Thursday, May 07, 2009

Community Management and CRM

I have talked a lot lately about community management. Companies become more aware about the importance of community management, and more and more of them have decided to create such a position.

Community management is very important on a customer relationship management (CRM) prospective. Communities are places where customers talk about your brand and products and where new ideas emerge. That is a reason why corporations must take advantage of it and add this component to their customer relationship management strategies.
I have already discussed on this blog about social score, which is a way to evaluate community members on a CRM point of view. There are also new tools to evaluate a community management strategies. Of course not all companies can dedicate a specific staff for community management but all of them could benefit in monitoring social media and leverage them for new business opportunities.

Now I believe there is still a great challenge in joining the CRM effort of companies, which manage internal data, with community management, which is difficult to integrate into a traditional CRM program as data is very dynamic.

I believe community management and customer relationship management are already linked together, and we are still discovering the potential of such a strategy.