We’ve been all over the social customer and the social business to the point now where it’s becoming annoying. Frankly, if you’re a business owner, executive or professional you’re probably ready for some stuff that fits into the job you already have – not a job the social media companies hope that you’ll have. You’re in Sales, Marketing and Customer Service – for the most part – not Public Relations.
Creating new jobs for social media monitoring, or even elaborate new processes designed around social media tools, is simply not something the average business is going to justify easily. In fact, even the ones that are really customer centric want simple, elegant and well thought out strategies for incorporating the reality that people are engaging on the Internet. See, I didn’t even have to use the word social. No one even knows what the hell that means unless you spend 3 hours reviewing a ridiculous PowerPoint deck. What it really comes down to is what it’s always come down to – relationships.
Relationships Haven’t Changed – But There Are More Venues Now
Anyone that has been successful in business will likely tell you that beyond break-through innovations, most success comes from great relationships. These can be with customers, advocates, referral sources, partners, vendors, etc., etc. That’s not a secret. A relationship has to be personal to build rapport and trust. And these are the core elements of the relationship that will help you get, understand and keep customers. Many would have you believe that the social customer no longer values a phone call, a game of golf or a baseball game. They may tell that this is not scalable, and it’s not. What it is, though, is high quality and scalable could very well mean scalable revenues and declining margins. I don’t know, that’s just a hunch.
Understanding the sentiment of a population of customers (or non-customers) who are online complaining about your product (or maybe exalting your product) isn’t really pro-active, nor does it get to the heart of the matters important to them – their jobs. While that’s another discussion, what’s relevant here is whether anyone is finally understanding the convergence of social media and CRM at a platform level. Normally, I try to stay product agnostic, but with all the flailing around in the Social CRM world – Social Media Monitoring, Social Support Communities and really bizarre Sales 2.0 efforts: all claiming to be Social CRM – it was refreshing to see someone from the CRM side of the world display a better understanding of the power that social collaboration and engagement tools will bring to the CRM world. That’s right, not the Social Media world – you guys don’t really get CRM, nor would I expect you to.
For those of you who don’t know of Jon Ferrara [1], he was the creator of Goldmine. And at the time, it was a ground-breaking product. He hasn’t been involved with it since FrontRange purchased his company, but the forward thinking in it’s design was unquestionable at the time. Since then I’m guessing Jon took some well deserved time off, but he apparently didn’t stop thinking. In fact, for someone I haven’t seen heavily engaged in the social media world, he has obviously been paying close attention from 30,000 feet, because his soon to be released product (Beta) has incorporated relationship capabilities that span the traditional, and the new media, elements of relationships. The cool part is how they all come together just like you’d expect. Smack your forehead . And this has all be done without forgetting that traditional elements of CRM are still going to be required. Therefore, while modern in design, there is still structure to it that makes complete sense.
The service is called Nimble (www.nimble.com [2]). The killer part of the relationship side of this offering is that you can be wherever your customer, partner, vendor or prospect wants to be and still be where you want to be. There is no attempt to draw them into yet another service. After all, the platform you are using isn’t what your business is selling (unless your in social media 
. I’ve talked about other cool platforms I like – such as InfusionSoft for it’s innovative marketing engine – but Nimble really understands the relationship side from an individual’s (and team’s) point of view. We’re not talking about push here – we’re talking about engagement and collaboration. Facebook gets it from the personal side of things, LinkedIn from the professional side of things. Nimble pulls them into the business side of things in a way that can be used, simply.
How Will Nimble Do?
I can’t answer that question. But, with the relationship piece being completely free, I’m sure many evangelists will try it out, be everywhere the people they engage with are, and begin squawking loudly about it. It could go viral because of that. I’m hopeful that I will be one of the squawkers, but it has to deliver. I’m picturing myself never using a twitter client again, or visiting Facebook or LinkedIn either. There really won’t be a reason if this works the way I think that it will. We’ll see. Then moving on to the Sales or CRM modules will be very interesting indeed. I think you can expect all the good stuff (tools) we currently have to work with – but all tied into this relationship piece which I think is going to be a game changer for CRM in general.
Will it be the ultimate new CRM platform? Of course not, there will always be the next innovation. But this could very well be the current and meaningful innovation for our industry – or I will gladly jump over a candlestick.
Disclaimer: I thought Google Wave was going to be ultra cool and was extremely disappointed.