Setting Up Your Social Media GPS

Today's Eloqua Artisan post is a guest post from Mike MacFarlane, our own marketing operations manager. Mike is responsible for our own internal use of Eloqua, and is one of the best when it comes to innovative uses of the Eloqua platform.

I often get asked "how does Eloqua use Eloqua?" and Mike is the best person to answer that question.

Steve

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As a Marketing Operations Manager with Eloqua, my goal is to use the app to its full potential. There is just so much functionality available today, I always feel the need to find new and cool ways to use all the tools that I have been given as a marketer.

The most recent challenge I have given myself is to help integrate all of our Social Media efforts into Eloqua that allow us to report on and react to activity that happens on the web. Steve wrote a great post a while back about how to setup Social Media Referral reporting so you can see how much traffic you are driving to your website. This information has been extremely valuable for us and has helped to validate that all the work we have done in terms of spreading our marketing message through Social Media is well worth the time and effort. Still, I thought that we could do more.

Keeping up with the Sales Enablement theme that we have been promoting through the use of our new tool, Prospect Profiler, I thought to myself “Hey Mike, wouldn’t it be valuable to our sales reps if they could see their prospect’s social media activity”? Agreeing with myself, I started to build out an integration between Eloqua and our CRM system that I like to call “The Social Media GPS” - know where your prospect started and where they ended.

The ingredients for the devilishly good recipe are:
- A dash of Program Builder
- A handful of Saved Visitor Reports
- A pinch of ability to create activities within the CRM system
- A sprinkle of data tools for use within Program Builder

The image to the right is what the program flow looks like.

To start, I created a single track marketing automation program with the feeder into this program being a saved visitor report of those that came from Twitter to our website within a hour of the visit. In this case, I am feeding these web visitors into our marketing automation program as Prospects (as this allows me to create unique entries that I can report on later). The key information that I want to map from the visitor to the prospect is:

- Most Recent Referrer
- Last Page In Visit
- Last Visit Date and Time

When the prospect is created within the marketing automation program, I can then see this visitor information stored on its record (seen in the image to the right)

My record then flows down to a step which I run a Match Rule that looks for an existing Contact in our database based on a matching Email Address. The purpose for this match rule is to append the CRM ID that is stored on the contact record and write it over to my prospect. This ID is what is used to uniquely identify the record within Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM on Demand, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM and write information over to it.

After I append the CRM ID to my record, I then flow down to an integration event that will write this activity over to the CRM system. You will notice that I have set this action up as a conditional action.


The condition in this case is that if there is no CRM ID in the associated contact record, I do not want to run the activity call over to the CRM system. If there is a ID, then I want to execute the call to the CRM system.

Once the call is made to the CRM system to create the activity within the associated Lead/Contact record, the sales rep can then see how the website activity was generated. Here is what the rep would see:


(you may need to click the image for a full size view of the record in your CRM system)

So in one snapshot, your sales rep can see:

a) What webpage/blog/online asset the prospect visited
b) Where the visit originated from
c) When the visit happened

The other benefit to this information is that the sales rep can view both the referring and visited page URLs (as shown in the comments). In this case, if I were a prospect, the sales rep could click on the referring URL and actually view my Twitter profile. They could also read over the blog post that I went to (which could be helpful in a call when determining what my interests are).

Just another way that Eloqua can help you read your prospect’s Digital Body Language.

Please feel free to connect with me on Twitter @eloquamike or on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemacfarlane01)