CRM resides in the attitudes and perception of people and what they acquire, individually or as a group. Social media is the place where people pride themselves with what they can afford. The marriage between social media and CRM seems rather unnatural only in the sense that social media is still relatively young while CRM has been around for many years.

The advent of social media has been viewed as a revolution - the Gavroche of the new millennium. Some say that it tipped the balance in favor of Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign. And that it connected the participants to the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street events, encouraged engagement between individuals with similar interests across the world, etc.

Consider these statements from a popular social media channel:

"Here's what I read: . . ."

"My new [brand name] phone is awful!"

"Going to watch 'Breathless.' Anybody in?"

What overarching feeling do you think people are left with?

For businesses, this means waves of hard-to-control customer information. In other words, tons of daily unstructured data describing not only the engagement of customers with their purchases, but also the general attitudes and beliefs of those customers.

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Keywords: supply chain solutions, retail supply chain, social media affects supply chain, social CRM and unstructured data