The Luxor CRM team reached out to give me a briefing on their company and their product set and it was great to learn more about them.  The company, founded in 2000, is located in Toronto, Canada.     They have a relatively small set of customers, around 50 – 60, ranging in size from  5 users to 3000+.

I like that they consider themselves a boutique firm, focused  more on customer success than bringing on new customers.    Their thinking is that 90% of the time CRM deployments fail due to lack of adoption (I agree) and their focus is to create a deployment plan (free deployment) and customized experience that maximizes value while minimizing adoption issues.

What about pricing?

Luxor CRM is confident in their overall solution, their ability to deliver a solid product backed up with services and support to make their customers successful.  They offer a month to month option (no contract required) and see most of these customers convert to a standard contract.  The month to month option speaks volumes and I am hoping to see many more vendors embrace the flexibility this offers customers.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by John Moore.

I have had several great conversations this week.  One that I wanted to share with you was a discussion I had with Alex Reed, an Independent candidate who is running for the Maine House of Representatives (District 99).  We spent our time discussing how to bring collaboration and communication strategies and tools to the local level, an important goal,  a difficult challenge, especially in a state where broadband penetration is relatively low.

Note that Alex has a lot of experience in this area, having worked with several non-profits in social media roles in recent years.  He sees need for Government 2.0 and, even more importantly, the need to get citizens the information when, and where, they need it. 

A common complaint that he hears is people want more visibility into how their government is spending their money.  Another problem, people often do not understand that strategies and technologies exist to help answer budgetary and other questions that surround government.  How do we change this?

Education is the starting point.  Alex sees real excitement from people he engages with when he explains what is possible with Government 2.0.    The challenge is taking the one to one, or the one to small group, conversations to a larger, more scalable, level to help people understand how this can benefit them and their personal needs.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by John Moore.

Rules….   Guidelines….  It does not matter if you are in the 38% of companies blocking social media (in the United States), are leaving social media access wide open, or are looking to strategically leverage The Social Ecosystem.  Guidelines about what is, and is not, acceptable, are critical to the success of your Social Organization.

There are hundreds of great examples of real-world Social Usage Guidelines available across the web.  This post is providing you with a template that you can use to create a set of guidelines for your organization, your Social Organization.

Note that any set of organizational guidelines need to be regularly enforced. I would recommend that Social Organizations review these with new employees and give regular, quarterly is best, training sessions for all employees.  The use of social media is too much a part of how people live to simply train once and expect people to remember your rules.

Also note, only 20% of companies worldwide have a policy for their employees (according to Manpower, see below).  Do not make this mistake.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by John Moore.

The folks at SimplyZesty.com have done an outstanding job with this video and you should watch it.  The statistic that caught my eye?  Users coming from Social Media sites are 10 times more likely to buy something on your site than those coming from some other place (71% versus 7%).  The Social Customer lives.

John

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Republished with author's permission from original post by John Moore.

This is not another analysis of the Old Spice Guy campaign.  At this point, if you haven’t formed your own opinion you’re not interested and you will not be swayed by my thinking on the topic.

The point of this post is that I have seen more discussion about what class of marketing/pr/CRM/advertising/you-name-it that this campaign falls into.  If you look at posts like this one from Wim Rampen,this one from Harish Kotadia, PHd, and this one from Prem Kumar you will see little discussion about the effectiveness of the strategies and tactics and instead see a debate about if this campaign is Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Marketing, Public Relations, and on and on and on.  At best we have a lack of clarity about these concepts, at the worst we have an industry-wide confusion made worse by:

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Republished with author's permission from original post by John Moore.

How many of us still think of IBM as that group of old-school business types that just don’t know how to keep up with the pace of business?  I mean, come on, they still talk about things like mainframes, how much can they really understand?

IBM invited me in for a briefing last week to learn more about their offerings in the social software space and I was pleased with both what I saw and what I heard.  While IBM suffers from an inability to build buzz around their solutions they have a good solution and are making some solid sales.

One of the first questions I asked Jeff Schick, Vice President of the Social Software division, had to do with why they were not even mentioned by Gartner in the Social CRM space.  Truth is, the Social CRM space is important but it is only a part of what they offer.  I agree with Jeff.  Social CRM is but a piece of what they offer, IBM is creating solutions for the entire Social Ecosystem and Social CRM is but a slice of that universe.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by John Moore.

Do you have an iPad?  Do you use Twitter and/or Facebook?  If you answered yes to these questions you have to download the new Flipboard application.  This is the Twitter and Facebook application that you have always wanted,you just did not know it until now.

Flipboard bills themselves as the world’s first social magazine.  While not perfect, I love the first version of this app more than any other iPad app I amusing (except for Evernote which is in its own class).

Flipboard enables you to view, in a magazine-style format, your Twitter and Facebook feeds.  Here is why this is different, worth paying attention to:

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Republished with author's permission from original post by John Moore.

Last November I built a short series to help organizations with their 2010 Social Media Plan.  The series was well received and I think we all learned a lot in the process of writing and commenting back and forth.

Sometimes, however, it really helps to boil things down to a simple checklist, keeping it simple to execute and simple to understand.  I was really excited when I saw Andrew Wilson, Web and New Media at Federal Government – HHS – SAMHSA, post a really good checklist for getting started with Social Media.  I immediately reached out to Andrew to see if I could build off of his checklist to give something to help people within The Social Ecosystem and he was nice enough to agree (Thanks Andrew).

Before we construct the checklist it is important to keep in mind that you must always define your goals up front.  No checklist is perfect on its own.  While it is a great guideline, it is only that, it needs to be modified  to meet the goals you have set forth.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by John Moore.

As customers we have all experienced bad customer service at some point.   The impact of this negative experience can range from minor grumbling to completely walking away from a given brand or product (ask me why I won’t buy another Ford). 

In this poor economy leaders often fall back to looking at customer service as a cost center and this viewpoint is common across the public and private sector. The focus shifts to revenue generating activities like giving out more parking tickets or rushing products to market.  Customer service organizations see reductions in headcount, lower quality tools, and lack of training as the customer service organization is not seen as the revenue generators.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by John Moore.

Last week I met with Laura Madison, a criminologist in Canada, about her research. Laura is researching how police departments across Canada, the UK, and the US are leveraging Twitter as part of their jobs. This research should act as a baseline to help police departments across these regions understand what is working, and what is not, ultimately creating a set of best practices.

While her research is not done, she was kind enough to give an overview of what she is producing.

• An index of police-related twitter accounts across the UK, US, and Canada. This index will include both official and personal accounts.
• For each account she and her partners are gathering a lot of data, including:
  • Number of tweets, followers, following.
  • Are links to social media policies included?
  • Level of discussion by the account, ranging from locked to talkative.

She is also collecting a lot more information which I have elected to leave out until her research is completed.

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Republished with author's permission from original post by John Moore.