The Google speaker pulled out a droid phone, and is showing how Google Buzz will publish your location based on GPS should you desire. 6 mins ago

Archive for the ‘Social CRM’ Category

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Matrix: Companies Should Factor ‘Social Influence’ Into Total Customer Value

Categories: Influence, Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on February 3rd, 2010

Case Study: An Influential Mom Blogger Caused Mainstream Crises
Popular blogger, Heather Armstrong (@dooce) was dissatisfied with her non-working Maytag appliance.  Following protocol, she called their support number, yet her issue was not solved.  Stonewalled, she argued/warned the support staff that she was on Twitter, yet didn’t receive special assistance.  Escalating further, she then flexed a muscle and told them she had over 1,000,000 Twitter followers –yet the support rep did not budge.  Finally, she blogged and Tweeted against Maytag, initiating a boycott by her followers, “DO NOT BUY MAYTAG” and continues to chronicle her experience on her blog.  While critics suggest she wielded her power with irresponsibility, the point is moot, what matters is her social influence was not factored into the support triage decision making process –making a minor support issue a PR issue now on Forbes.

Just as companies factor in value of a customers celebrity status, buying power or customer loyalty –companies must factor in social influence or put themselves at risk. That’s right, customers with more Twitter followers are more likely to get better service and support than those that don’t.

Trend: Consumers Becoming Influential Using Social Technologies

  • Companies Already Give Preferential Treatment To Famous and Wealthy Customers. Companies have given high influence customers preference for years.  Take for example, shopping malls in the Los Angeles area have private entry ways for celebrities to enter the mall and receive priorty treatment.  Or, how B2B companies cater to their top customers with special event days, golf outings, or other clients with deep pockets.  Companies know that not all customers are valued the same, and as a result, treat them differently.
  • With More Consumers Adoption Social Technologies, the Problem Will Get Worse. The tide is rising, in fact with more consumers adopting social technologies, the amount of voices that companies will need to deal with will increase in volume.  Treating each customer with the best possible service and support (Like Zappos unique culture) is ideal –but not realistic.  Companies are ill-equipped to support millions of customers in real time on the social web.  They must have prioritization programs in place to handle the high risk/opportunity accounts quickly.
  • Companies Who Don’t Factor In Influence Put Themselves at Risk. Companies can choose to not factor in the social influence of customers, but will be putting themselves at risk.  It’s just a matter of time before a company has a social blowup, and by not trying to handle priority customers could cause a small issue to quickly escalate into a larger one.  Also, savvy competitors who factor in social influence can swoop and acquire high influence customers from companies that don’t. Your goal, is to stay off this list.

Matrix: The Four Phases How Companies Factor Social Influence

Description Benefit Risk/Costs
Do not factor in social influence Companies treat all customers the same, regardless of number of readers, followers or social influence. It’s cheap, companies don’t have to spend resources to understand if a single customer can influence others. Run the risk of not prioritzing a customer that could influence others, resulting in missed opportunity or greater PR risk.
Ad Hoc: Companies factor in social influence as it surfaces, such as a customer explicitly staying their influence, or a service member proactively having to find it. Companies don’t have to invest in a program or system that tries to calculate this influence. May miss opportunities of serviing a high influence customer, or may not realize a potential social crises till it’s too late.
Absolute Influence: Companies factor in total number of Facebook book friends and activity, number of Twitter followers and assign a raw number. Easy to calculate, and expect future Social CRM tools to do this with ease in the future. Data may not be accurate: Numbers can be manipulated and gamed, resulting in companies misallocate resources. Risk of alienating consumers without social influence.
Relative Influence: Companies factor in the true influence a customer has over their actual market –ignoring factors that may not be relevant. Finally, companies can focus on those customer with social influence that impact other prospects and buyers in their specific market Such a program is hard to setup and costly, and will require constant inputs and tuning.  Risk of alienating consumers without social influence.
Companies Must Factor In Social Influence

  • Recalculate The Customer Lifetime Value Quotient. For years, companies have factored in the total value of customers over their entire lifetime, Stanford has methods to calculate this called the Customer Lifetime Value formula.  These formulas factored in ability to be a repeat buyer, income level, and size of purchases over time.  Just as companies spend more time with customers with deeper pockets, they should also spend the appropriate type of attention with followers that don’t.
  • Yet Recognize, that Not All Social Influence Is the Same. To be efficient, companies shouldn’t reward those with spammy followers they got from an overnight follow script, but recognize that influence isn’t always about quantity, recognize there are at least two types of social influence:  The first, absolute influence is the total size of the individuals influence. Take Scoble for example, who has over a 100,000 Twitter followers and probally 100k subscribed to his blog is influential in a broad market.   However, his relative influence within the high-end fashion market is low. D&G must factor in both types of influence in understanding how to deal with customers, therefore while Scoble’s absolute influence is high, his relative influence to the fashion market is low.
  • Expect New Technologies To Address This Problem. We’re seeing a whole group of companies emerge in the Social CRM space that are trying to address parts of these problems.  Eventually, we should expect CRM systems to automatically indicate to customer facing employees the level of influence customers have.  In the most radical future, customers may choose to broadcast their preferences to retail stores before the walk in based on preferences and past purchases in order to receive a better experience. If this happens, companies can match with their social influence, and treat them accordingly.

I look forward to hear from you: have companies treated you differently because of your social influence?  What companies are doing this now?  What are the risks of doing it or not factoring in social influence?

Posted in Influence, Social CRM, Social Media | Comments

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Placing Bets On Social Strategy, SCRM, and Mobile in 2010

Categories: Social CRMPosted on January 5th, 2010

Screen shot 2010-01-05 at 12.43.57 PM

Above Image: Readers of this blog asked for coverage in Social CRM, Mobile Social Networks, and Community Platforms. This is in alignment with my goals for 2010.

First of all, thanks to those who responded to the 2009 Web Strategy survey, the results were telling. One of the questions that I asked was about areas of focus, I’m pleased to hear that the direction readers want me to focus is in alignment with where I’m headed. It’s important to have goals, (even my personal goals to live in Hawaii 30 days a yearlike Operation Bluewater) and I’m happy to share my focus for the coming year.

Here’s my baseline topics that I’ve been blogging about, and helping clients through advisory and research, I’ve been doing this since I ran the social program at Hitachi, back in 2006, over four years ago.

Organizational Social Readiness: 80% of a companies success is getting their organization ready through the right roles, processes, policies, measurement, only 20% should be on tools. I’ll continue to talk about organizational readiness.

Social Strategy: This also ties into social marketing strategy, which should be focused first on socialgraphics (how your customers use these tools) and business goals –not reacting to the latest technology.

Vendor and Technology Review: I’ll continue to cover the social networking space, like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, as well as enterprise systems like Community Platforms like Jive, Lithium, Telligent, Awareness, Mzinga, Pluck, Eos, Salesforce Chatter.

I make it a point in my career to always be uncomfortable: trying new things, looking at the upcoming changes and taking risks, I hope that by continuing to blog what I learn, we can grow together. The areas of increased focus for this year are:

Social CRM: An organization’s response to the fleeting customer in the social space, and how companies must provide a holistic experience to customers by creating processes, integrating new channels, and responding to customers in near-real time. Why this space? Most companies don’t know they need it, but as customers increase their social behavior, tacking, managing, and responding will become increasingly difficult. I’ve already blogged some of my findings, read all the posts tagged ’social crm’.

Location based and Mobile Marketing: I place to distinct separations between these topics, although they are intrinsically tied. I’m placing bets on the increased marketing context that’s available by triangulating information through mobile and location devices. Similarly, I’ll continue to look at applications that extend to mobile devices –a natural extension to the social web. I’ve never put a lot of effort into the immature mobile space, but the adoption of these mini-computers are taking off, the space is slowly moving out of diapers and into adolescence. Read all my posts tagged ‘mobile’.

Now back to you: What topics and focuses will you have during this coming year? What areas of education are you planning to bolster up on? What will you practice and deliver? Wishing you a very successful 2010!

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List of Companies Providing Social CRM Offerings

Categories: Industry Index, Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on December 8th, 2009

Social CRM: A Growing Segment
Yesterday’s post on Social CRM vendors not walking-the-talk raised awareness of this nascent space.  However, not everyone was thrilled with the effort, as CTO John Moore gave us an A for effort but a C- for results, and Kim Kobza, the CEO of Neigborhood America (they were an early adopter) left a comment on John’s post suggesting we missed the mark (also, SAP ’s passionate team strongly represents).  Although we stand by our scoring, both John and Kim are right, our evaluation yesterday was only on a small subset of the industry, but a manageable starting ground, as we continue to unearth the variety of players.

Tracking the Market with an ‘Industry Index’
For a few years ago, I’ve created what I call my posts called the Industry Index (see all) lists to track companies in any particular vertical, it helps me, vendors, and buyers to track the space.  I expect this space to rapidly increase in size as social channels will be bolted onto CRM vendors, and many brand monitoring and community platforms are adding workflow, triage, and tracking capabilities. The purpose of this list is to quickly capture the vendors participating in this space, and to acknowledge those that were not on yesterday’s review, I expect there to be many more vendors who leave a comment, which we can quickly add to this list.

We owe it to the market to try to include as many as possible, although it’s going to be very difficult as this space quickly grows. So first, let’s try to put some scope around this space with a definition.

Social CRM Definition
We prefer Paul Greenberg’s definition of Social CRM, which he summarizes as:

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.” (also read his 2009 review of this space on ZDnet)

It’s a broad definition, but the key criteria he lists out are enough for me to go on.

List of Companies Providing Social CRM Offerings: (32 vendors total)

Traditional CRM Vendors offering Social Integration (10 vendors)

  • ACT!:  This barely fits the scope of social crm, but ACT! allows a single individual to manage multiple types of information, including social, however if this product was extended across an enterprise, it fits the quota.
  • BatchBlue: While not a ‘traditional’ CRM like many of the others listed below, has traditional sales automation features, but also connect with existing social graph data, think social aggregation of contact lists.  After watching the demo, it looks like you have to manually enter feeds of contacts, rather than auto-finding data from social graphs by scraping.
  • Buzzient: Offers a CRM platform that provides social media analytics that can be used for web marketing, customer tracking, or reporting.  They have partnerships with Salesforce, Oracle, and SugarCRM.
  • Microsoft Dynamics:  Offers Accelerators (here and here) that “Allows business professionals to monitor and analyze customers’ conversations on social networking sites, and as a result, provides real-time status updates about their products and services” (thanks Menno, who writes on the topic) They are also partnered with Neighborhood America
  • NetSuite:  Offers social CRM with a partnership with InsideView and has Twitter integration (submitted by Paul Greenberg)
  • Oracle Siebel Social CRM: Promises the ability to provide insights based on the buying behaviors of similar customers, as well as shared content to be used between sales teams.
  • RightNow CRM: Offers several features in their suite such as Support Communities, Innovation Communities, Cloud Monitoring, and Social Experience Design. Rightnow recently acquired Hivelive an enterprise community platform.
  • Salesforce: Offers acces to Social Networking like Facebook and Twitter. Salesforce, like SAP is importing the Twitter “firehose” feed, and has offered social features like Q&A, and social networking like Chatter, and has lightweight LinkedIn integration.
  • SAP CRM: Imports the Twitter firehose feed, and
  • Sugar CRM: Offers “SugarCRM Cloud Connectors connect via Web Services to leading third-party data service providers such as Hoover’s, JigSaw and LinkedIn”

Community Platforms Offering Social CRM (5)

  • Jive Software: Community Engagement, offers data integration from Radian6, encouraging management of the discussion.
  • Leverage Software:  I recall that Leverage offers built in integration with Salesforce, but I was unable to find it on their site.
  • Lithium Technologies offers the Social CRM Suite offering features such as Community Applications, Reputation Engine, Actionable Analytics, CRM Connectivity, and Social Web Connectivity.
  • Neighborhood America: Has had a partnership with Microsoft Dynamics, read press release, (they were early on in March 2009) and commentary from Paul Greenberg on ZDNet.
  • Concourse:  Offers a variety of integration modules to a variety of apps, including a CRM module that’s prebuilt. (via pjk54)

Brand Monitoring Offering Social CRM (3)

Social Media/Twitter Clients (2)

Social Customer Experience (4)

  • CrowdEngineering:  Helps to match experts to customer problems, by using a recommendation engine and skill resource set engine.
  • Fuze Digital Solutions: Provides a broad and modular multi-channel customer care solution using a community knowledge base as its foundation.
  • Helpstream: Offers tools that allow customers to submit questions to each other, with integration into SalesForce in addition to community driven knowledge centers.  see video.
  • Parature: Offers chat-like features for support reps to interact with customers, then measures sentiment.
  • Get Satisfaction:  Is an off-domain (all the support is done on their site –not yours) community that now offers premium features that offer ability to manage discussions.

Sales 2.0/Social Graph Aggregation (6)

  • Flowtown:  Allows marketers to prioritize targets to contact by a variety of influence scores, and their social graph.  It then offers targeted email marketing based on those two criteria.
  • Gist: Offers a way to track the social behaviors of your customers and prioritize.
  • InsideView: Offers some unique offerings that mine a business social graph to provide alerts as a plugin to traditional CRM systems, Watch this lengthy demo.
  • Roving Group: Offers a product called ‘Roving Contacts’ that aggregates the social graphs and contact information from your address book.
  • SocioToo: Not the typical corporate enterprise company, this Dutch company offers a search page (and no real corporate site –by intent) that mines social graph data in public.
  • Xobni:  This cleverly named (opposite of inbox) Outlook plugin scrapes your social graph and most frequently emailed contacts improving email utility.  This barely falls within the scope of social crm, but if the data was able to export to other systems, it could start to apply.

CRM Applications and Plugins (2)

  • Appirio: Offers the ability for companies to create applications on Facebook which then marry data back to Salesforce, called Cloud Connectors.
  • SocialCRMTools: Offers integration with Salesforce that imports, monitors, and manages Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. (via John Perez)

Social Networks and Others

  • Twitter: Has made motions they plan to offer premium services to brands, that would offer verified accounts, then management-like features. The specifics are still unknown, as they sort out their business model. They have partnered with Google and Bing.
  • Google has announced real time search integration, and Bing has shown some early integrations.  While far fetched we should not completely rule them out as eventually building a dashboard for brands to manage their namesakes, advertising, and website analytics, or Google alerts.  Historically, they generate money off content created by publishers, so this actually falls in line with ‘organizing the world’s information”.
Not on this list? Leave a comment, with justification why you fit in Paul’s definition with a link to your site explaining more, I’ll take a look and add to it, please be patient while I review.  Also, if you want to brief Ray and myself, please read and submit to this briefing form.

Update: Business Partner Ray Wang and I have created a more detailed matrix of this space for our clients.

Posted in Industry Index, Social CRM, Social Media | Comments

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Finding: Social CRM Vendors Don’t Walk The Talk

Categories: Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on December 7th, 2009

I first posted this on the Destination CRM blog, thanks to Josh Weinberger @kitson. Update: The below is a partial view of the industry, do see this larger index of Social CRM vendors.

Surveying the Social CRM Industry
Business partner Ray Wang (focused on enterprise strategy) and myself (customer strategy) of the Altimeter Group is undergoing a major project for a client in the nascent Social CRM arena.  We’re surveying the landscape to learn about a variety of vendors in the space, their capabilities and deployments. A small portion of our survey is to see who’s eating their own dog food, and truly demonstrating they understand the ’social’ aspect of social crm and living it.

Companies Who Sell Social Products Should Demonstrate Credibility By Living It
While critics may be quick to dismiss the mere inclusions of a blog or community to a product landing page, the message goes much deeper. Social CRM isn’t just about bolting on a new plugin to your system like a new air foil on your minivan but instead a new way of doing business. The promise of social crm says that companies are truly listening to their customers wherever they are, responding, anticipating, and making the commitment to improve products and services. Vendors that are assisting brands with this promise to the market need to demonstrate they fully understand the ramifications of social crm –not just a keyword checklist of the buzzword du jour.

Criteria: How We Graded the Social CRM Vendors
There are four major areas of grading, from very tactical ability to 1) Simple sharing of social content from the corporate product page 2) Surfacing a developer or business community, and a look inside of the discussions in each community, with bonus points for integration with product page. 3) Thought leadership with relevant blogs on the subject, and a gauge of their level of interaction and any twitter accounts they may have. 4) A subjective look at the overall page experience in the context of a company that’s offering a ’social experience’.

Findings: Overall, Social CRM Vendors Aren’t Walking the Talk
We’ve decided to make our findings public, at least for this part of our client deliverable to see how different vendors that are in the Social CRM space are walking the talk.

Sharing Features on Product Page (out of 1 point) Community and Integration (out of 1 point) Thought Leadership: Blogs, Twitter (out of 1 point) Overall Social Experience (out of 1 point) Final Score (out of 4 points)
Salesforce 0 0 0 .25 .25/4
Microsoft Dynamic 0 0 0 .5 .5/4
SAP CRM .5 0 0 0 .5/4
Jive (Community Platform) 0 0 .5 .5 1.0/4
Oracle/Siebel Social CRM 0 .5 .5 0 1.0/4
RightNow CRM 1 0 .5 0 1.5/4
Lithium (Community Platform)* .75 .75 .75 0 2.25/4

To pass, companies need to receive greater than a .5 in each category for a total score of 2.0 plus making Lithium the only vendor to pass.

For details, see the data, and our justifications on this Google Sheet.

Highlights From Study
The product pages are devoid of true social interaction, and none of them actually surface discussions about how the market is even talking about them. Marketing machine Salesforce demonstrated they aren’t engaging in a social experience on their own product pages and SAP and Microsoft’s typical enterprise looking design stayed consistent with ‘boring’ social experiences. Although Oracle’s bland web experience looks like it’s designed for the media-phobes, there is links to community and thought leadership blogs. Despite the overall meager findings, there were a few social hopefuls such as Lithium (Altimeter client*) who integrated social throughout the experience followed by RightNow Technologies who demonstrated thought leadership through executive blogs. Honorable mention to Jive engaging online video that captures the spirit of the Social CRM movement. We know that soon every webpage will be social, even if you don’t choose for it to be, so companies should enable features that allow websites to have conversations. Social CRM vendors that want to demonstrate to the market they are experts at this space should gear up to demonstrate they’ve the ability to do as they preach –as for now, it doesn’t show.

*Altimeter Client. At the Altimeter Group we practice open leadership (also the topic of Charlene’s upcoming book) and disclose our relationships with clients, given their permission. We hope you will trust us more if we do.

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Quicktake: Extend LinkedIn’s Community To Your Website

Categories: Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on November 23rd, 2009

I was briefed as an analyst by Adam Nash, LinkedIn’s Vice President, Search & Platform Products to learn about today’s announcement around opening their network as a platform.

Announcement: Access LinkedIn Data From Other Locations Using The LinkedIn Platform
Starting today, developers worldwide can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications and Web sites. They’ve announced that OAuth os now available at Developer.linkedin.com.  Like Facebook Connect, this means that any website or any web application can allow users to login from their LinkedIn account on a third party site, and even publish information back to their LinkedIn profile and network from that third party site.

What It Means To Business:

Connect the Affluent, Educated, and Active Community To Your Site
The stats are obvious, they have a network of 52mm (a sixth of the size of Facebook’s 300mm+) engaged individuals that represent decision makers and those that aspire to be upwardly mobile in their career, view the stats page to learn more. In fact, over 51% earn more than $100k+ a year, and 23% earn more than $150K+ annually. Over 77% of community members have a college degree, making this an educated bunch, yet It’s not just about quality of community, their is an apparent degree of site activity, LinkedIn’s site rivals that of Forbes, and even the WSJ.com, according to Compete.

Your Business Applications And Website Should Never Be “Alone”
If your company is in B2B or trying to reach business professionals, chances are you have an application for them to use.  Now, as you launch them, you can quickly integrate with the LinkedIn platform, this way personal data is already populated.    This also goes for your corporate website, provide your users the ability to see which one of their LinkedIn contacts has been there, and encourage them to interact with your site and trigger messages back to their LinkedIn news page –fostering word of mouth.

LinkedIn Data To Be Pervasive
CIOs must wake up and realize the value of social networks, even last week, LinkedIn announced a partnership with Microsoft Oulook, extending it’s profile information to legacy email systems.  Data will get pre-populated, meaning your contacts can be viewable within the context of your existing emails, empowering you to know more about who you’re meeting even though you’ve never met.  We should expect in the future that existing Intranet networks will connect their LDAP to the LinkedIn profile.

And yes, if you haven’t noticed yet, the speed on innovation on the social web is increasing at a rapid pace, things are happening faster than ever. To get a good sense of the evolution of LinkedIn, I’ve created this matrix which shows it’s evolution and some predictions of where things are to head.

Web Strategy Matrix: Evolution of LinkedIn

LinkedIn Evolution Example Status
Destination Social Network LinkedIn is a destination social network, users to there, login and only communicate within the confines of the domain. Since it’s inception in 2003, this is how it’s been.
Application Platform Allows third parties to build applications that sit on the LI domain and interact much like Facebook’s Platform In Oct 2008, A small hand-selected group of companies like Box were allowed to do this, it’s not currently rolled out to others.
Portable Data Third party websites can allow users to login using LinkedIn identity, see which friends are also present, then spread information back to LinkedIn.com. This is today’s announcement, Nov 2009
Personalized Experiences on Third Party Sites Third party websites can provide personalized content to first time users by recognizing their LinkedIn profile. Prediction: Mid 2010
Social CRM LinkedIn partners with SalesForce, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, to allow data in LinkedIn to quickly be exported to CRM systems. As customers have queries or support issues, the CRM systems will trigger notifications to brand managers. Prediction: Late 2010
Augmented Reality Using mobile devices, users can quickly hold a device up a cell phone in front of a peer to see their LinkedIn data –without even having a conversation. Prediction: 2011

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Matrix: The Four Social Support Strategies

Categories: Social CRM, Social Media, Social Support, SupportPosted on November 18th, 2009

At the Altimeter Group, I cover Customer Strategy, which encompasses not only marketing, but also support, expect our discussion to grow as social technologies impact the whole enterprise.

The Social Support movement is afoot (see opportunities), and more companies will be connecting existing marketing and support systems with the social web. Many companies, like Comcast, Wells Fargo, Intel, BestBuy, JetBLue are responding to customers and in some cases, supporting them in near real time.

The challenge is that these teams are unable to scale, even a support team of ten full time folks at Comcast will have a hard time responding to all customers in all social channels. As a result, expect companies to resort to scalable ways to respond to customers, such as:

The Four Social Support Strategies

1) Do Nothing: Use Legacy Support Channels
Some companies will not respond to customers, it’s not in their culture, exposes them to risk, have specific legal or federal restrictions in place, or simply don’t get this space. In this case, these companies may only choose to support customers in their formal forms of support in 1800 numbers or on the official company websites

2) Employee Based Support:  Employees Respond to Customers
Many companies are assigning people in their support or product teams to respond to customers in the social web. The more conservative the company, the less people are officially able to support. Take for example financial services company Wells Fargo has a handful of “Social Concierges” that tweet on the @Ask_WellsFargo account, they set expectations around hours of service (insert banker’s hours joke here) and not to disclose account information. On the flip side, Best Buy encourages their thousands and thousands of “Blue Shirt” employees to respond using a Twitter CMS system that response from the official @Twelpforce account.

3) Peer Based Support: Customer to Customer Other companies will approach this by encouraging their top customers to respond on their behalf. By creating online communities where customers can self-support each other using Q&A features like Salesforce “Answers”, or my Lithium’s unique Twitter alerting system that encourages advocates to respond to prospects.  (Lithium is an Altimeter Group client).  It’s not just on branded communities, many companies encourage support from third party sites such as Get Satisfaction, who centralizes support for all products.

4) Automated Social Support: Computer Generated Tweets
Social CRM systems are going to be intelligent, in fact, they’ll start to incorporate bot-like features you can find in web-based chat support, or the logic from interactive voice systems (IVR), and respond to customers. Support and product teams can already tweet from some CRM interfaces, so attaching an intelligence module will be the next step –it could even come from existing employee Twitter handles.

Web Strategy Matrix:  The Four Social Support Strategies

Benefit Downside
Rely on Legacy Systems This keeps customers in the right process and funnel that the company is used to. Secondly, it doesn’t reinforce that customers should yell at their friends to get help from a company Missed opportunities: Angry customers could revolt starting a Groundswell, or leave an opportunity for competitors to swoop in and take dissatisfied customers.
Employee to Customer Provides a personal touch to help and assist customers, builds relations and trust For large companies, this is not scalable, and will result in companies prioritizing responses to the most authoritative or most urgent. If rolled out to support in all social avenues, it can be costly.  Lastly, it teaches customers to yell at their friends to get support.
Peer Based Support Companies can reduce costs by having customers self-support each other. Collectively, customers may often know more about the company’s products than the actual product team. Unfortunately, not all questions may get answered in a timely way, or answered correctly by staff who may have the inside details. Also, content in knowledge bases, wikis, forums, and Q&A features are often unstructured, messy, and hard to navigate.
Automated Social Support Companies can quickly scale by responding to customers faster, and more accurately, using automated responses. Some customers may feel cheated if they find out they are talking to a bot, and it may be more difficult to build that personal relationship.

Posted in Social CRM, Social Media, Social Support, Support | Comments

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Evolution: The Eight Stages Of Listening

Categories: Analysis, Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on November 10th, 2009

As Social Customers Become More Empowered, Organizations Must Have A Listening Strategy
As we approach 2010 planning companies need a strategy around listening. Sadly, most companies, and their agency partners don’t know why to listen or how. As a result, they must identify which stage of listening they are at, and then set a goal on which stage they see to aspire in 2010. I originally published this matrix for client workshops and a keynote presentation on developing listening and advocacy programs, and I’m going to continue to share more and blow-out each of my slides.

Web Strategy Matrix: The Eight Stages Of Listening

Stage Description Resources Needed Impacts
1) No objective at all Organization has a listening program but has no goals, nor uses the information for anything resourceful Simple alerting tools, like Google Alerts and feedreaders will suffice. At the basic level, simple self-awareness.  Yet without any action from the data, this is useless.
2) Tracking of brand mentions Like traditional “clip reports” of media relations, companies now track mentions in the social space.  Despite tracking there is no guidance on what to do next. Listening platform with report capability based on brand or product keywords.  Radian 6, Visible Technologies, Techrigy/Alterian, Buzzmetrics and Cymfony, Dow Jones are providers. Improved self-awareness to track volume of information, yet unable to track depth, and tonality of conversations.  As a result, not a full understanding of opportunities.
3) Identifying market risks and opportunities This proactive process involves seeking out discussions online that may result in identifying flare-ups, or possible prospect opportunities. In addition to a listening platform staff must actively seek out discussions and signal to internal teams.  Alerting tools, and listening platforms are required. Organization can reduce risk of flare ups before they become mainstream, identify prospects and poach unhappy competitors customers.
4) Improving campaign efficiency Rather than just measure a marketing effort after it’s occurred, using tools to gauge during in-flight behavior yields real-time marketing efficiency. Dedicated resource to manage reactions, activity, and sentiment to a marketing effort, and the resources to make course corrections nearly real-time.  Traditional web analytics tools like Omniture, Webtrends and Google Analytics are common. Campaigns can be more effective, as hot spots are bolstered, and dead spots are diminished.
5) Measuring customer satisfaction In addition to customer satisfaction scores,organizations can measure real-time sentiment as customers interact. Sysomos and Backtype have focus areas into this space. Customer experience professionals will have to extend their scope to the social web, using a listening platform and sentiment analysis.  Insight platforms like Communispace and Passenger offer online focus groups solutions. Brands can now measure impacts of real time satisfaction or frustration during the actual phases of customer interaction.  Then identify areas of improvement during customer lifecycle
6) Responding to customer inquiry This proactive response finds customers where they are (fish where fish are) in order to answer questions.  Example: Comcastcares account on Twitter asks customers if they need help –then may respond. An active customer advocacy team that’s empowered, training, and ready to make real-time responses nearly around the clock. Customers will fill a greater sense of satisfaction, yet this teaches customers to ‘yell in public’ to get a response.
7) Better understand customers Evolving the classic market research function, brands can improve their customer profiles and personas by adding social information to them. Social CRM systems are quickly emerging that tie together a customer record and their online behavior, locations, and preferences. Salesforce, SAP, both have partnerships with Twitter to synch data The opportunity to not only serve customers in their natural mediums, but to offer them a richer experience regardless of their customer touchpoints.
8. Being proactive and anticipating customers Minority Report: This most sophisticated form actually anticipates what customers will say or do before they’ve done it.  By looking at previous patterns of historical data, companies can put in place the right resources to guide prospects and customers. An advanced customer database, with a predictive application put in place, as well as a proactive team to reach out to customers before an incident has happened.  Haven’t seen any such application yet. Identifying prospects and engaging them before competitors can yield a larger marketing funnel, or reducing customer frustration as problems are fixed before they happen.


Exercise: Self-Assess Culture, Roles, Process, Data, and Tools
Use this matrix to initiate a discussion within your company on which stage you’re at, then put a plan in place to grow to the next level. Do note, depending on size and complexity of the organization, different groups may be in more than one phase. First, identify the characteristics your company currently has, then define which phase you’re in:

  1. Does the organization have the right culture setup that’s ready to listen?
  2. Is the organization prepared to react to customer opinions? how about in real time?
  3. Are the processes in place to triage information to the right teams? How about during a real-time crises on a Saturday morning?
  4. Are the right roles in place to listen? Are proactive marketing and support teams trained, empowered, and ready to respond?
  5. Is there a single repository of customer information or is it currently fragmented around the enterprise
  6. Lastly, what technology platforms are in place to facilitate this strategy? ? Hint: choose this last –not first.

For Dialog: Which Stage Are Companies At?
Curious to hear your professional opinions, what stage do most companies think they’re at?  In reality, what stage are they truly acting at?

Translations
Please translate into other languages, I’ll be happy to link back to you

Evolution: The Eight Stages Of Listening


Thanks to the team at Foreplay, a digital agency, making the slides available in English.

Posted in Analysis, Social CRM, Social Media | Comments

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Social Support: Are Companies Teaching Customers To Yell At Their Friends?

Categories: Social CRM, Social Media, Social Support, SupportPosted on September 23rd, 2009

Update: I polled my microblogging network on which brands have supported them on Twitter, see which brands have ‘taught’ their customers to yell at their friends.

Recently, I started teaching puppy Rumba tricks beyond the basic sit and stay, I even made a video. How do I do it? I show him the move, then praise and reward him once it’s done. Repeat, over and over. Although customers aren’t dogs, (save for Purina and Dogster), we’re slowly training our customers that if they want better customer support, that they should say it loudly and in public –thereby influencing their friends.


[As companies accelerate their social support efforts, responding to customers in public reinforces the behavior of complaining to everyone they know]


An Increase In Companies Providing Social Support
The most notable example is ComcastCares who is more responsive to customers using Twitter than on the phone. Secondly, the recent customer service flareup reported by popular blogger Dooce forced the Whirlpool to respond to her when she wasn’t satisfied with support from the call center. BestBuy launched Twelpforce, a way for its thousands of employees to answer questions from anyone that has a problem. Want more examples? See these recent examples for B2C and B2B.

Three Opportunities For Companies To Evolve Customer Support
This isn’t just about rise of social tools, in fact, customers have had bad experiences before. The difference? Their voices were just limited to those they could tell in physical proximity. Rather than think of this as a threat, companies should see this as three distinct opportunities:

  1. Fix the root issues, beyond the customer vocalizations. Looking deeper, this isn’t about social technologies, it’s really an indicator that the support systems within these companies are deficient. In many cases, customers try the standard support effort, hit a wall, then seek other avenues for self-venting, help, or just sheer observations of their frustrations.
  2. Transform your support processes and go where customers are.Companies should continue to support customers on the mediums that they’re using (like social sites and soon mobile), as they are unlikely to change their existing behavior of being social and telling friends about their life and work experiences. Expect companies to grapple with outsourced crowdsupport in GetSatisfaction, UserVoice, Facebook Groups, Yahoo Answers, and community bulletin boards.
  3. Evolve your support systems to connect with the modern marketplace. Expect a rash of social CRM features, companies and solutions to appear that connect existing call systems, knowledge boards, and customer databases with the public web –closing the gap that was once the firewall.

In the end, there will be hundreds of companies that won’t care what customers think, or have their margins squeezed to tightly they can’t afford to innovate and may suffer the fate of any organism that doesn’t evolve in a changing environment. This is an easy fix: their competitors will listen in, and poach their unsatisfied customers.

Update: Jennifer Leggio extends the conversation, and sees the same trend

Posted in Social CRM, Social Media, Social Support, Support | Comments

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Salesforce Pushes Social CRM Technology –But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone

Categories: Social CRM, Social Media, SupportPosted on September 9th, 2009

 

Mark Benioff and Jason from Twitter Wonder what your high school mascot guy did when he grew up? He went to enterprise software. Salesforce Demo Area Marc Benioff of SalesForce 

Service Cloud 2 Answers Integration Service Cloud 2 Instanet Knowledge Integration Service Cloud 2 Google Integration Service Cloud 2 Twitter Integration


Above: Pictures from Salesforce’s event

 

This post was co-written on a wiki with R “Ray” Wang, Partner and Colleague at Altimeter Group

Salesforce launches a new set of social apps that make CRM connected to the social web. So what does it mean?

Salesforce’s Twitter integration and application launch helps brands monitor what’s being said. Yet despite the fanfare, the application lacks a pre-determined way to identify the profiles of Twitter profiles and primary keys within the CRM database. Secondly, the system doesn’t provide a default setting to prioritize the influence (such as more followers) vs a profile with few followers –limiting the ability for brands to prioritize their support offerings.

Salesforce’s “Answers” product is a threat to community platforms that offer support-heavy features. Vendors like Lithium (although a SF partner) Jive, Telligent, Awareness, and Mzinga are impacted. Brands that have a strong SalesForce implementation will first look to their CRM vendor for social support offerings –reducing the pipeline for community platform new comers.

The newly minted “Knowledge” product, which harvests the IP from customer service reps, and customers themselves is also a direct threat to wiki creators such as SocialText, Atlasian. Those vendors should quickly bolster their marketing efforts to demonstrate how they are differentiated. Client server based contact center products will face increased competition as business users choose to move to platforms that deliver provide greater social aspects tied to user generated content.

Despite Salesforce’s technical announcement, this doesn’t mean success for their customers. Technology is only 20% of any enterprise change, the other 80% is culture, process, roles, and strategy change –key requirements that Salesforce is not equipped to provide. As a result, don’t expect customers that don’t have the right program in place to take advantage of these technology offerings –instead expect vendors with a heavy professional service offering to empower a company to truly embrace customers in the social web.

Overall, Salesforce is above and beyond other CRM vendors in terms of connecting to the social web. Yet despite their ability to connect with new channels, they lack a full solution to empower brands to make the cultural changes within their orginiazations. Expect other CRM vendors such as Oracle’s Social CRM offerings and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to do a “me too” in coming months as others jump on the social CRM bandwagon.

For the CIO: R “Ray” Take: The coming wave of social CRM initiatives and cloud based service solutions require CIO’s to rethink about their overall apps strategies to support hybrid deployment options. Rapid proliferation of SaaS solutions inside the organization requires strong CIO leadership in coordinating data, business process, and metadata integration strategies. Moreover, now will be the time to begin master data management activities that will support social CRM initiatives and resolve profile identification and entity resolution issues. Take control now or lose control forever.

For the CMO: Jeremiah’s Take: Marketing has spread beyond awareness and lead generation –support IS marketing. Yet to be successful, your internal processes must quickly meld PR and support to provide a seamless experience to the customer. Be proactive, not reactive: Use brand monitoring technologies to head off issues before they volcano into PR disasters.

Posted in Social CRM, Social Media, Support | Comments

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Trends: Impacts Of The Era of Social Colonization –Every Webpage to be Social

Categories: Future of Social Web, Social CRM, Social MediaPosted on June 16th, 2009

One of the key findings from the very popular report The Future of the Social Web (which has been translated into over a dozen languages by the community) is that identity technologies like Facebook Connect, OpenID, as well as existing identities will soon colonize the web, making every webpage a social experience –even if they don’t choose to participate.


[Soon, every product page and webpage will be a social experience –even if brands don’t choose to participate]

Although the identity space is still in it’s adolescence, many of the vendors agree on the direction to head, but not exactly how to get there. Secondly, there’s many different groups coming together from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and the third party OpenID foundation that are trying to make their specific requirements work with each other.

Once the different parties representing the identity systems agree on the specifics and start to implement we’ll still need to see a transport method that will allow these identities to appear on any webpage:

How Every Page Could Be a Social Experience

• Connective APIs. Expect to at the highest level technologies like Facebook Connect and OpenStack to allow third party sites to connect with websites –without users having to give up their login credentials or personal information –essentially bypassing the annoying registration page.
• Social inlays and overlays. At the next level, expect social networks to create ‘overlay’ experiences so their social experience will traverse every webpage. If you currently click on a link within Facebook to a third party site it will open inside the Facebook experience. We also see this with Digg, with it’s “Digg Bar” experience.
• Browsers to add social functionality. Expect every browser to provide a social experience. Finally, at the next level, expect pervasive technologies like browsers to start to become social. Expect Google’s Chrome to allow your Gmail contacts to share their experiences on every webpage and product you visit. In fact, startups like GetGlue are already experimenting with aggregating reviews from a person’s network using Firefox plugins.
• Birth of the Social Inbox. In the most radical future, content will start to appear on a new type of aggregation webpage that resembles both email and newspages. I’m watching vendors like Friendfeed to aggregate public and some private data, expect Facebook and Google Wave to present unique new experiences we’ve not seen yet. As people interact socially with others on the internet, expect social networks to aggregate the colonization creating a new type of ‘Social Inbox’ (more on that soon). Expect to see Microsoft Live, Yahoo Mail, Gmail/Google Wave start to merge with social networks, birthing a new type of communication and collaboration platform. Why does this matter? because fragments of the corporate websites will be aggregated into these platforms, in a social context.


[As a result, people will lean on the opinions and experiences of their trusted network –diminishing traditional marketing efforts]

Key Impact: A Shift to Customer Opinion Over Corporate Messaging
More importantly, this means that your customers will be able to rely on their immediate friends and trusted network to make decisions –not just nameless customer reviews like on Amazon from folks you don’t know. This means they will also start to rely more on each other for reviews –not the marketing created by brands. This also applies to the real world –not just online, as people can access digital devices on mobile social networks to find out which stores, restaurants and activities their trusted network prefers.

Power continues to shift to the participants, and away from irrelevant corporate websites.

If this post was helpful, please tweet it by copying and pasting into Twitter:

Trends: Impacts Of The Era of Social Colonization –Every Webpage to be Social http://bit.ly/aAJ9c by @jowyang

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Future: How The Social Contract Between People and Brands Will Evolve

Categories: Social CRM, Social Computing, Social MediaPosted on April 10th, 2009

In the coming weeks, I’ll be publishing the much anticipated Future of the Social Web Report, based on research conducted with the leading social networking companies and organizations in the industry. This post is just a riff off one of the sub-bullets and is intended for those that are already well versed in the social web.

In one research interview, I spent time with the insightful Chris Messina who is an active member and on the board of the Open ID foundation. After speaking to him, he brought forth insight on how portable IDs will empower people (he uses the term citizen) to traverse the web and reduce their need to constantly register to sites, and login. He’s *finally* posted on the topic after my prodding, I wanted to wait on publishing this so he gets the proper attribution.


[Technology will shift the power from brands to people as they are able to control their own identity. As a result, the Social Contract between people and brands will evolve]

In a previous post, I highlighted how this simple technology will shift the power from marketers to customers, and as a result registrations pages will go extinct. How will this happen? Because people will be able to control their identity, and can choose to expose as much or as little information as they want to brands and websites, they are now in control.

The Social Contract: Today vs Tomorrow
In order to gain control back, marketers will need to reinvent the digital social contract as we know it. Here’s how it’s going to go down:

Today, the social contract puts brands in control
Prospects who want more information about a product, access to a white paper, attend an event, or get product support will often have to register on a website. As a result, they give information, and thus power to brands for them to bug them, and bug them more efficiently. While customers can choose to unsubscribe or choose not to be contacted, they’ve given the ‘required fields’ over to the brand…forever locked up in CRM systems.

Tomorrow, the social contract puts customers in charge.
As customers can elect how much information they want to share, they are now in charge. Prospects (not customers yet) can share very minimal amounts of information, giving the brand limited ability to bug them. As the prospect becomes more interested, sarah will choose to give more information to the brand in exchange for additional value.

Use Case: How the Social Contract Between Customer and Brand May Work
To illustrate my point, here’s how this new model could evolve with Sarah, our fictional customer, at the top is the start of her journey (someone not even remotely interested) to her becoming a vocal advocate(satisfied and willing to tell others):

Sarah’s not interested in the brand. As a result, she doesn’t have to give any information as she visits a brand site, she’s just browsing and she’ll choose not to expose any information.

Sarah sees a product that attracts her eye, and requires more information, but doesn’t want to expose her personal information or register to the site. She will allow the brand to send her information perhaps in her Facebook inbox, but she won’t have to give any information about her at all.

Sarah’ starting to compare this product to others, she’s in the consideration phase, as trust is instilled, she will choose to allow her demographic information exposed, and in return receives information related to what she is likely to want, reducing her need to navigate a large website. While her demographic information may be disclosed to the brand, they may never know her actual name or email address.

Sarah is getting ready to commit to purchase, as a result, the brand offers her greater incentives such as additional services or discounts if she shares her psychographic information to the brand. As a result, the brand will be able to offer her additional related products, or engage in an actual dialog.

Sarah has purchased the product, and the brand offers her a deeper discount to her friends, if she chooses to pass along information to her trusted peers that she’s purchased the product, or her review. This word of mouth is what customers trust the most, and brands will attempt to tap into this by offering group discounts if several buy.

Sarah, who is thoroughly satisfied with the product, chooses to be public about her purchase. Although you can’t expect every customer to self-express, she will knowingly stand behind the products and brands that represent her, and become a willing endorser of the brand. This isn’t that far fetched, we currently see this with many luxury or passion products, but now the brand will encourage this, by rewarding her with recognition or other forms of social currency.

Now some of you may say this contract already exists in some forms, and I’ll have to agree. However we haven’t seen formal systems and technology emerge pan-industry that can support this. It’s even possible people can experience this all within social networks without ever formally going to a corporate website.

Although fictional, this use case could very well come to life, and I’m sure some vendors will leave some comments on how they’re already experimenting with this. As this simple technology enables customers to control their own identities, brand will have to reshape how they’ll get customers attention and ability to register.

This topic of the social contract is only one small node in the upcoming report, we’re excited to share it with you in the coming weeks.

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The Future of Twitter: Social CRM

Categories: MicroMedia, Social CRMPosted on March 22nd, 2009

Twitter has multiple business models to choose from
I get asked over and over: “How do you think Twitter will monetize? What’s their business model?” While it’s clear they’re already experimenting with ‘house’ ads, ads that promote features of their service, I’m not sure that’s going to be the right direction for them. We already know that click through rates on social networks are low, why? because people are there to communicate with each other –not search for information like Google or on a media site. It’s possible they could turn on ads in the search tool, as people are seeking information. Yet all of these tactics have been done on other social sites, I think that Twitter has a unique opportunity to tap into the lucrative CRM space.

Manually tracking a large brand within Twitter isn’t scalable
It’s important to first realize that managing a large brand on Twitter isn’t scalable, with hundreds –maybe thousands of tweets about a marketplace a day, individuals will have a very difficult time managing, Brian Solis has some relevant stats on growth. The next challenge? determining who these people are, and if they are a potential customer is important, who are these people, are they important, where do they live? Lastly, responding in near real time is going to be key –as some users may ask their peers for product recommendations during point of sale, right in the store.

Twitter has two of the three key features of a CRM system
First, let’s break down why Twitter is going to be a Social CRM, let’s start by analyzing what entails Customer Relationship Management:

1) Customers: Yes, they got that. More than that, they have prospects, which to some marketers is far more valuable. As prospects start to talk about products, they’re indicating engagement, and could be further down the buying process. Both are valuable, however the challenge is mapping which Twitter ID is which customer –many don’t use their real names.

2) Relationships: Got that too. Now I realize that the intended definitions of CRM meant the relationships between customers and employees of a brand, but now you can see how people in Twitter are connecting to each other, and those that follow a brand, their indicating affinity towards them. The interesting thing is they don’t just offer affinity towards your brand, but also competitors, which helps in segmenting your market, and can help with poaching.

3) Management: Here lies the opportunity Twitter has no management tools to support this, as a result, their data is being whisked away in the API and being aggregated by two types of companies. The first company? Traditional CRM companies are importing the data into their own systems, in fact we know bits and pieces of this are happening for Facebook. Secondly, brand monitoring companies like Radian6, are importing twitter data into their listening platforms, and then offering simple workflow and task management.

CRM Incumbents Moving In
Today, SalesForce announces it’s integration with Twitter, or at least, their aggregation of their data in what’s called the ‘Twitter Firehose’ in order to suck in the discussions and allow it to be managed within the SalesForce system. As a result, brands will start to monitor –then manage– the discussions that happen online. I was briefed by Clara Shih (related book), the creator of FaceForce (now called Faceconnector) (Facebook + SalesForce integration) last week, and while I think they’ve taken one step forward –there’s more to be done in confirming IDs, influence, and intent to buy. Update: Here’s the Service Cloud site, which emphasizes customer service and support.

Twitter’s Opportunity –should they decide to take it
Although they have not directly said it, I think Twitter can go further than this, they could be their own CRM system, by perhaps offering their own analytics system to brands, that will help them to track and manage the conversations within the 140 sphere. This has tremendous opportunities for Twitter should they create their own brand management system that they can resell to the world’s companies to monitor, alert, track, prioritize, triage, assign, followup, and report on the interactions with brands. The myriad of authority based tools will need to be incorporated, as some users have a larger network and are therefore more influential than others. On the other hand, they just might leave the firehose open for the incumbent CRM companies to take advantage of –and miss this opportunity, hell, Scoble is already expecting brands to contact him when he has a major life event. Either way, with a recent funding amount of $35mm, they’ve enough run rate to first manage growth, then prepare for monetization.

There are a few layers when it comes to how Social CRM can evolve, I’ll save that for a future post. On a related note, this is one of the key findings from our many interviews for the upcoming report: The Future of the Social Web.

Posted in MicroMedia, Social CRM | Comments

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Social CRM: When Registration Pages Go Extinct

Categories: Social CRM, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on March 6th, 2009

This post is a bit dense, I’m not writing for my general business audience, but for those that really are advanced social technology thinkers. If you’re seeking starter info, read my FAQs.

I’m working on a report called the “Future of the Social Web” and I interviewed quite a few companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Lotus, RWW, Federated Media, Plaxo, Dell, Cisco EOS, Flock, Meebo, Gigya, Intel, Razorfish, Six Apart, and a bunch more to find out the trends in this industry. There’s probably less than 10 people in the world that have access to all these teams, executives and thought leaders, and I’m taking advantage of it. I just met with Appirio, which is a San Mateo company that birthed out of the SalesForce incubation process and I think they’re one of the first generation vendors that’s connecting social networks to CRM systems. They’re not alone, see the other apps in SalesForce AppXchange that connect with Facebook. Update: Rapleaf is in this space, I need to meet with them soon.

[Marketers Use Registration Forms For Only Two Reasons: 1) To Be Able To Bug People 2) To Be Able Bug Them More Effectively]

Most marketers don’t know why they want prospects to fill out registration pages, they’ve been doing it for so long, they’ve forgotten why. I’ll remind you, there’s only two reasons: 1) To get their contact information so they can bug them. 2) To get demographic and other data so they can bug them more effectively (target marketing). That’s it.

One of the calls I’m making in my report is that registration pages go away. Why? CRM systems and Social Networks will start to connect, and share information in a two way manner. Of course, the trick is to make it all opt in so the user community can control what part of their information can be shared and with who. Appirio does just that, they have built a Facebook application that can be rebranded for a marketing campaign, it can then be used to share information, recommend information to peers, and used for other purposes such as recruiting, word of mouth, and other typical social network activities. As information gets shared, it can be passed to a landing page where users can submit information in a web form –then passed over to SalesForce.

[The Future Of The Social Web Makes Registration Pages Extinct]

While they haven’t built out a system that can remove registration pages all together, I know the second generation Social CRM systems will be able to do this. How? A technology will emerge that will allow users to pass only as much of their social networking profile information as they want over to a CRM system, how much? It’s up to the user. A new social contract will appear that will encourage users to give as much information as t hey want, and in return the brand will reciprocate. The more information the user gets gives, the more the brand will give back in return, I call this a “Social web contract”. Since the data will come from the profile information within a social network, there won’t be a need to have a collection web form, instead information will be passed through connective tissues.

Obviously this flips a marketers world upside down as they are ultimately measured in most cases on generating leads and conversions, there’s a pretty radical mental shift that will need to take place, I’ll have to talk about this later. Oh, and I’ll have to tell you what this means to email marketing –that’s going to change too.

That’s all I can explain right now, as I’m still putting together dozens of interviews and over 20 pages of notes, I gotta get a draft to Josh Bernoff, my rather tough editor. Just remember, the power has shifted to the community, so the tools, approach, and ideology has to meet the needs of the users.

If you’re involved with connecting social networks and CRM systems, I want to talk. Also, Appirio needs marketing agencies to be truly successful, you may want to contact them, or just email me and I’ll connect you.

Posted in Social CRM, Social Media, Web Strategy | Comments

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