Social CRM or SCRM is a business strategy that enables brands to proactively identify, engage and build advocacy with customers through social media in real time.

The SCRM strategy focuses on building advocacy and brand loyalty through proactive engagement. The “traditional” CRM strategy has a transactional focus and is typically retrospective in it’s dialogue.

The prolific rise in social media has created a need to evolve the traditional CRM strategy. Masses of real time user generated content is being created all over the world. This UGC can provide businesses with key insights into their customers opinions.  The immediacy of Social content means the traditional CRM models have not kept up with the modern customers online behaviour.

Like the “traditional” CRM model, Social CRM will mean different things to different businesses but ultimately it will depend on what business objective your are trying solve. To be effective a SCRM strategy will need to be supported by technology that will aggregrate and feed social media data  into a CRM environment and a applied to a single customer view, where business rule can be applied to determine the next action.

Social CRM is moving quickly from being a theory to a business reality. The recent acquisition of Radian6 (a leading social media ‘listening’ tool) by Salesforce.com is a clear indicator that the shift is already happening.

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