It’s time to go to your favorite search engine. You type some keywords (printer, printer model, error message if any, words “not working”) and find 1,250,000+ links.  You click on some of them, and get pieces of the information you need. Your printer’s web site says you need to reset the printer, your computer’s website talks about upgrading drivers, and the operating system’s support site talks about parameters in the registry.

Who is right? What shall you do?

Welcome to the problem with knowledge: we have too much of it and it is too widely distributed.  Finding the right information is not easy, and even when you do it is generally not complete: either you are missing steps that a vendor assumes you know, or there is a link to a third-party web site that is broken so you never find what you need.  The level of frustration increases with each passing moment since all you want is to print, or at least to troubleshoot your problem.

According to The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI, run by the University of Michigan) customer satisfaction with personal computers support departments has been in a steady decline for the past 10-15 years.  This is when the interconnectivity between components escalated, and self-service knowledge centers came online.  As it turns out, the cost for self-service may be in the pennies per transaction for the organization, but the cost to the customer is much higher in wasted time and frustration.

Pushing the customer to support themselves via a self-service center might sound like a good move when you have a simple solution, with no inter-dependent components, but when the problem could have multiple origins, letting the customer try to figure out what is the proper way to troubleshoot and solve the problem does not work.

The problem is even bigger for brands.  Beyond upset and frustrated customers taking cheap shots at their products in social networks, they also have to deal with customer service agents and their lack of access to information.  The number one reason for churn in a call center is that agents don’t have access to the right systems or information to do their jobs. When the customer cannot find what they want online, they reach for the contact center.  Alas, if the agents don’t have any more information than the customer has – there is nothing they can do but sit there and be yelled at.

What is the solution?

There are three models that could solve this problem:

Hybrid Knowledge Bases – To create a hybrid knowledge base combine the content from two or more knowledge bases into a massive knowledge base.  The problem with hybrids is that very quickly they become so massive that finding anything is impossible.  So end users find the first 2-3 entries and hope that is the answer – similar to doing a search in the open internet – and they are not very easy to manage either.

Knowledge Management Partnerships – Two or more vendors work jointly to create solutions that are later propagated in their respective knowledge bases.  In the example above, the operating system vendor would work with the printer vendor to produce specific knowledge in the places where they intersect, and then put that in both knowledge bases.  The sheer complexity of coverage for all the possible combinations, and then being able to keep those up-to-date is where the model falls apart.

Federated Knowledge Bases –A federated knowledge base works in a similar model to a federated government: each vendor controls the knowledge specific to their products, and then work together in the areas where they intersect with other vendors.  Using the example above, the operating system vendor would create and maintain their own knowledge base for all the issues related to printers, and then jointly create and use knowledge for where they intersect with the specific printer in question.  Each vendor can create and manage their own knowledge base, they can maintain it as needed, and need to focus on only very little information in regards to the other vendors.  This information does not even have to be the same as the other vendor in the same intersection, just has to be accurate from their perspective (chances are that they will be the same, or very close in nature).

Obviously there are different scenarios that would work for each model, but the federated model is the one that works better when both partners have a similar commitment to the enrichment of their knowledge bases and they rely equally on their Knowledge Bases for service.

How do go about implementing a Federated Knowledge Base?  That is our next installment…

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Software is not a solution, we all know that.  Software is a tool, an aide to solving a problem.  The question that always arises is what is the problem we are solving. The best way to look at this is to say that there are two types of problems: pain-points and inefficiencies.  Bear with me for some definitions, it is important to distinguish them.

Pain points is what we all think of when we think of using software: a very specific function or process that is not working well and it is either costing more than it should, or not yielding as much as necessary.  Taking five days to answer a customer service email, using two weeks to process a database for a marketing campaign, or not being able to score leads —  these are pain-points, the problems that software is supposed to solve.  And, for the most part, it does.

Inefficiencies, on the other hand, are problems that exist within the process but they don’t hinder the normal operations of business.  For example, if an employee cannot get all the information they need in one screen and instead they need to go to three screens to collect it or if the phone system drops calls once in a while.  These issues will not cost us to consistently lose  business, and if we improve them it is likely that we won’t notice the betterment in the existing processes.

There is one more, rather two, distinctions:  buying centers and ROI.

The people who buy these solutions are different within the organization.  Inefficiencies are tackled by CIOs and IT.  Pain points are tackled by business units and stakeholders (some cross-over, but it does not last long — IT does not want to solve pain points, and business units are far from maintaining systems).

Then there is the issue of ROI.  It has been debated plenty and I will let you to Google or Bing your way to illumination in the matter. My point is that business units must show ROI for their investments.  They have no other way, in a civilized company, to get their funds approved.  Some of them try to skirt the issue by going the SaaS way – but CFOs and procurement officers are coming around to that idea, so it won’t last too much longer.  IT, on the other hand, works on the infrastructure.  Their initiatives are not ROI-driven (if you are going to call me stupid and tell me you are in IT and you have to do it, fine – lack of vision is rampant and your management has it), rather driven by the needs of the business to leverage technology and data.  They don’t prove ROI, they prove need.

This is, to me, the most important part of placing Social Business as a priority in the business.  It is a strategy, thus driven by the business side, that leverages technologies (Social Media) to accomplish what needs to be done (customers jobs, co-creation, customer experience, socializing applications – your call).

The strategy part has to prove an ROI and solve a pain point.  The technology part needs to prove a need and solve an inefficiency.  You cannot sell them together as one, nor can you make a business unit buy Social Media or an IT department buy Social Business.  You are no longer moving one project forward, you have to move two — with different players and different business models.

You are either going to solve a pain-point or an inefficiency.  Or both.  However, you need to do it differently.

What problem are you solving? What are you doing to sell the need and the solution? Are you talking to the right people about it?

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Finally, I thought, organizations are starting to understand the value of data and that we can begin to use it for strategic needs.  Then Dan Vesset (IDC Analyst and author of a terrific paper entitled Decision Management: A Strategy for Organizationwide Decision Support and Automation – must be an IDC customer or pay to read it) tweeted what I consider best news from the Event:

Now I started to get excited — we are finally getting to the point where systems can make decisions, look at the data and make sense of it and not only recommend or report on the data, but actually make the decision and maybe, just maybe even act on it.  Ah, the possibilities — all those years of Star Trek and Star Wars finally coming to fruition!

As a big proponent of automation for organizations to truly leverage technology and data management, my head was spinning — could it be possible? Are we really that close to making something like this happen?

Later in the day, I caught a tweet from Venessa Miemis (Futurist, Student, Amazing Brain, and the writer behind the very famous and well read emergent by design blog) that talked to a different (yet similar) reality:

A different opinion indeed.

This got me thinking: do we need Sensemakers, people who can make sense of the data — or can we trust the systems to make sense and make the decisions for us?

I had a conversation via Twitter with Venessa about this, but there is only so much you can do with just 140 characters at the time.  I told her I would write this post to explain my positions further.

Here we go.

I fully believe that there are three factors standing in the way of Sensemakers as Venessa tweeted:

1. Scalability – There are around 6.5 Billion of us in this planet, and we are growing towards 9 Billion in the next ten years.  Too much information that needs to be processed to those many people.  Sure, the counter argument would suggest, with those many more people you can have more Sensemakers — thus you can feed the needs of more and more people.  That would be true if Sensemakers were easy to find, train, and deploy.  As it was pointed out to me in discussions in my previous post, we still don’t know very well the type of people we need to analyze the information — how can we expect of have more of them?  To me the model is not scalable and thus would not fit the purpose.  To be fair, Venessa feels that this big-box thinking is what got us in trouble before — so why try again?  Well, for starters…
2. Globalization – We are no longer limited to the information in our near-and-dear communities.  The local, small-town mentality that most of us had (yes, even in corporations) has recently been replaced by a global perspective.  This is a big world (before you say Duh!, please read on) and to feed the knowledge needs of a global world you need a global mentality.  Human beings are nurtured in local groups and communities; we are not global in actions or thoughts.  The ability to think global is not innate, and it is not easy to do for one person.  Finding, training, and deploying that person – in addition to being a Sensemaker – becomes an almost impossible task.  Now multiply that by 6.5 Billion people or so.  Computer systems can handle the magnitude of this need, human beings can only say “Huh?”.  Further, globalization has also brought the issue of…
3. Complexity and Volume of Information – Raise your hand if you don’t feel overwhelmed  by knowledge and information coming at you (OK, the funny person who raised their hand can now put it down).  The sheer magnitude of data, knowledge and information is mind-blowing.  Add to that the complexity level of the information we receive and you get an idea of why you feel so overwhelmed.  Now, you have to find the potential Sensemakers to take that complex information, make sense and connect the dots and then communicate it and explain it to the people who need it.  Wanna apply for that job?  Me neither.

What I do want is to use computers and sytems designed to handle very complex, very large data sets and put them to work the right way.  We saw in the last few months the launch of machines so fast and powerful that my old Ti-99/4A seems like a — well even my phone is 100s times faster and more powerful than my old computer.  Why not leverage those systems for what they are supposed to do? Take large to gigantic data sets, organize them, make sense of them, and then act on it.

To me, this is the way we are moving in the next five to ten years. This is the reality I want to build towards, what I see as our future.

Wanna join me?  Why not? What do you think is a better way to handle these demands and needs?  let me know your thoughts, would love to know what you are thinking…

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This change brings vast amounts of content generated by the communities.  In spite of the extensive experience gained by organizations in the past few years dealing with large data sets and knowledge, the user-generated content still remains untamed.  What to do with it, and how to leverage it for value, are almost as mysterious today as they were when we first began accumulating Knowledge in the 1980s.  Organizations are struggling to understand how to utilize it and how to derive value from it.  Alas, Content Management Systems and similar enterprise tools can help manage the creation and processing of structured content – but the largest problem still remains the unstructured content produced in these communities.

Realizing Value from the New Large Volume of Content

Consider the size of some of these communities: Facebook is close to 500 million people, Twitter nears 100 million, and a few of the corporate-sponsored communities have over two million members.  The amount of content generated is bringing organizations that were already drowning in data from transactional CRM systems to desperate levels.  They are now saddled by massive volumes of knowledge and feedback that makes finding the needle in the haystack look like child’s play.  In spite of the amazing volume, the storage and management of the content is not the problem – storage space is cheap these days so virtually any amount of content and data can be stored for – well, as close to forever as we need to.  The solution of cheap storage has given place to a bigger problem: what to do with it?

An organization wants to capture and leverage critical information from their customers’ needs and wants to deliver better experiences and products.  On the other hand customers fear that their feedback is not being heard and used. To show customers they care about their opinion, companies must act on the feedback.  Alas, given the volume, and short of scanning each entry posted in any community for useful information or data, how can they capture and act on this feedback?

image by © Plumdesign | Dreamstime.com

Enter analytical engines.

There are two roles that an analytical engine can play in a community – they can either be used to monitor and report on usage, sentiment and trends, or they can be used to structure the unstructured.

Monitoring for the Sake of Monitoring

Social Media brought with it standard monitoring tools.  Whether from Social Media Monitoring (SMM) vendors like INgage, Radian6, ScoutLabs, and Visible Technologies, or embedded within the products of other vendors, these tools are quickly becoming the “first line of defense” for the barrage of data produced.  The ability to collect the raw data, summarize it and report on specific terms is valuable for organizations that are suddenly overwhelmed by these new channels.

These tools are used for monitoring specific words and phrases, brand mentions (or competitors’ brands), and people talking about industries or products.  For example, during the TV airing of Super Bowl XLIV there was an analysis of brand mentions done by Radian6 and partners, called  BrandBowl 2010, which resulted in the naming of a winner by number of mentions and “positive” (like or dislike expressions) sentiment.  During the same event, another analysis done by MarketIQ contrasting Coke and Pepsi, aptly named the SodaBowl, also looked at mentions and sentiments for both drink manufacturers.  Again, the conclusion was to which was more popular – they actually used the term “buzzworthy” – not who gained what from their different approach to promoting themselves.

While certainly entertaining, it yielded no value to the brands mentioned on the success of failure of their campaigns – just whether they were popular or not.

Although there is room for improvement in sentiment analysis, the near-real-time analysis of these events allows marketers to identify which communities are important to them, and which ones need further attention.  It also allows them, for the first time, to understand immediately what effects their actions have and adjust campaigns and plans in real time –invaluable to improve the message and ensure a good reception by the public.

However, monitoring for the sake of monitoring yields limited value to businesses on their way to becoming social.  Listening is the first step, but engaging with the customer and providing a return on their feedback is closer to becoming a social entity.  Organizations leveraging analytical engines to find and structure this feedback are on a more interesting path to assess.

Structuring the Unstructured

Among the contributions to communities by their members there are very interesting nuggets of information, opinions, and suggestions that are often lost since there are no tools that can extract it, organize it, and use it.  This information could be used to improve products, create better experiences, or to better understand the needs of the customers and prospects.  Customers are more open in their opinions among peers than when being asked to complete surveys or participate in focus groups.  This candor and openness often results in very valuable data – which is not always leveraged.

image by © Carsten Reisinger | Dreamstime.com

Analytical engines can find that information and structure it (create a data record from it), distribute it to the specific system that can utilize it, and keep track of trends and patterns on the data they find.  Organizations use them to carry out actions like ideation (the creation of new products and services), feedback management (understanding how customers really feel beyond the surveys), social prospecting (finding more about their prospects and segments to target in sales), and virtual focus groups (leveraging customers’ opinions without formally convening a group).

Good analytical engines will automatically classify all the information collected (using an SMM – social media monitoring tool – is the best way to collect all this information) into different buckets, and analyze those buckets to generate insights.  This categorized information in its raw form is somewhat valuable, but the use of workflows and databases to store this data and process it further yield very powerful knowledge for the use cases mentioned above.

Integration Rules the Analytics World

The most valuable output an analytical engine can produce is the ability to take different inputs, across channels and across functions, and use all that in search of insights.  Organizations receive communications via email, chat transactions, online comments, surveys with free-text boxes, and many other methods.  To focus the efforts only on the communities, because they are the “hot item”, leaves a lot of potentially valuable data un-examined.  This data must be merged and integrated with the community insights for further analysis.  Analytical engines cannot stop at simply producing a report for each community; they have to become a critical part of the platform used by the organizations to interact with and manage their customers.

This platform will then integrate the content generated by all channels and all methods the organization uses to communicate, and produce great insights that can be analyzed for different channels and segments, or altogether.  This analysis, and the subsequent insights, yield far more powerful customer profiles and help the organization identify needs and wants faster and better.

Alas, the role of analytical engines for communities is not to analyze the community as a stand-alone channel, although there is some value on that as a starting point, but to integrate the valuable data from the communities into the rest of the data the organization collects and produce insights from this superset of feedback.

What do you think?

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The concept of social business is not new and it has already been “implemented” by plenty of organizations in history.  The organizations that realized early in their life that being “social”, relating to the customer and giving them what they want and need, has hefty rewards have already been social for quite some time.  Most people would cite here examples like Ritz Carlton, Harley Davidson, and some other beloved brands – and they are right, of course.  Alas, companies like Amazon, that integrated reviews into their business model way before we had social networks of massive consumption, and MMORPG and MPORPG, the original social networks, should be mentioned as well.

What is indeed new, and what we need to explore in more depth, is the role that new generations play in the fate of business.  This is not a social revolution as much as it is a social evolution driven by a generational shift.  As we move from Baby Boomers and Generation X into Generation Y and beyond we encounter a different model of thinking and communications – and that is what is different today.  The technology and the networks we are creating, sure – they are new.  However, none of them would’ve amounted to much without the communication style and needs of the new generations they support.  And let us not forget the globalization of our world – another core component of this cycle.

We need to explore and determine better not whether organizations should embrace this new (r)evolution (I prefer to call it evolution, as business is constantly evolving and this is our next destination) but rather how they will change their hierarchies, processes, and communication styles to support it.  We have to bring together customers, suppliers, and partners into collaboratively creating better end-to-end business processes to fulfill needs for both the organization and the customers (after all, we did say collaboration – right?).

We need to remodel our organizations to support this collaboration models, and change the culture to embrace the value it brings to both customers and workers.  It is this value that becomes the return-on-investment that justifies the continuation of the model.  This is not a discussion of tools (only), or culture (only), or even processes (alone).  We are talking about the intersection of these three worlds and how we can work better together to create the evolved business model that will sustain us until the next evolution happens.

Let’s start the discussion and discovery — together…

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During the past three months they have been solidifying both the concept and the product.  The good news? The product they launched into Beta is basically the same they introduced at their event — more refined and easier on the eye.  Having an improved user interface for the entire line does not hurt them either.  The bad news? There is still some work to do — and it is not on the product side (well, there is some work to do on the product side, but since they have no competition on what they are offering, yet, that’s not the bad, bad news).

Read on for more details on what, and why, they need to do in the next few months

I had the opportunity to talk to Salesforce executives, product management, other analysts, beta customers, and “still considering it” customers.  The event was very good to collect information and determine the feeling their customers had towards it.  By far the main concern was the price that non-Salesforce and non-Force.com users have to pay to use Chatter.  This fear of licensing is misplaced, as I understand it, since non-Salesforce or Force.com users would have to pay to access the platform services anyways — and the number of users is not as large as most fear for platform access.  If you are going to use it as part of an existing Salesforce or Force.com implementation, you are already paying for the license and don’t need to pay extra.  The only really expensive case is if you develop a new Force.com application without having Salesforce or Force.com already deployed — but that is a small minority of the cases.

Bottom line is that if you are going to leverage the power of Chatter as a platform you need to pay licenses for accessing Force.com — not for every single user that will benefit from it — and then use that access to integrate to your existing or new application outside of Force.com.  The issue of the licenses is blown out of proportion as a barrier to adoption in my opinion — but Salesforce will be glad to correct me if I am wrong in this point and I will concede it is an issue then (please use the comment section to correct me so we can all benefit).

Once we get past the misunderstanding over price, the second issue was not knowing what “it can do”.  I can see that as a more significant issue in the long run, and one that will be a barrier to adoption.  While they showcased clients who are currently using it, these were the same ones I saw at Dreamforce (excellent implementations and both have matured some since then, Appirio showed their  PSA and Vetrazzo showed how they run the entire company among others).

The key to the success comes down to creativity and innovation.  If they can get interesting, and innovative, uses of Chatter in the next six-to-nine months they will have proven the value of making Chatter part of the platform and not an application. If these interesting, as in leveraging integration to external sources and to other platforms, implementations don’t materialize then they will have lost the opportunity to change the game.

The most interesting part of this discussion? Very few, if any, of their customers and beta customers were discussing Chatter as a CRM tool or Social tool.  While acknowledging the power of the social integration it provides, the demos and the “chatter” (could not help it) were hinting to Enterprise 2.0 tools and architecture areas — not a new CRM tool.  This is a critical point, as it opens up a new way to look at Chatter: a cloud component — not a CRM component.  And this is a massive differentiating factor between Chatter and other vendors’ attempts to integrate social networks: Chatter is part of the Force.com platform.

The implications of this? Chatter becomes a core architectural component of organizations that adopt it, replacing (with simple and faster programming, and more powerful integration) Microsoft Sharepoint, IBM Notes, and (I feel nice today) even Novell Groupwise.  Since you have to create applications for these platforms (and they are expensive and cumbersome) why not move those resources to Chatter and Force.com?  Yes, why not indeed.  Powerful implications.

One more thing: vendors of community and collaboration tools must not worry about chatter replacing them.  As I said in my original post, and continue to maintain, this is a very good thing for them.  Being able to leverage the platform, including Chatter and other applications it can connect to, increases dramatically the value of their tools.  They are no longer silo applications that are single function and single purpose, now they become solution providers to an entire ecosystem linked via the platform.  It actually enables these vendors to provide very powerful features — without having to worry about how since the platform will handle the connections and data-transfers.

This, to me, is the true value of Chatter — a platform that extends any other applications you want to or need to use in your organization.

Am I hyping this too much?  Is my high school-style  giddiness getting the best of my judgment? What is your point of view?

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I wrote that for a Social Business (actually, it really means any business with aspirations to leverage social channels) you have to over-deliver to customer expectations.  I did not say you have to meet them, I did say you have to exceed them.  Some of my peers in the #SCRM Accidental Community were not too thrilled with the idea (apparently, not sufficiently upset to comment on the blog post either) of having to exceed expectations, telling me that meeting them should be sufficient as long as it is done in a consistent basis.

I disagree, and here are the three reasons I disagree:

1) Competition – if you only meet your customers’ expectations, then your competitors will find out what they want and take them. It’s very simple, people’s loyalty (in most cases just rational with few exceptions — see next point) are for purchase.  What’s that? You want an extra 10 days to pay your credit card bill and the rigid bills at the your bank won’t allow it?  Well, guess what I got for you — an extra 15-days to pay your credit card every month!  Poof, customer lost — Loyalty can be bought.

2) Loyalty – I wrote before how loyalty becomes an emotional thing over time when you over-delivered to your customers.  The consistent over-delivery is what creates a bond with the experience that makes customers move from rational to emotional loyalty. We are more willing to forgive a bad experience from Beloved Brands than from any other brand.  If the Ritz Carlton screws up (yes, it happens) and they say they will make it up to you, you better believe it till blow your expectations of “making it up to you” out of the water.  If AT&T says they will make it up to you — well, you get the picture.  Which brand generates emotional loyalty in every interaction? Beloved Brands — the ones that are out to exceed customers’ expectations.

3) Long-term Strategy – Interesting thing about Customer Service and Experiences, they are not a destination; it is something you will continue to do until the day you close your business.  Planning for meeting your customers’ expectations, as opposed to exceeding them, is like planning to make it to the end of the month with your paycheck — you can get what you want done in the immediate term, but you cannot prepare for the future or properly accommodate unexpected occurrences.  If something happens that requires you to go beyond your current setup you won’t have the bandwidth or the capacity as your systems and solutions are only set to meet present  needs.  Sounds like it would never happen?  Think again.  When JetBlue was faced with apologizing for keeping people in a locked airplane in the tarmac for some ungodly number of hours (was it eight? 12?) a couple of years ago, they could’ve just said we are sorry, here is a voucher — as most other airlines would’ve done.  Instead, they changed their systems and procedures to make sure it never happened again.  Customers, accustomed to what the airline industry had to offer, never expected that.  As a result, over 90% of them intended to continue flying with JetBlue.  Trust me, JetBlue did not just want to meet expectations – they wanted to blow them our of the water.

Do you want your brand to become a Beloved Brand? To have emotional loyal customer? To have your service commitment work as your marketing campaign?  Your plans should be to exceed your customers’ expectations then.

Am I wrong? What says you?

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No, I am not talking about the shoes of the 1970s we loved so much, I am talking about the intermediate layer of the cloud model – Platforms used to deploy applications.

I wrote about Chatter back in November, and Genesys couple of weeks ago — and in both I expressed my firm belief that Platforms are going to be the issue that defines the cloud in the next few years.  I also wrote about the cloud as being more than simply SaaS (Software as a Service) applications in my 2010 “predictions”.  I truly believe this is going to be the issue that will define the next generation of enterprise applications (this whole SCRM v CRM v Enterprise 2.0 v Social Business has limited future — and even If I am wrong, they still need a platform to run on, right?).

Here is where I stand on this, an unedited version of my brain right now (careful, may scare you).

There are three layers to the cloud: IaaS (infrastructure), PaaS (platform), and SaaS (applications).  They all ride on a universally known and publicly available network — they need it to exist (note: thus the impossibility of the “private cloud” — sorry, pet peeve).  This network is controlled by — well, let’s face it Cisco and a couple of others that have some products here and there.  OK, mostly Cisco.  This “Mostly Cisco Network” supports the infrastructure layer which essentially handles the communications between the network and the platform, while providing some services (authentication, security, encryption, integration and links to database and legacy systems, and common protocols among others).

Right on top of the infrastructure is where the platforms live also interacting with the layer above: the applications.  The platform is the management layer that connects the infrastructure with the logic and presentation layers provided by the applications.  Here is where something like a community, a knowledge-base, and a rules engine (as examples) would exist in a cloud environment.  Platforms provide an answer to the application on whatever information they needed, with the infrastructure and network supporting them.

Finally, the applications – the stuff that truly, honestly is the easiest of the three (complexity decreases as you climb the three layers of the cloud – or the seven layers of the OSI model in which it is modeled).  As I used to say about survey software, anyone with a garage and a couple of weekends can build a cloud applications (as long as they have the platform and the infrastructure in place — otherwise is not a “cloud application”).  Maybe more than a couple of weekends, but you get the idea..

This brings me back to my original point that platform solutions seem are emerging.  A platform is what would make a call center (OK, contact center and we can accommodate several channels) flexible, dynamic, and able to add a new channel (say, like Social Channels) with relative ease.  The social networks we talk about so much are all platforms (yes, Twitter, Facebook, Communities, etc.).

Why am I bringing this up?

I am sensing a rising problem: interconnecting the platforms.  While ideally and in theory this would be handled by the cloud as long as the platforms support an underlying infrastructure, this is not the driving force for the design of new platforms.  I am seeing platforms that MAY be open and easy to leverage and integrate, but with zero effort spent in trying to figure out how these platforms can and should work with each other.  I am seeing half-baked efforts at platforms that don’t consider integration with infrastructure and other platforms as vital. This is not only bad, it makes the platforms not cloud-compliant and thus not very useful in the long-run.

I am trying to make sure that the new platforms are indeed open, integration-ready, and cloud-compliant.  I want to raise the flag early on so we can actually leverage them, and make application development easier while making the problems they solve more complex.  I want to make sure that this time around the cloud actually has staying power since my poor heart cannot take another CORBA-style disappointment.

Got it?

What do you think?  Am I asking too much? Is the cloud even possible? Are platforms going to be the big thing for 2010?  Would love to hear your thoughts on this…

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When I told you what I was going to focus on for this year I said I wanted to look at the evolving business functions in a social business.  I am going to use that platform for that exploration — but will also announce it here in case you just get the feed for this blog (yeah, I am that smart and figured that out last night…).

First post looked at the role of Customer Service as the new Marketing (conclusion, no).

Today’s post looks at the role of Sales in a Social Business.

Enjoy, and feel free to drop your comments there — as the content won’t be republished anywhere else…

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Somewhere in the mid-2000s this began to shift.  I remember in 2004 when I was doing the research for the ERMS (email response management system – email automation tools for Customer Service) Marketscope I was very pleasantly surprised to see their offering was actually — good.  Not market leader at the time, but good.  It continued to get better and better over time, and the other components of the eService Suite were also getting better.  In 2007, the last year I conducted the research for the eService Magic Quadrant, they had actually qualified for inclusion and were rated fairly well (unfortunately, the report was never published — but that is a long story and requires time and drinks).

After that debacle, I lost track of them and recently regained contact when I was invited to their Analyst day, which was last week in Palo Alto.  Here is where I need to insert a short note to congratulate Joe Heinen, Rob Hilsen and the Genesys AR team for a wonderful and amazing event.  Lots of great information, good pace, and good interaction — incredible how well they pulled off a very hard thing to do: keeping a squad of analysts interested and engaged.  Joe Heinen had an interactive voting session that inspired me to write this post, and to jokingly post the following on Twitter:

Alas, all joking aside, the intent for this post if not to show my screen-scrapping skills but to share something very interesting I spotted at the event.  Genesys, the little telephony company that could do better in software — has done better.  The new vision and architecture introduced (parts available today, the rest coming out with the next release – version 8 – in Q1 of 2010) was significant for three reasons:

1. It was re-architected to work with a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) server in addition to switches and cards — making it easier to tie telephony with other channels, which leads to

2. They are using a framework called iWD (intelligent Workload Distribution) – a follow-up to an Universal Queue that leverages the concepts I laid out in the Customer Interaction Hub (CIH) while at Gartner making it not only a multi-channel management unit, but also an universal interaction resolution framework.  Very powerful indeed as we move to a tight integration of the three layers of the cloud, which in turn leads to

3. They have the only working model (being implemented right now at a client that shall remain nameless under NDA laws) I know of a truly cloud-centric (not hosted applications or on-demand solutions) customer service solution.  This is the biggest thing I took away from the event.

Unfortunately, this is only a summary of the event and the very-cool stuff I saw while there.  I don’t have time (but do have the slides, email me if you are interested and I will share what I can with Genesys permission) to describe in details how the product works and how it does what it does (parts of it are still under NDA).  But let me tell you this:  as we evolve into a cloud-centric world, being able to work in all three layers (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) is what distinguishes the vendors who get it from those that just try to pass hosted applications as cloud-applications.  Salesforce gets it now, as they’ve shown when they released Chatter as part of the PaaS and linked to Service Cloud 2 and other Force.com applications.  And Genesys not only gets it – but can operate at any (or all) of the three layers.  This is a very big step forward.

Now, wiping the drool and going back to being an analyst — will it work and stick and change the industry?  Don’t know, too early to tell.  It is going to be very hard to convince contact centers to replace their telephony hardware solutions with a SIP-based solution, and tie that into Genesys components that will also replace existing solutions.  Technology refreshes that would address these issues happen every five-to-seven years at contact centers, so we are just beginning to see what could be a very large trend to come in the next few years.  One point in their favor: lots of organizations have already committed VoIP (and by association SIP) as a core component of their next technology refresh.  This is a good-news / bad-news item though, as Genesys has time to continue to improve and perfect the offering (yes, it is a version 1.0 right now, and with very limited distribution), but they may have to wait longer than they want to see adoption of the model.

One thing does remain in my mind: this is a good first step towards a true cloud-centric deployment of a Customer Service architecture.  I am looking forward to seeing how it progresses in the next few months and years.

Am I seeing something that won’t happen?  Is then cloud just vapor (not literally, of course)?

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My introduction to the topic summarized what I see as the main issue: SCRM and Enterprise 2.0 are heading in the same direction (customer-centricity), talking about the same issues (engagement), using the same technologies (collaboration), and solving similar problems (culture, politics, adoption) — yet, we pretend we are talking about two very separate, different things. Not only are they very similar, but whether you are collaborating internally among users, or externally with clients, without reaching out to the other constituency it won’t work.  Clients and users are closely tied in a Social world.

The most surprising thing was the answer to a simple question: who among the SCRM practitioners and implementers in the panel and the audience had enabled internal collaboration to support the SCRM changes they had adopted? Among 35-40 people, only one hand went up.  This was reinforced by the avoidance of the concept as I tried to ask more direct questions to that effect – when I asked what should an organization do to support the changes brought on by Social Media adoption and by SCRM implementations, the answer went back to implementing SCRM and the changes it brought to customers.  Although the audience was mostly SCRM, I am sure if I were to ask the E2.0 crowd what  changes they made to their customer-facing processes to reflect the internal changes I would get a similar answer (crickets).

Seriously? No changes necessary?

If this the current state of the convergence, we got lots of work to do to make it happen.  My prediction for 2010 as the year it begins the liftoff may have been a bit ahead of its time (a comment someone in the audience made following the event).

There is no way that either one of the two movements will succeed without the other.  You cannnot have meaningful change in processes dealing with customers (providing better experiences, increasing loyalty) if you don’t alter the way you work.  And altering the way you work without having a significant impact in how you deliver to the client makes almost as much sense (improved collaboration with no effect on delivery).

It is simple, the two shall meet and move forward together for organizations to embrace being social.  No other way around it.

I was searching for an analogy to conceptualize where we are.  I thought of two trains running on the same track, facing each other, full speed ahead.  We see them going to crash — yet we cannot warn them, or alter their course, or avoid the crash.

As I was thinking more and more about it I realized that it is a poor, albeit sensationalist, representation of what the convergence can bring.  Sure, both camps would prefer to have this representation of independence and momentum and a separate end goal.

But it is not like that at all.  The Convergence is more like building the Chunnel.

The underground tunnel between UK and France was built simultaneously digging from both sides.  Each one of them had similar problems to solve, and unique problems to solve.  They both did the best they could to keep the common goal in mind: meeting in the middle.  Now, if we can make two tunnels starting from opposite ends about 50 kilometers apart meet in a specific point in the middle — I am sure we can make two strategic solutions meet halfway and deliver an engaged, customer-centric organization – right?

The Convergence - If it happened once, it can happen again...

I am planning a series of weekly posts for February 2010 that will explore in more detail how to make it happen.  Let me know if you want to chat, converse, or collaborate on that.

What do you think? Possible? Plausible? Doable?  Would love to hear your thoughts…

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Why? Convergence.

If you remember, this is one of my key topics for 2010.  No, we will not witness convergence between Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 in 2010.  However, the smart organizations will start their move towards it in 2010.  And they will make inroads.  This is a three-to-five year trend that will gain momentum between now and 2012.  The road is long, and lots of changes await.  The most traditional path to convergence is a two-to-three year phase just to lay the groundwork and the foundation for it.

How do I know?

Because we did it before — and we will do it again.  Each time we have two “revolutionary” strategies deployed in the enterprise, seemingly in a collision course, they end up working together.  Recent examples are knowledge management and content management, bricks-and-mortar commerce and ecommerce, and accounting systems and ERP.  I am sure you can think of other examples from your organization.

Convergence is their future.  I highlighted it in my Roadmap to SCRM series, and talked about it since then in other posts.

What is my entry into the world of Enterprise 2.0? Two events:

1. I am doing a panel on Convergence of  SCRM and Enteprise 2.0 this coming Tuesday at 6:30 PM in Mountain View.  I will have some great panelists on stage, but people like Susan Scrupski, Nenshad Bardoliwalla (added 01/11/2010),  and Sameer Patel thought-leaders for enterprise applications  and members of the Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council will be in the audience as well.  An excellent opportunity to chat and interact with the top minds in SCRM and Enterprise 2.0 live.  If you are in the area, just come on by!
2. I submitted a proposal for a session on convergence for the Enterprise 2.0 in Boston in June.  I am going to lay out the idea of convergence, a roadmap, and the issues to consider while en-route.  I am collaborating with Mark Tamis who has a great deal of experience in Enterprise 2.0 topics and will keep me honest.  I have a favor (well, shameless plug actually) to ask you.  Yes, your vote (please vote) will count for sure (please vote) and I will appreciate it (please vote) — but beyond that, could you please let me know via the comments section in that site what your thoughts are?  (please vote) What should we cover? What should we leave out? Are we on the right track?  (please vote) Are we way off?

The next post here will be on Wednesday, following the panel, with my impressions and notes from the event.  I want to use this platform to start the discussion on Convergence and get a sense of where to go next. Does it make sense?

Where should we head next to cover Convergence? I’d love your opinions and comments…

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• You will definitely be able to get an ROI from your Social Media investment
• Social Media is going to take off
• You can craft your Social Media strategy and make it stick
• Your Senior Management will finally recognize the value of Social Media
• Social Media will change your organization/change your business functions/make you money/save you money

I am not linking to any of them because they are all so horribly wrong on their assertions that Social Media is what matters that I don’t want their authors to think I am singling them out.  This is an industry-wide problem.

Let’s get it straight:

Social Media is about tools and tactics, you can never set a strategy for it, and it has very short term life and results.

Social CRM is about strategically setting long-term goals for working better with your clients, and improving your organization in the process.

Social Business is the long-term, strategic process of reinventing your organization to collaborate with employees, partners, and customers.

I have been accused of spending too much time on definitions and splitting hairs on terms.  Why do I insist?  Let me explain with an example.

Let’s say you propose to use Social Media (tools and tactics, Twitter for example) for Customer Service.

You do an ROI calculation that says you should be able to recover your expenses within three-to-four months by reducing the number of calls into your call center; you are going to answer X percentage of them via Twitter.  You get approval from your management and you implement it.  You equip four-or-five agents with Twitter accounts, deploy software for social media monitoring, Twitter management tools, and create social media governance policies.

Slowly you begin to listen to the streams; you engage and interact with customers.  You have become social — or have you?

Within six-to-nine months you solve some of the inquiries and problems that come in via Twitter, but slowly begin to notice that for most of them there is more than Twitter can provide (it is still 140 characters and limited patience from customers – right?).  You create a process to escalate the large number of interactions back to the call center (or contact center, or online).

Wasn’t that what you were supposed to eliminate or reduce?

You are effectively doing two things: upsetting your customers by not solving their problems via their chosen channel and overwhelming your established systems with more interactions than before (it is called hidden demand, customers that would have ignored their issues but are coming through now because of the channel selection – in this case Twitter).

Your ROI is slowly eroding, your simple solution is getting complex, and your Social Media “strategy” is going down the drain.  If you did a good job, you have metrics you established before you started that are showing you this.  Otherwise, it will take you longer to notice the failure.

What happened?

You confused Social Media (channels) with Social CRM (business strategy).

This is what caused the precipitous failure of multi-channel CRM when we first started with it.

I wrote this as a comment to a post I read earlier this week and I think it is valid at this point in the discussion.

Social Media (used to engage customers and to listen to them, maybe even act without impacting the biz operations).

Social CRM (using the feedback to improve operations, impact the business, change the relationship).

The relationship between these two and loyalty is also telling.

Social media can, and usually does, affects short-term, rational loyalty. It does not, however, have much impact in long-term loyalty and it does not do much for the biz (other than good PR). It does set a precedent, so the biz has to be constantly on its toes to perform similarly across the interactions. As you can see, if the biz was not changed to accommodate the necessary changes to process, it may (and probably will) falter at a later time — which will destroy the rational loyalty.

Social CRM, on the other hand, impacts the long-term loyalty. You are making changes to your processes, to your business, and creating  historical-based two-way conversation with your customers. These are the basic elements of building a long-term loyalty with them. (text removed that pointed to specifics of post, not relevant to our discussion)

Social CRM is a long-term strategy that while it leverages Social Media does not depend on it. It is more closely tied to a Social Business strategy and the impact on the business goes beyond 2010 — even 2012 probably. Sure, you can adopt the idea and begin the planning and deployment this year, but the truth value of the implementation won’t show for a couple of iterations (similar to what we experienced with regular CRM). It could be shorter – if you leverage you existing CRM investment… but that is another discussion.

Enough preaching — where am I going with this?

You have to understand the relationships between Social Media, Social CRM, and Social Business and focus your efforts where it matters.

Let’s use another example.  You are losing customers because you did not adopt a Social Media “strategy” yet.  This is a rather massive and fast loss, comparable to an arterial bleed.  Gross, but please follow along…

Social Media is nothing more than a band-aid, similar to doing customer service via email or adding ecommerce without really thinking it through.  Sure, you get something quickly done and out of the way, but if you are bleeding out of an artery a band-aid won’t stop the bleeding — or save your life.

Social CRM is a strategy, but specific to a particular area (working with customers).  It forgets the rest of the organization – but more importantly also the role of the customer beyond the front-office functions.  It does serve a mid-term purpose – but is the equivalent of putting some gauze and pressure to the arterial bleed — you can stop the bleeding, but the artery still needs repair.

Social Business is the vascular surgery that will repair the arterial walls, ensure that circulation is working properly, and there is no loss of function.  This is your goal: to stop and repair the arterial bleed – rather the profuse loss of customers and do it in way that there is not further loss.

You may not like the example (hey, the wife is a doctor – what can I say) but the concept is well explained that way.  You cannot put a band-aid on a life-threatening problem and expect it to work.

What do you think?  Am I too focused on definitions? What would you change to my proposed model (other than using a not-so-gory example)?

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I would drive into the dessert (Las Vegas) embracing all it had to offer (mostly CHP officers pulling me over).  I would stay in a clean and modest hotel (hotels in the strip where cheap and decent then), and spend a few days pondering (playing blackjack and craps) on the fate (I almost always lost) of the year to come. It allowed me to plan better (how long to eat mac & cheese and ramen dinners) and to set my goals (ask for a raise at work).

As I got older, more serious (married and with kids) the process changed slightly.  Alas, since I live in the dessert now (for lack of better publishable words to describe Reno), the process is similar but I spend more time thinking about next year (married, two kids = no money, small town = nothing to do — might as well think).

This past week was my think week for 2009, and I am using the takeaways to frame my research the next 12-18 months.

Four strategies are going to be critical for businesses to address starting in 2010; use this list to plan where to spend your hard-earned strategic budget dollars:

Business Functions. How much has the customer changed in the last two years and how much will it change in the next two? We are not talking about customers any more (at least not as before).  Then, why would you continue to use same business functions as two, five – even ten years ago?  You have to embrace a new model, and you need new business functions for that.

Communities. The most critical element in dealing with “customers” (yes, in quotation marks) in 2010.  As the roles of business functions shift, they are finding communities to be the precipitant (I refuse to say catalyst) for those changes.  You will have to re-learn what you are thinking about communities, and how to interact with them.  You will no longer build communities to control, you will participate in ad-hoc and impromptu communities.

Experience.  If you solely focus on delivering the best experiences during customer interactions (as you have done until now), you will miss out on the best savings and innovation.  Disney plans and executes flawless experiences from the moment you plan your vacation through the post-vacation memories.  Are you approaching experiences the same way? Or are you trying to do the “online experience” or the “brick-and-mortar experience”?  The disconnect is what’s causing you to fail.

Convergence. You will need to converge your Enterprise 2.0 (internal) and Social CRM (external) strategies (first), initiatives (second), and implementations (third).  This is THE sine-qua-non condition for your organization to succeed and become a Social Business.  If you cannot get your organization to collaborate internally and externally at the same time, you will be left behind by the competition — and that means in the next 6-12 months, not years.

The biggest problem organizations are going to face is not going to be strategy.  That is easy (well, not so complicated) to tackle.  The biggest problem is the technical architecture underlying these changes.  There is really only one technology focus area for organizations going forward:

The Cloud. I promise not to say private cloud anymore.  In reality the cloud is not even started yet (although clues are beginning to pop up here and there).  I am planning a series of posts through the year to explore the issues and items you must consider from the business side as you dive deeper into this vaporware (not metaphorically speaking anymore – yeah, bad joke).  If you have any doubts that the cloud will change your business in the next five to ten years, you won’t by the time we are done dissecting it.

I did say before that analytics was a critical component of 2010 – and I still believe it.  I am trying to fit it within the bigger picture and will bring it out as needed (my wild card for 2010).

This wraps up 2009 blogging.  I want to write a short sentence to say thanks for your support and commentary.

Thanks.

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Ready? There are five things I don’t want to hear anymore in2010 (and the reasons why):

Private Cloud – Do you realize that the mere definition of a cloud forbids the existence of a private cloud? A cloud is there to interconnect two or more public applications or networks.  The concept of building a private cloud is a way for IT managers to say they are ahead of the curve, knowledgeable about what is going on, and to make their infrastructure sound hip and advanced.  In reality, anytime they say they have a private cloud they look like a fully dressed clown at a funeral: I am sure the intention is there, but the actions don’t reflect that.  Say you have an open architecture, a services-oriented infrastructure, or a dynamic API-driven platform if you want.  Just don’t call it a private cloud.

Death of Anything – According to my earlier readings today only, 2010 is the year we kill Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, CRM, ERP, Email, Enterprise 2.0, SCRM, databases, relational databases, and  I am certain I am missing some other ailing technology patients.  This is not to mention how vendor #1 will be “dead” before the year end, while the other vendor they back is pretty much alive and kicking.  Why do we need to kill things? Why does everything in this world need to replaced every single time something new comes about?  The shiny new object approach of new always being better and killing old one has never proven successful.  Let’s spend the time we dedicate to “killing” stuff to building better models of what we have.  No one is dying in 2010 — at least not in Enterprise Applications.

CRM Failure Rate – Yes, we know.  CRM used to fail at rates up to 70%. Shocking.  Alas, that was 8-10 years ago.  I want to think we already figured what we were doing wrong, how to fix it, and how to turn that failure rate into a same-number-different-metric success rate.  If we did not, as Paul Greenberg likes to point out, we would not have grown it into a 13 Billion Dollars industry.  So, let’s say the following from now on: CRM has failure rates that are comparable to any other large enterprise-wide application implementation — but we have great knowledge how to make it better and to make it successful.  Yesteryear failure rates don’t play no more.  I am sure that learning to drive resulted in high-failure rates among teenagers, but most of them managed to figure out and are doing fine. Right?

Social Anything – No, not saying that Social is dead (that would contradict myself – right?). I am saying that making special considerations for Social is so — well, 2009.  Social is no longer a new, shiny object — it is part of the fabric of the organization (like DNA better? fine, the DNA of the organization).  You had some couple of years to get surprised and amazed by the social evolution; now is time to take a deep breath, and start building the Social Business.  Darn, this one is going to be harder to do — how about if use either Aligned Enterprise, or we just call it Business?  After all, it is just another evolution of business like the coming of the PC, the Internet, and the industrial revolution before.  Did we change the name of business each time there was an innovation?

You Have to Start in Customer Service – As much as I was one of the earlier proponents of this mantra (been saying that CRM starts in Customer Service since the mid-1990s), it is time to put it to rest.  This was all fine and dandy (wow, my use of metaphors is really going south) back when our business processes and functions were differentiated — not so much as we move to use end-to-end processes.  So, no – you don’t have to start with Customer Service. You have to start where your needs are.  Don’t know where they are?  Lucky for you you became an Aligned Enterprise, and you can use your newfangled, shiny feedback mechanisms to find out.  Then, you will see how you don’t have to start in Customer Service — unless you completely lack imagination and cannot figure out how this whole thing works.  Then, sure start in Customer Service; at least you will be doing something.

Any terms you would like to see move on in 2010?  Pet Peeves?  Let me know in the comments and we can work towards making them go away…

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We exchanged a few DMs offline to discuss a potential way to do it, and then she twitted out to the world.

I then created the #MonTwit hashtag, advertised it a few times, “counseled” (coerced would probably be a better term) a few people to write about it — and the result was, well almost overwhelming for what I was expecting and for only a day or two advertise the experiment and get the word out.

First, some stats — as the writing of this blog there were 86 contributors (people using the hashtag) 164 times.  Twenty blog posts, and 14 opinions expressed via Twitter.  Check out the rest of the stats at WhatTheHashtag, or get a transcript if you prefer from there.

Some people (14 – list below) just tweeted their discoveries (yes, Twitter is a microblog – so perfectly acceptable).  Some others (10 – list also below) wrote posts or posterous or similar entries on their lessons learned and discoveries.

I read them all, as long as they were properly hashed and I could find them, commented on a few of them, and learned a lot of very interesting things in the process.  Here is my summary of lessons learned on the fist iteration of the MonTwit (Monday Twitter).

Will there be more?  Conversations are underway to try to produce it better, spread the word farther, and looking for better focused and more concrete topics.  Short answer? more than likely.  Stay tuned.

Lesson #1 – Tribal Knowledge Rocks — On Demand.  Asking people to talk about something they know, at a certain time and with proper structure brings you a lot of different views.  This is good.  One of the largest problems with crowdsourcing or wisdom of the crowds is that the largest voices influence the smaller voices (or more powerful or more influential - pick your word to use).  Setting a specific timeframe for the answers takes away the “bully” effect inherent to wisdom of the crowds.  You will notice if you read through the entries the influence that early ones begin to have on latter ones.  Setting a specific time takes away a lot of this and provides very interesting, different perspectives.

Lesson #2 – Twitter is About People, not Technology or Content.  Yep, virtually everyone wrote about the contact with people they did not know before, or met via Twitter, as the most critical part of what they discovered about it.  Twitter is a community, as I always said, and the knowledge sharing is inherent to the model of community. People want to connect to people, and what is what Twitter offers — the largest “brain phone book” in the world to find the people you want, to tap into brains and knowledge that you think must exist but are not sure how or where to find.  See @WimRampen’s entry for more on this, as his was the most RT one during this experiment (barely edging Venessa in reach and reads).

Lesson #3 – Know Your Purpose.  Twitter can suck the life out of you… yes, it is that addictive.  Close to 100 million people talking about — well, just about anything can really cause you to lose track of time even worse that spending time on YouTube.  Why are you on Twitter is the first and last question you should always ask yourself.  Sure, it works great as a time-killer, but even better as a community – and communities are about sharing knowledge.  What are you trying to learn today?

Lesson #4 – I Still Know Little.  I realized what I know and what I am still to learn.  I like to say that I am constantly evolving and learning and did confirm some of my suspicions and best practices by reading the blogs today, but I also realized that there are so many aspects of any issue I am not considering, or discarding too quickly.  Twitter is a great mind-expansion tool and you should always, always look at if for that: an unfiltered window into the tribal knowledge of the world.

Now, it is your turn.  Did you read them all? some? most? What did you learn? What is new or different that you picked up from today’s experiment? Do you have any ideas on how to do it better?  woudl love to hear your thoughts…

Update (12/23/2009): The #MonTwit hashtag will be revived in 2010 for more like experiments.  If you are interested, keep a search column in your favorite client to stay updated.  Thanks for the persistent asking everyone.

Late Update (01/02/2010): David Carr (@carr2n) wrote a compelling #MonTwit entry — without hashtag.

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I have been on Twitter since 2007 — well, almost.  I signed up with a bogus account in May 2007 to see what the buzz was about (there were so few people really doing it back then, it almost sounded like a porn place — was not going to use my real name for that… there was also some privacy fears).  Used it for 4 days — but not sure the word used is the proper one to describe my behavior.  Posted some breakfast and lunch things, exchanged a few messages with some people I never knew – but most of the talk at that time was not about technology or business, rather between friends and with some little professional chatter mixed in.  Left it behind, thinking it was interesting, but was not sure how it would actually make it to the next step.

Then in 2008 the noise was too high to stay out and jumped in.  Still, I was clueless as to what it was (I think it was in May of 2008).  I read about it and learned as much as I could: you have to follow to be followed, you have to listen before engaging, you have to put interesting stuff out, you have to build you presence… you read all the advice.  I turned into a generic Twitter user: no purpose, no reason, just follow the “basic rules” that everyone was touting.

I could not see the value of being another voice in an ocean of millions — I started to experiment with it.

Follow people who are different, with lots of followers but that have something interesting to say, participate of events, follow links, RT different things to see the reaction, and many other things.  A picture began to emerge of what Twitter was, what it can do for me, and how to use it better.  Slowly started to change my follower/following ratio, using searches more and more to find the right people and the right content.  Began integrating Twitter with other social networks, with blogs and other places.  Started to admit I was a Twitter user at meetings, explaining to people what it does and watching their reactions.  It was all data that contributed to my learning about Twitter.  To understanding what it was, how to use it, what it does.  It was the preamble to these three key things i discovered about Twitter:

1. Twitter is what you make of it. Twitter has no life, nor purpose, no direction, and no idea of who you are.  Sorry, hate to break the news like that to you – but that is it.  It is a platform that just sits there and waits for you to do something with it.  Approaching 100 million people quickly, it is a very large platform actually.  True, there may be 20-25 million active users — but that is still something.  However, it won’t wait for you or guide you to accomplish something. If you know how to get value out of communities, then you are going to enjoy Twitter.  If you enjoy listening to people talk about — well anything, you are going to get value.  If you know what you want to do in Twitter, you can get it.  Twitter has nothing prepared for anyone, it is what you want to make of it.

2. Twitter is a community.  Shocking, I know.  There are no forums or ideas or structure (well, you could try hashtags — it worked very well for the #SCRM Accidental Community), but it is a community.  I wrote about this a couple of times.  The main difference, and the great part about it, is that each person gets to build and mold their own community – and change it at the drop of a hat if you want.  You can create and follow lists, groups, searches, hashtags, and people for The Red Hat Society today, and for Punk Rock tonight – without much effort.  You can create several IDs and follow people in different ways, have several personas here and still be you.  It is a great build-it-yourself, shape-it-as-you-go community.  Just be yourself in as many ways as you want.

3. No one is ever wrong about Twitter. There is no right and no wrong way to do Twitter, since it is what you make of it and what you build around it.  So, don’t tell anyone how to do it right, or wrong, or better or worse.  What works for you, or your organization, may (probably won’t) not work for someone else.  Share your experiences and lessons, but make sure that you understand that it is just that  - yours.  As with any communities, the ideal outcome is gained knowledge from tribal sharing, or gained power from aggregation.  The way you go about doing that is going to be different, so don’t expect other people to do it same as you.  Share your knowledge in your community, learn from them, and always look for new ways to use it and get value out of it — then you’ll be right about it.

What do you think? What have you learned or discovered about Twitter? How was your experience different from mine?  Would love to hear your thoughts…

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Today, December 19th, is Paul Greenberg’s birthday.  You may have known that, if not – feel free to wish him a very happy one.

The reason I am writing this is because I am at a loss as to what you could gift someone who seemingly needs nothing.  So, I am going to use the only two gifts I have to give: writing something, and making a fool of myself in the process.

As you probably know if you read this blog, Paul Greenberg wrote in 2000-2001 a book called “CRM @ The Speed of Light”.  Paul wrote a seminal tome on a then fledgling enterprise application called Customer Relationship Management.  I had been doing that thing, CRM, for about 2 years then – selecting and implementing it at my then employer.  It had been out for about 10 years (Tom Siebel wrote in the S-1 for Siebel that they invented it in 1991), and really available for little more than a couple of years.

What Paul did back then was to, in the words of Siebel executives repeated many times since then, “validate CRM as a business”.

Of course, being an analyst at the time with Gartner I dismissed the book since — how could he know more than we did?  We were THE hottest team in the world when it came to CRM.  Turns out I did read the first edition sometime in 2002-2003 and I was surprised.  The book was good (yes, we had more material in some areas, but not bad for a “civvy”), informational, but more than anything else – entertaining.  You could read it and understand it without a problem, you had a feeling that he had suffered understanding the basic concepts so he could explain it “for dummies”.

It was a good book.  I must confess I skipped version 2 and version 3 was a skimming thing mostly.  Alas, Paul was doing very well building his reputation and influence, educating tons and tons of executives, and making sure they all knew what CRM was and what it did for business.  While, we even had him keynote at one of the Gartner CRM conferences (or two) back when version 2 came out (OK, second edition – sorry).

Fast Forward another few years and I am leaving Gartner.  As I was doing my studying to become an analyst again (mostly reading about the market and talking to people), I came across his blog.  He had posted a good article on whether he was going to adopt the Social CRM name or not for the fourth edition (he was favoring CRM 2.0 and I was with him on that – yet another time I was wrong).  I commented that I’d prefer 2.0, then he replied something and asked for my email, we started corresponding and talking, then exchanging information, meeting at conferences, etc.  Throughout all this time I was trying to decide what to do with my life when I grew up (IF is a more fitting description, per my wife) and talking to Paul about it.

Why am I telling you this?  Because Paul became a very good and true friend.  I am sure if you ever met Paul you would agree that he is the nicest person you will ever meet in this industry (probably outside of it as well).  He knows everyone, everyone respects him and adores him.  He has been called the Godfather of CRM – and never has a name been more fitting.  He truly cares and grows this industry like no one else.  I cannot find a single person that will openly express a single bad word or thought about him (and, trust me, this industry likes to gossip like teenage girls at the mall).

It was this Gentleman who made sure we all had a market and an industry to express our craft and our passions.  Would things have turned up the same way without him writing the book and tirelessly working to grow CRM into what it is today?  Maybe, but it would not be even close to being as  interesting as it is today.  I cannot find anyone that compares, in any other place, to Paul.

He is a consummate professional who cares for the career well-being of everyone whom he calls his friend.

He is a true friend to those who take the time to get to know him, as few good friends could be.

He was a true mentor and my biggest supporter while I was deciding what to do.

He is very generous, almost to a fault, and very friendly — even to those who waste his time (alas, he is always learning so not much is a waste of time).

He is a role model, and what I aspire to become.

And, without him I would probably be at some company doing something else I hate.  So, my gift to you, friend, is a very public and heartfelt Thank You, and a promise to not waste what time and patience you have given me, and the certainty that if I could be at 60 half the person you are today I will have fulfilled most of my personal goals.

Happy Birthday, Paul.  Thanks.

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We discussed definitions, and models, and strategies and plans.  What they are doing, what they want to do, what they would love to do. Ended up with a great view of where the market is now from all different perspectives.  There are three different views of SCRM.

Before, we start — do you want a refresher on what SCRM is? How to make it work?

The Vendor Reality

Vendors are rushing, well walking very fast or running at the very least, to call themselves SCRM vendors.  Are they correct? Yes. And No.  Since there is no defined SCRM market beyond taking on the social channels and integrating them with CRM, they are all right.  What they call SCRM is an integration between Social Media (Channels) and CRM functions (Sales, Marketing, and Service).

Alas, none of them provide more than one single function well enough to earn the label of complete CRM solution.  Actually, I would even go as far as to say that there are any that provide complete functions, they all provide parts of a function (for example, using the customer history via Twitter or Facebook is something I have not yet seen – yet, that is a critical function of service).  I already covered via different interviews and articles how to attack Social Sales, Social Marketing and Social Service and talked about what vendors are doing.  It took us almost 20 years to perfect,  well optimize is a better word, those same functions via old-fashioned channels — why shall it take only 6-18 months to do the same for social media?

Are vendors moving towards bigger targets?  Sure, Helpstream showed they want to do more than simply social support by adding  social marketing to their social service tools, Oracle and SAP unveiled platforms that allow them to tackle any function – even end-to-end processes, and Salesforce showed how to move the social network to the platform and forget about business functions altogether.  There are many other examples of vendors figuring out through integrations and partnerships how to offer more complex SCRM solutions (Radian6 and Lithium come to mind right away as an example).

This reality will start shifting in 2010 as consolidation starts to take over and a market begins to materialize (led by customers spending again, slowly at first), and larger and well-funded vendors begin to look for tools to complete their suites.  We will see a lot of movement in this market as we approach the summer, and very heavy towards the end of the year.  I will be talking about a very different reality in 12 months.

The Provider Reality

Just to be on the safe side, providers are consultants, integrators, analysts, and other people who help organizations adopt and deploy SCRM.

This group tends to be rather skeptical (pragmatical may be a better word) on anything new – at least until proven (which of course never happens since no one installs it as they wait to be proven – just kidding).  Alas, with SCRM without being a defined market yet, and with little to go beyond one-channel, one-function implementation (usually without ROI or strategy), you can expect a lot of negativity in this field.

But that it not entirely the case.  Sure, there is some skepticism on whether SCRM will succeed, on what it is, and failure versus potential success.  Alas, this is all mitigated with a heavy dose of reality this time.

There is a realization that the shift to social will happen – no matter what.  There is a realization that beyond the hype, vendors and organizations are actually beginning to understand that, and starting to see the path.  And the echo chamber (what happens when visions of the future and how to achieve it become common speech among practitioners and no one else) is quieter than usual. We also see more organizations embracing the concepts early on.  Encouraging.

There is one more thing that I am seeing among practitioners that also is encouraging: less hype.

The comments on what is possible are based on the reality of what vendors are delivering today, and what organizations are focused on.  Not really on what could, may, or should happen based on vendor promises and pie-in-the-sky visions.  It is certainly interesting to see more of a reality-based approach to SCRM than what I have seen in past iterations of  CRM.

The Organization Reality

The organizations are going wacko (my wife is a physician, that is a medical term – look it up)  and it is our fault.  On one hand there is a group of people led by those inexperienced in the enterprise applications market that is screaming at the top of their lungs how you have to engage, you must listen, become social or begone.  On the other hand we tell them they must create a strategy, that it is all about a strategy and everything else falls into place, don’t worry about the social aspect yet.

So, what do they do? What they can, namely Twitter and Facebook.  I cannot even count how many meetings and conversations I had in the past four months with executives who wanted to talk about SCRM – only to be asked how to setup Twitter or Facebooks Fan Pages.

There is an interesting and growing movement among organizations to control the “rogue” deployments within their organizations.  They may see a potential for them to flourish, or maybe started to see results – but now they want them to conform to the rules and guidelines they have for the organization.  Social Media guidelines are sprouting like mushrooms after a spring rain.

Is this good?

Some of the emerging programs have been curtailed severely, while others have benefited from this control and the resource allocation that comes with it.  It is all down to what was the intended purpose and goal, how structured it was, and whether there was an alignment with the organization’s overall strategy for that specific function.  In other words, if they can stamp the seal of approval on top of a good program, it will grow — most others, not so much.  It is indeed, all about the strategy.

Where to now, captain?

That is the reality from my side of the world.  The common thread? well, no one really agrees on where we are – but most agree on the future being full of possibilities.

So, where does this takes us in 2010 and beyond?

I see three trends that will impact SCRM in the near future, and one pattern for the long term:

Trend #1 – Market Consolidation.  What? This early? Really?  The market is not even defined yet, but we are already going through consolidation? Yep.  We have too many vendors defining SCRM in too many different ways and we need to consolidate.  A wave of vendors beginning to offer truly competitive solutions (as opposed to the disfunctional setup we have today) will emerge half-way through the year and bring some interesting offers to compare to each other.  I twitted earlier today than predicting a consolidation in a market of several hundred different vendors is not a prediction, it’s an overdue reality.  So, it is a trend that will continue and y’all can see that – right?

Trend #2 – Organizational Control.  Control was made to be the evil word of 2008-2009.  Guess what? organizations won’t simply empower an employee or group to become their social voice without some degree of control.  Rogue programs are becoming corporate programs, people-as-brands are becoming workers-for-brands, clear guidelines and rules are becoming more common, and roles for social networks are becoming a reality.  This is good, very good actually for corporate adoption of SCRM and the social channels.  This trend will result in a large number of formal SCRM strategies created and implemented in the second and third quarters of next year.

Trends #3 – I Now Know What to Do.  We are (finally) beginning to get away from ComcastCares, Ford, Dell, Coca Cola, etc. as being the only citable case studies in the world of SCRM.  We are seeing some real results from real companies that are going beyond PR and marketing their brand (why, even Comcast is going beyond Twitter now) to extending CRM to work for the social customer.  This will translate into best practices, clear case studies, and how-to-guidelines becoming commonplace.

These trends probably will hang around longer than 12 months.  How about longer term?  What is going to happen to SCRM in three or five years?  There is one pattern beginning to emerge:

Pattern #1 – Loud and Proud.  CRM is not going away.  Nor is SCRM going to replace CRM.  Neither is Social Business going to make CRM and SCRM irrelevant.

CRM is loud, in your face, with good results (now), and going to stick around for a while.  Did it fail in the past? You bet!  Up to 70% of implementations failed.  Then they recovered and did wonderful things — case studies in most cases.

I dare you to find one single failure from the early years that has sworn off CRM forever.  You won’t.  CRM  failures were part of the early days of moving one million miles an hour and shooting from the hip at the same time.  That is behind us, the bubble exploded and collapsed and we don’t need to support gazillion dollar implementations anymore.  Now we do what we need, pick the tools and technologies that work, and make it happen according to our strategy.

Do some people still fail? Yep, and they will continue to do so.  Why? Because, such is life, because we don’t define success and failure before starting, and because enteprise-class applications are very, very hard to do.  And, more importantly, because someone out there still believes that CRM is simply technology.

I now want to hear from you, with one caveat.  I am not going to engage in a SCRM is dead or alive debate here, but would love to hear why I am wrong, where I may be right, and overall what is your sense of SCRM’s reality today.

Thoughts?

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I still remember the time we had a heated exchange on Knowledge Management (me: you don’t have it, them: we are the best).  I challenged them to produce either a client or an internal resource that could convince me.  SAP came back with PhD in Linguistics that worked in their lab, with extensive academic and commercial experience in knowledge, knowledge management, natural language processing, linguistics and related fields.  I was overpowered and became a lot smarter about opening my mouth to challenge vendors (i.e. only when I knew I would win) and was introduced to the SAP Reverse Dichotomy: our technology is better than what we tell you we have.

Most vendors say one thing, usually over-hyped, and the product delivers something different, not so advanced.  While marketing usually wins at most vendors, SAP suffers from the opposite: they often have more in their labs and in their products than what they sell.

And the next generation of applications, based on what I saw the Influencer Summit, is no exception.

Their message talked about retaining the in-premise core product, using NetWeaver for integration to other systems, embracing non-TLA end-to-end processes as the core, and using analytics (present everywhere).  They expanded their message with the old-tried-and-failed approach of pre-packaged end-to-end processes (which I would have never recommended),and  a poorly-worded conflict between private, public, and hybrid clouds as the main excuse for not going in that direction.

The demos showed a very different product from the one being discussed in PowerPoint .  They showed use of REST interfaces, mobile platforms, incredible speed through the use of in-memory analytics and data manipulation, complex transactions and integration, and even support for the cloud.  They showed embedded analytics being a critical part of everything they did.  It was a competitive product.

Of course, this was my interpretation – not their exact words.  I did not attend the entire summit, just the keynote presentations via the virtual summit  which had the main message.  It is my understanding, by following some of the other sessions via Twitter that they went into deep details into Small and Medium Business Strategy, Use of Embedded in-Memory Analytics, and different delivery platforms – including onDemand.  I don’t have details on any of those, but the following reviewers can provide more details:

• Paul Greenberg has not yet published his review as of this writing.  But being Paul Greenberg, you know it is going to be good.  Look for it later today (Thursday) at his ZDNet blog.
• Jesus Hoyos did a quick review via Radian6
• Dennis Pombriant talked in more detail about the cloud and SaaS versus on-premise
• Excellent summary of their message via Ventana Research

Bottom Line SAP has a good chance to become a competitive force if their marketing messaging does not get in the way (and don’t forget execution — even on reduced expectations you still have to deliver).  Having a strong product with good features, and bad messaging, is the opposite of what you see in this market.  SAP has been working on fixing their engineering-as-lead-feature core message and hopefully they will get better during 2010 at presenting their product.  Then we will have fun next year at the Influencer Summit (which I hope to attend in person).

What do you think of SAP? Did you evaluate, test, or implement it and found it to be different from their promises (better, actually)?  Would love to hear your thoughts…

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