rep
effectively becomes the coordinator and manager of the VIP Room during the Sales Cycle.
A good Social Platform needs a variety of capabilities to carry off such a vision. At the very least,
it will need very fine grained permission to control who sees what. You don’t want to have to create
full communities for each VIP Room. Rather, these should be easily created (hopefully automatically
provisioned) gated sub-communitees.
• Bob Warfield 24
 Imagine a process that works like this:
 The Lead is nurtured until their lead score reaches a critical mass threshold (a Lead Score) of
buying interest based on the content consumption in the Nurturing Community.
 Once the Lead Score triggers the threshold, a Sales Rep is assigned to that Lead. The Rep is
automatically subscribed to the Activity Stream associated with the Lead so they can see what
they’re doing in the Community. This makes it easy for the Rep to start naturally engaging
right in the Community as needed.
 When the Rep decides through direct observation and interaction that it’s time, the Lead is
promoted to an Opportunity. A VIP Room is automatically provisioned and the Lead is notified
of their new VIP Room.
 Interaction proceeds with all the normal channels—email and phone, but the VIP Room is also
there to facilitate. Ideally, all Slide Decks, Webinar recordings, and other work artifacts go into the
VIP Room for reference by the Prospect.
At Helpstream, we refer to the opportunity for Sales to understand much more context as “Customer
Awareness.” Interaction with a Community brings about an unprecedented opportunity for Customer
Awareness. Used properly, it makes it much easier to understand who is a near term focus for new
business, and who should be nurtured further before engagement. The days of being able to badger
Customers into becoming new business through constant hard selling are drawing to a close. Smart
organizations are helpful, and they certainly ask for the sale, but they never badger.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 25
 Social CRM: 5 Steps for Getting Started
Through the previous eight chapters of the Social CRM Manifesto, we’ve covered a lot of ground
including:
 How the world has changed to put the customer in control of the conversation
 The Big Picture for Business of the different types of Social Media
 Gut level ways of thinking about how to be Social
 The Virtuous Cycle and how to start with Customer Service as the On-ramp for Social CRM
 Specific Social CRM strategies for Customer Service, Marketing, and Sales
By now you’re hopefully excited about starting up a Social CRM initiative for your own organization.
How should you go about that?

1) Start With Customer Service; it’s the On-Ramp for Social CRM
You have to make sure your house is in order before inviting guests.
Customer Service is the on-ramp for Social CRM. It will be a lot harder to succeed if your own
customers are not happy and social. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, the person your
potential prospects are most likely to trust is “a person like me.” Without the strong backing of your
own customers (those people who are like your prospects), you won’t be maximizing your credibility.
The second consideration is that your own customer base and Customer Service are the easiest
places to drive traffic to your community. Getting strangers to engage leaves you with much lower
engagement rates. The familiar Rule of 10’s says that for such communities, 1 in 100 people will ask a
question, 10 of 100 may answer, and everyone else just watches. At Helpstream, we see engagement
rates 3 to 10x higher for Customer Service communities. Take advantage of this to accelerate the
growth of your early community efforts to get to critical mass.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 26
 2) You Need a Community. Don’t bet the farm on Twitter or Facebook.
It’s attractive to think about getting started right now with Twitter or Facebook. So easy to just start
Tweeting or subscribing to feeds of various kinds. But this is not an organized effort that is focused on
producing long term results. It’s just riding on the hype wave those hot properties have going for them.
It’s not a strategy, it’s a tactic. As such, it’s better than nothing, but not much.
I’ve likened Twitter to the crowded bar you may go to in order to meet new people. That’s great, but if
your only relationship with them is in the crowded bar, how deep is it going to be? And don’t forget,
we also talked about starting with your own customers. Why would they want to talk to you about
anything substantive in the crowded bar?

3) Be Conscious About Strategy and Culture:

Social CRM is a lot more than Products and Technologies
Let’s face it, Social Software is very cool. I love working on it at Helpstream. But software alone is not
enough for you to succeed. It’s probably not even the first step, although there is an argument to get
started with Social and not spend too much time in a paralysis of analysis.
Ultimately, to succeed, you will need two ingredients just as much as great technology. Your organiza-
tion must have a good idea of what strategies it will pursue with Social, and it must have a culture
that is capable of supporting that execution.
If you have no idea why you are engaging with customers using Social Media, it will be hard for the
engagement to be a successful one. If nobody in your organization wants to engage, or if they’re
terrible at it, it will be equally as hard for the engagement to be a successful one.
There is one offsetting advantage Social has over conventional CRM: the feedback loop is much
more pronounced. It’s much easier for the old Centralized Command and Control CRM to go on
about its business of droning out messages than it is with Social CRM where the customer controls the
conversation, but it is also a lot less effective.
Social CRM is not a black box. If you poke it, it pokes back. Eventually, it will train your organization
what it needs to know to succeed, or it will convince you to quit poking the box at the very least!
It’s really not that hard to be Social though. Remember the gut level ways in which we already
know how to be Social.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 27
 4) Put a Program of Measurement and Continuous Improvement of
Best Practices in Place
It’s very hard to achieve repeatable results, show an ROI, or improve from where you are unless you
have some metrics to steer by. What metrics should you choose? That depends on the business results
you’d like to achieve. Get a clear idea of what those are and then figure out how to measure them.
There are well-understood methodologies for all of the obvious ones like customer satisfaction or
call center efficiency.
Also, make sure your metrics are layered. Start from the highest possible level metrics. If you want to
improve your call center efficiency, don’t start out defining that with things such as how long agents
spend on the phone. Rather, measure that efficiency at as abstract and high a level as possible, while
still making it measurable. Perhaps something like cost of service per customer is an approach. At
Helpstream, we have customers who have tripled their customer base without adding a single addi-
tional service agent while raising their customer satisfaction at the same time. Obviously they’re doing
something a little different than optimizing call times (for example, they’re persuading their customers
to participate in the community instead of calling at all).
Be true to the highest layers in the metrics hierarchy. In other words, don’t change them often.
Annually at most is a good guideline. The lower the level of the metric, the more you should be willing
to experiment and even ignore the metric in hopes of identifying new ways to optimize the overall.
Lastly, where metrics are concerned, look for benchmarks. Can your vendor provide you with
benchmarks that give an idea of how others do on various metrics? Can they help you to understand
the Best Practices needed to improve your results relative to the benchmarks? Helpstream answers
“yes” to both.

5) Your Social Platform Needs Business Process

A number of vendors talk about Business Process capabilities, but few deliver. You will need Business
Process to optimize your results, and in many cases, even to successfully collect the metrics you’ll want.
Business Process means control over your workflows, data (custom fields and custom objects), and
business logic. Integration with your existing CRM systems is another important consideration.
Without Business Process and deep CRM Integration, your Social CRM project will wind up a
siloed island. It will help, but it will never deliver optimal results because you’ll have too little
control over the user’s experience where it really matters.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 28
 Conclusion
So that’s it then: 5 steps to getting started down the path to Social CRM. It’s actually not all that hard,
but it does take a certain amount of determination and a sense of where you would like to get to.
We’ve tried to fill in as many of the details as we could in this Social CRM Manifesto. I’m sure you
have a lot more questions, and we’d be happy to answer them. Let me suggest you start by joining
our HelpExchange Community, which is our place for talking about Social CRM at a high level and
disseminating our thoughts on Best Practices. You’ll get a chance to ask your own questions there as
well as learn from what others are saying. When you’re ready, get in touch with Helpstream.
We’d love to help you with a successful Social CRM project.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 29