The hurdles of social websites for sales and marketing

Online social smalltalk

Inspired by Facebook and Twitter a number of on-demand solution vendors propose to introduce the concept of social websites into the daily operations of sales and marketing by merging a CRM with a social messaging in order to have more direct interaction or more social contact with customers and leads.
Somewhat similar to the social smalltalk at the beginning of a telephone call or a meeting in order to know more about the person sales people are dealing with.

The difference is the smalltalk is controlled related to the beginning of an event and controlled in time whereas the social messaging or chat is rather uncontrolled.

The white noise of social websites

The main problem with social website is the amount of white noise as social messaging is:
- Unstructured
- Without a subject line like email
- Capable of deriving quickly from the subject

All this white noise could derive people from their actual work as it could be more interesting.
Still the work needs to get done while the employees could be wasting their time filtering out the white noise not related to their actual work.
This filtering is already a problem with emails that are contained and classifiable items, whereas social messaging, chats or status reports are unstructured demanding even more time to file.

Customers and leads willing to participate in online social?

Even if your company enables and offers social features the question is if customers and leads will use it as they have to open a social conversation with you.
Are they ready for this?

Social website Return On Investment

Enterprises and corporations need productive operations from their employees that contribute directly or as directly as possible to their bottom line.
This will be hard to proof when employing social websites during work especially as it tends to be apparently unproductive work at first sight.

It could get even worse in case the marketing and sales teams are getting used to the social tool. They could get addicted and use it for all kinds of purposes not always related to marketing, selling or operations.
Work should be fun, but it should not be a waste of time.

It is questionable if the online social talk will be any profitable or improve profitability.
How about all the time wasted on messages that have little or no relation to the business whatsoever?
Calculating a Return On Investment on all the time that has been spend on a social corporate chat or status message board will be hard to do – if not impossible.

Online social websites allowing to interact sales and marketing with customers and leads are likely only to succeed if these social functions could be integrated with features that enhance productivity: for example workflow.

Will you take advantage of integrated social functions and features of your CRM?
Will your customers or leads use the online social conversation possibilities offered by your company?