The Future of Twitter: Social VRM

Post by Jeremiah Owyang on The Future of Twitter: Social CRM (abridged):

Manually tracking a large brand within Twitter isn’t scalable

It’s important to first realize that managing a large brand on Twitter isn’t scalable, with hundreds –maybe thousands of tweets about a marketplace a day, individuals will have a very difficult time managing, Brian Solis has some relevant stats on growth. The next challenge? determining who these people are, and if they are a potential customer is important, who are these people, are they important, where do they live? Lastly, responding in near real time is going to be key –as some users may ask their peers for product recommendations during point of sale, right in the store.

Twitter has two of the three key features of a CRM system

First, let’s break down why Twitter is going to be a Social CRM, let’s start by analyzing what entails Customer Relationship Management:

1) Customers: Yes, they got that. More than that, they have prospects, which to some marketers is far more valuable. However the challenge is mapping which Twitter ID is which customer –many don’t use their real names.

2) Relationships: Got that too. Now I realize that the intended definitions of CRM meant the relationships between customers and employees of a brand, but now you can see how people in Twitter are connecting to each other, and those that follow a brand, their indicating affinity towards them. The interesting thing is they don’t just offer affinity towards your brand, but also competitors, which helps in segmenting your market, and can help with poaching.

3) Management: Here lies the opportunity Twitter has no management tools to support this, as a result, their data is being whisked away in the API and being aggregated by two types of companies.

Jeremiah's argument is that this is a good opportunity for CRM companies to import twitter data into their listening platforms, and then offer simple workflow and task management (no doubt this article is written to tie in to the Salesforce.com announcement of Twitter support). He suggest they go down Facebook's route:

Twitter can go further than this, they could be their own CRM system, by perhaps offering their own analytics system to brands, that will help them to track and manage the conversations within the 140 sphere. This has tremendous opportunities for Twitter should they create their own brand management system that they can resell to the world’s companies to monitor, alert, track, prioritize, triage, assign, followup, and report on the interactions with brands.

I'm not sure this is a Good Plan, as Facebook has been involved in some pretty noisy episodes regarding doing various flavours of this, as has Phorm, and even Do-No-Evil Google is increasingly distrusted for just this sort of thing.

I wonder if a better play might be for Twitter to reverse this and build tools to let users manage their own data, a la VRM principles. In many ways Twitter facilitates this as:

- Asymmetric following goes both ways, users can as easily follow brands they want

- The 140 character limit is a great tool for semantic ontologies - initiating easily understood coded convos in this solution space would be relatively easy and lightweight

- you could put in lightweight clientside apps to manage customer / server interactions automatically

- Its realtime, so when required one can step up to conversation in an instant

- It should be possible to complete a transaction (and take a %) via the platform or a proxy service

VRM is also a less intrusive and potentially a more valuable system as:

- in this case there are a variety of business models (from producer pays to consumer pays, with various inbetweens)

- the "endgame" for VRM is to reduce the spend on unnecessary advertising and stock to mitigate demand uncertainty. This requires trust built over many lightweight "moments" of truth.

Realtime Unified Comms is a nice platform to run these sort of services off.