There has been some discussion lately about using Social Network websites for CRM purposes. Besides the relationships you build when engaging in social networks, you sometimes need som kind of industrial model to go when trying to convince your bosses that this is actually simplifies your work.
The added value being that the users update their own “customer cards” as they update their profiles -> hence you save the maintenance costs of having your own CRM database.
Testing content
The whole idea started molding in my brain in 2006 when I wanted to test content on the users our social network Globy. I wanted to ask them for their opinion and discuss the content with them. We would then save the data and analyze it. Then we would change what we published and post it as new content. NOT!!
Quite frankly, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing, we where just doing it. We had our own social network and we thought we rocked. This was three years ago and we were making a buck running viral e-mail campaigns. Our failure however got me realizing that there was something greater with social networking as some succeded whilst others (read Jesper) failed terribly.
The above model came out of my conclusions. And I will shortly explain it below.