Using Social Media as a Customer Relationship Management Tool

This article will provide a brief insight into the use of social media as a CRM tool, accompanied by a case study (Lorenzon, 2013).  The Uk's social media usage see 52% of adults using these services, e.g. Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. Lorenzon suggests that 02's customers use of social media is in the millions per year with the figure growing by 35,000 per month with a growth rate of 78% of 3 years. With the high growth rate of social media consumers are now expecting fast efficient customer service along these platforms.

O2 use the hub and spoke model with a centralised team of social experts to manage the social media presence, this model is shown below, image by Altimeter group.

This model allows for the centralised hub to support and guidance to all business units within the company. It also allows for full integration of all social media platforms and business units for consistency across platforms and specific messages reach the right business unit.

In July 2012, O2 suffered its largest set back on social media, with 120,00 negative mentions of the brand. An company inexperienced in social media may become unsettled and unsure on how to deal with the viral situation, some companies may even decide to hide from the storm and wait for it to settle. However, clever companies in this situation will realise that such a negative situation can be turned positive. O2's central hub and spoke model allowed them to rapidly respond to each individual tweet with a personalised message. To their customers this represented care, they were quick to apologise and react with a personal message. This is shown in Lorenzon's graph of O2 tweets categorised by sentiment. On  10/07/2012 the negative mentions started, however by the next day the rapid growing amount of 'anger' tweets ceased increasing, whereas 'love' tweets increased at a much quicker rate and became the most common category of tweets.





This shows the importance of maintaining a social media presence. If O2 had not reacted fast with personal messages anger and sadness tweets may have grown exponentially and virally, possibly resulting in loss of control by O2.

Lorenzon, K. (2013). Creating meaningful customer experiences and campaigns in social media: Case study of O2 (Telefónica UK). Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing. 1 (1), p32-38.

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