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.

As a grizzled CRM veteran, you probably have mixed feelings about all of this touchy feely stuff like the social customer and social business. The bottom line is that it's probably set you off a bit with regard to all these new things people are calling Social CRM. After all, you're the expert in CRM platforms, right? Who are all of these social media and PR people with all of these bizarre new software tools they're calling Social CRM?

Oh, I forgot the Sales 2.0 people who forgot that SFA died all by its lonesome.

Social CRM doesn't look like Twitter. It doesn't look like a product review website. It doesn't look like a Social Support Community and it doesn't look like a Social Media Monitoring tool. It doesn't look like a viral marketing campaign either. Support communities are logical extensions of CRM and linkage is usually available. Simple enough. Product reviews and and SM monitoring, however, are really about the people that are conversing, and these people are either in your database or they should be – as they already would be in a support community.

Don’t build your business on silo’s

So, what is Social CRM? Don't worry, it's really simple as far as you're concerned. Here's what traditional CRM looked like with regard to relationships. All of it in one place, the contact – inherited by the Account and anything else you tied into it.

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

If you look at CRM like I do, one of the things on your radar screen should be the identification of silos in a business. From an operational standpoint, they may be necessary, but from the customer’s standpoint, they are nothing but annoyances. Unfortunately, the vast majority of CRM acquirers (software) don’t think through the part where they actually have to redesign their business to effect the change needed to present the appearance of one company to their customers. So, did we think that the social customer was going to do that for us?

Maybe worse, did we think Social Media companies were going to do that for us?

As we all get super excited about all the over-hyped Social CRM software out there, it’s easy to lose site of the fact that almost none of it is supporting the customer-centric business. Look at what Gartner considers to be Social CRM, and you will see a number of seemingly unrelated attributes they just throw into the mix

• Social Monitoring
• Customer and Partner Hosted Communities
• Enterprise Feedback Management
• Product Reviews
• Sales Contacts

Product Reviews

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

…Innovation creates a hockey stick — as in market growth.

If the rest of the “sCRM” world doesn’t react quickly, they could miss out.

I just read Martijn Linssen’s post about his thoughts on Nimble and he was dead on. Everyone is talking about being where your customer is, but until now no one has designed a solution that worked that way. Duh! That’s really all I can say. Not only that, you need to be where your customer is while you are still where you want to be…in Nimble.

I was talking with a customer this week who was comparing and contrasting Oracle OnDemand versus a product we were working with and he was demonstrating a lot of excitement about the ability to customize fields and forms at the end user level. Not only that, the ability to build business rules within and around that functionality. All with no programming.

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

Along with many of my blogging peers, we are syndicated across a number of CRM related properties. Sounds great, doesn’t it? More readership means more exposure for us. You might be surprised to hear me say that it isn’t all a bed of roses, though. In truth, I’m a big believer in the Social CRM mantra of engaging with your customers wherever they are. That could be in a community, but let’s be real…not everyone is going to have an online community.

In the case of blogging, the engagement is through the commenting system – and to a lesser degree Twitter. Twitter doesn’t really count, in my opinion, because of it’s loosely coupled relationship to the blog post (thru back links and 3rd party products). The real engagement has to happen, back and forth, through comments on the post. So, what’s the problem, you ask? Syndicated blogs have worse than loosely coupled relationships with the originating post.

It’s The Comments, Stupid

For the same reason that I don’t like dealing with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gist, etc. and etc., I struggle with the fact that comments on one of my posts could be scattered around the known Universe. I’m not even sure I know every place my post could reside, let alone know when a comment has been made at that location. There is simply no tieback to the originating post other than an inbound link. Not in a meaningful way (not even a pingback).

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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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Republished with author's permission from original post.

I think we’ve come to a critical juncture in the discussion about the Social Customer. It seems that we keep focusing on the customer directly, and not in the context of the jobs people do to make the customer experience and outcome the best it can be. Just engaging in social conversation using social media, does not make a customer centric business, or person. It simply makes you someone who is distracted by shiny new things. That can be dangerous, because you still have to get the rest of your job done – and this distraction is invariably making that job harder to do.

What is the job to do done? Is a job sharpening pencils? Or is that only part of a bigger job? Is the job data entry? Or is that part of a bigger job. Is the job fork lift operator, or is that part of a bigger job? In my extremely mind-blowingly simple diagram below, I’ve depicted…

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Republished with author's permission from original post.

What Does the “s” Mean in  sCRM?

Did you notice anything? I used a lowercase “s” because it’s time for the hype to be over (I didn’t come up with it – but saw it on Twitter). It’s time to start putting the social extensions to traditional CRM into place. There’s really no reason to keep talking about the social customer anymore either. Why? Because we all know that our friends, family, vendors, prospects and customers do more than email. So, what are we going to do about it?

I’ve got an idea!

Instead of creating completely ridiculous new interfaces that completely ignore the continuing realities of complete businesses – and not just the individual sales or marketing or service faces – why doesn’t someone create something that takes into consideration the jobs we still have to do – and give it to us where we’re already doing it? Why can’t more traditional interfaces be enhanced to incorporate engagement channels that we are all using beyond email, phone and the face to face stuff?

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Republished with author's permission from original post.

I’m not going to quote it directly, because even 140 characters seems long-winded these days, but I believe Paul Greenberg’s tweetable definition of Social CRM has been blown way out of proportion. So much so, that I actually feel that I need to build a bridge. Can you believe it? The iconoclast is building a bridge!

I’ve read and heard many people since the time this came out talk about the customer controls the conversation. And then this morning, I read a Tweet by Graham Hill, I’m sure completely out of context – but I read it anyway, who said the customer doesn’t control the conversion. I realize he wrote “conversion” and not “conversation”, but it’s the control thing I zeroed in on. Let’s talk about this for a minute.

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Republished with author's permission from original post.

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.

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Republished with author's permission from original post.