Social CRM

Social media can be wonderful tools for sales and marketing, but so far most companies and most anecdotal evidence that I have seen point to practices that are mired in old-think, with the result that social media is being questioned as a strategy. Here are some ideas that I give my clients when th...

Business software has long been described as "front office" and "back office," which essentially mirrors the arrangement of real-world processes within most businesses. That arrangement made sense in the past -- what went on within the business was usually shielded from the customer. That dichotomy ...

By this point, most businesses understand that they exist in a new reality -- the reality that allows customers to communicate with them and with each other in new, faster and in a more pervasive way. Some businesses are actually doing something about it, too -- hence, the emergence of social CRM, s...

While we're on the subject of the customer relationship, it's important, even vital, that we do a better job of teasing apart customer types. It seems to me that the vast conversation about social CRM and the social customer has focused on the end consumer -- the business-to-consumer relationship -...

When CRM first came into being -- before it was even an acronym -- it was intended as a way to streamline and organize some very basic and essential processes and data. Those underlying features are still there today, and we take them for granted. Once things like contact information, sales historie...

OK, some people thought my last post was somehow bearish on social CRM, but I don't agree. I am trying to be accurate about what we ought to reasonably expect, nothing more. A bandwagon effect in early markets often has predictable results. Often people become adopters of new technologies not beca...

There's a huge discussion raging on the Internet started by a provocative question from Bob Thompson: Can you do social CRM without social media/networks? I find it curious that I am not in agreement with much of the discussion or, more to the point, I might agree with the conclusion but not the un...

While CRM has always been "social," it's now starting to get "Social" -- in other words, it's starting to tap into the ways customers have seized control of their relationships with the people they buy from through technology, participation and the ability to reach more people -- and more-important ...

Over the last couple of weeks, I have maintained radio silence, hardly blogging as I tried to prepare a manuscript for publication. This piece is not the usual analyst fare with charts and graphs and interpretations. It's a simple book of my writings from the last year and a half. Many things came...

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." If you haven't heard that one multiple times, you aren't really in business. It's a truism -- and part of being a truism is that it's true, for the most part. When a new business strategy emerges, it can temporarily topple truisms -- but soon, they're ...

New research from Harvard Business School and the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project give new perspective to the social media and social CRM phenomenon and raise a yellow flag for all those people proclaiming social media the second coming. First: Harvard. The Economist ran o...

It's important to keep the story of eService in mind when thinking about social media's role over the past few years in reshaping the ways customers interact with brands. Undoubtedly, the influence of social channels has been at least as profound -- and perhaps even more profound -- than that of eSe...

I am still thinking about the George Soros quote from a recent posting. The billionaire financier and philanthropist was quoted in Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money saying that "Every bubble consists of a trend and a misconception that interact in a reflexive manner." What he meant was that tren...

There's no longer any debate about whether social media's going to have a huge impact on CRM. Social media's a little different than the usual emerging business technology, mostly because it didn't begin as a business technology. It started with consumers -- and how they use it varies dramatically.

Mzinga, a player in the evolving community platform space, has relaunched its flagship offering with a product that integrates many of its internally developed features with acquired technologies. The new platform, called "OmniSocial," provides external and internal communication and collaboration t...