WOM Marketing: Infographic on Missed Social Opportunities

Once again, cool stuff from Frak Yeah Social Media helped inspire a blog post. Yesterday they posted an infographic about Word of Mouth marketing statistics and how companies are integrating social into their business. One part of this graph really jumped off the page at me. There is very little social media integration with CRM data, HR and product development. In my opinion, there is so much untapped potential in leveraging social to help build these elements of business. Social media has the obvious marketing component but leveraging these other areas are root areas that could really solidify a business.

Access to Data

With CRM data, social helps provide us with a wealth of customer data that nobody has ever had access to. Companies can make touch points with consumers in more channels than just phone calls or email blasts. We can respond to customers through their Facebook or Twitter activity in addition to whatever other channels that come along. There is also the ability to learn more about your customers outside of contact information, learning their likes, dislikes and behaviors to better communicate to that customer base.

Crowdsourcing Product Development

While talking about customer dislikes, social integration into product development should be a next step for business. We saw a soft version of social product development with Maroon 5's 24 hour song writing campaign with Coke and other crowdsourcing product development startups. Products are designed to help solve a problem or satisfy a need. Listening to customer complaints and/or needs is a great start going into designing a product. You would already know what sort of problem needs solving and can go from there.

Human Resources - Only a matter of time...

Finally, social integration into HR just makes sense. With many organizations still blocking social media within their walls, it's not hard to imagine why this is slow to take off. Eventually this will open up and HR pros who are already socially savvy will see the most success. Not simply in recruiting but also being able to better communicate with internal employees, which could be a valuable step in employee retention and engagement.

That's just my two cents on the state of Word of Mouth marketing so far. What do you all think? Any takeaways from the above data?

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Brain WadsDrew HawkinsBusiness, Customer, Customer relationship management, Facebook, Internet marketing, Marketing and Advertising, social media, twitterComment