Jeremiah Owyang misses an "M"

Ray Wang and Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group just published a major new report: Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management. It’s a real tour-de-force, summarizing the social media landscape, categorizing and rating the tools available for marketers to engage with it, and laying out 18 practical use cases for social CRM ranked by market demand and technical maturity.

The report sets out five “M”s that an organization should have in place in order to execute on the use cases (the summaries are mine):

Monitoring: Listen to how & where your brand is mentioned in the social sphere
Mapping: Link social identities to customer records
Management: Business rules to tie social channels into business functions
Middleware: Provides the “glue” for data flow from the social world to the enterprise
Measurement: If you can’t measure it, how do you know it’s working?

All great stuff, but don’t you find it a bit passive? How does an organization turn all this internal processing into actual engagement in the social sphere? I think Ray and Jeremiah need a sixth “M”: Messaging.

Taking the report’s Baseline Processes format, I’d describe Messaging like this:

Why It’s Important
To maximize the reach and effectiveness of your permission marketing, you need to be able to engage with your customers where and when they want you to, by whatever channel they choose. If they don’t find your messaging convenient, they will pass over you. Even if you have their permission, if you give them the wrong message in the wrong place they may ignore you, or worse still, shut you off completely.

Resources and Requirements
The ability to message on all channels: email, mobile, social, web: Universal Messaging
The ability to target individuals on all channels: Universal Identity
The ability to segment and personalize on all channels: Universal Preferences
The ability to measure response on all channels: Universal Measurement

What they don’t always tell you
Think in terms of a universal messaging strategy, covering all channels. If you segregate mobile, social and email permission marketing, you will miss opportunities to add value to your communication. Your customers care how and where you reach them, but you should concentrate on what you’re saying to them when you do.

Vendors to Watch
For modesty’s sake I’ll leave this part to you!

Here at OTOlabs we’ve been giving a lot of thought to the challenges of engaging your customers beyond the email inbox – to mobile, social and in the living room. We’re holding a  webinar about it at 11am on May 29, called From Email to Universal Messaging: Reaching the Multichannel Consumer. There’s a second session at 2pm the same day. If you’re as fired up by the Social CRM report as we are, it would be great if you could join us.