What is a Social Hub? Why is it Important?

 

Thanks for joining me this week on “No Fluff” social media.  Appreciate you reading my blog but I know you are busy so let’s get right to it.

If you are a social media professional, do you find yourself saying……….

“I wish I could listen and engage more on social conversation with my customers but I just don’t have enough resources to handle it all.”

“The tool I use to monitor social media can’t weed out the ‘noise’ and give me just the ‘actionable’ stuff.”

“I feel like I’m missing a huge opportunity to generate sales in social by not routing leads into our Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) so the sales team can respond.”

“I feel even worse that I’m not responsive in responding to my consumers that have had a bad experience and tell the world about it on our Facebook or Twitter account.”

“I wonder if the same consumers engaging on social networks area also calling, emailing or chatting with our brand.”

“It would be fantastic if I could combine a person’s Twitter handle with their other consumer data like name, address and email.”

“I don’t want to respond just because they are influential, but it would be nice if I could automatically detect when an influencer mentions our brand so I could provide a little VIP service.”

“Maybe the thing that frustrates me most is we have PR, marketing, customer service, legal, R&D and our handful of agencies all using a different social listening, engagement and reporting platform.”

If these thoughts sound familiar you certainly aren’t alone. At least not down here in the trenches of social media where I’m at.  Fortunately, one of the emerging trends in 2013 for social professionals is the concept of a Social Hub.

So what is a Social Hub?

Monitor MORE social conversation with LESS people by automatically routing ‘actionable’ social interactions to the right resource. Who couldn’t use a little productivity bump and save a few bucks in their budget?

Start driving social sales by automatically routing sales leads in to your CRM system for your sales team to follow-up on. Cha Ching!

Automatically route those complaints and questions on Facebook and Twitter to your contact center so customer service agents can retain consumers and improve loyalty.

With a Social Hub you can log in to your CRM and see the full 360 view of each consumer with their social data like twitter handle and followers on the same screen as their name and other demographic data.  Wonder if social customers spend more, are they more loyal? Those reports are possible with Social Hub.

I know you don’t want to treat influencers differently just because they have 50k followers but with Social Hub it easy to automatically identify them, maybe give them a little extra attention or quicker response, then sit back and take the credit from all the positive word of mouth driven by those positive mentions.

Granted no social software is best in listening, responding, reporting, and managing social content and that is the primary reason why large organizations have so many different tools.  But isn’t it time for a little teamwork in social media. A Social Hub can help stop the turf wars and get everyone holding hands in the same system.

The bottom line. A Social Hub is a social media business rules engine. It applies business rules to automatically route interactions to the right people to drive the right engagement.

It’s the glue Sales, Marketing and Customer Service need to sell, connect and serve your consumers.

Wow! That sounded a little fluffy didn’t it? Well we speak nothing but the truth here at No Fluff so keep in mind Social Hub is brand new stuff. It’s not perfect. It will take some tuning and continued improvement to work out the kinks.  No different than any other influential emerging technology.

Below is an example of what a 360 view of a consumer can look like after implementing a Social Hub. It includes the consumers contact information, where she last tweeted, social insights on her engagement level, other household members, campaign/promotion activity, customer service case history and more.

See you next week and if you found this information about Social Hub valuable please click one of those fancy social media share buttons below.