Definitions. Worthless. Waste of Time. And I promise I won't retweet every day for the next year.

Possibly worse than defining engagement is measuring engagement. It sounds great. But, you’re probably missing the real problem…disengagement. Of course, you need to have customers in order to experience this phenomenon. Maybe that’s why people without customers over-engage in all of the wrong ways. It only ends up making you look desperate, in a segment built on networks.

Left Brain vs Right Brain Thinking

The right brainers are going to always lean toward engagement.  To them it’s hugely important and they are good at executing it. It doesn’t matter that the metrics are merely validation of you spending your time engaging. Is there really, in a social media world, a way to tie this into the bottom line? Don’t strain your right brain – there is not. And that’s coming from a mid-brain person. I’ve spent my career being creative, but I’ve also spent a lot of it involved with analyzing businesses objectively as well. You could test me, I’m not sure how the test would come out.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Mike Boysen.

I’ve been reading a simple, yet really really cool book this week. It’s called Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers. When Wim Rampen mentioned it recently the titled sounded a lot like me (ok, 1/3 – challenger).  As with most things I’m attracted to, it’s a simple framework that can be used by ordinary people to do amazing things. How can you argue with something like that? Isn’t that what it’s all about? The opportunity to be amazing, no matter how simple minded you might be (like me)?

I used to read business plans for a living in my banking days, but they were really such crap. They were nothing more than marketing tools to attract capital or financing. None of the people I was dealing with (on either side) were really that savvy. If the extent of the thought process was to fill in the blanks in Business Plan Pro, then we’ve really dumbed down the entire process of weighing risk against reward. I’m sorry to report that our economic woes show me things haven’t changed much, or if so, they’ve even gotten dumber.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Mike Boysen.

I was dragged kicking and screaming into the Social CRM fray – so, I apologize for the crudeness of this post, but I just have to let it flow.

A number of years ago, I began a personal journey to discover where the real value of CRM was hiding. I was tired of installing software that my customers believed would rock their world – when it clearly didn’t (maybe a little ). I began my website, Effective CRM, as a place for me to begin writing about all of the things I was piecing together about how a business could get value out of their CRM initiative. While I was doing this, I heard about Twitter through a blog – and the title of it was something like “Twitter is the new CRM.”

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Mike Boysen.

If United broke planes, that would be really big news. So, it should be big news that Verizon breaks phones. I’ve been impatiently waiting for my Froyo update (Android 2.2). According to all reports, they were supposed to be done with the Droid 1 round on August 18th. The 18th came and went. No Froyo. Then last night (a day late – weeks of waiting), I was a excited when my phone notified me it was ready to receive an update.

I went to bed with dreams of candy canes and ice cream dancing in my head. I was going to have the new Android OS! Yay! I don’t even know what it does but I wanted it! So I jumped out of bed this morning to see the Motorola logo on my screen. It wasn’t done?

When I got to work I called Verizon on my land line and was told that this was a known problem and it was happening to others. I could take it into a store and have them attempt a master reboot. I suggested that we do it over the phone. It was just a simply key combination – and it didn’t work. “We’ll have to ship you a new phone, sir.” Um, really? Will I lose all my shtuff? “Yessir, you will!”

Ok, I needed to think fast since this phone is my lifeline. If I was going to be this inconvenienced, I needed something. I asked, “Can we work out some kind of discount on a DroidX? I mean, I’ll pay you, but I why do I want a phone that breaks from over the air updates?” No, sir. This is a warranty sitcheation. (typo represents overseas help desk).

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Mike Boysen.

A long time ago, really long time ago, when networked, multi-user CRM became a reality, we all thought it was so cool that we could see a meeting, or a To-do, or an Email that was created or acted upon by someone else. And so the story goes for nearly 20 years. Fast forward to today. Never mind, it’s the same old same old.

Without getting into continuums and things, I want to briefly collaborate with you on some practical applications of…collaboration. All within the confines of a CRM platform. That’s right, not in some other platform. Let’s bring it home, baby! We’re already here, so let’s figure out how to make it better.

What’s Cool About Facebook?

I do enjoy hearing what my friends are up to and making silly comments. More importantly, however, I enjoy helping my friends solve problems – like, what’s the best smart phone to buy (answer: Droid).  They can throw that out there on their status, and all of their friends can respond to, or “Like”, an idea. Using your personal network this way is powerful. I’ve relied on instant messaging for a long time, but this actually provides visibility across your network, and doesn’t put anyone single person (or friend) on the spot with a direct question.

What’s Cool About Enterprise 2.0?

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Mike Boysen.

Social is so now…so get over it already!

Something that we all learn over our careers, whether we admit it or not, is that the more things change, the more things stay the same. Yea, as technology is accelerating us into new directions and experiences, there is a lot of discussion about what businesses should be doing to adapt. And adapt they must. After all, things do change.

Adapt \A*dapt"\, verb (used with an object) [imp. & p. p. {Adapted}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Adapting}.] [L. adaptare; ad  + aptare  to fit; cf. F. adapter. See  {Apt}, {Adept}.] To make  suitable; to fit, or suit; to adjust; to alter so as to fit  for a new  use; -- sometimes followed  by to or for.

Notice that I didn’t use the word transform.

Transform \Trans*form"\, verb (used without an object) To be  changed  in form; to be  metamorphosed. [R.]

As strategy designers, I’m sure you have all planned for change. Everything changes. Your market changes as it matures or as innovation occurs. The economy changes, as we all know. Technology changes providing us with streamlined ways to deliver goods or services. Your plan has addressed the fact that changes occur and has built the mechanisms for measuring those changes and adapting to them – hopefully to your competitive advantage.

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I’m a long time CRM consultant and architect, but I’m a fairly horrible CRM user. I know this for two reasons. First, I deal with projects and one-off requests more than I deal with the traditional Sales, Marketing and Customer Service roles. I still deal with them, it’s just in the context of the project, generally or some ad hoc situation. I’ve worked with very few internal CRM implementations that have integrated project management into our CRM platform well. Mostly because we spent our time on our customers and not on ourselves.

The other reason I know I’m a horrible CRM user is because my customers always show me how to do something in a way that the vendor, or the consultant, had never thought of. Sometimes this is this great, and I try to remember it when designing a process or interface. Sometimes it’s horrible, and is the reason I spend a day and a half attempting to duplicate an issue.  The bottom line is that given a huge and comprehensive piece of software, there are, not coincidentally, an infinite number of possible entry points to a particular task – all through a big cumbersome application.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Mike Boysen.

Some of you may be aware of a post I wrote on a disappointing experience I had with Beachbody. They are the company that promotes fitness products like P90x, Slim in 6, Insanity, Turbo Jam and many more.  Anyway, I resolved my issues with them, as it appears to have been some kind of communication problem between the brains and the small toe. But, that’s not what I want to write about today.

I was just working out with my 18 year old nephew – and completely embarrassing him, BTW – when I took a closer look at how they are handling motivation and engagement. Essentially, they’ve provided the same stuff for a long, long time with improvements to the look and feel along the way. Basically it’s a multi-level marketing organization built on recruiting coaches. So, many of the people that purchase the program pay monthly dues to be coaches. Coaches can recruit people like me and get a piece of my action for anything I buy, and / or they can recruit more coaches and get a piece of their pyramid as it grows.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Mike Boysen.

Putting your Internal Needs First Puts the Customer Last

One of the most popular terms related to customer process I hear today no doubt came out of the mouths of conspiring academics. It’s since been picked up by the many consulting personalities and bloggers I know. What is it? It’s “what kind of information do I have that will let me do something?” Wait a minute, that’s not it. It’s Actionable Insights.

Why is that term so new, or is it? I don’t know. I do know that consultants, thought leaders and academics have this thing about crafting new terms for stuff we’ve been dealing with for thousands of years (or more). I guess if that’s what your passionate about, go for it. I’m just going to use it here because I don’t want to run over my self-imposed word limit. So, now that I’ve got that off my chest, here we go!

Where Are The Actionable Insights?

If you’re paying attention when you visit a client, more often that not, you’re going to run into years of silo building interwoven with a snarl of workflow and process – most of it undocumented because it was conceived in the minds of little empire builders. No offense. Now, I’m not going to talk about re-designing process from the outside-in because I would rather focus, today, on what you are missing because of the tangled mess you’ve created.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Mike Boysen.

Today, conversations, or threads, can take place over time and through a number of traditional channels. For example, you’re on the golf course with a client and he asks you to send him some more information on the topic you just mentioned. So, first you call him and leave a voice mail with the information he requested. Then, you think, I’ll just shoot him an email as well. Your customer reads the email, and replies with a number of questions. You call him back on the phone and suggest that you schedule a face to face meeting in his office. Then you have the meeting.

A real world thread isn’t just a conversation in a forum.

A major problem I’ve seen with traditional CRM platforms is that they do not present threads, so you can’t easily see the contextual conversation that took place. It’s almost like raw data. It’s there, but you have to piece it together yourself. This is one of the reasons I thought Google Wave might be cool (it’s not – yet) because it could have helped tie this together better in a single interface. So why do I bring this up?

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Republished with author's permission from original post by Mike Boysen.