What are you waiting for? Your organization already knows how to be social — you just may not realize it.

It’s not a matter of social media tools and applications, or finding the people who are willing to use them. Market research continually examines and details the pervasiveness of social media. Larry Dignan recently wrote about Forrester’s Third Annual Social Technographics Profile, detailing how only 18% of the population is not using social media. This represents a striking upward trend as non-users dropped from 44% in 2007, to 25% in 2008, and now 18% in 2009. Clearly, we’re well past the tipping point. In fact, we’re nearly done with adoption.

Perhaps it’s more about understanding how to think about social media. The topic for this post comes as the series turns away from the Why? of Social CRM and begins working on the How? Let’s get started by looking for analogies in the real world:

Blogging, for example, is one of the easiest ways for businesses to start being social. Blogging has a very good physical world analogy. A blog post is like giving a talk to a group of people where you welcome any questions at the end. Pretty simple, right? Your business would know how to talk to a group — therefore thinking about your blog as a series of such talks is dead-on in terms of detailing your strategy and tactics for blog topics, what sort of tone to use and so forth. It’s easy to see how to blog when you start thinking in terms of this conversational manner.

How about Twitter?  For me, Twitter is like being at a crowded, noisy and oh-so-hip club or party. There is so much “noise” that you can barely hear yourself think. Little snatches of conversation surround you, yet you struggle to focus entirely on a single one. It’s hard to keep all of the conversations in-line, yet you’re constantly being pulled towards one or another, chiming in to only the most interesting with a few words and opinions of your own.

I liken Facebook to lunchroom cliques at school or the water cooler conversations at work. You’re with friends telling them what’s going on, laughing together and having a good time. The pace and noise is a little easier than that crowded noisy club we call Twitter. It’s less dense but with more depth. Although water cooler conversation does not permit hanging out for hours at a time — especially in deep discussion — people still do.

Paul Greenberg gave me a great analogy along these lines, and that is Yelp. My family loves Yelp because it helps us to discover interesting new restaurants wherever we go. But Yelp also has a social review aspect. Paul says that Yelp’s Social Reviews are like being at a restaurant and hearing about your company from a conversation over at the next table. It’s an awkward moment. They’re not really talking to the company; they’re talking to each other. It’s hard to respond directly to the individual because all you can do is post your own review (e.g. talk about the business at your own table and hope they overhear you).

It gets you thinking, doesn’t it?

What about Social CRM, the focus of what we’re here to talk about? 

The best face-to-face analogy I know for Social CRM is that it’s like a user conference that goes on 24/7. Any business that has ever had a successful user conference can identify the tremendous value. Customers get a chance to rub shoulders with one another and with your experts to learn how to get more value from your products. Contacts are made. A good deal of fun is had and camaraderie is born. Companies that invite their best prospects to the user conference will experience an increased likelihood of such individuals to buy as they become immersed in your customer culture, meeting people just like them who are getting tremendous value from your products.

There are also unhappy people who came to the conference looking for answers. However, you’ve got such a powerful confluence of happy customers and available expertise (both from your business and your successful customers) that their unhappiness quickly wanes. It’s not uncommon to see total attitudinal transformations take place.

That’s what Social CRM is all about: providing an extremely leveraged mass consumer-to-consumer, consumer-to-vendor online experience providing results in ways a company would never get with one-to-one calls or face-to-face meetings.

By now, I hope you see that you already know how to be social in productive ways. Next, the question is how to be really good at it and how to maximize your effectiveness. To do that, you need a vision, some tools and a strategy. Our next post will talk about the vision.