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Next Gen Social Networking, VRM and CRM

Member: Jamesrichard
Located in: London, United Kingdom (Great Britain)

Business Details

Business Stage:
  • Start-up/Seed (business to be started)
Amount Required:
  • £10000.00
Investment Types:
  • Debt/loan financing
  • Equity/shares
Reasons:
  • Product R&D
  • Initial start-up of business
Industries:
  • Advertising, PR & Marketing
  • Internet Services/ISP/Web
  • Publishing & Media

Short Description

#iHASHED is a social networking site with inbuilt VRM/CRM elements that both individuals and companies can use to promote monetised content - all while giving the user complete control over the published site content in the spirit of true VRM.

The problem: Currently, social networking gives subscribers a voice to speak and to listen but no platform to be heard beyond their immediate user group. The sum effect of the status quo is that anyone who does not pay for (mostly ineffective) advertising or isn't already famous cannot reach a new audience online. Thus, the current billion-pound CRM software industry is essentially chasing consumers online who themselves are 'shouting into the wind'.

The solution: My site reverses this: making sure the 'fundamental data model radiates from the individual' (customercommons.org) by giving the subscriber one-click CRM software to follow companies, as well as allowing companies to follow consumers: this is a 360-degree about-turn on current CRM thinking.

Thus, my site will be a "space to be heard" whereby companies can genuinely hear what customers think about them - because my site gives them a voice to be heard - as well as their preferences, complaints and shopping habits. As this site, furthermore, leverages all the features of the large networking sites I anticipate site popularity to be exponential, which will reflect in the accrued ad revenue from integrated advertising platforms in an online sector that accounts for 11% of all web visits online.

Executive Summary

PROJECT AIM

#iHashed is a social networking site that allows private individuals, businesses and marketers to actually influence trending across multiple sites and outlets all with one-click functionality. The bottom line with social networking is that there is no site that allows users to post comments, blog entries and updates and be guaranteed network wide exposure and feedback: #iHashed guarantees this in ten possible site feeds, as well as posting to users' external outlets, and hence multiplies the relevant reach of hashtagged posts many fold. In this way #iHashed gives subscribers a platform to be heard, while at the same time making sure the 'fundamental data model radiates from the individual' (customercommons.org) by giving the subscriber one-click CRM software to follow companies, as well as allowing companies to follow consumers: this is a 360-degree about-turn on current CRM thinking.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

With many businesses giving up on their Facebook business pages (Money Crashers, 2015) due to a perceived lack of promotability while Twitter 'has not been able to translate its network into a strong commercial proposition' (B2C, 2015) due to it being a public proposition with little user information, the climate is right for a return to the original promise of social networking and the internet - and fulfill that promise.The real promise - and what individuals, companies and social technologists (forbes.com 2015) are desirous of returning to - is communication through education and entertainment.

The problem: The social networking scene as it currently exists actually discourages by design content rich - and hence entertaining - posts in favour of brief, shallow 'updates/headlines' (Twitter) and basic communication (Facebook), while CRM software scrambles to try and make sense of innumerable reams of data to make customers 'happier'. This problem is largely down to one factor: the inherent 'exclusivity' (masquerading as 'connectivity') of the current social networking scene: in the case of Twitter, you have no real way of being heard unless you are already famous; from a marketing standpoint - in the case of Facebook in particular - you certainly have no access to mineable data unless you pay them, and even then, their conversion rates are so statistically abysmal even General Motors recently pulled $10 million in ad money (businessinsider.com 2013). (A large part of the problem with advertising on Facebook and Twitter, by the way, is that their sites are not about entertainment; entertainment being a key factor in engaging people on a networking site.)

Bottom line: The average subscriber on any existing social networking site (or any site) has no way to influence and promote ideas that are important to him or her: ideas that marketers need to hear anyway to be able to target advertising. Win-win.

The solution: give subscribers the tools and a platform TO BE HEARD.

THE 'CUSTOMER'S VOICE': NO ONE IS LISTENING (BECAUSE NOBODY CAN)

Social media is uniquely adept at giving 'everyone' the much-touted 'voice to speak' (hence the myth of online empowerment through social networking); however, with no platform to be heard, we're all just shouting into the wind. And all CRM can do, ultimately, is 'listen in on' these voices shouting into the wind. All very untargeted and haphazard as 'communication' goes - regardless of your aim: personal, social, commercial, academic or professional.

How to deploy this site idea, conceptually and technically, to ameliorate the status quo?

My site aims to reverse the current state of not having a platform to be heard: a key part of my conceptual/technical innovation is about turning the tables: my site will provide intuitive CRM tools to all subscribers (who may well be companies, academics, news corporations, influencers as well as the public, etc.) as part of the interface, allowing subscribers to listen in on the internet and participate and respond to current trends, and create their own trends: a complete 360 degree about-turn on current CRM thinking.

I include a quote from a writer on the influential consumer site, Customer Commons, who has actually drawn hypothetical conclusions along similar lines (though with no way to deploy it):

'Here is where CRM needs to go: Customers need to track companies, and use their own systems to do it. A model that is the reverse of the current system, companies tracking and marketing to their own customers. A system that the fundamental data model radiates from the individual, each customer tracking multiple companies. It?s not how CRM systems are built now. It should be. [...] Each customer should have records of companies and products they deal with, what they think about them, what issues they have, what they recommend. That is already happening to some extent [...] This trend isn?t stopping there needs to be more tools that support customers more efficiently, so each customer will have evolving tools that hopefully work more like Facebook than Oracle.' (http://customercommons.org/2012/08/20/why-crm-needs-to-turn-around/)

Hear, hear to that! Of course, the CRM system and data in this case will belong to my site, not individual companies, so I will be able to develop CRM tools based on the opt-in data the subscribers provide.

THE MANAGEMENT

I am the sole creator and investor of #iHashed, now looking to develop the project through investment and added skills. I am an academic writer, copywriter and teacher, working in the area of the psychology of communications. It is this discipline that brought me to the (frankly surprising) conclusion that online social networking is largely inefficient, limiting and counter-intuitive in terms of basic human communications. In consultation with my web design team, to whom I outsource coding, I have designed a platform to ameliorate existing networking weaknesses and build on strengths, leveraging the power of the larger networks to the benefit of my platform and registered subscribers.

THE OPPORTUNITY

I am looking to raise £10,000 in capital to code architecture that will integrate the most effective features of existing social and business networks into one powerful platform. I currently have interest from a London-based development company that is interested in doing the development work.

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