Gaining benefit from social media when you don’t even use social media

Social customer care is great if you’re using a social channel. Problem is there are still plenty of people that only use traditional channels and get no advantage from the social channels.

At the CRM Evolution Conference I spoke with Ian Jacobs, a Senior Analyst on Customer Interaction for Ovum. Jacobs offered up a possible non-adhoc scenario to integrate social media into the knowledge management database as core corporate information.

The social channel handles things that aren’t in the company’s knowledge database. How do you get at that knowledge and then get it into the company, asked Jacobs. The trick is finding a method to validate the correctness. The technology to do just that is not fully baked, admitted Jacobs.

Ultimately, what Jacobs envisions is a series of automated tasks that use trust mechanisms, which then make that social input part of the company’s overall knowledge base.