10 steps to start implementing Social CRM.

1) Understand your Conversation Map. Listen and understand the social media conversations from advocates to influencers and from detractors to consumers.

2) Understand the Social Graph of your customers. This is very important - it refers to your current customer in your CRM system, marketing database or customer datamart. Are they on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, external communities, etc., etc?

3) Have a Social Graph of your Best Customers. Are your best customers using social media?  Can you start engaging them for your own pilots? Can you engage them? What other types of customers can you engage? Again, these are known customers in your CRM system or Loyalty Program.

4) Establish processes & requirements to meet your goals and objectives based on current needs and the analysis from the above 3 steps.

5) Get ready to put together a social media plan based on the requirements and processes. Do you need to be on Facebook? Do you need call center integration? Do you need to integrate social media marketing with your marketing automation? Do you need a community to provide ideas and collaboration for customer support? Do you have a Social Media Manager ad policies in place?

6) Create specific use cases for your integration points to capture data. This is not just about technology but also about customer experience, culture and processes.

7) Have your traditional CRM ready for social media. Do you have the workflow, processes, rules, data structure, training, call center, people, etc., ready to manage communities and social media channels?

8) If your customer or influencers are already collaborating using social media, is your enterprise ready to collaborate internally? i.e. Social Business, E 2.0.

9) Like in CRM... Do you have the culture, people and change management attitude to really change?

10) Improve your CRM ecosystem - this should be step 1. Fix what is not working today!