I think Seth Godin is on the dot with his commentary on social norms being redefined - We used to know the social norms in interacting with people: what to do, how to behave with our friends, business associates, leads, and contacts. We learned it over years of practice, watching others, and measuring and fine tuning our interactions and social skills as we figured it out what's right and what's wrong.
That brings up an interesting thought - We are now in the age of automated CRM accessible by millions of users; very powerful context sensitive drip marketing tools are at the disposal of the average Joe. In minutes a non technical business user can configure salesforce.com to send out context sensitive mail merged emails to their leads and contacts. But just because you can, should you?
Should you send out generic birthday greetings? How about an automated hello on the 6 month anniversary of closing the deal with them? Moreover, should you try hard to make it appear as if its not automated email, or go clean with a pure generic e-card type of emails?
I don't know all the answers, and the new social norms seem to be in flux at the moment as we collectively figure out how to behave in the digital world, but, I can feel if its right or wrong when I see it in action. My best advice to budding drip marketers is to use your best judgment and do onto others what you would like done to you. I'm a firm believer in respecting attention of people who given you the permission to talk to them. If you are in doubt, I suggest you error on the conservative side and don't send automated email if it does not contain useful substance.
With the advent of social networking and its increasing business / promotional use, we are now seeing the new social norms evolve of how people interact with each other on-line in promoting their businesses, causes, and agendas. Since digital social norms are not quite published yet, people are learning their way.
Here are my suggestions - they mainly apply old rules and common sense to the usage of the new medium:
1) Don't rush it, don't seek shortcuts. I've now seen on more than one occasion small business owners who have not been participating in the online facebook conversation just jump in and start promoting their businesses. That's a mistake. Don't abuse the forum and the permission you have been given. Go easy, subtle. Just like its tacky and off putting to show up to a summer cocktail party in your X Service business uniform and do nothing but tell people how wonderful your latest X Service is, you don't want to do that online either.
2) Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The salesforce.com workflow engine is very powerful - increases customer satisfaction in the right hands, destroys relationship in the wrong hands. Tread carefully, error on the conservative side. If you don't, it can harm you and you're brand more than you might think.
3) For businesses looking to leverage social CRM, go read only at first, observe the conservation, learn. Don't be in a rush to join the dialog. Its a new medium, and you don't want to make the wrong impressions, especially now that everything you say is permanently recorded in the ether.
