Social CRM

Bantam Live principal John Rourke remembers well one of the first glimpses the tech industry got of what was possible with real-time activity streams for the corporate environment. He was sharing the stage with a Salesforce.com executive at an industry event focusing on that subject in 2009. They we...

Sometimes I feel like we're stuck in the weeds with social CRM. Hopefully I will get a lot of mail for this, LOL! No, really. Sometimes I feel like we're missing the bigger point of social CRM because we're spending so many brain cells focusing on the technology and not so much on what it does bey...

My favorite scene in "The Social Network" is when Mark Zuckerberg's character has an epiphany that Facebook's screen should have a field to designate a user's status, as in relationship status or availability. Wait, I didn't give something away, did I? You've seen the movie, right? No? Go see it....

We've all heard the lines: "blogging is so 2008"; "say that in 140 characters or less," and now, "the feed is the new desktop." This last one is from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and he said it in the context of his company's release of the new version of its enterprise social networking tool, C...

Social media's explosion over the last few years has had some obvious implications for CRM. At first, as in every new thing in CRM, the implications for sales were appreciated first, although they have yet to be fully realized. However, this time around, there are other forces at work -- namely, eco...

In a Ted Talk from 2004 that I watched a the other day, Malcolm Gladwell spoke about Howard Moskowitz. You might recall the New Yorker writer made a name for himself with the publication of The Tipping Point and several other works that focus on the unpredictable things that people do in the course...

Salesforce.com has announced it is making its social tool Chatter available for mobile devices within the next several months. Chatter is a real-time social collaboration application and platform for the enterprise, allowing employees to create profiles, and send feeds and status updates about proje...

About the easiest way for companies to dip their toes into the social media waters is the blog. There are few technical burdens to setting them up, the time needed to create posts can flex with the workloads of the assigned writers, and they can become a conduit for customer conversations through th...

I spent an interesting day at Harvard Law School last week at the invitation of Doc Searls for a conference on the intersection of CRM and VRM, or vendor relationship management. Doc's involved with the Berkman Center at Harvard, which sponsors research into issues of law and the Internet, among ot...

I was at a friend's dual celebration of birthday and wedding anniversary recently, and as part of the occasion someone had prepared two fantastic cakes, which were both amazing to behold and a delight to eat. While the appearance was all to do with the icing, the taste and nutrition were defined by ...

Social CRM has earned widespread appreciation as a real business tool. It's no longer an idea or a theory or a hunch. However, it's still a new idea, and many are approaching it with trepidation because its impact on the bottom line is not yet well understood. I don't believe there's a single set of...

I feel like social CRM has become a burger joint. "You want fries with that?" is the traditional up-sell question made famous in skits and jokes, but now I feel like we need to ask something akin in social CRM. The revised question: "You got any data to go with that?" To date, the lion's share of ...

This year, the CRM Evolution event was true to its name. The organization of the show reflected the way thinking about CRM has changed over the years, with a breakdown into three tracks: CRM, Social CRM and Deployment Strategies. Really, the tracks parallel the state of CRM for its users -- or rathe...

There's a slew of CRM applications heading to mobile app format, available at online venues such as Apple's App Store and the Google Apps Marketplace. Social CRM, in particular, is on the vanguard as vendors optimize their applications for mobile use. One example is BatchBlue Software, a company tar...

Every business needs to understand its audience in order to put together a social strategy that makes sense. A one-size-fits-all template fits no one in the social era. Still, there are some things that you don't do. You don't use social data to creep out your customers, for instance, by revealing t...