SCORPFROMHELL

This is my personal blog & I note down my thoughts here as they come to me during moments of serendipity after long periods of struggle & strife.

All content/opinions/views/arguments/positions/strategies that is/are posted/expressed/attributed/linked/referred to in this site by me are based on my personal viewpoint and are not to be attributed to my employer.
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Is Social CRM about automated relationship building?

[ Friday, July 03, 2009 | 13 comments ]
Couple of days back I was presenting (in a teleconference) about Social CRM to a group of business analysts & developers working in the consumer goods industry.

PeopleBrowsr's Campaign Builder for Twitter.

I was introducing them to the concept of Social Media, Social Networks, some statistics as to why businesses should heed them & how the "consumer generated media" (CGM) affects the CRM functions of Sales, Marketing & Customer Service. The presentation was midway when I was interrupted by someone in the audience & was thanked for introducing the concepts. I was informed that there was nothing new in my presentation & that they already knew all about Social Media & had already built a tool for generating reports from the data that their tool grabs from the various social sites.

The group wanted to know if I had any better technology to showcase which could automate the text analytics even more & provide better insights. One another person was also interested in knowing how can social media marketing help him in sending coupons as part of his marketing campaigns. He started to explain about some successful mobile coupon technology value chain they had worked out between the business, the mobile service provider, the coupon distributor and whoever else. He was interested to know if we had any such value chain worked out for disbursing coupons on the social media.

The technologies that these folks were asking for was about more automated & targeted shouting so that their marketing campaigns could generate better hit rates & ROI.

I was dumb founded. Aghast. I did not have any such technology to showcase. Nor did I intend to showcase the technologies, piecemeal, during this session.

I tried to explain to them that they were trying to repeat the same mistake that the businesses have been doing with all the other kinds of media. I tried to explain that social media was not about pushing messages but about listening. I tried to explain that the customers are empowered now & they are baying for revenge, clamoring for blood, for all the marketing they had to endure over the years since industrialization. I wanted to explain that Social CRM is all about building relationships, to build trust & loyalty, to provide better customer experience, to co-create value.

I had to close the call saying that I would like to listen more in detail about their social media monitoring tool & see if I could integrate it with traditional CRM or BI systems.

I do know they have put in great technical knowledge into their tool. However, I doubt the intentions behind such a tool. They got the listening part of Social CRM right but not in the correct context. They wanted to eavesdrop & stalk on their customers talking in the social media and then bury them with more targeted messages, based on inferred knowledge about their customers.

I agree to the better targeting aspect. Businesses can now listen to the voice of each & every individual customer on social media. And thus provide more tailored solutions. But automating & targeting the marketing campaigns to these customers still does not make your business "social". It still does not help you build a "social" relationship with your customer.

The relationship between a business & a customer so far has been one of transactions. The interactions have been skewed to business triggered communications. The predominant case where customers initiate the communication has been to lodge complaints/issues, which should not have happened in the first place if the business is to provide a better customer experience.

But with Social Media & Social Networks its now possible for the businesses to build a relationship slowly over a period of time. Make small talk (no not the computer language) with the customers. Build a "social" relationship. With the permission of the customer, not by stalking them.

I fear that the term Social CRM might get disfigured to mean a set of tools that help businesses to eavesdrop & stalk on their leads, prospects & customers on the social web and thus push more targeted messages to them to lure them into buying more from the business, all the while reducing service costs by crowdsourcing it to the customer communities. The tools would still be the ones we envision, the purpose would be transmogrified. See how easy it would be fake a customer centric culture?

How do you want me to help convert the mindset of such people? What can convince them to see the futility of their pursuit? Or am I the one futilely pursuing utopia? Read the full story »

 

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Power of Communities: Tribes not Cults

[ Monday, June 22, 2009 | 5 comments ]
Denis Pombriant, a respected voice in CRM, feels Wisdom of Crowd is over hyped. Crowd wisdom is only as good as the crowd & can only tell what is known, not tell us something new. New information still requires research - experimentation, collecting data & analysing it. Don't miss watching this funny yet poignant Monty Python video clipping on YouTube as pointed by Denis in his blog post.



I agree with him of course. And that is why I ensure that never give up on research and also surround myself with people who are in research or are interested in them. Thats usually my Crowd - a collection of people.

The Crowd when it shares a common interest & communicates forms a Community. And the Community that has at least one passionate person leading it is a Tribe, says Seth Godin, the respected permission marketing guru.

Why the need for a Leader? Godin states that the Leader can help increase the effectiveness of the Tribe and its members by:
  1. transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal & desire for change;
  2. providing tools to allow members to tighten their communications; and
  3. leveraging the Tribe to allow it to grow & gain new members.
Seth Godin further says that a Tribe communicates four ways:
  1. Leader to Tribe
  2. Tribe to Leader
  3. Tribe member to tribe member
  4. Tribe member to outsider
One point to ponder is that the 4th type of communication in the Tribe - to the outsider - if absent, it leads to Groupthink, wherein everybody discusses only agreeable stuff that conform to the existing notions of the community, with no differing points of view or debates. The extreme case of such a Community, relying heavily on groupthink, is a Cult.

How do you prevent your Tribe from becoming a Cult or yourself from getting stymied by groupthink?
  • Join groups/communities/tribes that are completely different/opposite from what you believe. No need to agree, just understand their PoV.
  • Include people in your groups/friends/following list who think differently & will not readily accept your views. The more diverse the people in your network are, the better off you are.
  • Get into disagreements & friendly debates by posting opposing views in comments to blogs or responses to tweets. But be sure to remember & practice self-restraint*.
Hope I have been successful in alerting you to the difference between a Tribe & a Cult and you will ensure that your Community & yourself will not fall into the trap of groupthink?
* The self-restraint manifesto I had written for our organization's internal blogs network (ch1blogs):
This is your blog & I will certainly comply to your requests if I intend to participate in the discussions out here.

If I feel they are not sensible or if I will not be able to comply to your request, I will ofcourse not get involved. And I do understand that if I do get involved & go against the grain, you still have the right to delete the comments, and will not make a hue & cry about your deleting them or hold a grudge against you.

I do not intend to follow / not follow because I see them as a diktat, but because as a civilized netizzen I see the importance of respecting your sensibilities & all the other nettizens.

This is what I try to follow & expect others to give me the same treatment too.
P.S.: The points about Tribes are from the book of the same name by Seth Godin. Read the full story »

 

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Don't call it Social CRM or #scrm the first time

[ Monday, June 08, 2009 | 4 comments ]
Social Media & Social Networks provide a means to the customers to take hold of the loud speaker that hetherto had been the privilege of the businesses. And not only that, the customers know how to wield this new kind of loud speaker far better than the businesses.

Lots has been talked about the implications of Social Media & Social Networks on the businesses & why they are imperative, et al.

It is a no brainer to figure out that since the businesses have to use social applications (social media + social networks) because of the customers & for the customers, CRM inevitably has to integrate with it too.

And there is a lot of discussion around the implications of social media on CRM or the integration of social media with CRM or leveraging the social networks for CRM, etc.

Look no further than the #scrm hashtag channel on twitter.com

The who's who of the CRM world espousing Social Media & Social Networks from a customer relationship perspective are available on this hashtag. Including yours truly as @scorpfromhell & @prem_k. I am guessing I am the junior most in this bunch & the most vociferous too. Please excuse my "immaturity" if you will. ;)

Today @JohnFMoore, CTO of Swimfish, Inc. asked
Can people give me three short, concise, points to get people excited about #scrm ?
The guys on #scrm are ever helping & such leading questions help us define, redefine & refine our thoughts around the integration of social media & social networks with customer relationship management systems as well as strategy.

I responded & so did @ekolsky (Esteban Kolsky) and then we kept prancing & prodding each other. ;) The crux of the whole "altercation", as I understand it, is given below. Esteban, please correct me if I am wrong anywhere. :)

Esteban isn't impressed with the term Social CRM and I use it quite often & its even shorter term even more profusely - #scrm.

Esteban's contention, as I understand, is that Social CRM is nothing new or wholely different from traditional CRM. It is mere social media integrated with CRM. His stance, if I get correct, is that social media should be talked of only as an additional channel in CRM. Like the "e" channels were added to CRM some years back. He also vehemently claims that there is no new thing called Social CRM. Another point that he raises is that when email & IM/chat were integrated they were not called anything new, so why when social media is being integrated.

I agree with Esteban upto the point where he says that social media is just another channel in CRM & should be integrated with the CRM systems (as should social networks too).

I deviate where it comes to the naming. I use Social CRM as a second mention & #scrm as all subsequent mentions. First mention is usually one of the following:
  1. Social Media &/or Social Networks integrated with CRM
  2. Implications of Social Media &/or Social Networks on CRM
  3. Leveraging Social Media &/or Social Networks for building & maintaining Customer Relationships
To understand about "mentions" & names, please consider reading this post on the naming guidelines for Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007.

Twitter of course doesn't allow me to use the first mention or sometimes even the second mention. The 140 character limit on the messages, the "@" mentions & the #scrm hashtag eat up too many characters as is. Hence, I end up using #scrm when I want to refer to any one of the above points. Most others too end up using similarly, for the most part. Additionally, #scrm helps in all the wonderful ways hashtags help on twitter.

Now, why use the new name Social CRM when we did not stick with e-CRM for long? Because I believe that the integration of the "s" channel differs from the "e" channel in certain aspects.

When email & IM/chat - the "e" channels - were added they still kept the interactions between the business & the customer private. It was one-to-one and nobody else was privy to the conversations or rather the dialogs. Promises made by the businesses when broken were not brought to light and the stress on the businesses to be accountable & fulfill their brand promise was not heavy.

Where as, with Social Media, the conversation between the customer & the business is open to scrutiny from all quarters & puts some pressure on the business to be accountable as well as keep their promises too.

Esteban cotends this stating that business will still be missing on the promises, explain & move on. I have no heart to deny that. Errant businesses will try to do that same routine, rinse & repeat. But my point was that it will be noticed more by the customers than with the "e" channels.

And then we agreed that even if customers notice more, business will change only if theres an impact on its culture & not merely technology.

Estaban was vehement that this was exactly what was stated when CRM was first introduced - culture, training, integration.

However whats different now, IMHO, is that the same platform (social applications) is now available to the customers to weild it against the business and VRM is a step in that direction too. I reiterated what I had said before on twitter, Social CRM is the peace pipe offered by the businesses to the customers armed with social media & VRM.

My view on the "s" vis-a-vis "e" channel integrations: CRM & the "e" channels came from the businesses, more or less, to control the customer relationships. The "s" channel is being forced upon the businesses by the empowered customers hell bent on weilding their new found powers upon the businesses. (Some would say that CRM & the "e" channels were forced upon the businesses too, by the sales people of the CRM vendors!)

Looking forward to listening from you all regarding this. :) Pointedly, do you agree that we need a new name for this integration of social media & social networks with customer relationship management systems or not? Read the full story »

 

Art from abandoned refuse.

[ Thursday, June 04, 2009 | 0 comments ]

A beautiful work of art made out of used paper cups set up in The Forum mall, Koramangala, Bangalore.
Read the full story »

 

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"Social"ing the email - openly!

[ Sunday, May 31, 2009 | 1 comments ]
This week has been rife with raves & rants about Google's Wave & Microsoft's Bing. Adding my two cents to it.

Someone told me that Bing was "But its not Google". Don't know the sentiment behind it, but for me its been a let down. Go to the site & you get only a coming soon message. Hit the link there to watch a video thats promising the stardust from the Andromeda galaxy or the magazine both in the same place under different categories. Watch the video to understand what I mean, it shows off what can be done with Bing. Still waiting for them to deliver. I've become resigned to their failing servers, remember their recent product launches?

BTW, Bing seems just a re-branding exercise by MSFT for their existing Live Search. But wonder why they chose such a word that has lots of negative meaning attached to it!

Wave too is currently a vaporware but at least the site has a video that is more than mere teaser/marketing & gives you links to other places with info related to it. To give credit to the MSFT marketers, they have done a far better job than the techies at Google, by keeping the length of the video pretty short.


Now I'll delve a bit on Google's Wave since its all about "social"ing the email! What exactly is Wave? And why is it such a big deal even though theres nothing in it to show off until later this year?

To get some more background on Wave hit their About page or Mashable's guide to Wave.

Google defines Wave thus on its site:
A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.


The above diagram from ZDNet blogs tries to define whats happening in Wave. Its a very interesting post by Dion Hinchcliffe. But if the terms Wave, Wavelet, Blip confuse you look at the below graphic:

Still confused? Well you just need to read that Mashable Wave Guide. Yet all these are mere technicalities.

The real crux of this post is to scrutinize the "social" aspect of Wave. Though Google likes to define wave as a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, I like how Mashable has put it:
It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

As per the "social"ing of enterprise apps description, an application becomes social if it allows its users to share & network. And this the Wave allows us to do by the cart load. It remains to see if it allows people to "follow" or "friend" inside an enterprise. I have not been able to figure this one out, but I hope that its "follow" rather than "friend". How do they differ?

In a "friend"ing app one needs to take the permission of the other person they want to network with & only upon agreement by both parties involved is a "connection" created, over which sharing happens.

In a "follow"ing app one keeps sharing stuff & others listen in. If others find the shared stuff interesting then they "follow" the person. This person is now under no compulsion to "follow" back. So the networks are more value based & not imposed.


It would be great if the shared stuff is by default available to the whole enterprise & restrictions have to be explicitly imposed, say to keep the discussion within a project team due to NDA agreements with the customer for whom the project is being executed. The conversations are then discoverable by the others in the organization & experts, otherwise not known to the initial team, could join the discussions. Also, others interested in a topic but not with much knowledge could just listen in to the conversations & learn from them.

The same when applied to the enterprise & customers, then the open conversations forces the enterprise to always be truthful & accountable. Privacy issues can be overcome through private discussions anyhow.

So no wonder am looking forward to the Twave extension for Google Wave. :) There are lots of other promising examples of the Google Wave. Do have a look at them.

Last but not the least, Wave is based on an Open Protocol! :D Not only has it created an open protocl, Google has also contributed the patent covering Wave to the public domain! What more can one say? :)

If you are interested in implementing the wave protocol in an application of your own or are interested in building the Wave API or using it in your client applications, please do feel free to read the Google Code page for Google Wave API. :) Read the full story »