Many companies not only analyze what people talk about their products, but started also engaging in a more interactive way with them. A conversational style has evolved. Even one-to-one interactions with the persons active on the corporate Facebook, Twitter & Co pages become normal, especially in the B2B business.
It is good to ideally have a friendly atmosphere and let your followers and social contacts communicate with you in the more modern pull-mode.
However you should still decide at the right point of time to get the data of your social contacts into SAP CRM. Otherwise you cannot easily track your marketing activities with them, neither you can measure your success.
How should you then be able to decide if your activities with your social contacts have a measurable effect at all?
Of course it doesn’t make sense to upload all social contacts into SAP CRM:
- Not all of them are relevant for you
- You are not sure if they are open for being addressed by additional marketing activities
Why not using the principles you already apply on the company’s web site also in the social world?
Let your social contacts decide at what point of time their data gets stored in the SAP CRM system; for example as soon as they show interest in a newsletter, demo or event. When taking this active step they can verify for themselves if they actually want to provide their data to you, and if they accept that a more focused marketing will probably start.
With this you can keep the friendly and interactive communication style you started with.
In any case you can benefit from the following when storing social contact data in SAP CRM: You can connect the activities of your social contacts in the social world with the (internal) data in SAP CRM, and by doing this you can get a more holistic view on them.
Go ahead as follows:
- Get the data into SAP CRM, including their social user data, for example their Facebook accounts.
Tipp: You can create marketing prospects based on the social contact data, using the OData service CRM_MKT_PROSPECT_ODATA.
- Get the social user IDs from the respective social network(s). These are technical IDs that identify uniquely your social contacts per network, and can be used to connect data from the social world with the internal CRM world.
Tipp: Use the report CRM_MKT_PROSPECT_SMI_UPDATE to update the social user data in SAP CRM with the IDs from the social network(s).
