To find the first part of this post, check out yesterday's post.
Middleware
Brands use middleware to automate work flows and apply business rules to events from the social Web. Also, if your brand wants to make things happen (book events, process returns) across multiple systems, middleware is going to be a must-have. ETL technologies (extract-transform-load) would also fit here. Middleware is simply a piece of software that exists between two other pieces of software, allowing them to communicate. Nothing fancy. It basically serves as the lettuce and tomato (middle layer) between the bread (the social data and metadata) and the meat (the CRM). Also, middleware can connect disparate databases (e-commerce, etc.) to your CRM.
A good example of this function are clothing brands that take return requests via Twitter (run through Salesforce Enterprise Edition), and then use a Talend integration to issue a credit through their ecommerce solution, Magento, and grant the return merchandise request through their enterprise resource planning system, Glovia. Three vendors that perform this duty well are Pervasive, Talend, and SAS Dataflux.
The caveat with middleware is that it is usually somewhat expensive, though incredibly valuable in terms of how much time it will save you. The question to ask is: "Can we afford to have a senior manager that makes $120,000 doing 72 cut-and-pastes, every day?" (Annual cost of that is roughly their entire salary.)
Management
Unless there's a connection to a concrete business objective, you can't really do anything with social customer data. This is where the "rubber meets the road," in the words of Owyang, when business rules, work flows, and process meet the social data. Without these management systems, brands won't know (1) which social customers to help first, (2) which macro solutions can help a majority of them, or (3) which micro decisions need to be made immediately (or who should make those decisions).
Dell Computers, for example, uses Salesforce Customer Portal to map customer support data from Facebook and Twitter all the way through to a closed-case (happy customer). Three vendors who perform management well are Salesforce, SugarCRM, and OracleCRM.
An issue that arises with management systems, like monitoring solutions, is that they need to be manned 24/7 in order to prevent social customer crises. Just because your work week ends at 5:00 P.M. EST on a Friday doesn't mean that your customers won't be triggering business rules that require "micro" (human) decisions at 9:00 A.M. Saturday morning.
Measurement
Measurement is a critical piece for all social customer engagement: without it brands can't tell whether things are improving or worsening. Some brands call this "business analytics software." These are basically fancy dashboards that translate everything the social customer says into actionable decision making. Sample metrics that you could calculate here include Net Promoter,8 trend forecasting, brand evangelism, customer sentiment analysis, customer satisfaction and virality (how far or how fast customers push the message). Pull-through social marketing is impossible without good measurement.
Three vendors that perform measurement well are SAP Business Objects, SAS Institute, and IBM Cognos Express.
If you're thinking of trying to measure metrics across multiple brand extensions (i.e., five different brands under the same mother brand), a measurement suite is crucial. If you're not holistically measuring, you may have one of the companies under your umbrella just going gangbusters, and another having severe problems; without measurement software, this won't be clear, in real-time.
Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.