SRM didn't achieve our goals, but is worth the money anyway
April 15, 2016
SRM didn't achieve our goals, but is worth the money anyway
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Oracle Social Marketing
- Oracle Social Engagement & Monitoring
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM)
My group handles social sites for the Endodontics division of Dentsply Sirona in North America. We are the only unit that uses SRM. We need to control conversations with customers to ensure compliance with FDA mandates and mitigate risk of off-label claims. We use social sites to create awareness of new tools and techniques that improve the practice of endodontics.
- Monitoring. SRM allows us to fine tune the keywords we monitor to filter out the noise and ensure we are tracking relevant conversations.
- Scheduling. SRM provides an easy, flexible, powerful interface to queue up posts and tweets. We have been able to post real-time on trade show events as they happen.
- Support. Oracle provides a dedicated account rep plus a host of consulting and technical services. They not only show us how to use the tool, they suggest ways to do social marketing more effectively.
- Control. Our goal is for our sales reps to manage their own Facebook pages through SRM, but the interface is so clunky that most won't use it. They post directly or they don't post at all. I'm not sure how to make it better though, considering how tightly we must control risk of off-label claims.
- Cost. SRM's cost is in line with other social vendors, but the high cost is hard to justify to management because the return is so amorphous. Is social marketing really worth that much?
- Oracle. It's a big company, and sometimes we get lost inside. Opening a support ticket, for example, results in ovenight email chats with Sunitha from India.
1 - Social Marketing, which is part of the Digital Marketing team (Social, Email, Lead Generation and Ecommerce.) The Digital team works with Marketing Communications, which generates all of the messaging we broadcast. MarCom uses another tool, Oracle Content Marketing (formerly Compendium) to deliver us web content we can promote through tweets and posts.
Our primary concern was to guard against comments that are beyond the scope authorized by the FDA -- off-label claims, in other words. SRM was the best tool to provide the control our management required. The others had incomplete or easy-to-evade controls. However, we've found that to be a two-edged sword; the controls are so restrictive that most of our reps won't use the tool. Overall, SRM satisfies our needs adequately.
- Audience. Before SRM, we had 1,000 Likes on Facebook. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, our Likes have grown to 20,000.
- Frequency. Before SRM, we posted once a week on Facebook & Twitter. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, we now post 54 times a month, or about twice a day on weekdays.
- Internal acceptance. Before SRM, social was considered "a hobby" by senior management. Now, social marketing is a key part of the strategy of every product launch. That is due to the hard work of our social marketing manager, of course, but her efforts were amplified by SRM.