Social CRM and Content Marketing are buzzwords (buzz phrases?) that are used with increasing regularity by social media experts. In this post, we examine both concepts and consider how forum software fits into this puzzle.
Social CRM is defined as, “[A] philosophy and a business strategy…designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.” With this definition we can see that Social CRM is a strategy that companies adopt to engage with customers.
Content Marketing (also known as “Conversational Marketing”) is defined as “a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a target audience”. One famous example of Content Marketing is that of Jell-O salesmen in the early 1900s who distributed Jell-O cookbooks for free. The cookbooks demonstrated that Jell-O could be prepared in many different ways which lead to an increase in sales. Today, companies like Twitter and Pinterest could be described as platforms that other companies can use for Content Marketing. It is clear from this definition and these examples that Content Marketing is an activity in which companies engage customers without necessarily selling them anything.
Placing these two concepts side by side, we can see that a company’s Social CRM strategy is likely to include the activity of Content Marketing. This trend underscores the desire for companies to engage their users in a collaborative conversation. We believe that forum software could be an integral tool for companies to achieve this end. However, we believe there are two primary reasons why forum software tends to be overlooked as a social media tool. First, forum software is often too ugly to be considered a viable option by most companies. I have head the look of some platforms described as “unprofessional.” Second, many companies that invest money in a customized, “pretty” forum platform wind up with a “solution” so difficult to use, it fails to gain traction.
One of our goals with Ninja Post is overcome both of these hurdles with a design that is both functional and elegant. But there’s more to Social CRM and Content Marketing than simply giving users a place to talk. The key, we think, is to be able to measure user generated content in some way and capture the essence of what users are talking about. Thus, we believe there is a third reason why forums tend to be overlooked as a social media tool: forum platforms lack a built-in way to capture what is being said by users. Our latest goal and highest priority is to change this. We are in the process of building a trending content/sentiment analysis dashboard so that site owners can get more out of the user generated content on their forum.
