Integrate Social Media activities into your CRM/MAP systems

The power of a CRM system and a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is that you are able to see a comprehensive view into the activities around your customers. The lense gets even stronger when you integrate your CRM and MAP so you can see both offline and online activities for your customers. The inability to integrate social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging into your CRM/MAP systems is a negative but it also represents a great opportunity for the vendor that can figure out how we can do this.

Imagine if you looked up a customer in your CRM system and you had a view of all offline activities such as show attendance and phone calls along with all marketing campaigns from your MAP and all interactions with your various social media sites (retweets, blog visits and comments, FaceBook fan, LinkedIn groups). That would be a true Digital ID. I know Eloqua and Hubspot have done some things for tracking social media activity but I do not think anyone has been able to integrate it all into one view. I am not even sure this is possible, but it would make life a lot easier!

Can social media take the place of marketing automation platforms?

The Corporate Learning group at Harvard Business Publishing  currently uses Eloqua as our marketing automation platform (MAP). Eloqua is very robust and does everything we need and more. However, I have been thinking lately as social media applications mature do they have the potential to be a free marketing automation platform, especially for a small business? Already today there are services that you can use to do some rudimentary tracking. For example, if I use bit.ly to shorten my URL and post a note on Twitter about a free article on my site I can track click throughs and retweets through bit.ly's tracking capability. I can then use Google analytics on my site to gain even more information.This certainly is not as robust as an Eloqua, but it certainly gets the job done, and it's free.

Another important aspect of social media that can't be replicated by a MAP is highlighted by the findings in the recent Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey as seen in the chart above. The survey found that recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising. Ninety percent or consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.

“The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, has increased significantly,” says Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, for the Nielsen Company.”

Marketing is all about building trust and being relevant to the consumer. I know I regularly look at recommendations on sites like Best Buy before I purchase any electronics. I do not know these people, but it goes back to James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds theory, "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." Social media has a much greater advantage over a marketing platform because a Tweet to people who follow you is more likely to be taken more seriously than an email from a campaign.

Think of the power of some of the services below and compare them to how you would react to items posted there versus an email in your inbox from a vendor that you may have a passing knowledge of but no real relationship. What do you trust and believe more?

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Digg
• Stumbleupon
• revver
• Gist
• knol (yes, knol)
• Meetup
• Youtube
• Hollr
  

What other services are out there that have this same power? Do you think that social media could eventually be the defacto MAP as the technologies mature and people start building applications to track items (like Metricly)?
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Eloqua and social networking

Image by fredcavazza via Flickr

For those of you not familiar with Eloqua, it is a marketing automation platform. The software as a service allows you to track email campaigns, website visitors, lead nurturing and prospect profiling (among other things).

My company, Harvard Business Publishing, had a full time person working on Eloqua up until about 4 months ago. Since then I have been in charge of it. I have a basic understanding and really had just been using it for email campaigns. Lately, I have been trying to utilize more of the functionality to help drive leads.

One very interesting campaign I just launched involved placing links to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn on the landing page and encourage people to use those platforms to pass along information about the article we were giving away.The audience was probably not perfect for this experiment (high level C types), but the potential is very intriguing. Considering that many firms are seeing traffic from these sites explode I hope to take advantage of this trend for our website.

The one outstanding question is does our customer base utilize any of these services. I know a lot of our prospects are on LinkedIn yet I do not know how many are on Twitter. I expect few to be on Facebook, let alone use it for business. All of this goes back to a previous post I made about whether or not every business can use social media sites to driver traffic (Can any site use social media to drive traffic?). I think this will be a good experiment and possibly provide a glimmer of an answer to that question.

You can see the landing page here

Web Marketing Manager opening

Keywords: marketing manager, Web marketing campaigns, demand generation, lead generation, campaign metrics, b2b marketing, AdWords, webinars, Eloqua, Website management

Harvard Business Publishing is seeking a highly motivated individual for the role of Web Marketing Manager. This person will be responsible for creating and managing marketing campaigns designed to generate quality leads for our sales team. This position will work closely with our corporate marketing team and sales team to develop a solid strategy for quick response to the resulting leads. The individual will also be responsible for the Corporate Learning website, editing/proofreading content for style, accuracy, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and search engine friendliness. This person will manage the content development and overall design of the website to ensure branding strategies and marketing plans are effectively administered through the site.

The ideal candidate will have a strong background in driving qualified sales leads and will have a track record of demonstrated success in demand generation. The candidate will have experience creating/managing and maintaining a highly engaging and interactive website. The candidate must possess strong leadership skills, outstanding communications skills, and the ability to adapt quickly in a changing environment. Prior experience in a fast paced, high growth emerging business is desired.

Responsibilities:
1. Manage strong web marketing campaigns to drive qualified sales leads and awareness in our target industries. Work cross-functionally with product marketing and sales team to create targeted web-based campaigns including: webinars, Google AdWords, and other lead-generation campaigns.

2. Develop all internal and external communications to support the campaigns including email invitations, online ad/landing page content and newsletter sponsorships.

3. Manage online events including the development of strong messaging and the ability to drive traffic to our website. Define budgets and campaign metrics, monitoring and measuring campaigns to improve results and achieve lead goals.

4. Manage Corporate Learning Website including all content updates, multimedia content, identify and execute new programs based on a target account/target industry strategy.

5. Track and report on all programs and resulting leads. Effectively communicate the results to sales and marketing management for continuous improvement and refinement.

6. Oversee internet and electronic marketing media activities to include: Search Engine Optimizer/Search Engine Marketing, internet advertising, e-mail campaigns, customer data capture, social media, viral campaigns, affiliate marketing, mobile marketing, etc.

7. Develop promotional and informational e-mail list through utilization of our customer and prospect lead database.

8. Source and acquire the services of external agencies/vendors for internet marketing media.

Qualifications:

- 5+ years experience in B2B marketing, with demonstrable track-record in demand generation and campaign execution
- Highly motivated, self-starter who thrives under tight deadlines; quick learner with a "roll up the sleeves" approach and attention to detail.
- Experience working closely with field sales team
- Highly proficient in MS Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint); CRM tools such as Oracle and Webex (or other Web events program) highly desirable
- Experience using Eloqua a plus
- Experience in pay-per-click, online advertising and SEO a plus
- Strong interpersonal skills
- Travel required: 15-20%
- Bachelor's degree in marketing or related field; MBA a plus