The Answer to "Where Are the Social CRM Opportunities" is 42

What else is there to say. As consultants, we now have the answer to finding social CRM opportunities -- especially in the middle market. I'm glad I could help.

I'm used to taking great ideas and reverse engineering them. In this case, the ideas only seem to apply to the enterprise level businesses because I've never heard a peep from any of my customers about a pressing need for Social CRM. I'm still working on developing a more robust relationship marketing effort in most cases.

So, with the answer 42, we now have the ability to reverse engineer what all the big enterprises seem to have found -- social business nirvana. Hmm, where do we start? When I had a thing for financial engineering, it was easy. It could look at just about any output and figure out the inputs and how they were calculated. But 42? Hmmm....42.

Where do you think I should start?

All jesting aside, I think it's important that we start at the beginning. And Social CRM is really the end, or the periphery, to some sort of plan or initiative. I've been listening to a lot of consultants that have so much more experience than me that I'm almost hesitated getting involved in this conversation earlier this year. But, heck, I've got nothing to lose! :)

Can smaller businesses (and I do deal with them) or middle market manufacturing companies really benefit from this social CRM stuff? They've never really openly embraced the customer-centricity issue and still have silos all over the place. So what can we expect from them? And how do we start this conversation if we've never been able to start the more basic one -- who is your customer?

The answer is 42, but we still don't really know the question.