You might have heard that Social CRM is all around developing strategies around the “social customer”.  But, what exactly is a social customer and what do brands need to know about interacting with her?  Chess Media Group has released a whitepaper with Attensity 360 (which is free) introducing the social customer and the document provides a lot of valuable information and insight on who exactly the social customer is and why it’s important to understand her.  The entire document was edited by Mitch Lieberman (who actually also contributed content as well) who did a killer job.  Here’s what we covered from a high level.

We broke down the whitepaper into several parts:

Part 1 introduces the social customer and takes a look at how she interacts with content on the web and via mobile devices.  It also takes a look at some of the implications that the social customer has on brands and companies.

Part 2 talks about developing a holistic relationship between the company and the social customer and explores things such as company outputs vs company expectations as well as what the social customer actually means to brands.

Part 3 addresses creating mutual value between the company and the customer.  Referring to a quote from Gartner that I always use:

“By 2010 more than half of companies that have established an online community will fail to manage it as an agent of change, ultimately eroding customer value.  Rushing into social computing initiatives without clearly defined benefits for both the company and the customer will be the biggest cause of failure.”

Overall I think we did a great job with this whitepaper and everyone worked hard; I’m proud of the work we did.  In a few days I’m going to talk about the Social CRM whitepaper that Chess Media Group released around understanding Social CRM as it goes quite well with this one, but you’re going to have to wait a few days for that one.  Understanding the social customer is a great preface for what we are going to talk about next.

Here is a teaser powerpoint that was created to give more information about the whitepaper.

As I mentioned the whitepaper is free to download so please do so (and share it!) and let me know what you think.

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