Social Relationship Manager
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We are humans and social by nature. But humans are also tools freaks. We are also pretty good in lifting things, yet we created machines to lift more. Humans can swim, yet we build boats to swim farther and longer. Humans are very smart, yet we designed computer that can remember more and compute faster. With the inception of social media we are recognizing our limitations in keeping up with all our relationships. And so we start to build tools helping to extend yet another power - social relationship building.
Challenge
The social web is vast, constantly changing and growing. Our natural ability to manage all those changes and dynamics and also our abilities to network with a larger audience is limited. We try to overcome those limitations. In accordance to Dunbar (the dunbar number) humans have a hard time to maintain more than 150 social relationships. Many have a hard time to keep in touch with more than 20. But our rapidly growing needs in connecting with more and more people forces us to create - again - new tools.
Objective
The objective of a Social Relationship Manager tool is to help increase the number of social relationships while maintaining the quality of such a relationship. It is furthermore the objective to help reduce the mechanical work to actually get to a conversation like searching the people, grouping the contacts and so forth. At the same time a Social Relationship Manager needs to be versatile so it can be used in many business scenarios.
Definition
Social Relationship Management (SRM) - in a business context SRM, is the activity of building, maintaining, strengthening and broadening personal business relationships with relevant people. Typical goals for SRM is to improve the customer experience, strengthen the ties to a market and develop advocacy in the respective eco system. SRM is typically supported by a system to maximize the number of active relationships without loosing the quality and depth of a relationship needed to maintain a mutually valuable business conversation. SRM changes the typical social media connection behavior from a network focus to a people focus. While social netwoker log in a network and search for people, a SRM system users is focusing on relevant people and then select the network the user wants to engage with the selected person.
As such SRM is a process or system leveraging social networks and communities to increase direct feedback, gain knowledge and influence in and from a market or market segment across all company functions including sales, marketing, support, product management, product development, logistics and other departments.
SRM software maintains a database of connections and their respective networks, keeps a record of conversation initiation, as well as notes and other profile information per connection. It supports and eases the process of connecting and conversing with a large number of network nodes across the diverse social web. Typical SRM objectives may be faster access to relevant people, ability to overcome the physical limits of social connections (see Dunbar number), improved way to collect feedback from relevant connections.
Further details:
SRM system are supposed to support the different departments in their social engagement processes. As such, SRM needs to support product mangers in maintaining and strengthening connections to key customers, influencer in the market, business part, experts and other relevant parties during and after a product requirement definition phase, a product launch and a market expansion phase. SRM also needs to support marketing managers in maintaining and strengthening their connections to key customers, market influencer, media, agencies, service provider, public institutions and other marketing relevant parties. SRM also needs to support service and support teams in maintaining and strengthening relationships to customers, experts, experienced users, analysts and other relevant parties to improve and optimize the support and service activities. Respectively SRM needs to support other departments such as logistics, administration, finance, HR and other functions in their respective engagement to maintain, strengthen and broaden social relationships to effectively create a better customer experience and stronger ties to a market.
Who may benefit from SRM?
Unlike a CRM system that is internally focused on the sales organization or PRM that is focused on partner relationships, ERP that helps internal operations, SRM is an externally facing solution that deals with information outside a companies firewall and the inherited processes outside a companies four walls. As such, the beneficiaries of a SRM system are across all functional aspects, including sales people, channel managers, product managers, service people, support organizations, Human Resource Departments and all other groups facing and touching the respective business ecosystem, community or government organizations. SRM is and needs to be a cross functional system, helping people to manage their respective relationships and possibly share such relationships across departments, even companies.
What will be different with SRM?
While almost all defined business processes are organization related and internally focused (with a few exceptions like parts of a sales process), SRM processes are almost exclusively externally focused. While an employee in sales, support, marketing, HR is basically limited to a phone number or email address, the same employee using SRM is opening his or her methods of communication and conversation to many social sites with a variety of approaches, may it be blogging, commenting, tweeting, visiting their contacts presences and more. Unlike today where somebody would visit such a network and then go from person to person a SRM tools suggests the right people and supports the socializing process. Best practices and methods help SRM users to stay in touch and use the SRM system to a mutual benefit of the participating parties.
Background
The XeeSM (Xeequa) management team is working in and with the social web since its inception in 2003. In the past years the work with a growing number of connections and the ever growing requirement to strengthen the relationships motivated the team to formulate requirements and actually built a first prototype for a social relationship management tool.
The first version is in operation since summer 2009 and in private beta since September 2009.
The product is architected based on social media best practices and several years of experience.
The team’s founder was also a founding contributor to the CRM 2.0 now SCRM initiative of Paul Greenberg.
Vision
A social relationship management system is meant to help people focus on the socializing part with a growing number of people and reduce the administrative overhead to do so
May 5 - 2009 .
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