From the view of a larger company it is crucial to effectively manage the conversations in the social media channels to ensure that you manage the reputation of your brand online.

If your brand is quite well established there is going to be some volume of traffic in the tweets, facebook fan pages posts and community.

The question I have had posed many times is how do organisations manage the workflow, business process and customer relations around this emerging channel?

What is work flow around social media?
With all these conversations going on, you need to keep track of who are the key influencers in your community. On top of that you will have a range of questions being asked from offers, customer service, operational issues, technical issues and I am sure there are some I have missed out.
The point being the person managing the social media campaign cannot be expected to have all the answers. They need to ask the experts in the business for their response to the question / statement so they can work out a response. So companies need to manage the work flow around this, so the person managing the social media can keep track of which tweet has been answered, which are still outstanding and which ones need escalating.

They also need to build up a knowledge base which will be the common tweets / questions with the stock answers.

Saleforce Service Cloud

Salesforce is one of the leading CRM and cloud computing companies. They have launched Serviced Cloud which enables companies to integrate CRM and work flow around the twitter, facebook and community. Quite an effort to set up and not cheap either (so more for the larger businesses). Does provide an enterprise solution for managing your online CRM.

I am not sure if the lightweight version of the software for small business has this application included of if you can embed it in it.

CoTweet
Is a currently a free online service that allows you to keep track of those twitter conversations (doesn’t do facebook). It allows you to schedule tweets, assign updates to colleagues and keep track of conversation threads. Not as full weight as Salesforce – but then SME’s don’t need that do they?

Which software have you used to track your social media work flow – what recommendations do you have?