In my blog post earlier this week, I asserted that in order to really transform how businesses operate, social business collaboration faces one more big challenge. I called it “The Last Mile of Social Collaboration” and described it as follows:

“At the end of the day, business is all about getting the right stuff done. If the right work doesn’t get done, you really haven’t accomplished anything–whether it’s shipping a product, closing a sale, or fixing a bug. Making sure the most important work actually gets done is the biggest challenge for social business today. It’s the “last mile” in enabling social collaboration to transform the way businesses operate.”

After coming to this conclusion several months ago, I began to think about the skills, processes, and technologies needed to pull this off. Somewhere in the back of my head I kept hearing two voices. One was the voice of that delightful Yankees fan (yes, I know that’s an oxymoron), Paul Greenberg, who time and again has pointed out to all of us that the social part of CRM is all about engagement—engaging with the customer on his or her terms. The second voice I kept hearing was that of my Argentinean friend, Esteban Kolsky, the esteemed host of this blog. Esteban’s voice kept drilling into my head that online social collaboration is nothing more than a channel for CRM, not a replacement for CRM. To do CRM right you need to be effective across all channels, not just the so-called social channel.

(See, Paul and Esteban, I do listen to you guys, despite being a Dodgers fan—God help me–and preferring Chinese over Spanish)

These two critical insights led me to wonder that if the social side of CRM is all about engagement and online social collaboration is simply one channel for that engagement, what’s going to happen to the physical channel?  You know, that’s the face-to-face, voice-to-voice channel that in the old days was considered the only social channel. Somehow we’ve forgotten all about that channel, yet it’s the one that defines what it means to be social.

Is the physical channel doomed to extinction, permanently replaced by Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Sharepoint? Are we going to find a way to integrate the physical channel with what we describe as social business? Or are we destined to abandon the very core of what it means to be social—live face-to-face interaction?

The answer lies in a comment made by @CobraA1 (whoever he/she is—how social is that?!?) in response to one of Paul Greenberg’s recent posts:

“The best CRM is a friendly smile and a great attitude.”

Wow, @CobraA1 is a genius!  And if he/she is correct, then the physical channel is alive and well. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that as long as we’re human it will always be the primary channel.

So what does all this mean, and how does it relate to the questions I posed in my previous post?  Where is all this social business collaboration activity taking us, and how are we going to address The Last Mile of Social Collaboration?

I believe the answer lies in going back to the roots of what it means to be social and applying some proven tools for effective management. From a methodology point of view, that means

1. enabling face-to-face engagement,
2. embracing and extending physical means of communication,
3. integrating online social collaboration with how people work in the physical world,
4. modifying how people interact with existing computer systems and business processes, and
5. making it possible to constantly deliver “a friendly smile and a great attitude.”

From a technology point of view, by far the most promising technology I’ve come across that’s capable of addressing each of these requirements is commonly referred to as immersive technology. The goal of immersive technology is to pull people into virtual environments that mimic the physical environment they’re accustomed to. And, after spending a lot of time looking into it, I believe we’re on the cusp of seeing immersive technology do for business what James Cameron’s “Avatar” did for the movies. We’re about to enter a whole new world. If you want to begin to understand what that world will look like, I strongly recommend reading Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge. This book has quickly become the blueprint for immersive technology innovation by companies around the world (and will forever change the way you think about your retirement).

After reading this book you’ll easily understand why I’ve decided that my next big venture will be in the immersive technology space. And today I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve accepted the position of President and CEO of Teleplace (www.teleplace.com), one of the leading immersive technology vendors in Silicon Valley. Together with other immersive technology companies like Proton Media, VenueGen, On24, and others, Teleplace has been quietly engineering the underlying technology required to enable large enterprises—both in the commercial and public sectors—realize the efficiency and effectiveness gains derived from integrating immersive technology with the people, processes, and technologies they depend on to effectively run their organizations.

As a veteran of the social business software community, my vision—and passion—is to apply this same technology to the challenge of bridging “the last mile” of social business collaboration, enabling enterprises of all shapes and sizes completely transform the way they do business and deliver “a friendly smile and a great attitude “ to every customer they serve. Thank you @CobraA1, whoever you are.

Yes indeed, it’s great to be back!

My Two Cents (Esteban): I talked to Anthony about Teleplace before, saw and discussed the product,  and chatted about the vision – it is so very cool!  I am very excited, and of course — as a disclaimer — they are not a client, and Anthony is a friend.

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We often save the biggest problems for last.  In the world of business, that’s often because problems sneak up on us so slowly that we don’t notice them until they’ve gotten really big. Such is the case with the unintended consequences of social business collaboration, also referred to as Enterprise 2.0 (#e20) or Social CRM (#scrm).

Though still in adolescence, social business collaboration has already had such a positive impact on business that few seem to question the benefits anymore.  Questions like “what’s the ROI?” have given way to statements like “help me do it better than my competitors!”  But as the benefits of social business collaboration have become clear, so too have the next set of issues—as those of you working at the forefront of social business innovation have learned all too well.

Since leaving #scrm pioneer Helpstream a year ago, I’ve been on a quest to try to figure out where all this social business collaboration activity is taking us. In hockey parlance, I’ve been trying to figure out where the puck is going to be.

To do that, I spent a year at Socialtext, learning the ins and outs of the internal side of social collaboration–complementing the #scrm experience I gained at Helpstream.  I also spent a lot of time with members of the #scrm and #e20 analyst communities, gleaning deep insights from folks on the front lines of implementation–making some close personal friendships along the way.  And I spent hours and hours talking with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are working on “the next big thing” sure to be needed by socially-enabled businesses.  I discovered a lot of very smart people out there with a lot of amazing ideas and insights, and to all of them I owe a deep debt of gratitude.

Throughout this process, though, I found myself coming back again and again to one major theme.  I sum it up like this:

At the end of the day, business is all about getting the right stuff done.  If the right work doesn’t get done, you really haven’t accomplished anything–whether it’s shipping a product, closing a sale, or fixing a bug.  Making sure the most important work actually gets done is the biggest challenge for social business today.  It’s the “last mile” in enabling social collaboration to transform the way businesses operate.

So there you have it.  That’s my big insight.  Social business collaboration’s success or failure will be determined by its ability to ensure that the right work gets done inside—and outside—the organization.

The early challenge of social business collaboration was to prove that work really does get done faster and more effectively.  But it turns out that isn’t enough.  The right work needs to get done.  As they have begun to implement social business collaboration methods, companies have found that the increase in the number of problems resolved through this type of mass collaboration has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the number of critical problems never resolved.  Why does this happen you ask?  It happens because of how we’re solving the problems we’re discovering in the social ecosystem.  Even though we’re solving a lot more problems, the social collaboration methods we’re using are surfacing a lot more issues, with a lot more issues going unresolved.

Here’s an example.  Before social collaboration, of 10 problems identified by an organization, perhaps 9 got solved rather quickly but 1 really tough problem remained.  With social collaboration methods in place, an organization may now get 100 problems identified and 90 of them resolved quickly by the same level of resources.  But that leaves 10 really tough issues requiring the attention of their most highly skilled, expensive resources.  So they get 81 more problems solved than before, but they’re now left with 10 really tough ones to deal with—9 more than before.  Ouch.

Don’t expect the social collaboration Genie to go back into the bottle anytime soon.  We’re not going to solve this new problem by going back to the old way of doing things.  Clear visibility into problems we never knew we had before is not going away.

What we need is a modern, social way to solve this problem–one that brings big issues to the attention of the right people, in the right way, at the right time, while allowing everyone to collaborate in real time.  Most importantly, this real time collaboration needs to become part of the social record—not just a bunch of hollow words that disappear into a speakerphone or erased from the whiteboard at the end of a meeting like they do today.

It’s a difficult problem, but answers are on the horizon.  Before I delve into those in my next post, I’d like to hear what you think about all this.  Are you seeing this problem among your clients or inside your organization?  What are companies doing to try to solve this problem?  Let me know your thoughts and I’ll summarize them in my next post while introducing some emerging technologies I’ve found that are poised to completely transform the way we think about social business collaboration today.

It’s great to be back.

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Where to start? Quality of presentations was amazing:  Ray Wang, Natalie Petohouff, Brian Vellmure, the panel by Paul Greenberg with CRM Executives, and so much more.  I will admit that I just peeked into some of the presentations briefly, and attended parts of others — but what I saw blew me away.

Denis Pombriant was amazing in the quality and quantity of information he presented — and the topic and perspective he lent was just above outstanding.  In NPS terms, I am definitely a promoter for Denis’s Thought Leadership.  He posted his own summary of the conference if you want another perspective on it.

The presentations I missed, I got to “watch” via Twitter – thanks for Prem Kumar Aparanji, Mitch Lieberman (who stoically was up for a sunrise session at 8 AM — something I wish I could’ve done; sorry Mitch), Jacob Morgan and many others.  The quality of tweeting from the conference was incredible, with great analysis and links to more relevant information not just repeating what was said.  Very well done.

Absolutely incredible what the partnership between Paul Greenberg and David Myron was able to accomplish in just two short years: go from a vendor-led conference where each session was an advertising for their products, to the highest quality content available (and, yes, I was at other conferences recently).  The conference grew in attendance this year, beyond all expectations, but I will not be surprised if it sells out early next year.  Yes, it is that good — and the content is that superior to anything else that I have seen out there for CRM.  Thanks Paul, David, and the staff of CRM Magazine for the incredible work.

But you want to know my impressions… here we go.

• Social CRM is not going anywhere anytime soon.  It got past the point of novelty, as it was last year, and it was firmly embedded as one more item in all presentations and all tweets I saw.  Alas, it was not the main issue, just one more — that is a great evolution from 12 months ago (yeah, bad pun – I know).  Even Oracle’s CRM Boss (Anthony Lye) who is not the biggest fan of the Social Movement discussed it in his panels and presentations as one more part of CRM (which he reiterated at dinner on Monday).  I am actually encouraged by this, I can see how it is making CRM better – not replacing it – and I am glad that the people talking and writing about it are getting the idea. [side note: I have been informed / invited to two great conferences (not related to CRM) that are being made better by adding a Social CRM track to them for this conference season - definitely not going away... and will provide more details soon].
• CRM has more staying power than Social CRM pundits give it credit.  Not only did CRM not disappear as predicted, virtually everyone I talked to at the event agreed that spending budgets for CRM in 2011 are growing, and two-thirds of the money is being allocated to traditional CRM (the other one-third is going to Social CRM in many different models and definitions).  CRM growth will continue unabated for some time, regardless of the numbers that Gartner and Forrester and IDC will publish, mostly because companies woke up to the realization that customers are neither forever, nor easy t0 replace.  The trifecta of an economic recession, the social evolution, and the rise of analytics in the enterprise finally convinced organizations that customers won’t stand for abuse, won’t stay forever, and are always looking for more value and better interactions.
• Analytics, analytics, and analytics. In case you ask me what  is going to be the hot topic for the next two-to-three years (lots of the presenters will agree with me here).
• Collaborative Enterprise, Convergence, Collaboration.  Same question, but for five-to-ten years.

Paul, as I mentioned above, did a panel with four of the top five CRM vendors.  Salesforce was missing — which I cannot comprehend for the life of me.  A major conference is not the place to take a stand on — well, whatever the reason they chose not to be there.  What made that bad decision worse: CRM Magazine awarded them with best CRM solution for large, medium, and small enterprise.  I will tell them this in person – but they need to seriously reconsider their spending priorities for conferences.

Back to the panel, an interesting “vendormercial” as someone noted – but if you got past the good and bad lines, it showed the focus that each of the other vendors has for the future.  I tweeted this during the conference:

I wanted to expand on that here, since I think it is critical to understand the direction these CRM (notice I did not say Social CRM) vendors are focused on.

• Oracle - Oracle focus is making companies run better, improve their bottom line.  They want to save them money by providing a complete stack to run the organization, hardware optimized to their apps (nee Sun), and what they need.  Oracle is going to be doing lots of avant-garde development, but not usually incorporate it into their product until it becomes mainstream.  They have a good base for Social CRM, but are not promoting it since it is not what their clients are asking for.  Once that changes and clients ask, expect acquisitions and a fast move to capitalize on their research and development investment.
• Microsoft - Microsoft wants to provide a single solution, living in the Azure cloud, for the entire enterprise.  They would like nothing more than to have organizations standardize all their applications on Microsoft – and if they run on Azure even better.  Their applications are very focused on the jobs customers (their customers, the organizations out there) do and deliver against that.
• RightNow Technologies – As the premier cloud member in the panel, they are very focused on extremely well run operations for their clients.  They continue to innovate by providing their customers everything they could possibly need (twitter integration? communities? knowledge management across channels? got them) — as long as they need it in the cloud.  They invested heavily in creating a “private cloud” (although not such beast exists) for the government while not losing their core architecture.  Their next frontier? Massively Large Contact Centers (and they got a good person as the “Boss” of the Center of Excellence for Contact Center – Ted Bray, I am very bullish on him and his experience and expertise).
• SAP - SAP continues to have a technology focus, they want to have the best technology out there, the most advanced model of infrastructure.  I wrote before about their dichotomy (great technology, not so good implementation of it in their products) but recent conversations with their CRM Team is leading me to believe this technology is being implemented now.  Fingers crossed, it will be good to see SAP grow based on their innovation.

While there I also presented.  I did two presentations, I co-presented with Michael Krigsman on the Success of Social CRM and CRM Projects (he likes to talk about failure, I like to talk about success).  I also presented my view of Customer Service in the future ten years (some habits die hard, I always did that while at the Gartner conferences).  I put the slides in slideshare if you want them, and you can also view them and / or download them here.

I also got to talk to a lot of people.

This was by far the best part of the event for me, as I got to catch up with people I had not seen for a while, met some twitter- and blog-people in person (like the keynote speaker, Emily Yellin, one of the most delightful people I met in a long time and a true southerner to boot; I wish i would’ve had more time to spend talking to her — she did an amazing job in her keynote), and even got to meet some people I have been admiring from a distance.  One thing that can and will always be said about Paul’s events (yes, he is only the chair on this one — but that counts): camarederie, friendship, and networking trump content.

And that, to me, is the essence of being social.

Were you there? What did i miss? What was the most awesome thing you saw? Did you learn something new? Was it as good for you?

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You can read all about it here.

Feel free to leave comments either over there or here, I get notified of both.  Thanks for reading!

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Last Thursday (July 29th) in the morning (the twitter timeline is not displayed in the pictures below), Prem Kumar  Aparanji (@prem_k on twitter, and one of the early and most prolific pioneers in the Social CRM movement by way of always thinking ahead of the rest of us), twitted the following:

I thought it was an interesting question (autopoiesis refers to his post here, the definition is on wikipedia here, and Ouroboros has a definition  here — the basic concept he is tweeting about is that we stopped innovating, stopped growing the concept of SCRM) considering the heated battles for definitions and positioning we recently experimented.  He is right – we stopped moving forward with the concept.  We never did agree completely on a term and a definition, but we had some very good ones come out of it (I am going to refer to the curation that Prem has done for a list of links that are useful to compare and contrast definitions).  I think we have reached a a curious level on the way to defining a market, and said so in my tweet.

It is fairly typical for any cycle, and a market evolution is just another cycle, to reach this stage.  It is almost as if gathering steam to continue growing.  It happens when you start a new exercise regimen, a diet, even wars reach this impasse.  What is important is not that we reached this level – but how we get out of it.  As usual, friend and fellow CRMer Paul Greenberg reached a similar conclusion ahead of most of us and wrote so in this blog here.

Bottom line, where are we now? And, more important even, where are we going?  This is the critical step in the market; this is where we define the long-term success, or the flash-in-the-pan, one-hit-wonder status.

We reached the stage of Applied SCRM versus Definitional SCRM.  The conversations on what is SCRM are done; the battle for definitions are over; the “winners” and “losers” are all continuing (well, in most cases anyways).  This is no longer about what it means to be Social CRM, but what it means to do Social CRM.

I was having a great conversation with one the most grounded people I know in this market this morning, Mr. Brent Leary, who has been writing about Social CRM a little over four years (yes, I promise you that the concept of Social CRM is at least that old).  He  confirmed something I have noticed more and more lately:  It is no longer the role of the vendors to try to define what Social CRM means, nor the role of the pundits to take on that battle (if you want a great effort at summarizing where we are, Brian Vellmure collected a great resource guide right here).  It is now the time for the users to start doing and showing us what can be done, and the time for the small startups to create amazing new things for those same companies to try.

In other words, we turned the market from Social CRM (with emphasis on Social) into CRM doing Social (with emphasis on CRM).

It is the time for strategizing, deploying, implementing, failing, and succeeding in taking the first steps into Social CRM.  This is what you have to do:

Vendors - If you have a product that you want to introduce, continue to sell, or use to lead the world of Social CRM now is the time for you to differentiate your product.  The excuse we had before that there was no real market created yet does no longer work (even though we still don’t have a market).  Your customers are coming up with more detailed and complex scenarios and problems daily and they want your help to solve them.  Sure, you can resort to the old tried-and-trued model of deploying professional services to “customize” solutions — but that is not a long-term strategy.  Defining your product in terms of what it does, how it does it, and (even more important) what are the limitations is critical.  Even more important? define your Partner and Alliance Strategy so you can offer your clients and prospects more options that are known to work.

Pundits – (I am not keen on the word influencer, and analysts seems too limited of a group) – This is where the value we provide our clients is proven: it is not about selecting and rating vendors, although that is valuable as a start, but it is about collecting the stories, best practices, and pitfalls of each vendor and publish them.  It is time to work with vendors to help them create a better message, to explain better their differentiators, to highlight better what they can do.  It is time to help end-users understand the frameworks and the “stacks”, the strategic options they have to make, and how to proceed.  Stop hyping the “maybe, could be, would be” and start leveraging the “been there, done that” to help everyone.

Organizations – If you are considering jumping into Social CRM, this is a good time.  True, we don’t have as many “proven implementations” as we would like, but we already know what we are aiming for, what the tools can deliver, what the strategies and goals should be, and how to get there — and we are getting better at all that everyday.  Most aggressive adopters have already jumped in and best practices and case studies are beginning to appear.  There is sufficient information to generate a solid strategy on how to take the first steps into Social CRM.  Leverage that information, spread it around your organization, reach out for help (see pundits above, before vendors, for hype-less information), and craft your first strategy.  Whether you can deploy it or not, succeed or not, the first step is the hardest — and since this work is reiterative, you always gain experience that will help you improve next time.

Press – OK, I admit that controversy sells (or attracts eyeballs, or generates publicity – or whatever metrics you are using to measure success), but to grow Social CRM we need to forgo the controversies over what to call it, who is more right or  more wrong; forget the silly battles, focus on expanding the good that is being done and written.  Leave your enemities aside and focus on what works.  This Google blog-post is an example of a good curated article that even though it calls out the differences, takes some steps towards solving them.  And the application of those solutions (including the results – good or bad) is what the Press should cover at this time.  Maybe it is time to take a lesson from true practitioners who celebrate each other’s success as oppose to compete for a place under the spotlight.

And what are the rewards you say?

There is no Billion dollars or a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  I do believe that Gartner drew a line in the sand with their postulate that there will be a Billion dollar invested, but that is not what anyone stands to gain on this.  What we all stand to gain is a set of good case studies on how to implement Social CRM (from the practitioner’s perspective – even better!), some collective best practices to continue moving forward and doing more (and better) implementations, and a whole bunch of companies ready to take the next step: convergence with Enteprise 2.0 and build towards a Collaborative Enterprise.

Sounds like Fun! Right? What do you think? Can we just move this to the next level and start doing?

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I was curious as to how well (or bad, you tell me) things have progressed in the last year so I went back and took a look at what interested you the most.  Here are the top five posts (if you don’t count the pages like Know Me, Hire Me, Contact Me and Home — all of them in the top 5 as well):

Pretty obvious that you are interested in Social CRM, Social Media, and Collaboration… but, am I missing any big topics you’d like to see me cover?

How about your favorite? Any of the above? None? All of them?  Let me know what worked for you the best this part year(ish) and what did not. Please leave your comments with what’s good and what’s not (don’t worry, my feelings won’t get hurt).

Thanks a lot!

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I recently wrote an article about what an Experience Continuum is –published at MyCustomer.com – and how organizations can go about adopting the model.

It is not as simple as snapping your fingers, but it is part of the planning process that organizations are undergoing right now with the advent of the social customer.  It is part of figuring how to stop pushing “stuff” out to the customers, stop trying to obligate them to do things in a certain manner and instead try to partner with them, work together, and leverage communities to build a better business.

The problem that most organizations have in embracing this new model is that they are still doing business based on the traditional sales cycle of target-acquire-support-retain, which obligates them to think of the customer as being ready to enter, or already in, one of those stages.  If the customer behaves in a different manner (customers that know more about the business and the product based on their participating in communities, for example), the cycle breaks down and is unable to perform as expected.  The new “social model” where customers are more-knowing and feel more-empowered to deal with the organization in their own term, not the business’ terms, mandates the lifecycle to change.

And this is where the continuum comes in.  The continuum assumes that the customer is going to interact with the company, at any time, via any channel of their choice – and they will provide feedback on how to do it better next time.  They are no longer just looking for support information post-sale, they are looking for marketing materials to purchase the next item.  Retaining them is no longer limited to providing good service, it is now imperative to integrate their feedback into out methods for creating better processes.

The customer is no longer just waiting for the business to tell them how to interact and through which channel, they will come across all channels they have available and expect impeccable service, personal interactions, and to be listened to – both directly and indirectly via their communities.

How can a lifecycle do that? It can’t.

Welcome to Customer Experience Continuums.  Download this white paper to learn more about them.

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One of my clients (Ciboodle – officially known as Sword-Ciboodle) launched their community platform yesterday (Ciboodle Crowd).  You can read more about it and watch a video here.

That is the “official press-release” part of this post — but it is also related to the rest… read on.

Now, when I was at Gartner last week I stopped by their booth and we did a short video where they asked me for the relationship between cheese and customer service.  They did the same with other wonderful friends like Paul Greenberg, Michael Maoz, and Mitch Lieberman (there may be more, they are being stingy and releasing only two each day).  You can go here to view the rest, they are all quite remarkable and creative in how they establish a link between cheese and customer service.

My answer, in case you don’t want to see my beautiful face and hear my sultry voice: there are many types of customer service you can provide and, just like cheese, not one will please everyone.  Some prefer a sharp Cheddar, some a blue Stilton, and some an American radioactive orange (trust me, that is not cheese — ask anyone outside of the US).

There is not a single way to do customer service.

And that is the key to this launch, as well as what few  other smart vendors are doing in customer service.  It is not about how many channels you have, how you create knowledge knowledge, do integration, or manage rules.  Nor is it  about being able to do Twitter, Facebook, or even communities — it is about leveraging all those resources and channels and doing it equally well for all segments.  It is about effectively delivering to customers the proper solution.

I talked about segmentation before and how it is the secret to doing cross-channel and multi-channel CRM.  But until recently, there was no technology platform that would allow an organization to do that.  Now Ciboodle joins the ranks of the handful of vendors that allows any organization to serve Camembert next to Ementhaler.

How cools is that?

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You are probably as tired as I am of seeing the tweets  from people you follow (or used to follow in some cases) asking you to click their link so they can show their influence in the dumbest project since SXSW voting (I was going to say Enterprise 2.0 voting, but fewer of you might have gotten the reference – Mark Tamis blogged about that one).

I did participate in Enteprise 2.0 voting as I had a vested interest, and I did pester people who followed me at the time (some of them who don’t any longer) into CMS (click-my—– stuff, yeah- that’s it).  I apologized at the time, and I do again now.  I had a purpose, and I played the game as it was laid out in front of me.  My intentions were pure, spread the message and build a bigger pie, but the implementation lagged due to lack of judgment.

Now that I have my mea culpa out of the way, I would like to address the issue of influence, as Fast Company defines it, and how it is not influence.  I have said to as many people as they were willing to listen in the past that the killer app for the Social world is a universal reputation tracking engine.  Your influence both varies and carries across all your social networks and fluctuates almost by the minute based on your last (and next action).  There is no reliable way to measure reputation and influence – either on one channel or across multiple ones.  Virtually all algorithms you see there assume that the number of followers (or retweets) you have is the key to measuring influence.  Which of course, it is terribly wrong.

If you and I are members of the same community (one where followers are measured and reported, like Twitter or Facebook, or LinkedIn) and you have 10,000 followers and I have 50 I could have a lot more influence than you.  If your followers are not decision makers, recommenders, connectors, or people with influence in the same industry, you are just having a conversation among friends as it is very likely that no action will come out of that.  If my 50 followers are the people who make the decisions and set the wheels in motion and follow me because they trust me, I am ahead of you.

That brings us to Fast Company’s project.  It does not measure influence, by any stretch of the imagination,it simply measures reach (as well as how popular people are).  I could mount a campaign across networks to get people to click on my link, my reach across all networks is close to 120,000 people (I think I got this from some web-based tool or another).  Does that mean I am influential to 120,000 people? Or that I can get 120,000 people to do what I ask if I ask often and nice enough? How does affecting the actions of 120,000 people for something that has not benefit for me or the world make me influential? Who gains and who loses from this?

I am not going to bore you with influence and reach, I will direct you to Dr. Michael Wu’s excellent series in the Lithosphere (and continuing work), or I could tell you to listen to @TheMaria (Maria Ogneva, from Attensity360), who said this morning:

(I think there are a few more criteria to it, but that sums it up very well in a short 140 characters or less).

So, going back to the title.

Fast Company is a magazine that I respect, trust, and had some influence at some time or another in my life.  I wrote a few blogs in a now defunct blog I had there some time back, and I got good response.  All in all, we had a good relationship — until then went stupid. How so? they decided to throw their reputation and their influence behind a high-school popularity contest.  Alas, that is not the worse part — the worse part is that they call that popularity contest a measure of influence.

Sad, truly, that they are willing to lose their reputation over a stupid thing like this.  Hope they reconsider – or at least that they put some serious content that distinguishes reach and influence in their November issue.  Right after the pictures of the most popular people in the world…

Am I wrong? Right? What says you?

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Part of the reason I was gone so long was the Gartner Social CRM Magic Quadrant (paid subscription necessary) published last Monday.  I had to work with clients on the positioning, the arguing with Gartner before publication, and then attend the conference to see what came out of it.

The report came out, and as usual 99% of readers ignored the 25+ pages of text detailing inclusion criteria, evaluation criteria, market description, perspectives for the future, and vendor analysis only to focus on the chart.  So, let’s get it out of the way: Jive and Lithium came up as leaders (congratulations to both) and there is a field of 17 other vendors split between “… social media monitoring, customer- and partner-hosted communities, enterprise feedback management, product reviews, ans sales contacts.” (taken from the Gartner document).  That is all I can say for the chart (Jive is offering a free download just for opting-in.  I don’t endorse doing that — but you would’ve found out about it any way).  Update: Lithium is also offering the report in their web site.

Many assumptions were made from that little chart, and the few nuggets of information shared by Gartner at the conference, leading to some statements that I would like to  ”clarify” (and by clarify I mean provide my opinion as a former Gartner and current independent analyst).

So, let’s debunk these myths.

First myth, Gartner said that Social CRM was going to be a $1B market by 2011.

Hmmm, that is not what I heard.

I heard that there was going to be around $1B invested into Social CRM  through end of next year.  This would encompass software licenses, maintenance (or not if SaaS), consulting, process changes, culture changes, hardware, etc.  Basically, that is how much we should expect to see coming into the CRM market in addition to the traditional CRM expenditures (Gartner placed the CRM market at $9.8B currently) in the next 18 months.  I could not find a single Gartner analyst, or report, that talked to the SCRM Market as an independent entity worth $1B.  There is no $1B market being created, there is money being added to CRM to make it social.

Second myth, by putting this out Gartner validated the market.

Ah, no.  They did not.

They validated the concept, but not a separate market.  They said many times, as most people who have been working with SCRM from early days have said – this is not a separate market — this is a market extension for CRM.  Why, even during the keynote Ed Thompson  said so when he described  CRM as having three modes: transactional, analyitical, and social. Why they did do was validate the concept of Social CRM.  They said that not only does it exist, but it is becoming the third mode  for CRM implementation.  And, as such, it requires rewiring of the strategies, the implementations, and the tools — just like we did when we moved from transactional (called operational back then) to analytical CRM.  Good friend Paul Greenberg wrote on his summary of the event that Gartner is a market-maker, and I would concur with caveat — they can build the CRM market further, but they cannot build a separate SCRM market.  No one can do that.

They did, however, draw the line in the sand (I am thinking they had the stake that Paul Greenberg put there first as a guide — but that is just me) as to where Social CRM starts and where it goes from here.

Third myth, Gartner said  communities are the core of Social CRM.

Oh boy, I hate to get in trouble with some of my clients — no, they did not say that.

They said it was an important part of it, and they said that among the components they selected (see introductory paragraph) hosted communities were the key to getting value of Social CRM into CRM.  And I agree with that (and not just because I have clients that sell communities) and I said so before.

Gartner forgot to add the most critical part of Social CRM – social analytics to the list.  Of course, the assumption they made is that the modules that are used for analytical CRM are sufficient for Social Analytics — and the answer is no there as well (could be, if you figure some way to do sentiment analysis with it, and leverage social media monitoring to bring in the raw data to them).  But they did not add Social Analytics to the list of solutions they were considering as SCRM – so yes, communities is the most important part of those highlighted.

So, where does this live us?

I must say I was slightly disappointed with the social content at the conference.  I do truly admire Gartner for being the first of the major research houses (without counting my good friends at Altimeter) that have come out and embraced the concept of Social CRM and laid down some perspective on it.  At the same time, I was hoping for a little bit more direction than “there is a bunch of vendors that do something social, we have not yet figured it out and we will do so in the next 12 months”.  I was hoping for a little bit more avant garde thinking, some serious thought leadership.  I was looking for them to regain their throne as the undisputed thought leader for enterprise applications — and I did not see that.

I did see some very well executed, on-target messages aimed at people trying to figure this out.  I heard some very good advice about doing things slowly, taking the time to understand what is going on, and only then try new things.  I did hear all this messages we have been saying in several communities around the web — outside of Gartner and without their involvement.  What I am not sure: were they repeating what had already been expressed — or were they talking, as they are supposed to do, from their experience and exposure to several layers of the CRM Market.

I am hoping it was the second — what do you think?

“This MQ represents a very precise, small portion of one specific market (as defined by me) in one specific time (when I collected all the answers to the questions).  It is in no way a fair representation of the entire market, nor is it the one that applies to your particular situation (unless your evaluation and inclusion criteria, as well as timing, match mine).  It is to be used ONLY as one tool in an arsenal of many to understand a market, vendors in it, and where it is going (if you read the text that surrounds the chart).  If you make a decision solely based on whom the leader in the MQ is when you read it, you totally deserve what you will get in return.  There is a fair chance that one of the leaders may work for you — but there are also many chances that other vendors, even those not in here, can do the same or better.  If you really want to know how to interpret this to your particular situation, and how to use the tool appropriately — please do schedule a call with me and I will be happy to run you through everything you chose not to read in the report.”

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1) When I said I would never write another series I was so sure this would not happen — then, this became too long…

2) Social CRM is not a technology, never will be.  This is the vendor complement to The Roadmap to SCRM series I wrote before — you will need technology to deploy your strategy, this is what vendors should offer you.

Sometime ago I wrote this series of posts called “The Roadmap to SCRM“, five parts (plus an extra one added for lack of clarity) that explained how organizations can build their strategy from CRM to Social CRM.  It is based on years of experience and many deployments of CRM, and it is still applicable (by the emails I get about it).  Warning: It must be adapted to your needs, it is not ready to go as is — same as CRM, there is no one size fits all.

I also talked about what vendors need to do to become SCRM-ready when discussing the recent acquisitions (Attensity acquiring Biz 360 and Lithium buying Scout Labs).  Even better, right before releasing this post (which I wrote last week and was trying to make it a complete post, not a series — before I ran out of time) I noticed that fellow deep-thinker, practitioner, and exceptional CRM-meister Filiberto Selvas wrote a similar post to this (now you get to compare, how about that?) which you should read for more perspective.

I have been mulling this post for some time and I want to talk about what different vendors are doing to deliver Social CRM ( that is the next post on this series).  Let’s get into what vendor-driven SCRM should look like…

The attention on SCRM has not been on the strategy side; it has been on the technology.  This is unfortunate, but not unexpected.  I wrestled with the concept of writing this post, I did not want to cement a notion of “what the technology for SCRM should be” in either vendors; or users’ minds, but I feel we are at a point in the evolution into a market (we don’t yet have a SCRM market, here is why) where it is necessary to do so as the direction is starting to become more clear.

First things first, what does the SCRM stack look like?

Vendors venturing into the SCRM world today come from many areas: some of them provide communities, some of them social analytics, others do — well, not exactly sure what they do, but they call it Social CRM — lots of options out there if you are looking.  Remember, though, that we are not talking about technologies — Social CRM will require changes to people, process, and technology to be implemented — and that is where the stack comes in.

You will need technology to deploy SCRM functions, no questions about it.  However, you will need to do most of the heavy work (remember CRM? customization was the hardest part of the implementation) by leveraging a platform or architecture, and building on top of that.  The stack pictured below is the core platform or architecture you will leverage to deploy Social CRM functions.  Let’s examine it a little closer…

First, let’s talk about the essence of what SCRM will bring to your company: people’s perspectives dressed as actionable insights.  The Social Evolution (of Generation C as Paul Greenberg and Mike Fauscette call it) means that people aggregate into communities.  OK, fine – they were aggregating into communities before, the concept is older than — well, older than sliced bread, for sure.  However, the social evolution brought them to use online communities and store the shared knowledge in electronic form.  This is a major, major difference.  That means we now have access to this data and we can use it.

And use it we will, that is where the second layer comes in: analytics.  We can try to dress it up as a new concept also, call it Socialytics, Social Media Analytics, or something similar — and some of the tools we use are fairly new, to correspond with the newness of the social channels — but the truth is that this is still analytics, same as before, same as in the future.  You can leverage your analytics engine, you can add a social analytics engine, or you can do both (probably what I would recommend in most cases for now).  However you do it, make sure you do it — without actionable insights, the outcome of analysing the information, there is no Social CRM.

I have written some articles on how to leverage analytics better in the Social X world, you can find them here, here, and here.

So, here comes the tricky part — this is the layer-to-be-named-later (feel free to drop some naming suggestions in the comments below).  This is where we actually take action — where the company implements the actionable insights and improves the processes, the products, the services — the experiences.  For lack of a better name right now, I will call it the Actionable Layer Unit (ALU – if you know the acronym, you are as geeky as you think — not fair to use google or wikipedia).  And even worse than the name, there is no software that you can buy to do this — this is all elbow grease basically.  You have to take the actionable insights and make something with it — else, why collect the data and analyze it?

(hint: if you would’ve followed the recommendations I made way early in the roadmap to SCRM for companies, you would already know what to do — the picture below is a reminder and I also talked about it at my Collaborative Enterprise post in TheSocialCustomer)

Finally, the missing piece-de-resistance — the cherry on top of the sundae of sorts.  The integration layer.  Yeah, no more silos, no more standalone solutions, no more — well, whatever you want to call it.  Social CRM must be integrated.  Let’s say you collect the data, and you analyze it, and you decide to take some action on it — what do you with it then? Easy, put it in the system-of-record — the good old CRM (or SCM, or ERP if you are talking Social Business or Collaborative Enterprise) system.  You need some way to integrate the Social CRM platform or architecture to them, some way to send the insights, resulting actions, and data to store with the corporate information.  If we were to leave in an ideal cloud world, that would be simply a question of doing some PaaS to PaaS calls and voila!  We don’t live in that world — so we need connectors, API calls, or whatchamacallits to do the job.

So, what do you think?  Too simple? Will this put the argument of Strategy versus Technology to rest once and for all? Can that argument ever be put to rest?  Would love to hear what you have to say…

(remember, there are other parts to this series, so don’t overexert yourself by commenting on this one only)

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Check it out…

Social Media Readiness Assessment

I spent a considerable amount of the time the past four months working on a Social Media Maturity Model and the associated Social Media Readiness tools.  It is pretty cool, and it can help you organization understand where you are, where you are going, and what you are going to be doing in Social Media.  I have always said that Social Media (the channels) are going to become your basic infrastructure (just like phones or emails) — but there is a proper way to do this, to integrate it with other tools and architecture in your organization, and to understand where things like Social CRM, Social ERP, Social Business come in.

Would you like to know how it all fits together?

Would you like to use an online tool to see where your organization stands in relationship to the model?

Join me and Visible Technologies at these dates and locations (links are to sign-up pages for each event).

Oh, did I forget to mention that there is an ROI calculator that was developed by Dr. Natalie Petohouff that will help you justify how you can bring Social Media to your organization?

Silly me… all these tools, all this knowledge — all this hard work… how can you say no?

Join us on June 2nd in Los Angeles for a breakfast on Social Readiness, Adoption, and ROI http://conta.cc/buWIQO

Join us on June 3rd in San Francisco http://conta.cc/cLi3zm

Join us on June 17th in New York http://conta.cc/dd4pFA

Join us on June 22nd in Chicago http://conta.cc/c3vJ1i

Join us on June 23rd in Atlanta http://conta.cc/cYvcfI

Lei Parla Italiano? Lei Parla Enteprise 2.0?

I am presenting at the International Forum for Enterprise 2.0 in Milan, Italy.  Beyond the oh-so-cool factor that I am going to Italy for a few days, I am going to be bringing the voice of Social CRM to the Enterprise 2.0 world.  I am co-presenting with Mr. Mark Tamis, of Enterprise 2.0 and SCRM fame, and we will be talking about how to make it all work together.  Not only that, but we were also given the closing panel for the conference — talking about “Enterprise 2.0 is from Mars, Social CRM is from Venus — bringing the two together to make a Social Business”.  It is going to be awesome.

Sameer Patel (fellow presenter at the conference) wrote a great post with far more details that I can fit in here.

One if by land, two if by water (and three if by Enteprise 2.0).

OK, corny title — but I am coming to Enteprise 2.0 in Boston, doing a panel, and having lots of time.  What else is there to do at a conference of people that believe in collaboration, in working for the customer, and in innovating their operations?  Why, evangelize, of course!  Want to meet at the conference?  Email me and we can set some time… I am going to be there 15 and 16, looking forward to it.

Who Said You Can Never Go Home Again?

Gartner’s CRM conference is coming — and I am making the trip  to meet with former colleagues, fellow thinkers, and to see what they have been up to in the past 2.5 years since I left.  Have they embraced Social CRM? Have they adopted new models for collaboration in the enterprise? Is there a Social CRM Magic Quadrant being introduced (rumor has it)?  I am going to be there just for one day (June 28 – email me if you want to meet while down there) since I have to fly out to make it on time for…

Hablas Castellano? Quieres Hablar de Experiencias del Consumidor?

Sorry, just keeping international.  I am going to be part of an extension course / summer seminar in Madrid, Spain talking about customer experiences for the next few years, what to do, how to make it better, etc.  It is going to happen at the Universidad de Madrid, on June 30 through July 2.  I have a lot of work I have put into creating the new model for Customer Experience that I will be unveiling there.  Want to come?  Sign up and join me!

(July is going to be off-the-road, while I prepare to move, August has some events, so does September, October, November — and then off for the month of December — at least hoping that’s how it works)

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Preparing for this was quite interesting.  I was working with some of the slides I have on Social Experience (available on Slideshare) and thinking about the questions that I get almost every day on this topic:

Obviously, the first question is always “what is social experience”, followed by the traditional “and why do I care”.  Those are questions that everyone is asking.

But, did you ever think of the following questions…

“How does the Social Experience affect my organization?”

“What do I need to do about the Social Experience?”

“Why is it called a Social Experience, and how does it differ from the traditional experience?” (excellent question)

“Should I worry about the Social Experience?”

and, my most favorite question — “what if I don’t do anything about it?”.

There is a lot of be said and done, still, about the Social Experience.  We are past definitions, we are past acknowledgements of its existence, and we are starting to figure out what we need to do about it.

Want to know what to do?

Here is the link to register for the webinar (told you this post was a teaser)

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This is what I really learned in the past 9,999 tweets….

You truly, honestly don’t care what I had for breakfast. Or lunch.  Not even dinner… but someone will always take pictures of their food and tweet it — and I will always look.  While I don’t care what it is, I like to live vicariously.  Twitter is about sharing, and gossiping, and just plain out living your life in different ways (some of which you may not do in real life).  That is OK.  You are encouraged to share as much or as little of your life as you want — just don’t expect it to remain private if you share it.  Think of Twitter as an electronic postcard that is immediately read by 100 million people.

Not everyone will agree with me.  I made my share of friend-nemies, and plain out enemies, based on what I tweeted at one time or another.  No worries though, it just accelerated what happens in real life.  I made friends also, many more of them.  I am very grateful to both good and bad people (bad is those that don’t agree with me).  Twitter has been an incredible place to cross-reference what I know, to learn a lot, and to share what I learned.  People are mean? sure, as they are in real life.  People are nice? same, as they are in real life.  If you had enough of someone or something, simply use the filters that Tweetdeck gave you (or your favorite client), block them and go on with life.  Just like you would do in the real world.

Everyone wants to collaborate in Twitter.  Even if it is the old high-school concept of team (one person works, the others take credit) for very few of those “collaborators”.  Coming out of Gartner I missed the 6×24 (noon Saturday through Sunday afternoons were very slow or dead) global collaboration environment with smart people.  It was a very challenging and nourishing environment.  Think of Twitter as a mega Gartner.  Don’t like that reference? I could’ve said mega-Forrester and you would’ve really shuddered… (BTW, this may also explain the low incidence of analysts on Twitter, but that is just a working theory).

Twitter is a microcosm.  Twitter is a world in itself, and it has dramatic representations of what happens in the real world as well.  You want to see a computer pioneer get 30,000 followers before even the first tweet? Bill Gates did that.  How about see a Latin America dictator convince his dictator friends to join Twitter (and tweet under the name of the devil)? Hugo Chavez did that.  Seen a celebrity whose tweets can be worth $10,000.00? Kim Kardashian did that.  Did you notice that anther celebrity’s empty-content tweets are re-tweeted 350,000 times within 5 minutes? Ashton Kutcher would be the one (even if you don’t count the millions that follow him now.

In short, I learned that Twitter is a representation of the real world, no more and no less, and it requires the same commitment to get value out of it as you do from the real world.  Simply said, Twitter is another GIGO model.  Garbage In? Garbage out!

PS – I also learned that if you make a mistake and re-tweet something it does indeed goes against your tweet count, and if it was your 10,000 one you have to delete it, get a mulligan, and then re-tweet it again.  Just like in real life, you do get second chances .

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These are all questions that are answered in my latest slideshare contribution (and element of torture at Lithium’s sold-out 2010 User Conference).  Would love your comments…

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This is a terrific move by Lithium (and I would say the same if I did not tell them some time ago to do something like this, not that they would listen to me on these matters) and it positions them very well in two markets – for different reasons – and prepares them for an interesting convergence play.

As far as the SCRM market is concerned, they are growing their presence by acquiring the second of the four modules they will need to become a complete SCRM application (communities, analytics, feedback management, system of record – more on this soon) and by distinguishing themselves from the rest of the communities and analytics vendors in doing so.  In view of the recent spate of acquisitions in this market (such as Attensity acquiring Biz360, Jive acquiring FiltrBox, and RightNow Technologies acquiring HiveMind) this acquisition shows the commitment from Lithium to remain in the leadership position they have carved in the market.

However, most notably to me is that this makes them a very interesting play in the Enterprise 2.0 market. No, it is not heresy.  My view has been that these two market will converge eventually and that vendors will come from different sides to embrace the Social Business market (or whatever we will call it once we get there).

I wrote before that leveraging the content created on communities is one of the critical uses of analytics.  With this acquisition Lithium creates a very interesting combination of power bringing communities and analytics together, taking the first step towards creating actionable insights — the only purpose for building a SCRM (and Enterprise 2.0)  system.

Are they the first one to become a certified SCRM player? No, there is no one there yet (I said four modules, they have two as does everybody else — still room to grow).  However, they are the first ones to leverage communities as generators of content, feedback, and insights — and take the first step towards unlocking that power and converging SCRM and Enterprise 2.0.

Looking forward to what the world will make of this combined product (as soon as I can, I will talk to people taking on the combined entity and let you know).

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Accuracy is the rating that defines how true is the analysis performed by the computer without human intervention.  In other words, and talking about social analytics, how real is the computer’s perception that a tweet or blog post has positive or negative inclination.  The only way to measure accuracy is by comparing the results of the computer analysis to similar analysis done by humans.  In other words, did the computer pick the same a human would’ve picked?

We only rate accuracy as the capacity of a computer to mimic a human brain and we can only conceive that a computer can be accurate when copying how a person thinks.  Alas, we forget to consider the inherent bias built into computer calculations: the one provided by humans programming such systems.

Computers only do what we tell them to do.  They have (almost) infinite computational power, and can apply any set of rules to any computational variables.  This means that if we tell computers that a specific word or combination of words means something positive, then the computer cannot make it mean something negative.  In other words, we are not really rating the computer’s ability to determine a sentiment we are rating whether humans did a good job, or not, in biasing the computer to pick that sentiment.  This means we can accurately predict an outcome selected by the computer before the first variable is computed against the first rule.

Accuracy is not a computer function, rather a human bias – and its “manipulation” can have great effects in the destiny of the business.  Learning to reduce the bias is going to yield better results for analytics, and where the efforts should be spent – so that you can get real value out of the analysis and so you can know where to take action, because taking action on inaccurate data can be a disaster.

Reducing the bias comes down to the two core elements of analytics: what we analyze, and what we compare it to.  What we analyze has two variables: data and rules.  What we compare it against has two variables as well: taxonomy (categories) and ontology (definitions).

Let’s examine how we add bias to these four variables:

1. The data we chose to examine will determine the outcome of the analysis very quickly.  Whether we chose to analyze results from a survey, blog posts we picked up, tweets, or other expressions of human opinion, finding where the data to be analyzed resides is the most critical part of the analysis.  If we know that our customers frequent a specific community to discuss our products and services, analyzing twitter will not yield good results.  We tend to focus our listening to a myriad of communities, a very large number of them that don’t really matter.  And listening to the wrong place will bias the results by watering down the value of the positive and negative overall thinking.
2. The rules are the place where the majority of the organizations introduce their bias.  This is where you will determine whether a specific input matters or not, and how it should be counted.  Domain expertise and knowledge of the business removes the bias in this stage.  There is nothing easier, for someone well versed in the event being analyzed, than to determine the rules that matter or not.  Some of the analytical engines have automated technology for creating these rules.
3. The taxonomy is typically used to organize the insights found (sentiment, issues, etc.) into categories.  A few of the available products offer pre-defined taxonomies to which organizations add categories based on their product lines (e.g. cars, motorcycles, trucks) or business functions (e.g. sales, accounting, shipping).  Different customers have different categories or different ways to identify products and services
4. The ontology (sometimes also called a topic domain) is simply word definitions. These overgrown dictionaries, which also include thesaurus and contextual word functions, determine whether the sentiment and analysis was performed between the right term and concepts.  For example, defining the word “tire” for one industry might be different from another. One of the things that improve the ontology is having a capability around disambiguation, a computer algorithm used to better interpret the content and identify the sentiment and the issues it refers to.

Now let’s look at the implications of accuracy for the business.  Let’s look at one specific example to show “accurately” (pun badly intended) how the correct set of variables can lead to the right (or wrong) conclusions.

A car manufacturer had a problem: airbags in their cars were deploying under unusual conditions.  Even when the cars were not involved in accidents, not even a small hit to the sensors, the airbags were deploying.  Upon initial analysis of the data the conclusion was that the mechanism that deployed the airbag (which costs around $30.00 to replace) may have been at fault.  A recall was prepared to exchange it for all affected customers.  Right before the recall was issued, the company decided to analyze in more detail the complaints they received from their customers (which explained in good detail how the incidents occurred), and cross-reference them to the detailed repair notes provided by the technicians fixing the airbags after deployment.

A higher degree of accuracy in the analysis was obtained by removing the bias that was introduced when translating the original complaints from the customers to mean that the entire mechanisms was at fault, and deconstructing the problem further to focus on each individual component of said mechanism which was detailed in the verbatim repair notes. This allowed the car maker to determine that the problem was not the entire discharge mechanism for the airbag, rather a small spring that overheated and relaxed under specific circumstances – a spring that cost just $0.25 to replace.  The potential impact to the car company if they had to issue a recall for the launching mechanism for all affected vehicles versus the tiny spring, a savings total of $29.75 per car, quickly shows how a more accurate analysis and cross-referencing of the data helps the organization.

Are you removing biases from your analytics? Improving accuracy? Are you looking at multiple customer data sources and cross referencing them? How are you doing that? Let me know in the comments below, would love to see more examples.

This is the third part of a series of six sponsored research reports I am writing for Attensity on how to better leverage analytics in a social business.

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Here are the slides, feel free to shoot me an email with any questions or comments.

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Parature (not a client, in case you are keeping track of who is and who isn’t) introduced this morning a new product: Parature for Facebook.  It is the first in a line of products they say are going to be introduced in the next few months where they port their customer service solution to Social Networks  - in this case, the Facebook Social Network.  Using this product companies can put their existing  knowledge base on Facebook, conduct customer-service Chats, and let customers create and manage support tickets via the FBML-based solution. In addition, systems administrators can manage the product via a FBML interface, and can even manage tickets via it if they are so inclined (not sure why they would, but it’s there). See this next picture to get an idea of the interface:

There is not much (well, some admin actually) existing Parature customers must do to use this product.  Non Parature customers will need to implement Parature Customer Service first, then they can leverage it on Facebook.  Here is what results would look like:

The key aspect here is that you don’t need to do integration, migration, or support two different solutions (silos, if you may).  A single  solution presented over two different interfaces is a much better solution.  Being able to leverage existing rules, knowledge, workflows, integration, and all other channels via Facebook makes it easier to deploy.

I saw the product, and it is quite well done.  Works the same way as in a regular web site, but it uses the Facebook look-and-feel.  Organizations that decide to do Customer Service over Facebook Like Pages (can we go back to Fan Pages, please?) benefit from having more than just a wall and a messaging interface to carry out those functions (standard Facebook offers).  I have not had the chance to talk to anyone who implemented it – yet, but expect to do so soon.  Finally, here is the admin console (before the analysis begins):

Now the gloating.

Back in the good old days before we embarked in a race to define Social CRM I said in a post relating the nascent SCRM to the failed e-CRM of yesteryears:

The prospects of having a “new” hot technology skewed the decision to launch e-CRM

Eerie, similarities ensue… The point is that Social CRM is an extension to CRM, and that smart companies will actually take their existing CRM strategies and implementations and adapt them to the Social channels they want to use.  Thusly, a company wanting to do customer service over Twitter would have to create an entire sub-strategy for that (Mission, Vision, Goals, Objectives, Step-by-Step planning, etc.) that extends their Customer Service and CRM strategies.  In other words, it is not about rushing to just “do something” over the new social channels, rather “do the right thing if it makes sense” over the Social Channels.

Yes, before you attack me, there are new “things” that Social CRM brings, but they are things like getting to know your customer better, understanding their needs and wants, embracing them in c0-creation, reducing the barriers to proper service — all things we were promised in 1991 when Siebel CRM was first introduced (and ever since, continues to be so).

What Parature introduced today is one technology step in that direction.  You want to do Customer Service over Facebook? Make sure it makes sense for your organization, that you have the right people, and you have the processes to do it right — then look at what they have and see if does what you want it to do.  Fits? Then, by all means — they are  the first vendor to introduce business functions inside of Facebook (until someone proves me wrong in the comments below), and I am dying to see what happens with it.

As for the gloating, well — will try to remain humble…

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