Category: Social Networks
November 23rd, 2009
Chatting (Not Chattering) About Salesforce - Part I
(NOTE BEFORE I START: This is one really long post. So rather than post it in all its glory in a single file or post it here over two days, I’m trying something new. I’m posting the first half here. And the second half on PGreenblog. Let’s see how that works.)
I’d like you to think about something. The Big 4 of CRM are considered the following:
- Oracle
- SAP
- Microsoft
- Salesforce.com
Salesforce has at best 1/15th the revenue of the smallest revenue of the other three. At best.
By no standard imaginable - except one - does salesforce.com belong in this list - especially IF size matters.
But that one factor is the combination of their continuing ability to at least be the leading market edge when it comes to recognizing trends and at best be the innovator and the creator of those trends. Plus the incredible energy and charisma of Marc Benioff doesn’t hurt either. ’Cuz if it were sheer numbers that determined the leadership - not just the shareholder value - there is only a big three - and little slightly more than a billion dollar salesforce.com wouldn’t be on that list.
But larger than (business) life they are - as Yoda told me just the other day.
So where are they with the release of what Marc called the “4th Cloud” Salesforce Chatter yesterday along with the other three - SalesCloud 2, ServiceCloud 2 and CustomCloud?
I’d say, at least if choosing my body of options, they aren’t creating the trends or innovating here. What they are doing is nailing what the trends are and being on the leading edge of those trends. That’s going to be the suit they wear in the post-Dreamforce 2009 world that we will all be inhabiting after this week.
Marc and salesforce.com have always had an uncanny ability to see the business world in its sexy glory. Marc put it well several times when he said that creating the company and the initial sales app/service were inspired by Amazon and the current incarnation of salesforce with its products etc was inspired by Facebook, Twitter and what pretty much amounts to the social web.
My take has always been that consumer thinking has penetrated the enterprise - been saying this since I was a young whippersnapper back in 2003. But salesforce.com has had a vision for years and been following through on that vision with an extraordinary rigor.
What is that vision, you ask? Well hop onto the Wayback Machine, Sherman and let’s go to 2003.
The scene is a hotel restaurant in Shanghai with men and women of mystery eating their breakfasts, talking to “someone”, murmuring under their breathes about important things. I’m sitting at a table with Tien Tzuo, the then CMO of salesforce.com, now CEO of the very successful SaaS billing and payment systems vendor Zuora. Know what he’s telling me?
(This is a paraphrase. Read the 3rd edition of CRM at the Speed of Light for the literal): “We want to be the place that all business people come to run all their business applications. We want to be the Business Web. We’re not just a CRM company.”
Guess what folks, while this may be an ambitious goal and one that they’ve tempered with the message that Marc peppered his two days of keynotes with at the conference that (again paraphrased) “we realize that companies will be running other systems,” this is precisely what they are continuing to drive for - with force.com and cloud computing. Have they succeeded? No, not yet, there is a long way to go, but they are walking on the same road - even trotting on it - that they were walking back in 2003. To those who say that force.com takes them away from their “core competency.” Knaves, you are wrong. Force.com is their core competency. (Boom. Fade to black).
Now, lets get on with it. For the rest of this post, I’m going to discuss their so-called 4 clouds. Service Cloud 2, Sales Cloud 2, Custom Cloud 2 and of course, Chatter, their 4th cloud. At PGreenblog, I’m going to do a piece on the back stories of the conference - like the analysts who were there in droves, the conference management, the meetings I had, and maybe even some of the parties. We’ll see. That’ll be out before Thanksgiving.
First, Is All This Social CRM? The 4th Cloud?
The answer - which will be qualified by the end of this piece - is “Yes” “No” and “who cares?” But I do want to start this by telling you that calling Service Cloud 2, Sales Cloud 2, Custom Cloud 2 and Chatter the 4 “clouds” are not clouds. They are either cloud services (Chatter), cloud applications (Service Cloud 2 or Sales Cloud 2), or platform as a service (force.com a.k.a. Custom Cloud). I don’t particularly like marketing like this because it just confuses a market with customers and prospects who are trying hard to understand what the cloud is. This isn’t the cloud. Not clouds. Niet wolken. No nubes.Keine wolken. ניט קלאָודס. 没有云彩
That’s my multi-lingual declarative and I’m sticking to it. Take me on if you want with some comments, but I won’t fold. Ironically, I did a webinar on the cloud for salesforce.com about a month or two ago that you can access here (registration is necessary). Listen and then tell me that those 4 things are “clouds.”
The Big Picture
While touted as game-changing, earth-shaking, revolutionary, and transformative, I didn’t see that. Other than the “apps are talking to me” I didn’t see anything that I hadn’t seen implemented somewhere else - and better elsewhere n some cases (I’ll discuss that later). But what I did see and was beyond impressed with was a fully integrated framework and architecture for social computing that integrates social CRM, and could easily enough deliver social ERP and social “supply chain” and social “anything you damn well want.” We saw that with the extraordinary - and I do mean extraordinary demo by Vetrazzo CEO, James Shepard.
Were they perfect and seamless? No. But after all the conferences I’ve attended this year of all the vendors, this was the most developed and integrated execution of an end to end contemporary platform I’ve seen to date. That said, it still was a demo with what seems to be a February through indeterminate 2010 release date. So how complete it ends up, remains to be seen. By way of comparison, Oracle Fusion, talked about for 3 years, which could be the competitive platform to this someday, is still in the “wait and see” stage with a demo of Fusion Apps for the first time at Open World 2009. For now, end of 2009 and into 2010, force.com, even with the problem of Apex as a proprietary development language, is going to be the platform to beat. (if anyone dares excerpt this in part, w/o the caveat, I’ll kick your butt.).
Also, the claims that were being made sounded a bit much at times, though not always by salesforce. One that particularly stood out was that Frost and Sullivan in a May 2009 report said that salesforce.com had 55 percent of the revenue from North American SaaS deployments of customer service. I’d love to see that Frost and Sullivan report and hear they came to that. I literally don’t believe that number - even if Frost and Sullivan “proved” it. Sorry.
So how does this all shake out ? Let’s break (dance) it out.
The Health of salesforce.com - Left Brain
The numbers speak for themselves. If you’re a fan of run rates they are at a run rate of $1.3 billion annually as of now. My run rate is about 4.5 mph. So you know where they and I stand in this. That’s all fun but a bad month can kill a run rate. But their actual numbers are pretty healthy too. Revenue for the 3rd Quarter was $330.5 million up 20%, beating financial analyst expectations by a little (I had no expectations - which is why I’m not a financial analyst) They now have 67,900 customers with 4700 new customers. They were slightly more profitable. All in all not a bad showing, which of course is why their stock price declined on the news of their improvement - nothing like Wall Street to ruin a party - except the ones they throw using their newly restored bonuses. (PG Safe Harbor: The previous sentence is a populist commentary, not an expert analysis. Thank you).
Service Cloud 2
When salesforce originally announced Service Cloud a year plus ago, I thought it was a good thing because they were filling out the portfolio for CRM at least with something that has been notoriously poor in CRM suites though it was offered, and for them it at least filled a major hole. Though I was, after an initial rush, somewhat underwhelmed by the first offering. with Service Cloud 2 they’ve filled gigantic gaps from the 1.0 version and they’ve added some integrated social features. They have the requisite Twitter integration, which is a perfectly adequate integration though frankly, the current stellar enterprise Twitter customer service integration belongs to SAP with the use of Business Objects Insight to provide a sophisticated sentiment analysis capability and business rules/workflow/alarms/triggers etc. Salesforce.com, of course, integrated Chatter functionality around things like case resolution for example (e.g. have a “service conversation” with not only the customer but with the managers and so that the triggers and alerts are visible as a subscribed feed. Again, you’ll understand what in god’s name I’m talking about a little later.)
They’ve also gone the “complete solution” route by allying with Cisco to provide a pre-fab contact center for small and medium businesses which is a very wise move on salesforce’s part as they continue to move upstream. This way they don’t lose the market that made them what they are - small and medium business.
One area that they’ve done extremely well in this release is built around customer knowledge. One of the reasons that customers are turning away from the companies and more toward peers when it comes to solving problems with products and services is that they don’t trust the companies to give them the right answer nor do the companies have the knowledge captured that they need to really help the customer. Plus the search capabilities for many of these knowledge bases is awful.
But rather than simply try to improve the quality of the knowledge presented to the customer from some internal source, salesforce has taken the most intelligent route possible by embracing this new paradigm and using the “wisdom of the crowds” (god. If James Surowiecki gets a royalty for every time that phrase is used, he will be richer than Ellison soon enough) rather than fearing it or trying to compete with it.
What they’ve done is create Salesforce Answers which essentially lies along the “engage customers through communities to help solve problems” spectrum. While this model in more specific ways has certainly become popular in 2009, Salesforce Answers is a relatively flexible option that is highly configurable to the customer service needs of the customer. Combined with Salesforce Knowledge their “multitenant” knowledgebase and their so-so Twitter integration, there is a lot of customer service value being provided, particularly around customer service engagement and self-service. Service Cloud 2’s concept is responsiveness, information and engagement.
My rating: A bloop single because of the improvements from the original Service Cloud, not because of its strength relative to other packages. Its only a hard line drive but caught there. (for non-baseball left-brainers 3.00 of 5.00; for non-baseball right brainers “not bad.”
Sales Cloud 2
Now we’re talking! This is actually more exciting to me than Chatter, and given my proclivities toward (oh-be-have) social “stuff”, that’s saying a lot.
Salesforce was always a leader in sales force automation. No doubt about that. They have had solid functionality, a tolerable interface as the tab pioneers and strong traditional SFA functionality. Of course, that meant that the functionality was geared toward sales management more than directed toward providing features that would be valued by sales persons. However, not only have they strengthened the management features, but they added features that were without a doubt aimed at providing what the sales person actually needs to do his or her job.
Are they the first to do this? No. Oddly Oracle was back in 2004 when they added a quote generating engine for their Oracle CRM (pre-Siebel, pre-PeopleSoft CRM). I wrote about it in the 3rd edition of CRM at the Speed of Light in fact.
But salesforce has done a major league job by improving on other quote engines by providing a real time quote engine. They model it, according to them, on the power seller paradigm that eBay uses. Meaning a few clicks and there is a quote based on the current pricing and configuration. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy as the Geico gecko says.
One major feature that I think is a vast improvement over past editions is the Cloud Scheduler. What makes it more than a personal information manager feature is that it allows scheduling with outside partners and customers pretty much using drag and drop. If your partners and customers - and of course - other staff are connected (opted in) then you can do what Outlook does with the “find best available time for all concerned” automatically.
Of course, they have the requisite Twitter integration, though aside from me not being particularly impressed by their Twitter integration in general, what its doing in a sales application beyond a monitoring tool, I have no idea. Even in their official press releases they talk about converting “Twitter conversations into customers” which is honestly, a crock. It isn’t an integration that converts a Twitter conversation into a customer. I’m glad you can integrate Twitter conversations of customers into the sales record but beyond that, so what?
Any salesforce Content Library document is available on mobile devices with this release which is a huge plus for those on the road all the time - which includes, what else - salespeople. All in all a smart feature.
That said, let’s take a brief look at the social integration of the Content Library. Salesforce claims that rather than just getting a presentation from a repository, you can now take a look at the content, see what others have said about it, find out which deals it was used on, solicit feedback on the value of the presentation or document given the opportunity and also collaborate on changes. While this is fine, it sounds like a somewhat less robust and thus almost dead ringer for Oracle Sales Library. So I don’t think this was inspired by Twitter and Facebook. Sounds more like it was inspired by Oracle. But, its still a good addition to the library.
Sales Cloud 2 actually is a significant step forward for this company formerly-known-as-CRM’s CRM SFA application.
My rating: A line drive triple into the gap, driving in at least a couple of runs. (for non baseball left-brainers 4.00 of 5.00; for non-baseball right brainers - really quite cool)
November 16th, 2009
CRM Association-Netherlands Rocks Het Huis!
I’m in love with Amsterdam….no wait, I love it but I’m not in love….no, hold on, I like it a lot, but I’m not in love, nor do I love it.
The Theory….
Interestingly enough (to me at least and who else am I really writing this for anyway?), while this may seem to be nothing more than the ramblings of an emotional confused sensitive male, during my speech at the CRM Association NL spectacular conference a couple of days ago I spoke about those very emotions as a way of looking at how granular the knowledge of emotional states are for each individual human being when it comes to truly knowing how you feel. Humans actually operate a.k.a. live with this incredibly complex knowledge of their range of individual emotions. This is not how many loyalty marketers look at it, though. While by no means am I opposed to the science of loyalty marketing, what I find as often as not is that traditional loyalty marketers tend to reduce their view the universe of human connections and relationships in scales - often from 1-5. Without any disrespect to those who don’t, a scary number of them see a “granular understanding” as a scale of 1-10 instead of 1-5. Metaphorically of course. Maybe.
(The problem is that loyalty (and advocacy) are the results of emotional connections to someone or something which can’t be truly measured on a scale of 1 to anything. For example, what can you tell me of the loyalty of a person who measures 4.2 on a scale of 5 versus the commitment of another person who measures 4.5 on that same scale? Nothing. Broadly, does it matter to me or you whether or not the demographic segment that this person represents scales at 3.8 rather than 3.6? If it does, please see someone. Really.
Again, putting my edgy New York sarcastic blade aside for a moment, the way customers actually work is to get involved with a company in a way that satisfies the emotional (and buyers) needs of some aspect of our personal agenda at some time and over some time. We don’t scale things. We say “they’re really cool!” Not “they’re just so 4.6.”
Chris Brogan, one of the social media mavens that I thoroughly respect and actually like too, told a story on Callie Lewis’s Geekbrief TV the other day about how a car service that that was supposed to pick him up to get him to Microsoft headquarters didn’t show. He tweeted his anger/anguish and a CEO of a national car service sent him a tweet with “here’s my cell.” Call it whenever you need a car and I’ll take care of it for you.” Car came, Brogan happy, loyal customer. As Chris rightfully said, “Yes, you may say its opportunistic, but he listened (to the tweet) and he solved my problem and now I’m loyal to him.”
That’s what I’m talkin’ about!
While this might be a long aside, a version of it was part of my speech and at the same time, I’m in love with Amsterdam and the Dutch and love the incredibly high caliber the CRM Association NL works at and I like the food a lot.
Amsterdam is So 5.0…err…Romantic and Amazing
I flew to Amsterdam as the second to last leg of “PG’s 41K Flyabout” I had committed to speaking there, which I felt I should as the EVP of the CRM Association of the United States. It was a fellow association, after all though 3700 air miles away. I was in touch with the man who has been its face for several years, Wil Wurtz, who also runs Metrics and More, a company that designs the measures for companies so that they have some idea of how they have to perform to make their customers - and shareholders - happy.
But I had never been to Amsterdam, nor had I known that much about the CRMA-NL except that they were expecting around 200 people at the event, pretty much 100% from the Netherlands.
The Practice
In Love
One of the reasons that I loved this trip was that I had the opportunity to meet both Mark Tamis, who came in from Paris for the event and Wim Rampen - who lives in the area. If you don’t know these guys, shame on you. Both are becoming key Social CRM/Social Business (call it what you will) thinkers in Europe and thanks to blogs and Twitter, internationally. You can find Mark’s blog here and Mark on Twitter here. You can find Wim’s blog here and Wim on Twitter here. This was my first opportunity to meet them. Mark got in early after a 6 hour drive from Paris and we met about 1 hour after I got to the Savoy Amsterdam Hotel (more on that later).
Mark graciously gave me a 5 mile walking tour of Amsterdam (he is a Dutch native living in Paris) that was not only great in terms of realizing the history of Holland and the remarkable nature of the the city but also a great chance to get to know this very fine human being.
Amsterdam is without a doubt a city that combines a remarkable history with a culture that might be unmatched anywhere in the world. Stunning churches with remarkably ornate rectories and ceilings that reached some point in the universe that was unviewable from the church floor - now museums. A culture that treated bicyclists as more significant than auto drivers. Thousands of cafes, restaurants, and bars, cobblestoned or bricked streets that saw human and bicycle traffic with the occasional car up on what you would think was a sidewalk. A people who are the tallest I’ve ever seen who drive cars half the size of what you see in the U.S. And are perhaps the most relaxed and funniest with, let’s say, a lusty sense of humor, I’ve ever met.
At one point, yesterday morning, I looked out the window of my room at the Savoy Hotel and I saw a light rain falling that had coated the streets - made them damp with a little glistening, rather than really wet. Across the narrow street were these homes/buildings with courtyard like wide alleys - most of them built out of brick in the 17th century - also damp. There were two bicyclists - one riding slowly and steadily up the street; the other walking her bike. I started thinking “Van Gogh could have seen this exact scene” - which was entirely true until the BMW drove by. But the charm and romance of the thought really nailed me. I just simply “got” the city and the people at that exact moment.
I am in love with Amsterdam.
Love
The CRM Association of the Netherlands (CRMA- NL hereafter), I would have to say, is the best organized, most substantial CRMA I’ve ever run across. Led by Wil Wurtz and Gerard Struijf, it has 200 member companies who support it wholeheartedly and in return it provides a range of services that any CRMA worldwide should be envious including this conference. This was a CRM Awards conference with awards for CRM Accelerator (went to UBS) and CRM Excellence (went to CarGlass) that are taken seriously. In fact, the only awards I ever saw taken as seriously were those that GreaterChinaCEM jefe Sampson Lee gave out at his conferences in Shanghai over the past few years to Chinese companies.
What also makes the CRMA-NL a gem is the way that they related to vendors. Unlike the incredibly ambiguous approach that U.S enterprise institutions have with the vendors - which is to treat them something like lepers with money - they treat vendors the same way as they treat practitioner companies - as companies who have something to sell because that’s what companies do. Meaning the vendor sponsors are as integral to the growth of the CRMA-NL as the practitioners and are treated as equals - they co-mingle. They can talk with each other about anything they want. Sponsorships can be from Microsoft and Accenture as well as ING or DSM International. It kind of simplies what I alwasy see in the U.S. with conferences - contortions on the policy toward vendor sponsors. Our Dutch compadres have practitioner sponsors too - because of the way the vendors are perceived - as a company rather than a predator.
Lest you think I’m going soft, I’m not. Any company will still continue to be the public subject of my ridicule if they deserve to be. But other than that, they are on equal footing to me too.
OK. Now that I’ve protected my manhood, I’ll continue on.
The conference was attended by both vendors and practitioner companies - mostly practitioners. I gave the keynote with a somewhat new version of the Era of the Social Customer (see below) -not the same as the one I did for the Lithium Social CRM Virtual Conference. I was told Dutch audiences are shy as an audience and direct as individuals. All true.
Here’s the presentation. (Note: There this is a slidecast with creative commons licensed music. Maria Daines “Rollin’” Get it here.
When it was done, I spent the next several hours (except for an incredible interview with Sales Exactly correspondent Marielle Dellemijn that became so interesting a conversation, I was interviewing her as much as she interviewed me) fielding questions from individuals - being challenged (a little) on ideas, and having amazing discussions with the practitioners.
I was truly impressed by the commitment to CRM that these attendees had - meaning they were spending money implementing social CRM and traditional CRM.
- DSM (which is an international company) is carrying out a significant series of social initiatives that they are linking to CRM systems - particularly in e-commerce run by the Director, Corporate E-Business, Marc God. They are as good as or better than any I’ve heard of anywhere.
- Financial services giant, Robeco has a department, led by an industry veteran, Gerard Wolfs, who’s sole purpose is to develop customer insight. Hear that? Not manage customer data, not use analytics per se - but to develop customer insight. An entire department. A whole department. Insight.
- The MC was a brilliant host named Rens de Jong. He is a radio personality and managing editor at BNR Nieuws Radio. Let me tell you, as a host, the man knows how to move a crowd. But more germane to Social CRM, he led an initiative at BNR, which is not a small entity, to develop a community of known listeners - and they are 4000 strong within a few months. Think about it. Radio listeners don’t usually have names and lives associated with them listening. They just listen. The only data that normally is gathered is transactional such as the data that Sirius/XM has for those who subscribe or the names of donors to National Public Radio (NPR) in the U.S. But with the BNR community we are talking about living, breathing humans.
- Carglass Nederland (which does car glass repair and is international) won the CRM Award 2009 for their company wide B2B and B2C implementation of an integrated customer centric strategy aiming at 100% satisfaction of customers. This involved all levels of the business and creative thinking around it. For example, if your windshield breaks while driving, they send someone to you to replace it on the spot. Customer experience indeed. UPC Nederland, a cable company won the CRM Acceleration award for their progress in their customer-centric implementation and strategy. Meaning they don’t allow it to bog down in the bureaucracy we often see when it comes to CRM programs.
Those are only a few examples. On the vendor side, Microsoft and Accenture along with BrixSoftware, a Dutch SugarCRM partner were particularly prominent. Martin Hermsen, who runs the Benelux CRM Practice at Accenture, was so astute and good natured that he got me a little closer to the “let bygones be bygones” stage with Accenture, with whom I’ve had a long standing animosity.
Okay, I know that this isn’t some big “how to” piece on Social CRM or related to the ongoing discussion in social CRM practice that needs to continue. Honestly, if you have a jones for that right now, you should be reading Graham Hill’s very important “A Manifesto for Social Business” over at CustomerThink, and (note I didn’t say “or) read Esteban Kolsky’s absolutely extraordinary and groundbreaking series of five posts on “The SCRM Roadmap” (it starts with #1 here). They are groundbreaking. Any one or all of them will take care of that for you - and I’m sure that I’ll have something to say to each of them because I never know how to keep my mouth shut.
But if there’s anything I think characterizes Social CRM or the whole science of CRM in general its that it is a science of business that attempts to reproduce the art of life. That means what actual people are doing to improve how we contact each other is what really is exciting. So when I am blessed (in a secular way, of course) with the opportunity to meet those who are doing it in the business world - who are real humans, and not personas or avatars, once in awhile I’m taken so much by the experience that I feel compelled to deal with it one of the ways I know how - which is to write about it. Because the human part of it, not the processes, measures, or technology, is electrifying.
Like a Lot
I have to say that the overall hospitality was pretty amazing too. The Euro-style hotel, the Savoy Amsterdam (which makes all the sense in the world in Europe), had the requisite small room,
Savoy Amsterdam - See how charming it is?
but unlike the Hudson Hotel in NY, of Margin of Utility infamy, the room was well laid out - i.e. I could get out of bed without smacking my head into a wall; and the amenities were meaningful - a free, full Dutch breakfast;extraordinary but low key service from the front desk; a free mini-bar. Even though the mini-bar was just a variety of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, the idea was amazing. ”Free” and “mini-bar” are not a phrase you see strung together frequently. Additionally,
The Room - Smaller than it looks, but great
there was a free bar - a help yourself kind of bar in the lobby - though I didn’t partake. What was astonishing to me in the “like a lot” was the hotel exceeded my expectations, which had been tempered by the Hudson Hotel in NY, because it was supposed “euro-style.” Here not only were the accessories high end, but the value adds were wonderful and the service excellent - and most important, the room just big enough and comfortable enough to make its purpose successful - sleeping in it. Thus, the additional stuff went from being an ineffective mask like the Hudson, to a delightful set of additional benefits.
Enough No More
So, thank you to the CRM Association - NL. This was the best leg of the 41K so far.
The lesson on the Social CRM side, since I’m not supposed to be writing travelogues for ZDNet?
Loyalty doesn’t lie in stats or data, it lies in humans being human and how you apply your business principles to that simple understanding.
November 4th, 2009
Organic Social Networks, the Yankees and....Wha'? (UPDATE: WE WON OUR 27TH WORLD SERIES!)
Needless to say, being a Yankees fan of the entirely driven and committed sort, I’m biting every nail on my hands off and frankly, if I could reach my feet, would go at those nails too (Ugh.). I do that every time that the Yankees are in the playoffs or World Series particularly, though, I have to admit, I do it to a lesser degree, but to a degree during the 162 game regular season too. Meaning, from April through hopefully early November, I don’t need nail clippers.
But this year is very, very different. Aside from being in the World Series for the first time since 2003, which makes it different, Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, push technologies and an iPhone make it different.
I no longer watch the game by myself though I’m the only person in the room (my wife, also a Yankees fan, is up in Newfoundland at the moment with her mom who’s recovering from surgery). I’m not even just watching the game with friends of mine who are Yankees fans on Facebook such as fellow Yankees fan David Sims, who is without a doubt one of the all time great writers and columnists in CRM and other IT matters - and one of the funniest. I’m also watching the game with several thousand people who are actively conversing from the stands at Yankee stadium or watching it on TV themselves - all members of either subgroups within social networks communicating via channels or members of organic communities - outcome based communities that have come together for the World Series and the World Series only and who will, for the most part, disappear after the Series ends.
But note something, I said will disappear for the most part, not entirely, which we’ll get to
If this were 2003…
If this were 2003, I think probably by now I’d be hating Josh Beckett (wait I still don’t like Josh Beckett) for beating us and Jesus Hoyos, a CRM thought leader in Latin America, would be the happiest man on the earth because the Marlins had beaten the Yankees - though to his credit, he’d be happy if the Marlins had beaten anyone at all in the World Series because he’s not a Yankees hater, he’s a Marlins fan. But how would he be letting me know (if we knew each other - which then, we didn’t)? An email maybe - a phone call? And only after the result itself was in and done. To communicate in some real time fashion with even one person was either cumbersome or expensive even then. Or at least more cumbersome and expensive.
But This is 2009….
While the Series isn’t quite over when I’m writing this (prior to game 6), here’s the picture so far and now.
The kicker is that I’m in Bogota Colombia, as one of the keynotes at CRM conference here, but no worries, broadband is solid and I have a subscription to MLB television on MLB.com which gives me streaming video live for the game. Or, I can watch it - yes watch it - using the MLB iPhone application streaming via Wi-fi that’s readily available.Or if for some feverish reason, I’m sick of Tim McCarver and Joe Buck (which is a frequent occurrence) I can listen the audio/radio feed from NY with John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman - our homie broadcasters.
In the meantime, David Sims is getting ready to watch it from New Zealand somehow - TV or streaming maybe. The key Yankees bloggers for the press like Mark Feinsand are already starting to set their tweets out to the Yankees fan faithful to get prepared for the game. The conversations are already beginning on #yankees on Twitter and in the “enemy camp” at #phillies on Twitter.
When the game begins, I’m watching somehow or listening and in the meantime, between communities and sub-communities on Twitter and my Facebook buds, we’re rarin’ to go. So the night is a viewing experience and a conversation stream that organically evolved that includes my CRM colleagues, my cousins, a good friend who roots for the Phillies and other friends I have who happen to root for the Yankees or the Phillies who I had lost touch with but am now hooked up with primarily on Facebook. Plus there are the myriads of unknown folks gathered either physically at the park or watching on the tube or the web who are connected in total through twitter via their mobile device.
The conversation stream is real time and its intense and responsive to the game itself.
What’s remarkable is what organically happened from the beginning of the playoffs. People who I’ve befriended over the last couple of years and vice versa, or who are mutual followers began yakking about something they are passionate about using not email but social networks and communities to correspond. Which dovetails with the Nielsen data from their Global Network Survey in March 2009. Their finding was that more Internet users correspond via social networks (66.8%) than via email (65.1%). WOW.
The Social Side
But think about this. I’m working on a personal social graph that is outcome based - i.e. built around an event - the World Series - that incorporates my family, sub-communities of CRM influencers; large communities of yankees fans who I only will know for the games - and phillies fans - and fans who are converging because of the World Series only - regardless of who they root for #WorldSeries - using social channels like Twitter and social networks like Facebook. What makes this even more fascinating is due to Facebook Connect, my tweets are carried to Facebook allowing my friends on Facebook who don’t tweet much to comment and converse on the content of my tweets.
And this is all organic.
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post on outcome based social networks (OSN) which was an excerpt from the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light. What was most prominent about it was that the OSN was pretty much archived when done. That’s likely, hopefully after tonight. But in the course of this amazing playoffs, two things happened. I made some new friends and found a bunch of new people on Twitter who follow me and/or who I follow. I saw how quickly that even existing social networks and communities can morph themselves into new forms with new rich results and conversation - which tells you how important it is to not just understand the business value of the communications revolution that we’ve seen in the last five years or so, but the social value that’s been added when it comes to being able to converse with “people like you” in real time in a few seconds after you decide you want to. Extract what business value and thinking you want from this observation. I’ve got to get ready with my laptop and iPhone, for the game, sitting at my hotel in Bogota.
Though I wish I could be at Yankee Stadium tonight.
October 14th, 2009
Oracle OpenWorld 2009 - Social CRM Technology Rears an Actual Head
I am almost always in awe of Oracle OpenWorld. The scope of this conference is spectacular. Can you imagine an event that the attendance is down to 37,000 attendees? Actually, that puts me in awe of their event planners more than even the event. How in the name of whoever can you put together something of this magnitude?
Back in 2007, I was also thunderstruck by the changes they made to their CRM products thanks to the team led by Anthony Lye. It was dramatic and it impacted Oracle as a company - and as it turns out, has had an impact on the industry as a whole. While I can’t remember exactly when they started calling it Social CRM, I do remember they had somehow understood that the customer’s requirements and demands and mindset had changed. They adapted accordingly - which was another source of astonishment because they were about the last company I expected to see this kind of progressive and valuable thinking from. But to their credit they did it.
While my focus has always been CRM, I have some experience with enterprise products generally, having built practices for a variety of them back in the 1990s and into the early part of this century - so I keep my eye on them. But the CRM transformation changed my expectations of what the company would deliver as a whole - ranging from their excellent CRM applications to their mysterious Fusion Apps (which are apparently going to drop at this show) to their entirely forgettable Beehive collaboration server (which I hope Oracle has forgotten too). Plus Larry Ellison’s flair for the dramatic makes me expect something remarkable.
Sadly, there was nothing remarkable presented, which is not a condemnation, just a fact. Outside of the CRM products (more on that shortly), what I’ve seen from Oracle so far (with the keynotes of Safra Katz and Charles Phillips) has been…..uneventful at best and pedestrian at worst. Not bad, just uneventful to pedestrian. The changes (at least generally) in their products have been incremental and small increments at that. Statements were made that were dramatic such as Safra Katz talking about Oracle’s “slavish devotion to Open Standards” but nothing dramatic actually occurred.
Don’t get me wrong. The keynotes by Charles Phillips and Safra Katz were fine if you were interested in an overview of what Oracle has been doing in the last year or so. The “keynote” by an EVP of Hewlett Packard was nothing more than a giant ad for Hewlett Packard, only interesting because of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. Unfortunately, the wisdom of the crowds so to speak, supported me here because they abandoned the hall in droves during the speech.
including the growth of their retail business and the useful sophistication of their retail products - but all in all, nondescript is a good description (get the irony there?) of what I’ve seen so far.
Oracle CRM Moves Forward In Quality…And In Thinking
I will say, even with my narrow focused lenses, Oracle CRM stood far out far ahead of the rest of the Oracle Apps pack. Also let me tell you right now, I’ve been a retained consultant with Oracle though as you all know, that buys them nothing but a good job (I hope) by me. Not anything in these things I write.
CRM at Oracle seems to remain their star application, probably because it is, in 2009, the fastest growing application suite at Oracle and probably will be the Oracle revenue leader this year. That’s because they’ve understood what businesses need when it comes to being successful with customers. Note that I didn’t say collaborating with customers. That’s not what Oracle CRM is all about. They are really applications for sales and marketing effectiveness. They don’t have much to speak of in the world of customer service - with the exception of their tight partnership with Helpstream - an excellent move given their lack of native customer service apps. But they are doing what they do very well utilizing their existing Siebel applications expertise and their on demand applications in combination with a view toward internal collaboration at a company. Witness the development of Social CRM Sales Library On Demand in the last few months.
But what Anthony Lye, Mark Woolen, Christine Viera, Melissa Boxer and Adam May showed at an executive briefing yesterday on the advances in CRM was heartening because they are molding their CRM applications - traditional ones - with social and collaborative features that make them infinitely more valuable.
Anthony Lye, SVP in charge of Oracle CRM and the intellectual driver for much of this, started off with a discussion on the idea of reinvention rather than recovery as the strategy that companies need to take aggressively during poor economic times.
So far, so good.
He then framed the soon to appear demos by talking about what he saw as 3 game changing strategies:
- Executing the cross-channel customer experience flawlessly - Anthony distinguished between multi-channel and cross-channel (which was something like the difference between multigrain and whole grain) - multi-channel was a strategy that delivered an experience in mobile, field, community, call center etc. Cross-channel was a strategy to traverse all the individual channels at any given time by embedding processes to instrument business so that the customer experience was consistent. PG: While I thought the strategy was smart from a software and processes standpoint, I wasn’t truly sure that cross-channel was that much different from what I know as multi-channel. But regardless, the idea of a consistent (though he didn’t talk about authentic which is the companion piece of consistent when it comes to the customer experience) customer experience accessible whenever across channels was dead on.
- Tap into the power of the social web - this is the one that goes without saying and is the technological and process driven aspect of how Social CRM works - though by no means all of it.
- Deliver CRM data, when, how, and where users need it - this was the most interesting actually.
Anthony’s contention was that there were two types of relationships that CRM users needed to know when it came to customers. First, the explicit relationships - what kinds of communities was the customer associated with; who were his or her friends or friends of friends; the historic transactional data about the cutomer and the more contemporary profile data. But most interesting to me at least was his idea of the implicit relationships. These were not of the “who do you know” variety, but more of the “who do you look like?” When Mark Woolen, the always personable and very accomplished #1 VP for the Oracle CRM grouplet, demonstrated an app for a I presume fictional company though it was one that sold the iPhone 3G (S), he showed a button with the name “Connect to Someone Like Me.” When that button was pressed, it took you to a list of customers who were ranked by percentage of how close to your profile they were. You then could type in a question to ask of those like you. Great feature and entirely social in how it was connected. Built through the new Siebel toolkit I believe.
This is not a new idea. Political campaigns use micro-targeting to identify the lifestyle habits of their potential voters and identify blocks of voters who might all own Mercedes, be involved in social clubs etc. They then use this “implicit information” to figure out who those “similar folks” would most likely vote for, based on this kind of data. What Oracle is contending and I think rightfully is that the transactional data that’s been gathered by CRM applications can be used to find “someone like me” segments - and they’ve gone ahead used Siebel toolkits to build out what they claim here. Impressive and smart.
Melissa Boxer, who is probably the smartest person I’ve met anywhere when it comes to applying the principles of loyalty to enterprise software, demonstrated a genuinely fantastic iPhone application for Swedish Rail (SJ). Here’s a screenshot on that.
Swedish Rail Social Marketing iPhone App
What makes this application powerful is that it literally allows you use the points you have in a loyalty program to purchase items from Swedish Rail including tickets that are not only shipped right to your iPhone when you’ve used the points to buy them but can be redeemed via the iPhone. Additionally, you can make reservations directly and then have your itinerary delivered to your iPhone and if you choose to make it public so your friends (chosen friends) need to know where you are going - it can be delivered to Facebook for public or semi-public scrutiny. Swedish Rail then gets all this new data about your transactions and interactions and can use it to create targeted offerings on the spot.
Way cool and what social marketing looks like, albeit in a nascent form (so don’t get in my face about something that might be missing, okay? Nascent form.).
But Oracle is even doing more than that. They have done some I think is important with a traditional CRM application. They’ve extended Siebel with the use of a new Siebel toolkit that allows developers to integrate business processes and components into any framework whatever. That means the results of the development can be delivered to users via a widget, or an mini-application or a mobile app. But what makes this toolkit particularly important is that its got APIs based on RESTful architecture.
This is big for Oracle. The reality is that Sage led the way in the effective use of RESTful architectures and builds their current products on this simplified and yet powerful architecture. Unlike Sage, Oracle, and most of the other major vendors has been relying on service-oriented architectures which use far more commands than a RESTful architecture for their messaging and are considerably more complex. For the Siebel toolkit to use REST to deliver Siebel metadata is an important step forward in the world of CRM. It will allow for more effective and easily consumable applications when combined with the other piece of the Siebel puzzle - a visualization toolkit to change the interface to be appropriate to the delivery channel.
There were a number of other developments including a strong offering of Siebel OnDemand Release 17, which has added features that are most often found in larger on premise products including PRM, advanced analytics and what I think Adam Day said was the OEMing of Best Systems Marketing Development Funds program. and an increasing amount of vertical applications including a mobile pharma app for salespeople. All in all, there are 12 new products, 31 new features, 88 “customer-driven enhancements” - Anthony’s words not mine - and nine new integrations.
But to me the core developments are the improvement in true social marketing that recognizes the behaviors and activities of social customers. Oracle is using the traditional customer transaction data and the newe interaction data in an intelligent way tp micro-target and create “segments like me.” That’s really good for improving customer insight but what makes this truly powerful is that they’ve developed the channels and outputs to give the customers access to that same information by hooking them up with the people discovered through the micro-targeting efforts. Not only does the business gain insight, but the customer gains access. Truly multi-directional. In other words, this is what a technology can do to support a social CRM strategy. Everyone benefits.
So, hats off to Oracle now for conceptualizing and building a genuine social CRM application. But capital H Hats off to Oracle when they release it and get it beyond the demo stage. This is important and may be a paradigmatic set of CRM applications if it bears out in the real customer world as well as it seems to in the demo and development environment.
NEXT UP: Marc Benioff Speaks; Denis Pombriant and I speak; Larry Ellison speaks. Other OOW 2009 coverage worth following.
August 3rd, 2009
Inside Curve: Lane Bryant Scores Plus Plus
Who doesn’t love style and fashion? Well, I suppose I don’t love fashion, judging from my incredibly poor clothing selection skills (I rely 100% on my wife, who has mad skills when it comes to picking out good looking clothes) but I am in love with style. I love to feel cool. In my case this translates to gadget head stuff, but in the case of many, its clothes that make the hip man or woman.
But oddly, despite the fact that clothes and styles are a primo topic of discussion both at schools, on the street, while watching makeover shows, or “Who Wants to be the Next Supermodel,” there have been no social networks or communities built around the retail apparel world. I’m not saying there isn’t innovation or there aren’t Facebook pages. Retail apparel companies galore have Facebook fan pages and they tweet. J.C. Penny’s has a Facebook page targeted at teens that links back to an ecommerce site for back-to-school clothes. American Eagle has Mike Dupuis, a VP of Digital Marketing who works their Twitter, Facebook etc. strategy. Bebe’s, Candie’s and other apparel - especially younger apparel stores/chains have some presence on social networks of others creation.
But I gotta tell you, its taken a visionary dude that I met when both he and I spoke at the Global Retail Marketing Association (GRMA) - an rather astonishingly interesting association run by Stephanie Fischer - national conference in April to take the retail apparel world where it’s supposed to go with social networks. That would be Jay Dunn, VP of Marketing at Lane Bryant, who, today, is hard launching Inside Curve - a social network, sponsored by Lane Bryant, for plus sized woman.
What makes this important is several fold (please see my article later this month on vertical communities at SearchCRM for more conceptual detail):
- Apparel of any size are an emotional buy - totally tied into style, look and feel, and even identity and self-worth. Studies have been done that show how emotional this actually is. One 2008 Fitness magazine study of woman who were trying on clothes in stores found that 64% (80% among those who thought they had to lose 30 pounds or more) of the women felt that shopping for clothes was bad for their self-confidence; 10% admitted to crying in the dressing room. Even trite expressions are tied to this intensely emotional activity and product - “clothes make the man.” Of course, if that’s true then I’m in real trouble. Sniff.
- Buying clothes is something that is important for socialization. Multiple studies since the 1980s and through today, have shown two things - 1. What kids wear is important for a child’s socialization into the world of other children; 2. Buying clothes without their parents, with their own money is one of the more important acts of growing up as an independent person for a kid when they reach a certain age.
In other words, clothes - how you wear them and what you wear are a deeply personal part of a person’s life, and, unless you’re a nudist, skinny dipping or having sex (at least most of the time), a necessity of ordinary life along the lines of food and shelter.
So what’s the Inside Curve story with all this?
A Really Good Inside Curve
Let’s face it. Plus sized women don’t fit the stereotypical view of the perfect body. The fashion industry to give you a number, says a plus sized woman is size 14 and weighs 162.9 pounds. Let’s hear what Jay has to say which will give you an idea of the beauty of Inside Curve as a community.
“The plus-size woman has been excluded from mainstream media, fashion, and advertising for 4 decades. If you think back to the 1950s and early 1960s, the icons of femininity were voluptuous women such as Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren. In 1966, Twiggy hit the scene and the “thin is in” movement started and continues to this day. Kate Moss is Twiggy reimagined.
“The psychology of the plus-size woman has been altered by the fashion industry’s insistence on “beauty” as “thin.” As you look at the blogs and social networks you see those women have an immediate bonding, a commonality, a shared experience of exclusion that becomes the foundation of community. A “community by exclusion,” if you will.
“An interesting aspect of exclusion: when enough of the “excluded” bands together, their identity can change from “exclusion” to “exclusive.” Suddenly, a new tribe develops, with a language, rules, desires, and needs based on shared experience. And if you’re not one of them, if you are not a size 14+ woman, you do not belong. It is the power of the tribe, and the psychology changes from one of weakness to one of authority.”
What Jay and Lane Bryant had to consider was how do you turn what organically was a community of exclusion and institutionally make the membership a powerful organized voice.
Lane Bryant
Keep in mind, Lane Bryant is hardly a stranger to the world of the plus size woman. They actually invented both the concept and the clothes. They have over 800 stores located throughout the U.S. that deal exclusively with this group of people. As Jay says, “Lane Bryant never deviated from the plus-size category. we invented it….For over a hundred years we’ve done only one thing and that’s plus-size apparel for the American woman.”
But that didn’t mean that Lane Bryant was ready for the development of this ambitious social network project. Their focus and culture, like most apparel retailers, had been sales and product focused. It wasn’t easy to go from a “plus-size retailer who sold women’s apparel” to a “fashion-retailer who sells plus-size.” While that might sound like marketing, its actually a culture change that takes the social customer’s emotional experiences with not just Lane Bryant but why they buy clothes and want to feel good about how they dress and what they buy. That culture change took well over a year to evolve, but it did and Inside Curve was born.
Inside Curve
So what does Inside Curve provide to plus-size women that makes it something Social CRMers like us can be glad to see?
First, take a look at this image of the site: So you can think about it and feel it a little at the same time.
Inside Curve is focused on customer engagement. While Lane Bryant does advertise some of their wares, which is something which will test as good or bad over time, they also involve the customers in finding out what they think and how they think. Customer driven product reviews, design tips and style advice in the Buzz section not just from the experts but also from the customers themselves, discussions on fashion trends, behind-the-scenes exclusive stuff, and even promotions and savings for members of the network are part of the experience designed to reinforce the development of what Jay Dunn unashamedly calls “a sisterhood.” Blogs are an integral part of Inside Curve, too. Blogs, articles, etc. are written by Jay’s staff, with some forthcoming expert commentary from the Lane Bryant trend group and other fashion experts in the brand.
They aren’t ignoring the glam either - which, regardless of how you view the fashionista world and the catwalk, is something that zillions of “ordinary” humans pay attention to. They are involving the Lane Bryant models “behind the scenes” content that would show what goes on in a photo or video shoot; content from the TV show More to Love with clips that will be for the site and other glitz of interest to the members.
While Lane Bryant plays a major role in the blogging and the content exclusive site, they are playing much more hands off when it comes to forums and groups. Not only are they allowing them to grow organically in Inside Curve, but also are encouraging external growth too. They are fully aware that their customers are using social media to communicate. Consequently, Lane Bryant sees its role as providing brand content.
Jay again:
“We want to allow ‘inside’ access to the brand, thus the name. If ever there were a brand with whom its customers feel a “lovemark” connection, it’s this one.”
As of this morning, Inside Curve had 3642 members - prior to launch - an auspicious start.
Thoughts? Of Course!
A couple of things.
Notes to Lane Bryant
First, would I do anything different, add anything, or at least monitor some of the more touchy areas? Yes, of course. What would this be posting be without me being opinionated? Here are a couple of iniitial thoughts on that.
- I think that I’d minimize the advertising and clearly differentiate it from the brand content. Until the community is substantially large enough and has the confidence of its members, the advertising can be detrimental. I’d tread lightly.
- I think too that I would make a serious effort to encourage and support a blog or two from members of the community, not just experts.
Community Building Notes
There is one exceptionally important pioneering lesson in the Lane Bryant community that I want to make emphatic.
With the creation and launch of Inside Curve, Lane Bryant is institutionalizing an already existing community of people who have no organization and loose ties. The plus size women are as he called them “a community by exclusion” that grew organically - almost protectively. They’ve had a presence but no organization. Now they do have that presence under the umbrella of a trusted brand.
There are many groups like this out there that have grown organically and are loosely tied. You can point to the PC gamers community for example. If I were a business, I’d take the Lane Bryant lesson and find those that are there, identify who the influencers are and engage the influencers - who are the glue of the loosely tied - in helping me build my institution so that these loosely tied, organically created groups are supported by your brand. There is mutual value to be derived in that - more on that in an article I’m preparing for SearchCRM today.
What Lane Bryant has done is important - for plus size women and for Social CRM community practices. For the plus size women - they have a place to go to converse and benefit and in return, Lane Bryant benefits too. For Social CRM community practices - providing a model that recognizes that the community doesn’t have to always be built - it can be captured.
That works too.
July 15th, 2009
Coca-Cola Teaches The World To....
“Participating in the community of the consumer.”
I love that phrase. That’s the way Jim Keyes, Blockbuster CEO described their Facebook group - which is for the most part, despite all our conversations to the contrary, is what most people think of when you say “community” or “social network” now. As I’m sure you can guess, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of businesses who are using the most popular social networks to create groups, or pages, or fan sites to develop an external - beyond their own firewall community. They are going to where the customer lives, but not necessarily where they shop. Ecommerce is not Facebook’s strong suit.
But these fan pages on Facebook are nothing more than a segment of a strategy for customer engagement when a company does it right though there are incredible Facebook groups that function as powerful engagement engines for some companies.
For the sake of developing the evolving Social CRM models, I’m going to discuss and deconstruct some of the pieces of the Coca-Cola social CRM strategy - though I doubt they call it that. This won’t be complete. Its just to indicate two things that they’ve done that are just right and how they’ve utilized existing resources in combination with the new ones to do that.
BTW, I’m hoping assuming that I’m going to get a geographical uptick in page views from Atlanta. :-)
Coca-Cola Loves Its Fans
On the simplest level, In creating a Facebook group for your organization, you’re banking on a number of things:
- That your customers actually use Facebook.
- That they can be informed via the Facebook tools provided of the existence of your group - in addition to your own normal communications channels
- That they will find what you are providing to be enough interest to make your community a regular stop when they are logged in to Facebook.
- That the customers will opt in to being updated about the continuing activities of your community.
- That they have no objection to Facebook owning the knowledge of their activities in your group as an asset and as part of their Facebook “customer record” also known as their profile.
The benefits of these external community pages can be well worth it if you are willing to accept that you don’t control the source - in this case, Facebook. Marketing and loyalty are one of the areas that profit from this kind of external community. Customer service can be served by these kinds of communities though Facebook pages are not necessarily the best vehicle for that. There are sites like GetSatisfaction that provide external customer service communities created by either the customer or employees of the company, that serve this function. Additionally, companies like TiVo have seen the value in Facebook as a supplementary site for garnering and capturing customer service issues and data.
But Coca Cola, oh, baby, oh baby, oh baby. Check it out.
Things Go Better with Facebook - Coca-Cola’s Fan Club
Coca-Cola established their Facebook “fan page” in September 2008 and from then to June 2009 recruited 3.4 million fans. (As of today, it had 3,497,642). Actually, this isn’t entirely accurate. What they did was find a page that had been created by a couple of 29 year old Coca-Cola fans and, rather than sue them which is what one of the youngsters feared, instead worked with the two fans to build the page up. But this wasn’t a case of buying the page. The creators became an intimate part of the continued development of the page. Coca-Cola had a savvy understanding of the benefits and the limitations of a Facebook group. They understood that Facebook was a site that their customers used, not one that the company owned. Coke wanted to be unobtrusive and leave it a “fan club.” While I’d say that they aren’t unobtrusive any longer, they have been entirely successful because of their understanding of how Facebook works and their intelligence when it comes to collaborating with their fans.
While the founding fans still use the pages, Coca-Cola has a wide range of interactions on the page. They use it for promotions. They track the conversations of their customers through the postings to the Facebook wall and to the discussion groups. They give fans “exclusive sneak peeks” at things like the Coca-Cola iPhone Facebook app which makes those fans feel like they are on the inside of something.
When it comes to the visual arts, they don’t just have generic or random photo uploads. They wield photos like artists use brushes. One album will be an archive of historic Coke photos evoking nostalgia. Another will be a birthday album of Coca-Cola employees celebrating a birthday - Coca-Cola’s - but as informal shots at a beach. They also allow fans to upload their own Coke related photos to the site.
Think of what kind of brand image is projected in just the way the photo archives are used. “We are a company with an immensely proud tradition that not only can stay up with the contemporary but are also personable and intimate with you, our customers. We want you to know us and we want to know you.”
The brilliance of the fan page doesn’t stop with photos. If you look at the Wall updates, they are in Italian, French, English, Spanish; two or three languages I can’t figure out and even when in English, reference Coke in Macedonia, Thailand, Romania, and France. “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony….” (I know you know that one).
What the brand leaders at Coca-Cola, particularly the Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing Michael Donnelly, realized is that if you let the fans control their own conversation and support it, you can build something substantial and engender advocacy in ways that weren’t even a glimmer several years ago. What that translates to is 3.4 million fans, the second largest fan “club” on Facebook, second only to President Obama with over 5 million (by June 2009). According to PageData, Coca-Cola recruits between 0 and 3500 per day with the median numbers somewhere in the 1500 range. That’s per day.
It would be nice enough to see this fan page which actually lets the members guide it, though with input from Coca-Cola, if that were all there were to how Coke views the social customer. But they have a much more comprehensive engagement strategy. They understand that the customer doesn’t just want engagement. They want personal engagement. Hence the brilliantly conceived and so far so good executed Coca-Cola Free Style - their new vending machine. fountain dispenser Yeah, vending machine fountain dispenser. (Update: Thanks for the correction goes to Ray Crockett, Director, Communications, Coca-Cola, NA)
Coca-Cola Freestyle
If nothing else, Coca-Cola is innovative - and the aptly named Freestyle gives you a hint of that.
Freestyle is Coke’s new vending machine fountain dispenser. Its not innovative because it takes your quarters a.k.a. dollars to get soda (or as those from the Midwest keep trying to call it “pop”) or “healthy” drinks from it. It’s innovative because it actually allows you to customize your drinks - with up to 100 combinations including, for example, if you really, really want it, raspberry orange Diet Sprite.
First things first. Here’s how it looks - very cool - though a bit too much like a contemporary Maytag washing machine -but an undeniably trendy one.
But what it does has nothing to do with cleaning clothes. This thing is remarkable for three reasons.
First, it gives the customer the choice of over 100 selections of drink combinations customized (modularly) that include soda, diet soda, sparkling water, tea, health drinks etc. - several of which have never been sold in the U.S.
Second - it is tied into an IT backbone that allows it to wirelessly send information to an SAP system that not only tracks the personalized drink preferences of the customers using the machine but also manages the inventory - “oh, Freestyle is almost out of Coke Zero, needs refill.” All of this data is tied back to the SAP supply chain and CRM systems in the back.
Third - it is an incredibly innovative use of RFID and one of the first that really indicates how valuable RFID can be.
For some discussion on this, I got Mickey Brazeal, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Roosevelt University and author of the 2009 book, RFID: Improving the Customer Experience, to opine on how RFID and Freestyle work together:
“It’s easy to add wireless communication and data processing to a vending machine. Such a machine could respond intelligently to individual customers and to changing situations.
“It could know what it’s running out of and arrange to be replenished efficiently, the way an RFID smart-shelf can. Tags on individual products or ingredients talk to a reader that orders replacements as necessary. The replenisher doesn’t have to carry in everything - only the stuff that needs replacement. And the system isn’t perpetually running out of the most popular items. People who use vending machines are very often in a situation where there is no alternative, and an out-of-stock is a bad customer experience - much worse than in a store where you can usually just choose a different brand.
“It could figure out which combination of products generates the fastest sales or the largest profits in a particular location. It could offer products (drinks) in different sizes and create the package mechanically immediately after its button is pushed. It could offer different products in the morning than it does in the afternoon. It could authenticate the items loaded into it, and make sure that no counterfeit or unauthorized product is sold. This is a level of control over remote vending machine servicers that marketers have not always been able to assert in the past,
“It could accept payment cards and, through the payment card, offer loyalty points that are recorded automatically, and that generate an occasional free vend. It could use a group of ingredients to customize the product for each individual customer. Why should a machine offer six flavors instead of sixty, or six hundred? It could recognize a customer by his payment card, and serve up “my usual”, like a neighborhood bartender.
“The Coca-Cola initiative is a big first step. It will use ingredient cartridges to create, on the spot, the beverage ordered by the customer. Because it doesn’t have to contain the finished product, it can offer a huge range of flavors - about 100 in this case. It will authenticate the ingredient cartridges and prevent the use of counterfeits or competitors. It will track inventory and summon the service person with specifics about what is needed. It will shine a light on the item that is to be replaced so that no mistakes are made. The customer uses a touch screen to select the right item.
“When you can choose from a hundred flavors, it’s hard to see the process as mass marketing. It starts to be less about the product brand (Diet Coke vs. Coke Zero), and more about the retailer brand (all these flavored waters from the Coca-Cola company.)
“It might create more use-occasions: breakfast-at-your-desk beverages, bubbly waters with lunch, a Coke at the afternoon break. People who are stuck with a “vending room” in a remote location start to see it as less of a sacrifice. Suddenly it’s not so much the low end of the foodchain. Maybe it replaces some of the pilgrimages to Starbucks.
“Right now, if you hate the stuff in the vending machines, tough luck. In this new world, the vending machine will try very hard to find out what you like, and when and where you want it, and make certain it never runs out.
“Down the road, there are potential environmental advantages as well. If such a machine could be attached to a local water source, then the fuel-guzzling business of trucking around products that are mostly water would be unnecessary.
“Vending machine soft drinks from Coca-Cola have a loyalty program where the purchaser can find the number inside the cap, go to a website, record the number, and collect a micro-microcredit toward premiums. But it’s an awful lot of work to earn one two-hundredth of a baseball cap, and therefore has limited participation. A payment card could make the points process automatic.
“The next step is a store-sized vending machine - an entire convenience store without employees. If you only have to restock the items that have sold out, you can do it with a single daily replenishment trip. Services will be sold automatically as well. Imagine an unattended car wash. The door opens in response to an RFID tag on the customer’s windshield. Soap and water are dispensed automatically. Brushes and buffers whirl as the car reaches the right spot. And the tag on the windshield picks up the check. Frequent users get big discounts. Almost all the car wash business is frequent users. And it’s sold as a relationship. Transaction customers can’t even get in.”
….Customers Go Better With Coke
Okay, so think about this. Coca-Cola is working with a strategy that has as parts of it, social networking use and the use of technology tied tightly into CRM and SCM. They tie these pieces into a matrix that interweaves with their loyalty/advocacy programs (I’ll talk about those in a future post). But what frames all of these seemingly disparate pieces is their interest in providing an optimal and personalized customer experience - in whatever venue the customer is. So the customer can socialize with other customers around the coolness of Coke or the nostalgia around Coke on the Facebook page. Then they can go take a break (at least in Atlanta, Coca-Cola HQ where Free Style is being tested) and go to Free Style touchscreen, punch in their customized quaff and then return to Facebook to talk about the coolness of Free Style. Wow.
What are two apparently disparate parts are actually tied together by Coca-Cola’s corporate commitment to its customers to making them advocates, not merely committed Coke gurglers. The experience is built around “fan” engagement in all facets - Facebook to Free Style. Smart move, from a very smart company.
June 24th, 2009
Enterprise 2.0 2009 Conference: Aggregate and Organize
I finally made it to Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference with my record intact. That record would be that I have NEVER in 15 years of flying to Boston a hundred times, NEVER, repeat again, NEVER been on time both ways. This one was resolved quickly because my flight to Boston was over an hour late on United. I once thought I would get out on time about 10 years ago and 11 minutes before we were to board, a luggage belt in the terminal I was in caught on fire and we had to evacuate the terminal. The gods spoke loud and clear and continue to, for some reason, yell at me for coming to Boston
But at least the Enterprise 2.0 conference is a reason to withstand the wrath of the gods. Before i get into some of the highlights and my take on at least the first day of the conference, I want to emphasize something that makes me sound like a fanboy. If there’s one conference you need to attend that ends with a 2.0 - this is the one, if you care about your business. If you’re a geek, I think you could make an argument for O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference; if you’re a government employee or even government contractor, Government 2.0 is a good place to be; but if you are a business person and you want to understand what you have to do in the next year to 2 years….this.is.IT. Hell, I am a fanboy when it comes to this baby. Come here next year. Even with the gods of Logan arrayed against you. If you’re fearful of the gods of Mt. Logan, they announced a second conference for San Francisco in November of this year, with a much less frightening airport.
Aggregate and Organize
I’m noticing a trend that might actually be worth making note of that I’ve just seen reinforced multiple times here at the conference. That would be the that the new enterprise, from particularly mid-market to largest enterprise, will realize the most value from strategies, systems and technologies that aggregate and organization information and/or systems.
Several years ago, composite applications were the rage - that application framework that allowed you to take your legacy systems, and combine the data from those systems in ways that made the legacy systems “new” applications. You were able pick the interface that you loved the most from among them to be your interface of choice for the composite application. I did a longer piece on them back in 2005, if you’re interested.
As the social web began to move into place in 2006 and later, the companies that specialized in composite applications, like AboveAll, while genuinely foresighted, began to fail, because the tools of its successor and ultimately, its killer, became available and they were at least initially, cheap. That would be enterprise mashups - which not only allowed the enterprise to use the data for legacy applications, but also allows you to incorporate external data through RSS feeds. Plus the data, rather than tied together by a complex framework of APIs through a SOA architecture was vastly simplified. Here’s two diagrams that at least metaphorically give you the picture. The first was the AboveAll architecture. The second is the enterprise mashup equivalent (source Mike2.0).
Well, the role of enterprise mashups and applications has changed and that is apparent from the Enterprise 2.0 conference. First, on the technology side, to understand this, we have to give props to the evolution and increasing maturity of service oriented architectures and RESTful architectures - and - really, web services in general. They are to the point where not only are they mature as frameworks and underpinnings for corporate technology backbones, but they are more easily (though, of course, nothing is that easy) integratable then ever before. Second, the standards for communication between systems have been, well, standardized. J2EE, XML, etc are so ordinarily accepted that interoperability among systems and even between disparate companies systems is now a doable thing. (hey, don’t get your pants jammed. This isn’t meant to be some technical treatise - just an explanation of what I’m seeing as a dominant trend at Enterprise 2.0 with a bit of background. So I’m going to use difficult technical terms, like “doable thing.”
On the business side, complexity, while an unavoidable part of a large company’s operations, is not seen as a desirable condition. As the amount of information available to companies in both structured and unstructured formats (made available through those external feeds and internal data systems like CRM systems) becames both increasingly large and necessary to decipher in ways that are valuable, the need to aggregate, organize, and thus simplify both the information and systems within the corporate firewall is becoming a corporate desire and necessity. How information is processed and presented is perhaps the most important IT and cultural function of a company. What you do with information is not trivial - it makes or breaks the company.
So taking the complexity out of both the processing and the presentation of information is what Enterprise 2.0 does. It giveth, because the ability of Enterprise 2.0 applications and thinking to get incredible amounts of information from behind and beyond the firewall is unparalleled in business history. If its working right it taketh away, because it can strip the complexity and mask the processing and presentation effort so that the information is provided in a way that is incredibly valuable and rich. It becomes truly shareable knowledge, rather than just information that is technologically available to all.
This is what I saw as the underlying theme. What do you have to do to make sure that your employees have the knowledge they need to increase their productivity and to improve the culture of the company. What steps have to be taken to do this using the good old people, processes and technologies that have been such a dominant CRM theme for infinity plus a day and now are a dominant enterprise theme.
Example: the winner of the Oliver Marks-Stowe Boyd Award for Open Enterprise Innovation this year was Booz Allen Hamilton for their Hello system. Walton Smith, a senior associate of BAH, presented on the system, which is open to all employees (not contractors), without reservation. The core of the system are activity streams tied to profiles which resemble FriendFeed activity streams. What that means is that, as an employee, you can follow people that provide you with critical expertise via their activity streams, all available on a single page and tie in feeds that you need for information (aggregate). You can then tag the information and rank and rate the information (organize).
Example: I had the good fortune to interview Suresh Kuppusamy, the CEO, CTO and co-founder of Bluenog. Aside from the very salient he is a really nice human being, Bluenog which I hadn’t heard of until yesterday which is more my bad than their problem, does exactly what I’m talkin’ about - aggregate and organize. They have framework that was built on open source called ICE (at version 4.5) that ties enterprise content management (ECM), business intelligence (BI) and a portal through common, and secure services, so that a midmarket company can provide role-detemined information through the portal regardless of what system, internal or external the data is drawn from. Columbia University is one of their customers. They use the Bluenog portal and single signon so that, as Suresh said, “they can push the right content to the right entities.” This means that management has a dashboard indicating how well they are doing with their KPIs, there are shared calendars, content from feeds like wikis or blogs or standard structured sources or internal data is all aggregated and organized (there are those words again) for each kind of person on a need to know basis. These guys have been so successful that they have been winners on the Red Herring 100 and the Infoweek 50 in their mere 3 years of existence. Check out the diagram and then check them out. Smart.
Aggregate and organize.
Example: This is a mashup of Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext and 2.0 ubermensch. It’s the combination of his discussion on a panel and an interview I did with him and his very bright VP of Professional Services, Mike Indinopulos. What Socialtext is doing from a technology standpoint has been and continues to be for me the ne plus ultra when it comes to aggregating and organizing information in ways genuinely create actionable knowledge - not just intelligence. They are moving the fastest in the world of wikis at least into the realm of CRM with their technological capability to expand into not just behind the firewall but at this stage a private outreach to customers for collaboration within the Socialtext framework. They can do public interactions, but private is what a few of their more forward thinking customers are ready for.
What is even more interesting though is their (his and Mike’s) development of the Social Software Value Matrix which is almost (not quite) a maturity model for oganizational evolution when it comes to using the services that social software provides for early stage operational improvements to late stage businss model innovation. I won’t outline the whole thing but it basically organizes the information from a company and ultimately its customers across departments, silos and throughout customer and partner networks. Aggregate the information and organize it. That underlays the entire matrix. What changes is the purpose its used for and the scope of the information gathering. But it is an incredibly well thought out piece of work, increasingly my confidence in my choice of Socialtext as the SuperStah! for the chapter in CRM at the Speed of Light 4th edition that goes through wikis. Even though they integrate far less with existing CRM systems than the folks at Atlassian, they get what has to be done when it comes to Social CRM.
There are countless other examples that I could provide for this such as some of how even Microsoft Sharepoint, the collaboration industry 800 pound gorilla is being used for aggregation and organization, but for now that’s enough.
Enterprise 2.0 so far has been an eyeopener because its telling me and around 1200-1300 others that there is not only a lot of cool and collaborative things going on but E2.0 is moving into mainstream thinking and soon into mainstream operations, systems, and best of all strategy. Plus this thing is REALLY well organized by the TechWeb folks. No glitches at all.
However I do have a beef with the conference content.
Where’s Social CRM? Or CRM 2.0 if You Want To Call It That
I actually thought, maybe in a bit too self-absorbed a way, that Social CRM was going to be one of the key themes here. It isn’t. I remember CRM being mentioned once by someone but it is not even a blip on the radar. Granted, this is an enterprise 2.0 conference so it could very well be firewall constrained but I would have liked to heard a speaker who was looking at Enterprise 2.0 from the standpoint of how it would engage customers directly into the collaborative value chain of the enterprise. However, at least in the 1 on 2 I had with Ross and Mike there was discussion of that and they do really get it. But I would suggest for the San Francisco conference later this year or next year’s conference they have some explicit discussion around Social CRM since the customer engagement is now a strategic imperative for business, rather than just customer management which, as a strategy needs to be relegated to, as a famous leftist once said, “the dustbins of history.” You operations guys need not freak out. We still need traditional CRM for day to day business ops.
Rock On, Social CRM
Tonight I’m doing this Rockstars of Social CRM panel with Brent Leary, Michael Thomas and Frank Eliason, moderated by Chris Brogan and Marcel LeBrun at the Renaissance Waterfront Hotel in Boston between 8-11pm. Has both live participating audience and a twebinar attached and will discuss what social CRM is. There’s also a party with Rockband 2 and karaoke which I am announcing now that I will NOT participate in since I have a some arthritis (sadly, not just an excuse) and I suck at it too. Check on the links that I have here to register for the live event (which may be closed) or for the Twebinar which is always open - like the bar. There are in total over 500 registered participants already.
June 18th, 2009
Outcome Based Social Networks: Yet Another CRM at the Speed of Light Excerpt
I’m going to finish the book today. CRM at the Speed of Light, 4th edition will be done by the time that the day ends - though I suspect a lot sooner. It’s going to be a 750 page tome - mostly print, some supplemented electronically, on CRM 2.0 - I hope a definitive work. In honor of me being able to devote much more time and effort to this blog and the rest of my life than I’ve been able to in the last few weeks, even months, I’m doing one last chapter excerpt from the upcoming book, pre-edited. Let me know what you think of the idea - This is on Outcome Based Social Networks. Again, this is unedited so it will be improved in final form. I have to edit it once before I send in, as I always do and then I send it in to be edited by my copy editor.
Enjoy!! Read the rest of this entry »
April 8th, 2009
Study Says Social Media Not Useful to Close Sales. Duh.
Jessica Tsai writes wonderfully (as always) at DestinationCRM about the results of a survey done by the Effectiveness Solutions Research (ESR) Group that tries to (and I really mean “tries to” not “succeeds at”) look at effect of the use of new social media tools” on B2B sales.
What’s bothers me here isn’t the results of the survey but the survey itself. This is a flawed survey when it comes to the definition of what constitutes social media and the questions that it asks.
First, identified as social media tools are:
- Plaxo
- Jigsaw
They also merge two traditional services Hoovers and OneSource as a counterbalance I presume. Though why they thought it necessary to pick two and merge them rather than choose just one or use both separately, I don’t know. At least they got Hoovers and OneSource right as a service.
But that’s the least of the issues. Here are the problems:
- Twitter, Plaxo, Facebook, and LinkedIn are not social media “tools” especially not sales tools. Twitter is a channel/network and the other three are social networks. Calling them tools is a disservice to readers and to the networks themselves (and their members).
- As Denis Pombriant said in a great post on “The New, New Economy” in CRMBuyer: “I got an email this morning about a new analyst report purporting to show that social media is not helping to close many deals. Here’s a news flash: It’s not supposed to be a closing tool. Social media is an opening tool, a way to keep lines of communication open and maybe even keep pipelines full. It might even help reduce the sales cycle.” Oh, do I ever concur.
- With all these things as problems to begin with, their projections are somewhere between so what and thanks for nothing and huh? For example, “Twitter is an anomaly…ESR has found that for the near term, within corporations, marketing personnel will find the tool much more valuable than their counterparts in sales. Presently it is not a valuable mainstream prospecting or relationship building medium for most B2B salespeople. This one is on the order of “what else is new?” Or that Facebook. at least for now is better for personal and family matters, rather than sales. Okay……and….?
- They have a chart titled “Do These Tools Help You Win B2B Sales?” with the aforementioned channels and social networks as the tools. The answers are pretty much “no” with LinkedIn mentioned as helpful by 35%. These aren’t the tools a sales person would use to close business. Because they aren’t tools and social networks aren’t used to close business.
These are social networks/channels. They function the same way that all communities function. There are interactions among the participants who directly or indirectly have a relationship with each other and are there for a common reason or practice or event. Their raison d’etre has little to do with closing B2B deals, just because there are corporate representatives there. Calling them tools is like calling Los Angeles a “tool.” There may be a few tools who live in Los Angeles (mostly around Hollywood Hills) but the city itself isn’t a tool.
Worst of all, with its purported purpose, this survey ignores the actual tools that are being put forth by companies like Oracle with their Enterprise 2.0 sales products that they call Social CRM; or by companies like InsideView which actually have a tool to find out sales intelligence which might actually provide an edge that would benefit someone closing a deal in a B2B environment.
When it comes to social networks and channels re: sales, there is some value, due to reputation and influence garnered when participating in the social networks including those identified above, but not to close deals. Their value is in developing the kinds of relationships that serve you over time, if you’re a sales person, in pursuing opportunities and finding leads and developing the kind of sales intelligence that provides you with the insight in making your job easier and better.
One last thing.
According to DestinationCRM, Dave Stein ESR Group’s CEO said the following:
“What social media should not be doing…is taking the place of investments in core sales methodology-that is, people, infrastructure, tool, processes, supporting technology, education, and training. All of these things are expensive, they take time, focus, but that’s what works, that’s what helps companies be effective from a selling perspective… “We’re concerned about the distraction factor more than anything else.”
While its hard to argue against the basic practices of sales, its also limited to think that they are the reason that things work. This isn’t the same as the era that existed years ago. The ascendancy of the web changed the nature of competition because not only are the products and services that a company provides - in either a B2C or B2B environment easily available elsewhere, but sales people have to compete with all the noise out there - the 3000 messages a day that we all are subjected to - or assaulted by -depending on the day. That means that using things like social media tools (actual social media tools) aren’t a distraction. They are useful additions to a sales arsenal and they are here to stay also. As are the social networks and channels that are so wildly popular. The idea would be to integrate them into the thinking because the potential customers are using them to communicate with peers about the companies that have the sales people.
Ahh. Look. Here’s a presentation on social sales and how to think the use of actual tools in the sales environment and the value of social networks and channels - as distinct from social media tools like blogs, wikis, user generated content They would help in enhancing lead generation, opening up opportunities in a B2B environment. There is some things that can be done for closing but remember what Denis said above.
I’m going to not use this research, not because of the conclusion which may or may not be the case, but because it just asks the wrong questions and starts from the wrong premise and defines things incorrectly too.
Here’s the presentation:
March 23rd, 2009
Is Twitter Social CRM? Nope.
Over the last few days, social analyst Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang and PR 2.0 pundit Brian Solis have been calling Twitters’s Future: Social CRM. Jeremiah did it in his wildly popular Web Strategist blog here and Brian did it in his very good PR 2.0 Blog here. While Jeremiah’s argument is somewhat different than Brian’s the basic premise that both of them have is that Twitter can be (not is going to be) a Social CRM something. Product? System? A little unclear actually.
The reality is that they’re both wrong. Twitter is an increasingly important channel that provides businesses with a means to engage customers on Twitter and to gather data in real time from Twitter, potentially. If Twitter was to be social CRM system or product, it would need the level of overhaul that would make it Twitter no longer. Twocial TweeRM?
Jeremiah claims that Twitter has two of the three elements of CRM - customers and relationships. Just not management.
A retail clothing chain has customers too - so do all businesses. That doesn’t make them a social CRM system or product.
Relationships the way he discusses them - which is peer relationships that discuss a brand and its rivals positively and negatively can be found on ePinions, FeedbackPlanet, and MyStarbucks Ideas too - but that doesn’t mean that this is the opportunity to turn any of them into a Social CRM product or system.
Twitter’s benefit and its relationship to CRM is that it is a location, a community of people who are engaging with their peers in honest open discussions about things that benefit or hurt specific businesses, among many other things. Because there are operational CRM tools and will be new tools that can potentially tie business rules and workflow, processes and systems to communities of prospects and customers who are conversing, then a channel or location like Twitter becomes eminently valuable.
The first reason? Because a problem can be monitored, noticed and acted upon, with tools like the Twitter extension to the salesforce.com ServiceCloud or the SAP/Business Objects integration of Business Objects sentiment analysis with Twitter that allows businesses to monitor customer conversation and route the conversations for action to the right people to take action.
The second reason? Because gathering data on the actual discussions around brands - both yours and competitors is invaluable.
But all of that is just on Twitter, not the thousands of other channels that Brian Solis actually identified in his now well known “Conversation Prism” of the types and sources of conversation going on via the social web.
Twitter is one of those. Social CRM requires more than one channel.
Even though Social CRM/CRM 2.0 is a strategy, it does require tools and systems to get the strategy accomplished.
Jeremiah seems be focused around:
“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.”
But that makes the competition companies like Radian6, and the other 170 social media monitoring companies (thanks to my bud, Nathan Gilliat for the number) not CRM companies. Even if they focused on competing in that space, the problem a Twitter brand management and monitoring system would have is that they’re only going to monitor Twitter. The social media monitoring companies who complement CRM so well aren’t even nearly that limited. They monitor, blogs, forums, and other social networks/communities as well as traditional sources of brand monitoring and company information like Reuters and Hoover. Twitter would be limited to monitoring…Twitter - unless they decided not to be Twitter anymore.
At the moment, Social CRM is in a nascent stage, so all discussions like this are necessary, so we can define what it is. But CRM products and services are a mature market with a substantial dollar value, one that Twitter would be smart to take advantage of. It would be a way of monetizing themselves. Perhaps, rather than Social CRM, might I suggest Twitter do as one of Jeremiah’s commentors suggested and extend their API and provide a paid service to CRM (and other) vendors to customize the activities they integrate with on Twitter. I can’t speak to the details, but the key here is “service” which is simply something that Twitter offers, NOT Social CRM applications which would be FAR beyond their scope or purpose - I can’t speak to their expertise in building them.
With the customers in control of the business ecosystem, companies have no choice but to define strategies for customer engagement. Twitter is at this point a channel for finding the customers to engage with and to get data from so that richer customer insights can be garnered and problems solved in real time or nearly so.
That’s a channel. Its not a Social CRM strategy, system, or application. It could provide premium services to make it a more responsive channel but it won’t be Social CRM unless it’s no longer Twitter.
In addition to being the author of the best-selling "CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century," Paul Greenberg is President of The 56 Group, LLC, a customer strategy consulting firm, focused on cutting edge CRM strategic services and a founding partner of the CRM training company, BPT Partners, LLC. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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