Is Social CRM the key to growing membership?

This is the first of a series of blog posts we’re writing for the Avectra blog, to be reposted here for you.  We’re working with Avectra on an ambitious project about Social CRM for Associations; we’ll be having several conversations about the topic, on both of our blogs, in person with any interested association execs (contact us if you’d like to participate and we’ll send details), and at ASAE’s Annual Meeting in St Louis in August.  We’ve also written a white paper on Social CRM for Associations, which is out very soon now!

Social CRM is a term fraught with some confusion. It was coined in the corporate world to describe a business strategy for managing customer relationships in the age of social media. If traditional CRM (customer relationship management) is a business strategy which tracks the relationship of a customer to a company from prospect to qualified lead to sales and post-sales (support) using business processes and technologies, then Social CRM takes that same business strategy but incorporates all of the different ways that social technologies have enabled that same customer to engage with the company.

How might associations incorporate Social CRM to recruit and retain members?

For associations, the idea of “customer relationship management†is analogous to what we think of as the member lifecycle: member recruitment, member retention, member services, and marketing–and especially member engagement. From a fairly linear, predictable lifecycle, this relationship between the organization and the member has now evolved to be much more networked, multi-pronged, and messy. Not to mention public and shareable. (Here’s the most widely quoted definition of Social CRM from Paul Greenberg).

Adding the “social†piece to traditional CRM processes is much more than just adding social tools to an associations’ existing technology infrastructure. For associations, building a Social CRM practice is about changing how we work. It’s about developing community management and outreach skills in our staff. It’s about integrating a variety of social management, monitoring, and discovery tools with our AMS and other systems. It’s about building relationships in a strategic and measurable way. It’s about incorporating all of the ways a member might interact with the association and with other members and prospective members, in order to achieve mutually beneficial value to those members and to the association. And it’s about making sense of all of this data, so we can make better decisions as association executives.

Translation, please.

This all sounds great in theory, doesn’t it? So let’s get a little more concrete. What specific objectives might a Social CRM practice help associations achieve? How about these:

• Recognize influencers among the membership in order to encourage and reward their championing of association activities
• Identify at-risk members–those who are not connected to other members–and reach out to them to help them become more involved in the association
• Recruit potential members by building relationships in social spaces with them first
• Stay ahead of trends and the topics that members are discussing this week, or even this minute.
• Target marketing messages better–reach the right people at the right times–in order to maximize responses to important calls to action

I posted the specific question “How might associations incorporate Social CRM to maximize recruitment and retention of members?†on Quora. See what some smart people have answered already.

What do you think? Is your association thinking about how to integrate social media holistically? How might social channels feed back into your member lifecycle?

Tagged as: AMS, scrm, social CRM, social discovery, social media management, social media monitoring