Third Idea Consulting

It has been a busy couple of weeks for followers of CRM, Social CRM, and all that goes along with it. I haven’t got my head around all of it yet, but I’ll provide a handy link-dump at the end of this post to give you some starting points. It’s good to know that even when there’s more happening than I can reasonably cover, I can always link to my friends.

I’ve just returned from BPT Partners‘ Social CRM Summit (search the hashtag #scrmsummit to see some of what went on) where I had a great time refreshing and expanding my skills. Paul Greenberg—friend, mentor, mensch—was at the helm as usual, and it never ceases to amaze me that he always has something new to say on the topic of social CRM.

I don’t want to say too much about the specifics, since this is professional development and I need to be able to sell the result of what I’ve learned instead of giving it away, but there was a lot of emphasis on usable business strategy. A few years ago, social media strategy for business amounted to, “Get involved now, because this is gonna be huge.” It was good advice in 2006, and it’s still good, but we’ve had a lot of time to refine our techniques since then. With the addition of social media monitoring and analytics, it’s possible to make a really solid business case for SCRM adoption.

Catching up with friends and meeting new ones is always a benefit at events like this. Brent Leary even showed up—the trip from his neck of the woods to ours wasn’t trivial, even if it was in the same state—to say hi and let me talk smack about his alleged free throw skills. There was an escalation, and something tells me we (along with Mike Boysen, Mitch Lieberman, and others) will be putting it on the line to shoot from the line in the near future for bragging rights. I don’t care how bad I do, since basketball is my anti-sport, but as long as I outscore Brent I’ll be happy.

A few days before heading down to Atlanta (actually Kennesaw, which is near Atlanta in the same way that Northampton is near London), RightNow Technologies held a launch event here in New York for RightNow CX. I provided a lot of my thoughts on the company’s new social platform in October, but I want to reiterate that this looks really good. While history may show that CRM got the most traction among sales professionals, today’s customer-driven social CRM has a natural starting point in customer service and support. RightNow, with its contact center pedigree, is definitely one to watch here They’ve got some great customers, including CBS Interactive, Match.com, MySpace, and Aircell (the gogoinflight people), that show off what a natural fit SCRM is when grown in contact center soil.

A few days prior to that, I took a call with Clare Dorrian of Sword Ciboodle to discuss the company’s direction and new offerings. Ciboodle is more of a traditional CRM vendor (which is fine), serving larger enterprises. It also has strength in the contact center—I love the look of Ciboodle One, its new unified agent desktop—and is further building out its work flow and Web self service capabilities to capitalize on that. I just got hold of some of Ciboodle’s customer case studies, so that should give me some fun reading over Memorial Day weekend. (That’s not as sarcastic as it sounds; I have genuine interest in some concrete examples of how the company is helping businesses.)

And now the link dump. Actually, it’s more of a shout-out to two of my friends, but since they write so much and so well, it can serve both purposes.

Denis Pombriant (previously mentioned here) has been extra-prolific with his blogging lately, with a lot of coverage from Sage Insights among other things. Wish I could’ve been there, but this is the next best thing.  See all of his May content here.

Ray Wang, now of Altimeter Group, got to see what was up at SAPPHIRE 2010, the big annual SAP conference that I would also have loved to attend. He’s also been banging out a lot of news coverage, especially where acquisitions are concerned (SAP and Sybase, IBM and Sterling Commerce, Lithium and ScoutLabs, Attensity and Biz360). See his blog here.

If you’re wondering why the blog has been quiet for the past few days, it’s not a question of laziness—I’ve been working. Specifically, I was at CRM Evolution 2009 in NYC (co-located with SpeechTEK 2009), experiencing my first professional conference as an independent. It was fantastic, and before I write anything else, I have to express my gratitude to the people who made it possible. David Myron (editorial director of CRM and Speech Technology) and Paul Greenberg (conference chair and all-round great guy) outdid themselves from their positions at the top. Bill Spence and Paul Johnston kept the technical side of the show running smoothly. Josh Weinberger, Jessica Tsai, Lauren McKay, and Chris Musico (the staff of CRM); Len Klie, Adam Boretz, and Eric Barkin (the staff of Speech Technology); and all the support staff of Information Today should be proud. I’m sure the staff of the Marriott Marquis Hotel deserve thanks and credit as well. I just don’t like the place as a conference venue, so it’s hard for me to be as magnanimous with my praise.

The reason you’re hearing about CRM Evolution ‘09 now, instead of during the show itself (except for my tweets, hashtag #CRMe09) is because I am not used to doing it all myself. I’ve always had access to a laptop, but I don’t own one—there was no need, and I prefer desktops for personal use. While I knew I’d need to buy one before the conferences started in mid-September, I figured that for late August I’d be able to write my reports from home after hours. Little did I realize that there would be no “after hours” for me. I was getting home so late I only had time to sleep, shower, and go back. Lesson learned.

Paul kicked the show off right with his opening keynote, “The Social Customer: Listen, Then Act.” Not surprisingly, he made an apparently bulletproof case for the power and relevance of social networking technology as applied to CRM. Some highlights:

• The most trusted source of info for customers today is other customers.
• Customers want to do business with companies that are transparent, and that understand and cater to their needs.
• Social CRM humanizes the company in the customer’s eyes, and gives the company insight into its customers.

Of course there’s much more to it than that, and I expect the transcripts and recordings of Paul’s presentation and the many conference sessions will be available before too long.

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It’s been said that trade shows and their ilk are more about meeting and greeting than about learning anything. I have sometimes felt this was true. This conference was both for me. I learned what Sage North America’s next ACT! product will be like (more about that next time), and also got a sense of what SugarCRM is planning in the near future, but most of the learning wasn’t about specific pieces of software.

• I learned how speech analytics can be leveraged in social CRM, courtesy of Steve Graff, vice president of technology and chief architect for Autonomy/eTalk.
• Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research gave a great talk on the CRM journey, teaching more about what it takes for a company to fully embrace customer experience as its chief mission.
• Michael Krigsman, ZDNet blogger, extended his coverage of IT failures to include failures in traditional and social CRM efforts, yielding a lively discussion.
• Brent Leary (CRM Essentials, CRM Playaz, biscuit fiend) unloaded tons of great info in his talk on CRM and the Socially Empowered Customer. Next to Paul’s keynote, it may have been the most eloquent discussions of the power of social CRM I’ve heard.
• Casey Coleman from the government’s General Services Administration and Bob Greenberg (CEO of consultancy G&H International Services) amazed me with examples of how government agencies are using social technology to improve information flow, especially in times of crisis.

That’s just some of what came out of this show; I missed a lot of sessions I’d otherwise have attended due to scheduling conflicts. I also learned more about my own position as a consultant and analyst in the CRM world—there were too many sharp minds around, so I couldn’t help but improve myself by talking to them. Meeting and greeting them—old friends and new, including some I’ve known for some time but never encountered face to face—gave me a serious case of the warm fuzzies.

Maybe it’s because I was working for myself instead of providing coverage for an employer, but this felt like the best trade show I’ve been to in a decade. And that’s just for a relatively small event. My head might explode at Dreamforce.

I had some other topics lined up for today—my thoughts on what applications like Scanaroo are doing for social CRM, for one—but it looks like there’s some breaking news on broken social tools that must take precedence.

Today saw a massive denial-of-service (DOS) attack against popular social networking sites, most notably Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I won’t link to them directly right now—they’re the Big Three so you know how to find them, and they also have enough traffic trouble at the moment—but I’ll cheap out and give you the New York Times coverage here.

Social media like these have quickly changed the way we go about our daily lives, so it’s all the more painful when we info addicts get cut off at the source. I was really looking forward to seeing what was happening in my personal Twitosphere today, not to mention driving some traffic to my site and those of my allies. Twitter has been hit hardest, and despite claims that the problems have been fixed, many users (myself included) still have no access. Facebook has been unreliable as well, so my Mafia Wars conquests are on hold for now. LinkedIn is more of a tactical asset for me—I use it when I need it, but don’t stay connected for long—so I haven’t seen the extent of the damage there, but you can be sure that some important business connections didn’t get made today.

The optimist in me says that when irresponsible scriptkiddies with a surplus of free time and a dearth of creativity launch attacks like this, it ultimately strengthens the sites they attack. But the inner optimist is very small, and not nearly as vocal as the rage-filled monster who wants to make an example of these jackholes with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers, Marcellus Wallace-style. I suppose I’ll have to settle for the criminal justice system, but that will do.

This moment of Ahab-vs.-Moby-Fail also reminds us that social networking and customer engagement aren’t new phenomena. We still have phones, and the ability to go to bricks-and-mortar establishments. Most of the Internet still works, too, so it’s not like the engines of enterprise have shut down altogether. Social CRM is a strategy, and the online component is not the only component.

/rant

In other news, I’ll be guest-blogging for my friends Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary, the CRM Playaz. My piece isn’t live yet, but when it is I’ll have the honor of being their first post. Along with that, I’ll also be chatting with them on their next podcast, recording tomorrow. I can’t get enough of these guys—they combine insight with humor, whether separately or working together. They also show exceptional taste in guests.

Businesses, you may be surprised to learn, exist to earn money. So it’s really not hard to understand why many of them are reluctant to embark on any new project—especially one that costs money to implement—before they have a solid idea of how it will affect their earnings. Beyond the company’s products/services, this has been the case with every new technology, every new management principle, and every business process. It’s one of the things that puts money in the pockets of analysts and consultants like me.

Social CRM, and social media awareness in general, is passing from the wowgottahaveit buzzword phase of its existence and entering the cost-benefit analysis phase. There are lots of discussions (or one big discussion, in a way) being had about how one measures the return on investment—ROI—of social CRM. You can see the Wordpress blogs that have touched on it here; I can’t say I’ve read them all yet, and likely never will. A guy’s gotta get out of the home office from time to time.

Forrester analyst Natalie Petouhoff (Dr. Nat to her friends and pretty much anybody else) has a report on The ROI of online customer service communities. Sometime in the near future, Ryan Zuk will be publishing an article on social media monitoring for the PRSA newsletter. I may or may not be quoted in it, depending on how the piece shapes up and what his word count ends up at. (I’m not trying to add pressure for my inclusion, Ryan, just using you as a lead-in to my point.)

If I’m in there, I may come off seeming like I don’t think ROI should be a consideration for businesses implementing social CRM. That’s not the case. It’s the foolish (and often failed) business that doesn’t consider the consequences of potential actions. What I do think is that sometimes “hard” ROI, expressed in dollars and cents, is tricky to estimate and sometimes utterly beside the point.

You can see a few cases where social CRM has made a big difference for small businesses in this New York Times article. Beautiful examples of clear, identifiable ROI—even though most of the social tools mentioned don’t cost anything. These business are reaching out directly to customers, using simple applications as a marketing engine first and a means of receiving feedback or participating in a conversation second.

I’ve developed a habit, when discussing ROI on social CRM for larger companies, of putting things in terms of fear. Next to greed, fear is the prime motivator in business. “Your customers are having conversations about you that you’re not party to,” I’ll say. “They’re also having conversations about your competitors, but some of your competitors are participating. If somebody starts a rumor about your products or your practices, your customers might perpetuate it, and your competitors aren’t going to do anything to stop it, if it’s bad. Can you afford not to listen?”

Of course it’s not all about fear. One of the best anecdotes of social CRM in action is owned by blogger, consultant, and CRM Rock Star Brent Leary. Ask him about biscuits (the American kind), and how a single tweet got him to eat at Popeye’s after a multi-year absence. More than just the $6 revenue Popeye’s got, though, is the tremendous positive word-of-mouth the restaurant chain got by making one response to one person—the right person—at the right time. Brent will be able to tell this story about how Popeye’s “gets it” for years to come—and if he doesn’t, then I will.

My advice to businesses, in brief: Study social CRM as much as you can, see what others are doing and what works best for your particular business. If you can figure out a way to make it pay, then by all means do that. But get in the game regardless. It may cost you nothing, but the rewards—monetary or otherwise—only come when you get involved.

I’ve been sitting on this one for about a week, trying to decide how I feel about it. As I found out from a Brent Leary tweet (retweeting @Agotthelf, who was in turn RTing @markjreuter), Intel published its social media guidelines for employees and contractors. This is a good start–Intel may be one of the first names in technology, but it also feels to most people like a faceless megacorp, no matter how many blogs it has or contributes to. Anything that helps to soften that image (like their recent TV commercials with the a cappella jingle) is a step in the right direction.

The Intel guidelines are broken into three sections. The first and third are nothing special; one is a reminder to think before you post, be helpful, and don’t be a jerk, while three is all about guidelines for moderating content in social forums. Both are good to have and necessary to the discussion—it’s posted in the Legal Information section, after all. But section two, “Rules of Engagement,” is the standout part of the document.

The first bullet sets the tone. “Be transparent. Your honesty—or dishonesty—will be quickly noticed in the social media environment. If you are blogging about your work at Intel, use your real name, identify that you work for Intel, and be clear about your role. If you have a vested interest in something you are discussing, be the first to point it out.” It’s advice that I (and my colleagues) can’t stress enough, but is often ignored by corporate entities to their detriment. Social CRM touches some of the roles of public relations and marketing, but it is neither, and thus requires a different voice and a more open attitude.

Other entries (“Perception is reality,” “It’s a conversation,” and “Are you adding value?”) are similarly important bits of advice for anybody who blogs on behalf of a business. It’s too easy to forget that you’re not writing to a forum, or a group, or a hashtag—you’re writing to the people who go there because they want something they can’t get from the newspaper or the TV. Each person wants to feel like they’re involved on some level, and each has different opinions and hot buttons.

Of course, Intel is a huge company that must cover its own arse, as well as those of its employees. Thus, the following: “Your Responsibility: What you write is ultimately your responsibility. Participation in social computing on behalf of Intel is not a right but an opportunity, so please treat it seriously and with respect. If you want to participate on behalf of Intel, take the Digital IQ training and contact the Social Media Center of Excellence. Please know and follow the Intel Code of Conduct. Failure to abide by these guidelines and the Intel Code of Conduct could put your participation at risk. Contact social.media@intel.com for more information. Please also follow the terms and conditions for any third-party sites.” Yeah, it may seem strange or artificial that they have a training program and Center of Excellence (whatever that is), but it shows they’re trying to get it right.

But just as important as that is this: “Did you screw up? If you make a mistake, admit it. Be upfront and be quick with your correction. If you’re posting to a blog, you may choose to modify an earlier post—just make it clear that you have done so.” Advice like this doesn’t seem to surface often enough. It should be posted on every wall of every room of every building everywhere. The most honest thing you can say is “I screwed up,” and it’s a sign of maturity to try to fix it without being forced to.

As I said when I started this post, I have been letting the topic marinate for a week, so I’ve probably missed some good discussion. Links to other coverage are appreciated, and if you have any other examples of good attempts at corporate social media policy, I’d love to see ‘em.