Last week’s very successful IPO of LinkedIn has many asking what the value of social is – both in financial markets and to their businesses.

Quoting CNN:

When the dust settled on LinkedIn’s IPO on Thursday afternoon, the company was valued at $8.9 billion, making it worth more than household names like JC Penney, Electronic Arts and Chipotle.

As the biggest Internet IPO since Google and the first pure social networking site to go public, its jaw-dropping opening-day surge of 109% will also go down as a watershed moment for the Web, as historically significant as the debuts of Netscape in 1995, TheGlobe.com in 1998 and Google in 2004.

Is social really this big of a deal?

I believe the answer is an absolute 100% ‘yes’.

I have spent the last 20 years of my career in and around customer-facing applications and technologies, in other words in the marketspace that analysts (with their fondness for three-letter acronyms) like to call ‘CRM’. It is well-known that CRM is difficult, especially since one of the most popular terms often associated with it is ‘failure’.

Having seen many of those failures, but also quite a few successes, I believe that one single factor – focusing efforts where the customers are – is far and away more important than any others in determining who succeeds – and who fails. When CRM becomes an IT project, a reengineering exercise, or otherwise inward-facing – it seldom succeeds. When it is outward-facing and focused on the customer and where their activity is taking place – it often succeeds.

Fast forward to today, and the enthusiasm and excitement that so many (including yours truly) have for ’social’ – and then think about where your customers are increasingly spending their time and energy. It is on those social networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others – where that time is being spent, where an increasingly vast trove of data (much of it about you and your company) is kept, and where you must channel your efforts if you want to reach, influence and do business with those customers.

Your customers are on social networks. You need to be there with them. It’s really that simple.

That’s what all the excitement is about.

P.S. If you’re interested in more information on the intersection of CRM, Customer and Social strategies, please join Paul Gillin and me for an Infoboom Twitter Chat on June 21 entitled ‘Does Social CRM Really Matter’. We hope to see you there!

Tags: CRM, IPO, LinkedIn, Paul Gillin, Social CRM

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 24th, 2011 at 7:40 AM by cselland and is filed under Social CRM, Social Intelligence, Social Media Metrics, Strategy and Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.