Social CRM

Making sure that every customer gets the personal touch may be fairly easy for the owner of a neighborhood bakery, but in a mass market of millions, making each customer feel like an individual is a formidable challenge. In the information age, tools like customer relationship management software ma...

Aretha Franklin didn't intend it, but she offered a powerful business lesson when she sang "R.E.S.P.E.C.T -- find out what it means to me." Customer relationship management has evolved into customer experience management, and respect is the biggest part of providing an excellent customer experience....

My ride from San Francisco Airport to Redwood Shores, Calif., tells the story of my entire trip to the West Coast last week. Southbound on Route 101, traffic was lighter than I was accustomed to in my more than 10 years of visiting the area. Northbound, there was a five-mile backup, which caused m...

Can the privatized and anonymized be monetized? When it comes to the mega-million-name member lists of social network sites like Facebook and MySpace, Big Business really wants to know. As consumer databases go, the Facebook and MySpace lists have an appealing advantage over databases derived from ...

With an attractive force akin to the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy, online social networks have pulled into their orbits scores of new startups searching for profits. The target: eyeballs. Last January, Facebook totaled 68 million unique visitors and 1.1 billion page views, and MySp...

I have been remiss in not paying enough attention to social media monitoring software. I suppose it's understandable given that social media is at the margin of CRM -- moving to the center, but still in the outer shell -- and monitoring software is somewhere beyond that orbit in the software equiva...

Nobody, not even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himself, has yet successfully produced a proven, sustainable and scalable business model that can satisfactorily monetize the vast ecosystem of the social networks -- Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. The reason for this could be rooted in ...

A computer company's research team puts their latest video up on Facebook rather than presenting it during a technical conference. A video game developer turns to Twitter to first break the news of a new release to the masses. A salesperson stays in touch with all professional relationships -- colle...

I have to admit that it's hard to concentrate on business with so many issues and crises swirling around lately. As if the presidential election was not enough, the financial meltdown is threatening an economic meltdown, and I am forever asking myself what this all might mean to CRM. The political ...

At 5.30 p.m. on Friday while you're stuck in traffic heading home, I'm just beginning to get in stride. The timing is ideal. Secretaries are gone, and the executives that I want to reach are still at their desks finishing up e-mails to subordinates or calls to the West coast. They even pick up their...