Towards a Framework for Integrating Social Media, Customer Relationship, and Knowledge Management

Abstract

Academic concepts such as customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management (KM) are well established concepts today. Integration between these two concepts has been established with the term customer knowledge management. Social media (SM) is now fast growing and has an intrinsic nature hence reducing barriers of varying concepts. It has been integrated with CRM through the term social CRM (SCRM). From the above it appears that there is interdependency between the concepts. It is on this basis that this work proposes a process model integrating SM, SCRM and KM. Through data collected from expert interview and extensive literature review, this study explored the possibility of interdependency between these concepts to make a case for the process framework for business organisations. The framework, leaning on the CKM model was able to identify strategy, mindset and engagement management, including knowledge context as crucial additions to the existing model towards integrating the three concepts.