Integrating Social Media and Traditional CRM: Toward a Conceptual Framework for Social CRM Practices

In recent years, marketers have paid lots of attention to a new field called social CRM, created from the combination of social media and traditional customer relationship management (CRM) practices. In the past, traditional CRM practices have mainly focused on the task of valuing individual customers’ profitability through relationship management over time as the proxy of creating the firm’s value. Shifting away from this trend, firms have recently attempted to promote customer engagement into the value creation process as the core of CRM strategy. This chapter proposes conceptual guidelines for the success of social CRM practices, while considering the development of personalized customer engagement programs with social media depending on customer status over the life cycle.