The Customer Relationship Management Opportunity on Facebook

Rahim Fazal, CEO of social media application company Involver, says that businesses should assign more value to consumer interactions in social media, and measure the impact over the long term, not just during a promotion. Key quote from the full interview on eMarketer Total Access:

Mr. Fazal: It’s really important to recognize that the activities happening on social networks require special attention and a very personal contextualized approach for marketers. It’s unlike the approach that we as a marketing community have taken over the past decade, where we’ve extended the television model of impressions to banner ads for websites.

In social networking sites, the behavior is really dictated by the users, like playing games or sharing photos or videos with friends, or writing comments about a news article. It’s important for us as marketers to think about how we can support that activity.

Rather than trying to figure out how to advertise to our customers, it’s more important to figure out how to provide tools to our fans, so that they can advertise to their friends about us.

eMarketer: I see a lot of marketers on Facebook using a coupon or promotion to drive more people to become fans. But once a brand has accumulated fans, the next step is crucial. What can marketers do to help get to that next step?

Mr. Fazal: Marketers need to think about the bigger potential of Facebook as a customer relationship management opportunity. I think that is where all of these efforts lead to. For example, our client Us Weekly has been around for decades, and they have a very large following. And that following has traditionally been communicated with through direct mail, or more recently, through their Website.

However, as more of their subscriber activity has transitioned over to social networking sites such as Facebook, they’ve found it important to maintain engagement with that community there. And so when they started working with Involver back in April, they had 2,700 fans. Today, they have more than 270,000 fans. So it’s growth of a couple magnitudes mainly driven by various social media applications that met both the objectives of distribution and engagement. Now it’s leading to a broader opportunity, which is developing relationships.

I’ll give you an example. The base of 270,000 fans on Facebook is a very active one, in terms of their engagement metrics. There’s a high level of frequency. And Us Weekly has done a fantastic job in really maintaining the interactions with those fans.

Us Weekly is now translating it to real measurable business value, where they’ll post a couple of examples of cover photos for an upcoming issue and actually have fans comment on them. Or they’ll put various stories or photos or pieces of content that the editorial staff is interested in building a story around, and push it out to the Facebook fan page to gather input. Ultimately that is becoming a meaningful source of information for editorial decision-making.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access subscribers only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs. Other meaningful of case studies/interviews about brands using social media can be found here.

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