Pfizer tomtomed about what they call as the first slideshare channel from a regulated industry player and many social media pundits have taken up arms against this claim & termed the channel as not social at all since Pfizer is not interacting, but rather only using it again as a channel to publish its materials - a very one way communication.

I thought it would be prudent to make it plain about some of the aspects of social media that is not conducive to the regulated industry, especially Pharma. Of course there are far better informed people than me in this area, but this is just for my audience. Also, these are only my limited understanding, what I have gained by working with clients in these industries as well as attending seminars & being a panelist in their industry meetings.

Importantly, I am not a lawyer or an expert in these areas. You should not hold me responsible for anything that you do with the information I write in this post, if you are ok with that, please continue reading more after the jump. (If anybody from Pharma industry gets to read this & there are any factual mistakes, please do leave a comment & I will make the corrections).

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If you are from the US & watch TV or follow twitter, facebook and/or youtube closely to catch the fleeting memes as they unfold, you must have obviously noted the exalted buzz around the recent ad campaign to revive P&G's Old Spice brand, first on TV and then on the aforementioned social media channels.

Its been a hugely successful PR/Marketing campaign and I hear it to have proven ROI too already! I will not get too much into the details of the campaign & what worked and if it can be replicated or not, etc. You can get those from other sites far better suited to the purpose than mine. (some links provided below). I did not get into the discussions initiated by Jacob Morgan either (who initiated me to Sushi when I was in SF in May 2010 & is an up & coming Gen Y dude in the Social CRM arena).

What prompted to post me this commentary on that awesomely brilliant & tough campaign (Imagine 200+ videos within 2 days, can you script it all? Or even act in those many short clips?) is the editorial pick by CustomerThink.com of a post by old colleague Harish Kotadia (and currently an independent consultant) claiming this to be the best ever Social CRM campaign.

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“Every firm that intends to communicate, or permit its associated persons to communicate through social media sites must first ensure that it can retain records of those communications.”

– FINRA Regulatory Notice (January 2010)

I cannot comment on a regulatory policy of USA, IANAL and I am an alien to boot. But this sure adds a layer in the social media communications that makes the businesses slightly slower to adopt/use. What the above means is that we have been ignoring the specific needs of the various regulated industries in Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, etc.

We now need to not only monitor the social media or have CoTweet/Hootsuite kind of tools, but also be able to provide archiving solutions for the communications happening via social media. Audit Trails from a programmatic perspective & archiving from a infrastructure perspective. Kind of makes sense why Dell claims that 90% of data saved by enterprises are not read again! ;)

However, we do not need to archive each & every tweet or friending happening on the social web, just those that emanate from the company & its people as its employees (am still not clear if an employee can use their personal account for personal reasons without having to archive).

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Humans have always been social & until they were in villages, everyone knew everyone in their communities. With the growth of cities, and the rat race, a lot of that social aspect of humans is left underutilized. You know what happens to your muscles when you don't any longer use them as you used to? Yeah. But thanks to the Internet & especially whats now called the Web2.0 tech, which gave rise to social media & social networking sites, and the ever increasing computing capabilities in the mobile phones, people can find some help in re-exercising their social 'muscles'.

But this post is not about that. I wanted to talk about the Social Firm or the Social Business or the Social Enterprise (some call it the socialprise) and what potentials I see in them (mostly at a very high level, so high that its more like wishful thinking / philosophical).

Ever since I came across this wikipedia article on Autopoiesis (don't remember how) I have been fascinated by the concept & have wished it w.r.t. the internal & external use of social technologies by a business/enterprise/firm.

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I went to BSNL, a traditional, state owned national telephony provider here in India, yesterday to get a new EV-DO connection (we will talk about it a bit later). Folks working there are quaint & older than those in the private service providers. Clean, but not necessarily well groomed. The lady at the customer service booth does not even use a mobile phone. She has a landline at home and at office. So per her admission she doesn't need one. And her employer hasn't given her one anyway. The exchange is in an old buliding, with overgrown grasses & shrubs, etc. and just an old man for 'security'.

People who have not had the experience of dealing with BSNL, can take a look at their corporate website & certainly get a feel of what they are offline too. Informational in parts, functional, not really usable, not much support. Pretty inside-out as some of my friends would say. Its actually a big change in BSNL that they have the most up to date information on plans, tariffs, etc. on their website. You can even quote it when you are dealing with the customer service folks!

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On my flight from Dubai to Atlanta aboard DL 007, I read a short piece in the Delta in flight magazine on the Millenials. Given my interest in all things affecting Social CRM (hope its not news to you) I read it & found it interesting.
The article was written as a blurb for a newly released book called The M Factor, which is based on an extensive research done on the Gen Y or Millenials or Digital Natives or just about anybody born after 1980.

The article goes into a lot of details about the earlier generations, the differences in outlooks, etc. There are supposedly (I haven't read the book) a lot of case studies in the book. You could read the book [The M-Factor: How the Millennial Generation Is Rocking the Workplace] or the article. But heres what I found very interesting for me:

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I believe that my year old IT Landscape diagram is up for a few updates now. Predominantly in the Analysis side of things as well as in the examples for each of the components in it. There is however one tech that is muddling my thoughts. XAuth.

XAuth is a new initiative from Google, Yahoo!, Meebo, etc. - an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web. It could help as a bridge between 'individual' & 'community' social channels as per our SCRM vision diagram & in the User Components section of the SCRM IT Landscape diagram.

It is still not clear to me how much of a value it provides in terms of the functionality that it believes it provides to the end users. One clear value is that it will make the existing Open ID, OAuth, etc. very usable for the end users & thus could get wider usage. Businesses need to use it if they want to provide a good user experience, but wonder if it would be easier or tougher to get profile information into the enterprise systems. Because XAuth is supposed to be very good with Privacy implementation. The users' id even is not shared with anybody, just that the user is logged into some site that uses XAuth.

Links for further reading:
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There is a great discussion going on in Frederique Garzon's (@lalachad) blog post titled "Just what is Social CRM anyway?".

I am merely reprinting what I posted there (with a few minor fixes), and thus what follows would seem a bit out of place/context. I strongly recommend that you first read her questions & then continue further. In fact, you must also go through all the awesome comments in the post.

Businesses, especially large ones, those that call themselves enterprises, formed after the industrialization of manufacturing. When they were formed, they modeled themselves from what inspirations they could get from the other two huge organizations in existence then – government & military. So there is a heavy emphasis on command & control.

The advent of mass media enabled people with big bucks to go broadcast their messages. The common man had no choice but to listen to them because these ads subsidized their viewing costs. As a medium, these did not render to a way discussion (I like Mitch’s way of putting it – dialog, not two one-way communication). Businesses excelled in broadcasting. Since customers voice was not much heard they were thought to be dumb. Any negative messages were squashed by the PR machines with their heavy clout/lobbies with the media houses.

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Good friend, professor, thought leader, VP at SugarCRM and great guy to hang out with, Mitch Lieberman has put together a slick presentation using the awesome Prezi.com as only a professor with real world business experience can do.

His post gives some background on the presentation and provides context too. So please ensure you go through it.

His prezi helps you get your bearings if your thoughts center around:

• whats new with the customer (what does a Social Customer mean?)
• why is the power of communities increasingly important (what's new with online communities?)
• how are they affecting Business As Usual (is it all a risk or an opportunity or just a new way of life?)

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This is an interesting question that I see cropping up of late, since the news about the arrival of the new kid on the block - Social CRM - is reaching new ears. Is it just old wine in a new bottle or is it something more disruptive? I have been asked this when I meet people & strike a conversation around Social CRM, mostly from the CRM folks, who have just heard about it. The technologists are fine with it, its just another channel to be integrated to CRM, like an email or a call center, and they are happy if you give them the specifics on the integration modules.

But then people who are not too deep in CRM technology or who are involved with CRM from a business perspective (the later I have been interacting more only in the past couple of years), are not too happy with yet another prefix to CRM - it brings to them memories of the previous attempts like eCRM & mCRM.

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