Two more key applications for social media CRM

We've established that social media is on the way to being fully embraced by the business community. Now we're looking at two ways you can use your CRM to take your social media integration a little deeper: using CRM to control events, and to monitor activity in fast-moving conversations.

How you can use CRM to events.

Your first step is to create an event within Facebook, which is easily done. However, to integrate your CRM, you'll want to take it beyond simply "I'm attending" (powerful though that is, since it appears in a user's timeline). From a CRM point of view, the key is to direct users to an event booking screen on your own website. Here you can use customer sign-ups to populate your CRM and develop intelligence around who responds to which invitations through which channels. To make the integration work, create an associated event in your Dynamics CRM - then tag the URLs of links pointing from Facebook to your site, so that CRM can capture the fact that Facebook drove the signup.

But don't feel you have to keep visitors on your site. It can be better to direct them back to Facebook. They can then invite guests - their friends and associates - which will increase your customer reach and make your event even more of a success.

Beyond "out-of-the-box" Dynamics CRM: addons for monitoring social media

Most advanced users of Microsoft CRM in Bristol are familiar with add-ons that give you some degree of marketing automation, such as SalesFusion or ExactTarget. And in the social media world, add-ons can help you go beyond the out-of-the-box functions. Let's look at a particular add-on for one of the biggest social media sensations.

Parrot, by Fortis, is a Twitter client within your Dynamics CRM. Sitting within the familiar Dynamics interface, like most Twitter clients it shows you a timeline of tweets from people you're following, or topics you wish to monitor.

What can you do then? First, you can post tweets from within your CRM. You can hover over others' tweets to follow or search the timeline of individual tweeters. You can also save tweets as favourites, send Direct Messages and access the usual Twitter functions.

But most importantly of all, you can create new record within CRM for your Twitter interactions. It doesn't matter if they haven't exposed their personal credentials - you can create record based on just their Twitter handle. This then empowers you to send @replies or Direct Messages to them from your CRM as you engage them through this channel and look to convert them into a customer.