Ann All spoke with Brent Leary, a CRM industry analyst, advisor, author, speaker and blogger. He is co-founder and Partner of CRM Essentials LLC, an advisory company with a client list including Research In Motion, Sage, Microsoft, Intuit, Cisco and the state of Georgia's Depart of Economic Development. A past recipient of CRM Magazine's Most Influential Leader Award, he co-authored "Barack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Small Business." He also hosts and produces the "Technology For Business $ake" Internet radio program.

All: What are the biggest differences between traditional CRM and social CRM?

Leary: When you think of traditional CRM, most of the benefits are felt internally. You get more operational effectiveness, better forecasting, an improved ability to share information with people on your team. But social CRM is totally focused on the wants and needs of the customer. More and more, customers expect the companies they do business with to be using social media. When customers are looking for product or service information or help with something, they go to Google, maybe to Facebook or Twitter if they have good social networks. Because those are the ways people are engaging, companies have to understand that and create opportunities for themselves to be part of those kinds of conversations. Social CRM is how you get that kind of information to people when they are looking for it and in the format and channels they are using for their conversations.

Social CRM works best with a good traditional CRM foundation. At some point, you do have to enter the formal sales and customer service processes. You need to integrate social media into those formal processes. But you begin those processes now with a click, it’s starting online.

All: So companies with existing CRM systems are better positioned to take advantage of social CRM. In addition to the lack of such a system, are there other technical challenges involved with social CRM?
Leary: The main technical challenge involves all these great free services people are using like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. Right now, they are disparate. They’re not well-connected. And they’re also not connected to CRM applications.

All: Some CRM vendors are creating tools to integrate their systems with channels like Twitter and Facebook. But is the proliferation of these channels a problem?
Leary: If you look back a year ago, there was no Twitter integration. People didn’t really know much about Twitter. But what’s going to happen next year? What will we be using then, and how will CRM applications integrate with that? People spend a lot of time on these social networks, so it’s important. You want to make sure you are using the channels where people want to receive information. Identifying and tracking the activity is still a challenge. How do we account for that from a CRM perspective? How do you analyze that activity?

All: What about cultural challenges? Those usually seem to be a bigger deal than the technical ones.
Leary: The cultural challenges are bigger. Integration and putting technology together can be tough. But there’s nothing tougher than changing someone’s mind. Many times when I talk to companies about social CRM, I get a lot of questions along the lines of “What if someone says something bad about our product or company?” Obviously people may not say things like that on a company blog, but chances are they are saying it somewhere. Companies have to learn that, in honest conversations, people will sometimes say negative things. That’s a tough hang-up for a lot of companies.

And you don’t want to use traditional marketing and sales speak in social media. Nobody cares about your product. What people care about is solutions to their problems. If you can speak to those things, people will listen to you. Last year I had a conversation with a buddy on Twitter. We were joking about stealing a biscuit off a guy’s plate at a conference. Out of the blue, somebody from Popeye’s Chicken came in and said, “You know what, I think it was your buddy who stole the biscuit.” It was so funny. He didn’t come out and say, “Buy a Popeye’s biscuit,” but he really got my attention. I ended up going to Popeye’s. It was great. He entered the conversation in the proper context and had fun with it. I ended up blogging about it, in addition to visiting Popeye’s myself.

All: So how can companies get started with social CRM?

Leary: The best way to get started is to go to your big customers and ask which networks they are on and how they use them. You’ll find that’s a blueprint for your social CRM strategy. You can then begin to create conversations in the channels where they are. Find out which bloggers your customers follow and engage with them. Once you find the right networks, check out the conversations occurring there. That’ll deepen your relationships with your customers, but it’ll also help you find more customers like them. You can establish a sort of social media profile for your customers.

All: You've written about the three As of social CRM. Can you explain those?
Leary: First is automation. We all know about salesforce automation with traditional CRM. In social CRM, automation is how you create content and distribute it as simply and consistently as possible. If you automate content creation and distribution, you should be able to join some really good conversations. You’ll start to hear from people and get into what I call conversation relationship management. It’s important to also have a strategy for doing that. You have to really focus on responding.

If you’re doing that, then you also need to analyze. That’s the second A. It’ll help get you into the right conversations with the right people at the right times. Who’s digging your content, who’s stumbling it? There are different ways to analyze, and you have to do it because you’re not just creating content for fun.

If you do automation and analysis, hopefully that’ll free up time to think creatively. That’s being audacious. There is so much content out there, and people’s attention spans are shrinking. You want to not only get their attention, but to enter into exchanges that will hopefully lead to a meaningful business relationship. You have to think creatively and do things you may not have thought of doing before.

All: A lot of this seems to come down to making people feel passion for your products or services. So many successful social media campaigns can be polarizing. Some people think they're really great, others are turned off by them, but nobody is neutral about them.
Leary: You want your customers to be comfortable with spreading your message. That’s why you are seeing these customer communities. If you have a good product and a good relationship with your customers, then they’ll probably respond to negative comments about your company. Your community of customers will come to your aid. They’ll call somebody out if they think they’re being negative for the wrong reasons