Category: Enterprise 2.0
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)
October 20th, 2009
Finally! A Three-Cornered Consulting Service for Enterprise 2.0
Its not too often I endorse a new service - in fact, I never have without a lot of due diligence and at least some production history. So, for the first…and potentially only….time ever, I’m telling you that I’m truly excited about the launch of Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0. I’m not only telling you as readers at larger enterprises to bring these guys to the table but I’m also going to tell you why its easy for me to support this new entity despite the fact that its only been launched today.
What in g-d’s name is Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0?
Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 is a triangular consulting service that fits into the “its about time someone did this” category of consulting services. For a really good comprehensive blog posting on PE2 check out Sameer Patel’s, “The E 2.0 Service Appliance” here.
Okay, back to this station.
Triangular?
The First Triangle: The Players
Yep, for two reasons. One, it’s a trinity of three major heavy hitters in varying spaces that cover the enterprise and contemporary business thinking. They are, in no particular order:
Dion Hinchcliffe - perhaps the godfather of Enterprise 2.0 - and the boss of Hinchcliffe Associates, He is the most knowledgeable guy in the space that covers the strategies and practices for the contemporary enterprise - especially when it comes to real world applications of internal collaboration and strategies for co-creation within the enterprise that return a genuine ROI. The guy is also a fellow ZDNet blogger who I think writes some of the best posts that ZDNet produces in his Enterprise 2.0 blog Dion is so well known and so successful in his realm that he has a customer list to drool over.
Michael Krigsman - Michael is the CEO of Asuret and a revolutionary in his own right. He has developed a methodology and an application to go with it that actually is able to ferret out the problems that are likely to arise during a project implementation at an enterprise. What he and it shows is uncanny and he and it work like a charm. Michael is also a popular ZDNet blogger who writes the well read (including me) “IT Project Failures” blog - which, incidentally, is now covering CRM, thenks got.
Ross Mayfield - Chairman and President of Socialtext, pioneer in Enterprise 2.0 and especially the world of corporate wikis - and a rockstar too - one of the most visible luminaries in the Enterprise 2.0 firmament. Ross’s Socialtext platform won my “SuperStah!” designation in the upcoming CRM at the Speed of Light’s 4th edition for the chapter on wikis because it is the best in its class without a doubt (at least without a doubt of mine) - as is Ross as a thinker. Ross did a blog entry on Social CRM a few months ago, called “The Social C.R.M. Iceberg” that sparked a major discussion in the industry - well worth reading - again.
While its cool that there are such notables tied into this venture, that isn’t, by itself, the thing that gets me going frankly. What I do like and will be anxious to see in action is the other triangle that they are providing, not the star power. I know and trust them for what they are able to do.
The Second Triangle: Framework, Platform, Application
The more powerful triangle is the offering itself - a trio consisting of a framework, a platform and an application - all tied to services that the joint effort will provide. What makes it important is that this is a close to a practical package of strategies and tools as I have ever seen in the world of co-creation and collaboration. There are some Social CRM implications for this too as we’ll see.
Let’s treat this simply. They’ve got an offering that is for the first time that I can see, based on the best practices at the IT, process and strategic levels, complete. Here’s the framework (See Figure 1):
Figure 1: The Pragmatic Enterprise Framework
If you look carefully at the framework, something stands out -its nearly complete. The only thing that I would say I don’t see is a way to allow the customer to collaborate with the company - the inbound communications and interactions “layer”. I suppose you could make the case for Community Management being that component, but I don’t. I would want to see a customer interaction channel as part of the framework. While not piddling, that doesn’t in any way denigrate the power of this particular framework - especially as an internal collaboration strategy and implementation. With Socialtext being the platform that this framework is built on and Michael K’s Asuret application (see Figure 2) a foundational app for implementation, this framework, Socialtext platform and application (FPA) is the first of its kind to make the way to market.
Figure 2: Asuret Anonymous Participant Analysis
What gets me excited is the possibilities. I would say is that, rather than the ridiculous noise about nomenclature that goes on all the time around enterprise software and strategy, especially when it is a nascent area, these guys are providing something that is eminently practicable for business. That indicates that the market is starting to mature.
Why (before you jump all over my butt for making that statement)? Because the framework, software and platform all have sufficient best practices, sufficient application to the market, sufficient histories of success and sufficient strategic relevance to indicate that there a body of knowledge ready to be applied. THAT’S why I say starting to mature.
So, congrats to you, Pragmatic Enterprise. Its exciting to see your two triangles out there. Your launch is a good sign for a growing business approach. Hopefully your future success will be a better sign.
October 7th, 2009
Salesforce.com Plays In the Enterprise - Again
Back in 1999, I was a salesforce.com user and at that time, it was a rather kludgy sales force automation application that didn’t do much right - for example if I tried to export a .CSV file it gave me an .XLS file and vice versa. I read something by Marc Benioff then that said, “we are going to be the leading enterprise application provider” (or to that effect) which spurred me on to criticize them for their statement - which at the time I saw as ridiculous.
That led to Marc Benioff, who got wind of it because Salesnet had taken my criticism of salesforce.com and put it up on their website, to send me a note that said pretty much literally:
“I love to convince skeptics. Can I take a crack at you?”
My email back to him was:
“Take your best shot.”
Which he did and, to his credit, with a few great-story-to-tell glitches, he convinced me.
That’s why I saw the recent salesforce.com announcement about their their joint venture, alliance, minority investment, in Unit4 Agresso to create Financialforce.com as something both fascinating and even a little ironically amusing given that decade ago comment by Marc.
What It Is
Financialforce.com seems to be salesforce.com’s/Unit4 Aggresso’s joint effort to enter the financial/accounting market in the cloud. Coda 2Go, the original product, now rebranded Financialforce.com is already built on the Force.com platform so this isn’t a technological stretch at all. Given my at least rudimentary knowledge of accounting software and its market place (though I’d trust Dennis Howlett’s excellent September 30 take on this before I’d trust mine), this move has advantages for both salesforce.coma and Unit4 Aggresso. For salesforce.com, they get a force.com created, functionally solid accounting package - they don’t have to build their own. From the Coda 2Go perspective, despite CEO’s Jeremy Roche’s comments in Destination.crm’s Jessica Tsai’s very good article on this joint venture about their “distinct branding strategy” from salesforce.com (yeah, right, that’s gonna be really easy to distinguish), this gives them a mighty sword to go to market with.
Here’s what their home page looks like for those of you who think that this cloud offering is merely vapor.
Financialforce.com Home Page
My Take on It
I’m not clear on what market they are going after yet. If its the same market as NetSuite goes after - the midmarket to upper midmarket, with some bleeding into the larger enterprises, that means that Financialforce is going to put itself squarely in the wheelhouse of SAP also - and Oracle for that matter though SAP probably has more to worry about. But it doesn’t stop there. On the lower end, Financialforce might be competing with financial software juggernaut Sage - which as you may know is much larger in the backend systems market then they are in CRM - not that they’re slouches in CRM either. But the bulk of their nearly 6 million customers is ACT! and their varying financial packages. Plus we got Intuit in the mix here too - who are arguably the small business leader - period. Then there’s Microsoft…. In other words, this is not going to be easy for this new venture, though I don’t doubt some measure of success since they seem to be able (from what I’ve seen) to be competitive at least in their functionality. But its a really tough market to be in because it’s very mature when it comes to the quality and range of offerings.
I never count out a salesforce.com-related venture - especially in a market one they set their sites on 10 years ago. Back then Marc B. convinced a skeptic. Now he has to convince a believer that he can play in the back office. The cloud makes this promising and something of a differentiator. I think it is great that they’ve made the plunge. They seem to be successful in the areas that they get into more often than not - see the recent Customer Interaction Center announcement combining their Service Cloud 2 offering with the Cisco Unified Communications Platform for example. But this is a different kettle of fish - a busy market that doesn’t look for an innovator, though any newcomers (which they are despite Coda 2Go) still need to be an original to succeed.
August 31st, 2009
Voice of The Customer: Speech Meets Larynx at CRM Evolution 2009
Last week, I keynoted the CRM Evolution 2009 conference - probably the best conference I ever attended, though I was biased because I also chaired it - first time I ever chaired a conference - so I had the opportunity to be a participant in more than just the speech.
But the keynote wasn’t just for the CRM Evolution conference; it was a joint keynote for CRM Evolution 2009 (get all coverage here) and SpeechTek 2009, the annual best attended speech technology conference (get some coverage here).
So I had this dilemma. What can I say to a joint group of people with diverse interests that would interest both without watering down the message? Honestly, it took me WEEKS to solve this one. I truly had no idea beyond a mundanely clever title for the presentation - Voice of the Customer (get it?).
But after awhile I realized that I was thinking about the whole thing wrong. I was trying to appease the dual groups rather than realizing that my actual job was to get across my idea in their metaphor. AND that there was a common glue that bound both audiences - they were all business people who needed to engage customers.
The ultimate difficulty was combining the metaphors in a way that would attract both audiences. The idea remained the same and its one that I preach constantly - “the social customer is the customer of the 21st century and they demand engagement and knowledge that they need to accomplish a piece of their personal agendas. In order for you as a business to provide that you need insight. That means data needs to be captured and analyzed. But data is no substitute for human judgment, merely an aid to it.”
Here’s my presentation. I’m doing this because I got the idea when Michael Krigsman, our ZDNet compadre who has the world class IT Project Failures blog, did the same for his presentation at CRM Evolution last week. Please let me know what you think. This was slightly uncharted waters for me, so I can stand to get some pointers on where I might have done better - both on the ideas and the style of presentation. Though I do admit, that I think its pretty good.
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.
July 6th, 2009
Time to Put A Stake in The Ground on Social CRM
The debate and discussion about what defines Social CRM a.k.a. CRM 2.0 vs. its traditional parent has been going on for about 2 years pretty regularly and started, according to thought leader Graham Hill almost a decade before that.
Personally, I’m done defining it and am moving on. I think enough time has been spent trying to decide what we’re calling it and what it is. I think that we’ve reached the point that though there is no one point of view, there is a general idea of what we have. So this post, which will be on ZDNET and PGreenblog is my stake in the ground for the definition of Social CRM. If anyone asks me what the definition is, they are going to be referred to this post on either blog. I’m putting it on both blogs, but it has implications for each blog that are somewhat different. Check toward the end of the post where I’ll discuss how I’m going to approach each one.
Also, for this post, I still will welcome comments and discussion on the definition if you want. But I’m really ready personally to move on.
Why?
First, there seems to be a consensus on the definition already. We all agree on its general characteristics. We see it as the use of social and traditional CRM tools and processes to support a strategy of customer engagement. Or some permutation of that.
Second, there’s too much other work on Social CRM to do. Its time to start figuring out and documenting the business models, policies, practices, processes, social characteristics, applications, and the methodologies that we need to actually carry it out. There is some great work going on in those Social CRM areas already with folks like Graham Hill, Denis Pombriant, Thomas Vander Wal, Brent Leary, Prem Kumar, Chris Carfi, Bill Band, Natalie Petouhoff, Mike Fauscette, Michael Maoz and Ray Wang, among others (please forgive me if I didn’t mention you. There are many others). But we need to create a repository for all this work - and an institution that can represent it agnostically. Right now, the body of practice out there is all over the place. Even with this, the work on Social CRM’s “how” needs a dramatic escalation now.
So, I’m providing one last aggregate look at what I see Social CRM to be. When the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light comes out, you’ll see a lot of the what and how in that nearly 800 pages. This is the condensed - black hole condensed - version of that.
I hope that I’m reflecting the consensus. If not, I’m sure the discussion will go on. But as far as I go, I’m interested in the more substantive discussions on what we actually have to do - not how it differs from traditional CRM nor what we’re talking about when it comes to “social” and whether or not we are going to call it CRM 2.0 or social CRM.
My Take On It
Okay, here’s my take on Social CRM’s definition.
- I’m conceding to “Social CRM” as the term of choice, rather than CRM 2.0. If ZDNET will let me, I’ll change the name of the blog to “Social CRM: The Conversation” CRM 2.0 has been a placeholder at best and obscuring at worst - it doesn’t reflect the customer’s control of the business ecosystem all that well. Social CRM is a better, though not great, reflection of what we’re talking about. Let’s use the acronym of the Twitterverse group for it - SCRM or sCRM. I don’t care which.
- The customer controls the business ecosystem and the conversation, but not the business a.k.a. company a.k.a. enterprise itself. What that means is that while customers have much greater control over their destinies in how they interact with businesses, make no mistake about it, they don’t run the business, nor does the business have to concede everything to the customer.
- What this means is that SCRM is an extension of CRM, not a replacement for CRM. Its a dramatic change in what it adds to the features, functions and characteristics of CRM but it is still based on the time honored principle that a business needs its customers and prefers them profitable and that same business needs to run itself effectively too.
- The transformation that’s sparked the need for Social CRM seems to have occurred in 2004. It has been a social revolution in how we communicate, not a revolution in how we do business per se. All institutions that humans interact with have been affected by things like the cellphone/smartphone, the new social web tools and the instant availability of information in an aggregated and organized way that provides intelligence to the person on the street, not just the enterprise.
- Part of that transformation affects how we trust and thus who we trust. Since 2004, “someone like me” is the most trusted source, not businesses, NGOs, government agencies or corporate leaders. That means that peer trust is how influence and impact germinates and then propagates most effectively - at least as of now.
- The lesson for business, in terms of Social CRM is that we are now at a point that the customers’ expectations are so great and their demands so empowered that our SCRM business strategy needs to be built around collaboration and customer engagement, not traditional operational customer management.
- We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction - or the data associated with it.
- Businesses still need to run their operations, set goals that are cognizant of what the customer wants and needs, but not determined by that. They need to map their goals and objectives to the customers’ goals and objectives to make it work for all concerned.
- That means that we need to recognize that there is an extended enterprise value chain which consists of the company, its suppliers, vendors and agencies that the enterprise has to deal with. There is a separate “personal value chain” which is the total greater than the sum of its parts of what an individual customer needs to achieve whatever their personal agenda is.
- For the company to succeed, since they cannot control the personal value chain of the customer, nor should they want to, they can only provide what the customer needs to satisfy that part of the customer’s personal agenda that is associated with their enterprise. That means products, services, tools and experiences that allow the customer that satisfying interaction.
- The intersection of the extended enterprise value chain and the customer’s use of part of his personal value chain to satisfy that personal agenda creates the possibility for a collaborative value chain that engages the customer in the activities of the business sufficiently to provide each (the company and the customer) with what they need from the other to derive individual and mutually beneficial value.
- That means that transparency and authenticity become more than buzzwords because in order for the customer to make intelligent decisions on how they are going to interact with the company and the level of that interaction, they need that visibility and honesty from the company.
- That also means that the companies need to make the decision that its a good thing to allow the customer to have that increased level of knowledge, access and honesty - it can help the company immensely in their engagements with their customers. That’s a cultural issue that has to be resolved for Social CRM to work.
- If these aforementioned conditions are met, the customer is afforded the ability to co-create by the company. What that means is not all that pat. It can mean anything from customers and the company collaborating on product development, to customer suggestions on how to improve a company process, to customers helping other customers solve customer service issues, to even doing what gamers do and modifying game play using tools for scenario creation which adds value to the game. Co-creation is the ability of the company and customer to create additional value for each other - what form it takes is not always THE BIG THING. But co-creation, mutually derived value, is at the core of SCRM.
- SCRM differs from Enterprise 2.0 though is integrally related to it. Enterprise 2.0 is organized around increasing the productivity of the workforce in all that it does utilizing new collaborative tools to do so. It uses those tools to aggregate and organize information and systems. However, though different, Enterprise 2.0 is integrally related because part of that improvement in productivity increases the effectiveness of employee-customer interactions. It also increases the company’s ability to capture useful information and knowledge about customers, not just boatloads of data. But what it doesn’t do is provide avenues for the customers to engage themselves with the company. That’s not its purpose. That is the purpose of SCRM.
- SCRM also changes the nature of what kind of customer is optimal for you. Rather than aiming at a satisfied customer (an increasingly useless metric) and even rather than thinking that a loyal customer is your best customer, your objective should be to create advocates and settle for loyal customers.
- How you measure customer value changes when you’re thinking about SCRM. Rather than just Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - which reflects the direct financial value of a customer to a company over the life of his relationship to that company, think too about Customer Referral Value (CRV) which measures how valuable influential customers are when they tell others about your company, not just promise to.
- When you look at the SCRM applications out there - there are no actual SCRM suites, no matter what the claims of any company on either the CRM or social tools side. What you do have are effective and important applications that increase the ability of employees to interact with customers - though they are not tools that facilitate the actual interaction. You also have the integration of social media and community building tools with traditional CRM tools which are providing effective combinations which are leading toward SCRM. I want to emphasize. These are all good tools. They are worthy of any company’s consideration. There is just no SCRM suite out there - as of yet or in the near future. Which doesn’t matter one iota.
I’d say that covers the basics.
A Shorter Definition
For a shorter definition of SCRM, I’d say:
“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”
Well, it may not be tweetable but it’s shorter.
A Tweetable Definition
“The company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.”
With the quotes and the period, its 71 characters. Get rid of the period and you can just write it twice.
What’s Next?
Let me reiterate something. This is my stake in the ground. It would be presumptuous of me to assume I can halt a discussion that I no longer want to participate in. That said, in presentations etc. I’m going to continue to give the definition of SCRM because people will be asking. But I’m not going to try to define it anymore. I know what it is. I think that most people who read my stuff know it too - and many who don’t, also know it. I also am no longer going to engage in discussions or defenses of whether or not it’s “necessary” or “marketing hype” or any of that. Again, stake in the ground. While there is plenty of room for traditional CRM strategies, the change in the customer necessitates some sort of commitment to social CRM to succeed with that neo-customer.
So, here’s what I’m going to be doing and not doing from here on.
- No more debates on what Social CRM is, though I certainly will discuss what it is in presentations and when else it makes sense. But I’m not trying to define it any more
- No more detailed defenses on whether or not its necessary. Its existence is always necessary. Its use is necessary in appropriate situations.
- No more calling it CRM 2.0 for me. Its Social CRM.
- In all the venues I have when it comes to discussing Social CRM, it will be the new business models, the processes, the methodologies, the practices, reviews of the applications that are part of the SCRM universe - and debunking the claims of those apps if need be. I’ll be providing as many success and failure stories as I humanly can so we can develop a body of practice.
- For ZDNET, now that the book is done, I’m going to focus on what the ZDNET audience loves the best - the technology and processes of Social CRM - related or otherwise. Plus the practitioner stories of successful implementation. There will be deviations from that but that’s my ZDNET primary direction. Plus I’m going to try to change the blog name, if it doesn’t wreak too much havoc to Social CRM: The Conversation
- For PGreenblog, the focus will be on the discussions ranging from the business models, the social psychology, the economics to the theoretical concepts and the practical strategies. I’ll look at the culture of the companies, the nature of the customer’s thinking, the effect of style on all of this, etc. I’ll do the best I can with what the line of business person needs to know and what the academician needs to explore.
- I’m going to spend some time trying to create an institution to capture all of this called the Institute for the Future of Business and the Customer (IFBC) which will include the actual B2B and B2C and B2G customer on its leadership body with the company leaders. Unlike any other institution of its kind that I know of. This is not an easy task. I’ve been trying for two years to do this already and have made some progress but it needs a good academic institution and an endowed chair and a couple of companies to underwrite it. It is an agnostic body that will attempt to aggregate and organize all this incredible knowledge on how companies and customers engage and establish what the new business world looks like going forth. Ambitious, even grandiose? Maybe. But I’m going to try or go down in flames trying.
That’s it. Stake is in the ground. Comments on the definition per se are welcome this one last time on either of the blogs that you see this.
But I’m done. AND I’m just starting.
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 »
June 11th, 2009
Guest Post: Steve Wylie on The Enterprise 2.0 Conference
I’m heading over to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston on June 22. If you’re interested in the social customer and how businesses should respond to them - and how workplace performance can be improved - this is the one conference you shouldn’t miss all year. I mean that. Go. I’ll hook up with you if you’re there. Contact me via Twitter to set up some time.
I asked Steve Wylie, the GM and Conference Director for this knockout of a conference and all around good guy, to write a guest post because I don’t think I’m persuasive enough and this guy has those needed mesmerizing powers to get you there - using rational thought as his hypnotic tool of choice. He is also the editor of the Enterprise 2.0 Blog, which means he can write a pretty mean posting to begin with. He’ll give you an idea of why an Enterprise 2.0 event is even more cogent than ever.
SF-based Steve is an events industry veteran, having handled some of the biggest conferences around including the Interop mega-events in Las Vegas and New York. He is an IT industry veteran too, as the former program director for InteropNet, which ran a multi-vendor test lab geared to evaluate, improve and showcase early implementations of open-standard IT infrastructure technology.
I’m always amazed at what it takes to run an event. I think event planning is a magnificent and difficult venture. But Enterprise 2.0 is not just an event, but one with actual content - and plenty of networking. Oh, if you want to hang around with the rock stars of the social web, they hang there too. Here’s where you can get more info on the conference.
I’d truly take advantage of this and make the effort to get there.
Take it away, Steve
The Next Phase of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption
Paul kindly invited me to share my thoughts on the Enterprise 2.0 market and provide some highlights for the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. As the conference chair, I’ve got a fairly unique perspective on the state of Enterprise 2.0 and some ideas on where we’re headed. We’re roughly three years along since Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee first described this new category of enterprise software and organizational strategy that he dubbed “Enterprise 2.0”. Someone recently asked me what’s changed in the Enterprise 2.0 market from that point to present day.
For starters, we really didn’t have much of “a market” to speak of three years ago. At that first Enterprise 2.0 Conference we described a new vision for business applications that included some truly ground-breaking concepts. Attendees were largely business users and managers, frustrated with the disparity between fast-paced, consumer technology innovation and the dated applications being supported by corporate IT. At that first conference we were embarking on a radical journey to turn these business applications and the corporate culture around them upside down. We were ready to take on the world.
Fast forward three years and those early aspirations are now grounded in reality. Momentum is building for what is now truly an Enterprise 2.0 “market” and we’re seeing many early signs of success. But while we’ve made tremendous progress in three years, Enterprise 2.0 concepts and applications are still striving to reach more wide-spread, enterprise-scale adoption. There is an abundance of use cases around small or department-level successes but far fewer examples of large-scale deployments – examples of Enterprise 2.0 concepts and applications that form part of an organization-wide fabric for productivity and communication. Why is that?
While we could argue that this is a very new market and that businesses take time to change, I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be challenged by large-scale adoption until corporate IT is fully on board. Early adoption has been largely driven by business users and department-level managers. They had a problem to solve and were fed up waiting for IT to provide the solutions they needed. They took matters into their own hands by finding workable, web-based solutions and even celebrated this new found freedom from IT. With a few exceptions, IT took a reactive posture to Enterprise 2.0 and viewed it as a threat to be managed, secured and even blocked in some cases.
Three years later and I see that posture changing for many IT leaders. We’re entering a new era where forward-looking IT leaders embrace Enterprise 2.0 as a strategic advantage and as part of a cohesive, company-wide system. This change is an important ingredient to the next phase of Enterprise 2.0 adoption.
So what should you expect from this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference? Expect to network with nearly 1500 people from over 40 countries. Expect our most comprehensive program to date with deep coverage of new topics like Social Media and Cloud Computing. Expect even more innovation from industry veterans and start-up vendors preparing for the next big thing. And expect to hear some really compelling case studies and speakers from organizations like the Obama Campaign, the US Army, Booz Allen Hamilton, Volvo and Jet Blue, all ready to share their experiences on how Enterprise 2.0 is transforming business – changing the world.
May 13th, 2009
Sapphire 09 Live: Smart business plans, moral benchmarks
SAP is always a bit of a conundrum to me. They have extraordinarily talented people, an incredibly deep product portfolio that they are always extending, more often than not make good acquisitions that take some time but work out all in all, and seem to be actually dedicated to transforming their ecosystem - internal and network - when the world’s conditions merit it. Which is more than I can say about a lot of similar companies. On the other hand, they make business decisions that I politely would have to say are perplexing and statements that they just simply shouldn’t make.
All in all, I have to say, before I get too far into this post, I am a fan of the company. I find them to be innovative in places I don’t expect; with some caveats, especially related to Territory Management, they’ve developed a CRM product, CRM 7.0 that will be highly regarded and is a valuable addition to the choices that that enterprises have. More on that in another post. They are innovative in ways that have nothing to do with software - but have more to do with culture (collaborative value chain) and with perception and intellectual influence - their unique and useful Business Influencers Group, an organization that is an exceptionally smart idea - and unlike any other at any company I know. But SAP has these flaws that just…just…shouldn’t be there.
Leo Apotheker Keynote Kicks It Off
CEOs, as far as I’m concerned, need to be visionary, not salespeople. Several years ago, in 2003, Craig Conway, then CEO of PeopleSoft, went and did this almost literal song and dance routine about “no code on the desktop” when speaking about PeopleSoft’s first web-enabled applications and it sounded like a sales guy making a hard core pitch with a bit of theater thrown in that shamelessly (though I’m sure he thought it was funny) included his young children. There was no vision, there was no sense that you were dealing with a leader - just a guy trying to sell a product to an audience of about 16,000. It was pathetic actually.
Now, I’m not sure of the size of the audience at Sapphire 09, Chris Musico, an associate editor and bright bulb at CRM Magazine tells me is 10,000 here and 8,000 virtually - they call it their largest audience ever but there are not as many here as there were last year - live humans that is. The numbers are impressive.
But what I am sure is that Leo Apotheker knows the message and believes in it. His sincerity, to my slight surprise, came across, to the audience and if you followed the Twitter feed on Sapphire 09, you’d see that.
But that doesn’t mean the message was perfect. Nor the vision was totally clear.
Leo began his presentation by a grim look at the world economy and the effects of the recession on how the world of business is going to have to function. The net of that part of the discussion is that companies will have to function in a world that has limits and that is at greater risk. This means that in order to bring forward the next generation of business, its going to require “clarity.” That means a clarity of purpose and strategy. Businesses must be able to make strong choices based on a realistic evaluation of “the situation” and then executing on those choices. It means full visibility into the operations of an enterprise with speed and accuracy. It means leaders who think clearly and act accordingly. He mentioned that he had hosted a conference of academics from around the globe and they all decided that it was urgent to rebuild trust and confidence with all stakeholders - especially customers and shareholders. That, I have to say doesn’t take an entire conference to figure out, but it was still good to hear it.
Clarity, which consists of transparency, accountability and sustainability drove the core of his keynote. Around that, which was, of course to be expected, he pitched SAP software and services and SOA architecture. One point that i found interesting was that SAP now supports more than 25 industry specific best practices based roadmaps. SAP is working toward cross pollinating industry best practices, which in theory might sound good, but when it comes to best practices, history kind of bears out the idea that one company’s best practices might be the reason for collapse of another company - so cross pollination of industry-wide best practices might lead to nothing more than a bunch of bee stings rather than honey. So to speak.
Without going on forever on this, there were two specific areas that I want to cover because I see them as exceptionally important - one good - excellent in fact, and one the continuation of a mistake that SAP just seems to keep making.
The Good: Sustainability
I get the fact that my speciality is CRM so I’m not the most qualified to talk about sustainability as an expert. My commitments to being green (beyond seasick), carbon footprint reduction and using less paper tend to be at the level of citizen who owns a house who is trying to reduce energy use without freezing to death in the winter. However, I am more than aware of what has to be done at the corporate level.
When it comes to this, SAP, as evidenced not just by the passion and sincerity of Leo Apotheker on the issue, but in their actions as a company and in the products they’ve acquired and produced are going to be if not already a leading force in sustainable business over the next several years.
Apotheker pointed out that in 2008, SAP had reduced its total corporate carbon footprint by 6.7% compared to 2007. In fact, Peter Graf has been named Chief Sustainability Officer to deal with all things sustainability at SAP including not only meeting their corporate objectives but also to provide their related products and services.
Their commitment went beyond just the achievement of their corporate objectives. Leo showed a Sustainability Solution Map that was comprehensive and valuable. Here it is.
SAP Sustainability Solution Map
They have not only committed to be a company that is socially responsible, but they’ve developed an initial blueprint for other companies to be socially responsible and sustainable. That is something that no other company has even considered that I know, much less done.
But they’ve also monetized it and kept it at a viable level.
For example, the always incredible Ian Kimball, who does many of the SAP presentations to loud applause (guy is a master of this), showed a web based ecommerce application an SAP Web Store (a construct) that had a product - GPS system - that you wanted to buy. Under the GPS system was a note that said, “Guaranteed: Most environmentally friendly product in its class.” That doesn’t sound like much until lan actually took us behind the scenes and showed us the algorithms and dashboards and KPIs built into applications that had the benchmarks for that guarantee built in. In other words, it wasn’t just a claim, but it actually met standards that were provable via app.
But they went beyond even that. They actually have identified a path for themselves as a company that means a rigorous adherence to a set of sustainability KPIs that are probably a first for the industry.
All in all this is a world-class effort that they mean. This isn’t a marketing ploy or a trick to play on the conference. This is a passionate and serious commitment by a mega-giant company that can affect the next generation business models if they can follow through. I think they can and will.
The Bad: Once Again On Demand
I am constantly perplexed by the on demand strategy of this company. Leo was both vague and ultimately defensive and didn’t provide any real reason to let me see that SAP is on the right path to an actual Business ByDesign product that is anything but fluff. I heard Leo make a commitment to “on demand” or “on demand, on premise, hybrid or anything that you want to use.” I even heard him speak on the “cloud coming to earth” and their architectural map had a bottom layer of private cloud - virtualization - and public cloud in that order. But the delivery dates? Unclear. Again. It was almost as if he said, “We are committed to on demand and we’ll deliver it to you….someday.”
He even then said, “if you think SAP is a newcomer to on demand, then think again. We’ve been doing it for five years. You can do your research.”
First, they have been doing it for five years - and doing it badly. I had a conversation in Dallas with an SAP VP when the first “hybrids SFA” came out and was told that the reason for it wasn’t to meet a market need but instead to stop the encroachments of salesforce.com on their customer base. Awful strategy.
Not much real progress has been made. I truly hope that SAP someday gets this right because its almost impossible to be in the market without a SaaS product. They have Business Objects BI On Demand which is an actually good product, but we heard nothing about that. I guess we can continue to wait, but the message was “we don’t have much yet” whether it was intended that way or not.
The Press Conference
While this was a comprehensive press conference that covered a number of “ecosystem” announcements such as a smart and valuable global services partnership with Cognizant, it too was highlighted by one outstanding discussion/announcement and, in this case one horrifically stupid comment by someone who should have known better.
The Good: Business Objects Explorer
One of hte most intriguing products that emerged this conference was Business Objects Explorer, an analytics application that SAP claims may change the way that decisions are made forever. For me, that is a hard thing to say and see but no matter what this is an interesting and potentially important product.
What makes Explorer important is that even a mathematical moron like me can use it to get results of real interest and it provides results lightning fast, so that you don’t have to crunch numbers for hours or days before decision gets made.
For example, if you are doing a simple product analysis, and you want to look up all the refrigerators in a massive catalog - style and price - it takes milliseconds to get an answer. They did a run on some actual data from Sara Lee, one of their beta partners and they were able to go thru 266 million rows in a third of a second. It was breathtakingly fast.
But you can do much more complex analysis - let’s say a comparison of television models that are over 43″ and cost over $2500 or more that are located in inventory in the southeast states compared with all the same criteria for the EMEA and that are plasmas and LCDS but not DLP or any other variety. That would take a couple of seconds of clicking and, apparently, since they didn’t actually do this study, less than a second to get the answers.
Here’s a screenshot to show you the simplicity.
SAP Business Objects Explorer
Now, of course, there are questions - which mostly revolve around data types. In the press conference Ray Wang, a superb Forrester Group analyst, raised the issue of data quality - what is the quality of the data going in - how that affects it? All in all, it will obviously but that’s out of the hands of SAP. He also raised the question of Master Data Management (MDM) - can it handle multiple data sources with different data types? They say yes, but how well remains to be seen. The SAP claim is that it can do that or it can operate as “accelerated Explorer” - which enhances queries power and speed when it comes to SAP own’s Business Warehouse - especially those that are over a million records in length - which even they admit start grinding BW’s analytic capabilities when things get that big. Explorer can easily handle it.
The combination of the extraordinarily intuitive interface and the speed of results makes this a truly interesting and potentially leading product.
That’s the good thing in the press conference.
Shame on John Schwarz
It was just one statement and I truly can’t imagine that he meant to put it this way. But John Schwarz, former CEO of Business Objects and a member of the SAP Executive Board, tripped and fell flat on his face when he….well, here’s a summary (paraphrased):
I’m sure that you heard that there was an SAP reduction in force that affected 3000 SAP employees. I just want to say that I assure you there was little impact in that loss and that in fact, SAP will probably operate leaner and more efficiently as a result.
I wonder if Mr. Schwarz, who I’m sure rests on millions of dollars of personal wealth, remembered that these people, who in effect he is saying are useless (no impact) fat (leaner), have families and no livelihood. I wonder if he remembers that we’re in a recession and its hard to find a job now. I can’t speak for how many of the 3000 are still not working, but I’m sure a significant amount are still looking.
I could excuse this shockingly cold comment by saying that Mr. Schwarz didn’t mean it and he may not have. But he is a member of the SAP Executive Board and what he says carries serious weight. This was a cold, cruel and callous statement that can’t go unnoticed. Literally everyone at that press conference I spoke with later (about 5 or 6 others) - analysts, journalists - were aghast at this.
There is no other way to be. Mr. Schwarz should apologize.
Consistent Doesn’t Mean the Same
Last year at Sapphire, one of the things that struck me funny was SAP’s incredibly scripted messaging which was so minutely micromanaged that it sounded inauthentic. This was around the RIM - SAP SFA for the Blackberry announcement. Everybody, regardless of where the message was delivered or who delivered it mentioned that they used their Blackberries as an alarm clock. Everyone. I commented on this at the time and talked to SAP about it.
Damn if they didn’t do it again - this time around their message of Clarity and Timeless Software. Not more than ten minutes after Leo Apotheker’s on the whole excellent vision and speech, John Schwarz said the same thing about Clarity and Timeless Software in the same way. Scripted and micromanaged again. Inauthentic again.
I won’t dwell on it. Suffice to say, there are two mantras I recommend to SAP that they repeat - in different ways and tones of course:
- Consistent messaging doesn’t mean identical messagings
- Authenticity trumps consistency everytime
Develop the message and then free your spokespeople to present it in any way they want to. Stop telling them how to say they. They have their own personalities and styles and interests and vocal chords. Let ‘em loose. You’ll get much better results.
In Sum: Day 1
Day 1 is always the key to any conference. The tone is set by the visionaries and the spokespeople and the revelations. All in all, SAP continues to impress me. They are locked and loaded and aware of the changes going on in who customers trust and how they communicate and they are responding. Leo mentioned the growth of Gen Y’s influence in the workforce (BRAVO!) and that 1/3 of the baby boomers are on their way to retirement. He got the recession down cold in terms of what to expect and how to think about it. SAP is responsive and working toward doing what it has to so they can meet and participate in the transformation.
But they still have weaknesses that their competitors can exploit especially in the SaaS space. They didn’t help their public image either with the Schwarz faux pas.
But on the whole, they are a company that is not only competing but in areas that matter like sustainability in business, it seems they are becoming actual leaders who have both smart business plans and a moral and ethical benchmark that other companies might do well to imitate.
Let’s see what today brings.
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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