It's a big, big place......click on the image to be taken to the original infographic and see the (huge) numbers change as you watch.
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Nimble, the pioneer of social relationship management now integrates with HootSuite, makers of the market-leading social media management system. Now users can connect social media best practices to Social CRM capabilities, such as identifying, connecting and nurturing prospects to really engage with their customers.
Great review of Nimble's first year at the DEMO Conference from CEO Jon Ferrara. To find out more about Nimble CRM and how you can make it work in your organisation - click here  Erik Qualman is the author of Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business. These videos form the world's most watched Social Media video series; "Social Media Revolution".
What is interesting to see is the change and growth in the social media statistics from year to year. Is it a fad? Watch the videos and judge for yourself... Social networks continue to grow at an alarming rate. While Twitter is averaging 250 million tweets per day, Facebook has grown to over 900 million active users. This means that now for every five minutes spent online, one of those minutes is spent solely on social media sites.
Every week over one million people view customer service related tweets, with 80 percent of them being negative. Understanding and responding to the needs of your customers is crucial, because 59 percent of consumers will switch brands for better service. The social help desk may turn out to be a game-changer in the ongoing relationship between businesses and their customers. As customers increasingly turn to social media sites for customer service, the social help desk lets you respond in real-time to meet the evolving customer definition of "now." See below for a great infographic from Desk.com showing how the Social Helpdesk is changing the game. In preparation for his attempt to break last year’s Guinness World record for largest webinar ever– SCIENCE OF INBOUND MARKETING –Dan Zarella of HubSpot been collecting piles and piles of new marketing data. One area he focused on recently was Facebook. He collected data on more than 1.3 million posts published on the top 10,000 pages to put together this infographic to help you get more likes, comments and shares on your Facebook posts. Click on the Infographic below to see the full size version   NIMBLE RESPONDS TO OVERWHELMING MARKET DEMAND FOR SOCIAL CRM SOLUTION WORLDWIDE.
Santa Monica, CA - Nov. 8, 2011 - Nimble announced today that its award-winning Social Business platform for small businesses has now officially launched into the European market with the partnering of key channel organizations to meet overwhelming demand. Nimble is the first SaaS platform designed to help small companies turn business connections and social communities into customers for life. "More than half of our customers are overseas, and European partners have recognized the power of applying social to their business processes and are looking for a solution today," said Jon Ferrara, CEO, Nimble. "Companies are trying to fix their social business dilemma with legacy CRM systems. That’s because most business people live in Outlook, Address Book or Google and they only go into the CRM systems to manage leads to update lead status and forecasts. Having to copy emails and activities into your CRM system does not work. An effective relationship platform needs to capture your social contacts and communications and activities for you and your team." With its unique combination of relationship management, social networking, and sales and marketing tools, Nimble helps businesses capture leads with its website lead capture forms, organize them with its advanced contact manager, and engage them with automated drip marketing campaigns. To further help build relationships with those leads, Nimble enables businesses to run marketing campaigns and engage in social conversations via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. As conversations and campaigns turn to business opportunities, Nimble manages the sales pipeline by tracking the deal amounts, probabilities, and conversations that translate to business success. Said Michael McKenna, Principal Consultant, SmartCloud: "We became a Nimble Partner because we could see there is a fundamental shift in the way that companies and customers interact. Companies are looking at other ways to engage with the users of their products and services via the medium of 'social media' and the power of this media is plain to see to anyone witnessing global events this year. Nimble has looked at traditional business and at social media and created a tool that allows 'social business' for the next generation of business owners and employees. Nimble has changed the game. This is going to be the natural way to do business and we are really excited to be part of the change." A recent report from comScore measured social networking visitation and engagement around the world, by region. Europe saw the highest engagement of worldwide visitors to social networking sites. Nimble’s groundbreaking standalone and team solutions have driven unprecedented early success: since its launch earlier this year, the company gained over 20,000 registered users and is one of the fastest growing CRM platforms today. Nimble has signed up over 300 partners worldwide with our European market as our fastest growing market who see the vast potential in the social business marketplace. According to Gartner, the global social CRM market is forecast to achieve USD $1 billion in revenues by the end of 2012, up from approximately USD $625 million in 2010. The same report shows that spending by buyers on social software for marketing, customer service and sales increased by 40% in 2010, but that social CRM received less than 5% of revenues from the total CRM app market. This indicates that there is now a clear path for a market leader to emerge in this billion-dollar market. About Nimble: Since its initial launch, Nimble has quickly established itself among publications and customers alike as a leading Social Business platform. The platform was awarded PC Magazine "Editors Choice" as well as the coveted "DEMO God" award from a field of hundreds of start-up contenders. It has also been recognized by leading analyst firm, Gartner, as a “Cool Vendor” for Social Software and Collaboration and placed on "The CRM Watchlist 2011” by Social CRM expert and best-selling author, Paul Greenberg. Founded in 2009, Nimble leverages the power of traditional CRM, Sales Automation and social media to create a complete, web-based Social Business platform capable of helping small businesses transform their social communities into business opportunities. Located in Santa Monica, Nimble is in the heart of the Southern California tech community. Please join the conversation on Nimble’s Facebook page, LinkedIn and on Twitter @NIMBLE.  The following is a research note written by Jim Davies, Research Director with Gartner. In it Davies draws an analogy between the behaviour and attitudes of organisations today towards Social Media and similar attitudes a decade ago towards CRM. At that time Gartner developed its eight building blocks of CRM which consisted of steps such as vision from the board, implementation of strategy and changes to organisational structures, processes and culture. In this article Davies subscribes to the same approach to ensure that investment in social CRM isn’t wasteful.
Applying the Eight Building Blocks of CRM to Social MediaJim Davies, GARTNER The increase in adoption of social media across media, high-tech, consumer goods and retail sectors has been prolific during the past few years, and is set to expand into other industries during the next three years. Organisations need to embrace this phenomenon as an integral part of their customer relationship management (CRM) strategy. Our research points to improvements in customer and market responsiveness, product development, sales effectiveness and operational efficiency as key drivers. Success, however, requires the same due diligence in traditional CRM that Gartner has reinforced for the past decade. CRM is difficult to get right and Gartner estimates that fewer than 10 per cent of organisations have optimised the management of their customer relationships. A decade ago, Gartner created a framework called "The Eight Building Blocks of CRM" to help organisations be more successful. This framework has stood the test of time and is still highly regarded worldwide. Updated versions of the original research have been released over the years to reflect market shifts, but no fundamental changes have been made to the core framework. The Eight Building Blocks of CRMOur very latest research emphasizes the additional considerations that organisations now need to factor in across each building block from a social CRM perspective. Many of the social CRM projects Gartner has studied over the past three years have been in the "pioneer" phase, where individuals experiment and break new ground, but don't measure benefits. We are now seeing a desire to move to the "settler" phase, where a more structured approach is needed to get business results. Of course, to achieve this settler status, commitment to all eight of the building blocks will be required. Gartner defines social CRM as a business strategy that mutually benefits cloud-based communities and the business by fostering engagement while generating opportunities for sales, marketing and customer service. The key considerations within this definition that organisations need to take heed of are: Social CRM is a sustainable strategy, not a single project, such as setting up a Facebook page or mining social media.
1. Social CRM VisionA CRM vision encapsulates the very essence of a company's reason for existence, highlighting the differentiated attraction for its customers. A social CRM vision should take this customer value proposition further by embracing the shift of power associated with social CRM to one that is much more balanced. 2. Social CRM StrategyThe CRM strategy is a blueprint for how to create and maintain a customer base that is an asset to the company. It needs to integrate with the overarching corporate strategy, and requires the segmentation of customers by attributes such as value, loyalty and satisfaction. Adding a social dimension to a CRM strategy does not technically change anything, it just expands the options available for each segment and each phase of the customer life cycle. 3. Social Valued Customer ExperienceA successful customer experience management initiative ensures that feedback is continually used to help design and refine the customer experience. When adding a social dimension, organisations need to consider how social media can be used to better set/reset expectations with customers, to positively influence the customer experience directly and to collect feedback on the customer experience and then act on it in an appropriate and timely manner. 4. Social Organisational CollaborationOnce an organisation begins to embrace external social media, new guidelines and policies for employee participation need to be created, and associated aspects (such as its governance and enforcement) embraced. With social CRM and the emphasis on having a true relationship with customers, in which they contribute through activities such as co-creation, support, lead generation and campaign feedback, these "customers" have a far more influential role to play within each department. 5. Social CRM ProcessesCustomer process re-engineering to ensure each process flows down a logical path from the customer's perspective is a common investment area and a key influencer of the customer experience. When executing against a social CRM strategy, specific processes spanning sales, marketing and customer service will potentially be impacted. The key is to determine what processes are most appropriate to be driven socially, and where mass collaboration adds value, ensuring that there is an upside to the customer, as well as the business. 6. Social CRM InformationIn addition to the sheer volume of social data that can be collected from customers and prospects from social environments, the subsequent challenges associated with determining its meaning and importance are the major hurdle to tying that data to individual customers within the existing customer database. The ability to capture the comments made by an anonymous customer called "Jimbo" and then to retrospectively assign them to "Mr Jim Davies" once a linkage can be determined is a key development area. However, there are lighter-weight approaches that can provide some degree of value and should be explored; for example, looking at participants' follower numbers on Twitter to determine the importance/impact of their comments. 7. Social CRM TechnologyMost, but not all, CRM initiatives require some form of technology to enable the CRM strategy. Within the social CRM area, the marketplace is extremely fragmented, with over 100 vendors, each providing a specific functional capability. Most have annual revenue of less than $1 million and are not profitable. No one vendor can yet provide a holistic social CRM suite that can facilitate execution of socially driven sales, marketing and customer service processes. However, over the next two years we expect significant market consolidation and much tighter integration between social processes and traditional processes across sales, marketing and customer service. 8. Social CRM MetricsThe health of any CRM strategy can only be assessed through the provision of appropriate metrics. Once social CRM is embraced, new metrics need to be applied, which are often much harder to measure. Very few organisations have measured the return on investment of their social CRM activities, but this will begin to change in 2011 in line with growing maturity. In another article Davies identifies the fact that the social media technology landscape is very fragmented, "populated by the likes of community builders and social media monitoring firms", with no one vendor having a full suite of tools. He states that "next year the true social CRM suites will start to emerge as acquisitions happen [and the market consolidates] and as R&D happens then [vendors] will start to get broader in their capabilities." He finishes this article by saying;
So the message is, define clear Social Media strategies and goals and get moving quickly. Experiment and learn because, if you don't, your competitors will.
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Author - Michael McKennaMike has been working in the CRM arena since 2001. With a BA in Economics and a BSc. in Financial Information Systems from Trinity College Dublin, plus a background in project management and sales, Mike is a recognised CRM expert with over a decade of experience in delivering cost-effective solutions that work. 
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