In search of a maturity model for Social CRM / Social Business

Enterprise implementations of Social CRM can never be turnkey. The software may evolve to be turnkey suites (not today, but might be in the future) but not the business (vision/strategy, policy/alignment/governance, metrics/measurement, tech adoption, culture internationalization, etc.).

An organization would then have to grow into a social business. And this calls for a maturity model to aide organizations in figuring out how to grow (Do babies come with a maturity model? Is it written in the DNA?).

This being the task I ventured out to find out what models are there to draw inspiration upon (Why reinvent the wheel?) But am not a pilferer, so I have no choice but to learn them, think through and try and come up with something suitable for our customers. More than a mere mash up (greater than the sum?).

I here present the models that I have come across, you can very well understand why am more confused than enlightened!

First up is the SEI-CMM from Carnegie Mellon University, since my employer is certified by them to be at the highest level of maturity.

This model tells us how well are our processes optimised. But Social CRM is not merely about the processes now, are they? But this is important.

Next is the Gartner CRM Maturity model from the dawn of the millenium (June 2001 to be precise). This is a great model defining the stages of how an organization becomes customer-centric by using the eight building blocks of CRM.

But Gartner & SEI-CMM are proprietary models. Nothing "social" in that.

BTW, IANAL, so I do not know if I can really show Gartner's figures on my site, since I have not obtained any permissions for doing so. People can anyway see them for free at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=98877

How can I not consider the awesome model from the Destination CRM guys (the experiment for which is still to be completed)?

This model is grand, comprehensive and ... daunting. Not for the weak of heart. We need something simpler for the simpletons ... oops ... for the people with no time for comprehending the complexity of the social business, but with the powers to sponsor &/or implement it. This one has scope for improvement, but its the most comprehensive I have come across so far. And its for the use of the community too. Mere attribution of the source will do it for the folks at the CRM magazine. They are in here for making a business by spreading the knowledge for the sake of knowledge, not hoarding them and thus make them scarce, jack up the rates and then make a killing with the "content".

This next is the enterprise social media maturity model from the maxx online guys in Netherlands but I can see it fit into the social business too (I of course agree to the nuances that Esteban Kolsky had described differentiating social media, social CRM & social business, as does Paul Greenberg).

You can also view this presentation that goes with the above daigram:

Enterprise Social Media Maturity Model (ESM3)

View more documents from Gijsbert van der Sleen.

Then comes a professional services maturity model, used by call centers too.

Or this maturity model derived from the CMMI, used a hosted CRM vendor for developing their solutions.

Going back to social media marketing pundits, here is a model for conversation maturity!

The above model claims to comply to Room 214's PPLE Social Media Framework.

And today I found two interesting posts too. The first from Brian Solis on Mashable describing the 10 stages of social media business integration. The second one about the 5 things to consider with Social CRM by Axel Schultze on Customer Think.

So you can see the predicament I am in now. So many to consider, learn from, adopt and come out with a comprehensive & relevant yet a comprehensible & refined maturity model. Want to help me? I am open to ideas from all quarters! :)

Read the full story »

Avatar 3D : Pocahontas :: Social CRM : CRM

Avatar 3D has no new plot line, but is very different experience & supposedly a big game changer.

Social CRM has no goals vastly different from CRM, but it is very different in thinking through (strategy) and implementation & supposedly a big game changer.


Avatar 3D is not a mere mash up of Pocahontas plot and 3D. The differences are in the nuances. Not much difficult to imagine a land from your history to draw it up on your storyboard. But very difficult to imagine the planets, moons, flora, fauna, technology, etc. of the future and put it on the storyboard. But the most important thing in Avatar 3D is possibly applying the underlying, inherent "white man's guilt" onto a completely new environment & culture. Old wine in a new bottle, not just wrt the plot, but also the colonization aspects.

Social CRM is not merely a mashup of CRM and Social Media or Social Networks. Not much difficult to imagine functions in your organization whose purpose is to transact with the individual customers, not converse and throwing storage capacity around that. But very difficult to comprehend a networked customer (not just online BTW) who converses with the organization & its ecosystem and throw not just storage capacity but also computational capability to derive actionable insights.

Integrating social technologies with your systems serving the existing CRM functions is not very difficult to draw on the storyboard. I did it in Dec 2008 and still holds good for the most part.

CRM 2.0 - Understanding the Social CRM Landscape

View more documents from Prem Kumar Aparanji.

I would add more meat to the SMM, BI & Dashboard part of the diagram - and make it Social Analytics. They would take in the noise from the social web & community platforms, traditional systems, et al. and provide insights.

SCRM - Social Analytics

View more documents from Prem Kumar Aparanji.

A new addition I would make is a BPM element in there, which would help in converting the insights derived from the Social Analytics into actionable work/tasks. This would require easily reconfigurable business rules that would parse the signals coming out of the Social Analytics end and route to the appropriate work baskets and track their status too. The tasks could also be initiated & assigned manually after going through the reports from the dashboard of the Social Analytics piece. The BPM tool also helps measure & analyze the actions taken and ties in with their effects on the social web.

I am open to suggestions on how to put all this into the old SCRM IT Landscape diagram. Hopefully I am able to update my diagram soon. :)

Read the full story »

What I’ve Discovered About Twitter

This is a post to contribute to an experiment initiated by Esteban Kolsky & Venessa Miemis wherein we all write about what we discovered about Twitter and tag the post with #MonTwit.


I have been on Twitter since April 2008. As with most new things that I try out on the web I created my "scorpfromhell" profile out there. Thats kind of my perpetual beta account. :) I had known it for a year by then but took me a lot convincing to get onto that since I was busy exploring other stuff, especially for building a social technologies framework. So I had built some presence on Twitter pretty soon in the Indian users segment. I connected to various people from various walks of life. Very few were known to me from before, not even 10 in all. It was like settling in a new city and getting to know new folks & taking your time to settling down, helped by a couple of old acquaintances.

The 2008 Bangalore bomb blasts incident was my first brush with Twitter's usefulness in real life. I was in a restaurant with my team, out for a project lunch and I get an SMS from @BangaloreMirror, the twitter account of the local Tabloid. Bomb blast in a place we had crossed not more than 10 minutes back to reach the restaurant! That was close! Very close! It was me who informed my wife about the bombings even before it aired on the local news channels. Twitter helped me & my team mates to reach home safely, bypassing all the areas that had become sensitive or crowded for the traffic to pass through. Our families wanted us safe at home, soon. Twitter told me the areas that were not bombed & thus prone to be relatively less problematic. Some of my tweets were picked up & I got a big jump in followers. I was mentioned in some journalism blog too. November saw me tweeting the Mumbai carnage. This time it was all second hand, since I was tweeting from what I saw on the TV. This time it was about spreading the news & getting involved, time to time, in the "common room" discussions around the stuff being shown on TV.

However, most importantly, I connected with some CRM gurus whom I had been reading for most part of the decade. Paul Greenberg, Jill Dyche, Graham Hill, Brent Leary. Wow! And what do you know, they were now talking to me too. Like one-to-one! And I was like the star struck wide eyed kid! :D I started RTing them & responding to them and finally got their attention and then they gave me treats & patted my head. ;) That was before I bent berserk with the #scrm hashtag around Feb/March '09. I brought in so many folks into the discussions around CRM 2.0 / Social CRM. I was using search columns in TweetDeck and was constantly discovering new people. Mitch, Esteban, Mark, Wim, John, Jesus, etc. etc. It helped that #scrm was started by Brent Leary & had Paul Greenberg contributing to it too. And before I knew those very two people (my superstars - Rajnikanth & Amitabh Bachhan of CRM ... ok Tom Cruise & Brad Pitt of CRM) jumped a surprise on me & made a mention of my perpetual beta handle of scorpfromhell. You don't get recommendations better than that - "Social CRM Maven" indeed!

This new found recognition propelled me to get a bit more bold with my thoughts around Social CRM and make more deeper contributions to the discussions with some of my original thoughts. Also, since I was now getting recognized for what I do to earn my bread & butter, it meant I had to now graduate to a handle that was more "professional" & voila, I now live a double life on Twitter as prem_k too. ;) I got to know a lot of people from the vendor & analysts side of the CRM industry too. I also found two new ways of going through research literature - from Graham & Esteban. Graham taught me how to "use" Google Scholar, not merely know about its existence. Esteban made me look deeper into research literature from the Gartners & Forresters of the world. It helped that I had access to these reports thanks to my employer. So together these allowed me to think deeper than mere technology and go into business side of the stuff too. Over these months I have learnt a lot about the business side of the SCRM story and having experienced them all without really realizing why such things happened in an enterprise, I picked them soon too. :)

My post is more about what I discovered via twitter but the meme is about what we have discovered about twitter. I didn't know when I started to write this post, but by the time I came to this point, I had a rough idea. Twitter is a very simple tool, one that allows people to use it to communicate very succinctly & thus convey thoughts much better. Because of the nature of the conversations & the tool (and the esoteric syntax used by the tweeple, like RT & via or h/t, short for hat tip) it is easier to propagate the ideas. Because of the nature of the tool it is a great platform to build communities. Its the best for ephemeral ones, but you could build lasting ones like the #scrm accidental community too. So, in a tweet - twitter is a place to learn about stuff & connect with people.

And thats that. Whats your twitter story? Lets us know in the comments or in your own blog. Just let us know about it by tweeting a link to it & including the hashtag #MonTwit. :)

Read the full story »

Context is queen, especially for Social CRM

I am sure you have heard of the adage that the Content is King and also of the addendum to that adage that Context is Queen. If you haven't well then think about it a moment and then continue. We are not talking about media alone, but for everyday, normal walk of life. The content of what we speak means differently in different contexts. The context could be the situation or event at which we are speaking or the context could be the past experiences of the speaker & the listener (prejudices?).

Content alone doesn't provide as much value as it can with proper context. And this is true in Social CRM.


In social CRM we are predominantly looking at conversations. Why? Conversations give us a measure of the connectedness of the parties involved. In addition to the friending/following on social sites, the conversations (and transactions) are a proxy to measure the networks too. And it is fairly easy on the social web to figure out the conversations happening between the people. For the social web is all about the easy creation & sharing of content & connections at a very low cost and high speed at that. How long does it take to capture the video of the scene on the street, outside your window and post it on youtube? And if its a darned interesting piece, and some how gets viral (BTW, we can't always predict virility, ask Duncan Watts about it, not Malcom Gladwel - the tipping point is toast), how long before it spreads to become a meme?

But connectedness doesn't really mean a good relationship. The content of the conversations matter too. But as we all know, when it comes to human conversations, context is very important too, we can't just rely on the content always.

So ... how do we get our systems to figure out the content and the context? Sentiment analysis & text mining have come made some strides, but they are not yet robust enough to make good judgments all by themselves. Heck, even we humans make mistakes. Haven't we had more than the number of misunderstandings we ever wanted in the first place? All because the context wasn't understood properly by both parties? So we can't leave every thing to HAL or R2D2 yet.

But these are challenges for the longer term. Computer science needs to advance a lot more, so does study of human beings.

We can certainly take charge of correcting one mistake related to contexts. Especially when we are talking about integrating social media/networks or communities with our corporate content / business applications. Isn't that how you can look at Social CRM at its easier maturity levels?

Jeremiah Owyang is spot on when he is measuring the effectiveness of the Social CRM vendors walking the talk by figuring out the contextual integration of their communities with their product pages. You should read the justifications for the community integration aspects on their google docs page.

Creating a community around your offerings is big task, not in terms of setting up the community site/platform, but in terms of building the community of users, enthusiasts, loyalists, fans (short for fanatics), etc. But more important is to engage the community in the right contexts, which predominantly means - in the right places & the right purposes.


Community can be latched on to your site like how ebay does (disclaimer: my employer, Cognizant, serves ebay as one of its clients). Or it could be integrated in context of the page (of this I don't have an example, if you have one, pls share). It makes a lot of sense to integrate portions of the community discussions, members, groups, tags, etc. which are relevant to your porduct/service/legal/corporate policy/management/etc. page by mapping them properly. The community manager & the content manager need to work together here, with the IT, to help integrate the content & the community in the right context.

It also makes a lot of sense to integrate the community discussions, members, groups, tags, etc. with the needs of the visitor/prospect/lead/customer who is trying to get some product/service/company information or trying to get some opinions or trying to make a decision or trying to resolve some issue or trying to contribute her feedback/inputs to the business. This needs a lot more sophistication than the previous context of place. This is the context of purpose. Here the community can help better than software. But the community is made up of people and as the Freakonomics guys say - people need the proper incentives.

Theres probably a lot of information on why people create/contribute/share selflessly to communities in general & online ones in particular. Look no further than the contributions made towards the free/libre & open source software. Or sites like Yahoo! Answers. Or your personal community on facebook/twitter that helps you with answers whenever you ask something.

But we can still increase the ante by providing incentives to the community. It could be badges like on Foursquare or getglue.com. Or it could be points/reputation/rewards/monetary compensation/etc. But all in the context of why the community formed in the first place. Giving a badge to the code contributors of the Linux would not be as big an incentive as a karma rating for the forum members of any product users cum support community.

So whats the context of this post? Well, for me its a learning from one of the projects we are bidding for. And I wanted to share this with you all in the interests of furthering the horizons of the Social CRM field, and get your inputs/feedback too. And its been a loooong time since my last post, which was all theory and heavy for many. ;)

Not sure if I'll post another this year, if not, then happy new year & seasons greetings! :) 2009 is the year it got nailed as Social CRM and defined too, all thanks to Paul Greenberg and the accidental community of #scrm. Hope 2010 is very good for Social CRM and you too. :)

Read the full story »

Simple strategies for Social CRM implementations

Social CRM is an emergent strategy for businesses to accommodate their customers' demands in this new age of social computing - a cusp of technology & sociology paradigms - that has enabled them to create & share content as well as connections at alarming speeds digitally across space & time.

The old school method for dealing with customers, derived from practices of mass production & mass broadcasting during the industrial age, is getting pushed to the back by the resurgent social mores of interactions between customers & businesses – both online and offline. A lifetime of understanding relationships with customers in terms of transactions has blinded us to the social world & made businesses unprepared to cope with the new social customer.

Unless "social" technologies by themselves are able to change the culture of the company to achieve shifts in how business is conducted, we need to drive the culture change by other means. The culture change might be to become a listening organization, customer centric organization, helping/influencing buying decisions rather than selling organization or co-creating end-to-end value rather than at point of sale.

The "social" components for CRM systems coming to the market in the recent months might not be able to affect the above kind of shifts by themselves. They can help in accelerating the change of culture in an organization, however merely implementing them will not change organization cultures automatically.

Though we might not be witnessing a "Kuhn"ian paradigm shift, we are in the cusp of two of the Sigmoid curves[1] as put forth by Charles Handy in his book "The empty raincoat" or as it is called in the US "The age of paradox"[2].

Dave Snowded of Cognitive Edge explained[3] during his keynote at the recently concluded CII's KM Summit in India that we are in a phase where we are changing our understanding of how things work/should be and are seeing a lot of new ideas taking shape & further changing the status quo. We are shifting from a systems design view to a social computing view. We are in between two of the S-curves as shown above[4].

In such a phase it is not possible to know what the future will hold. What he says has profound effect on our consulting practice's approach. If we cannot know the future state, we cannot create a roadmap! However, Dave says that we can control the process by which the future will evolve. He suggests[5] using complex systems instead of chaos systems or organized systems approach.

If you come to consider it a moment it sounds true. Most of what we see today in social computing is not something we could have predicted. Wikipedia makes sense in hindsight, it was ridiculed when it began. Most of the current uses of social technologies we are seeing are exaptations, very different from what they were built for. Twitter & Facebook were not built for all the purposes we are using them for today. Social computing is about technology enabled networking of human beings and thus slightly unpredictable because of the human element.

A study on relationship between performance and the amount of structure in an organization[6] brought forth varied results, but the conclusion is that there is definite value in having a simple set of rules for strategy. Two of the findings are as given:

"First, we confirm that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between performance and the amount of structure. Yet, this relationship is unexpectedly asymmetric – i.e., it is better to err on the side of too much than too little structure. Second, we describe how market dynamism moderates the relationship between structure and performance. In particular, increasing unpredictability is associated with a less structured optimum."

But making things simple is actually very difficult. Its easy to write complex thought pieces as this, however very difficult to put them down in a simple manner such that common people can grasp the concepts.

Graham Hill (one of the CRM gurus & strategic thinkers from Europe) suggests a similar approach for the telecom industry and puts forth his customer lifecycle management in 100 days approach[7] which he describes as:

"CLM (or CRM) in 100 days provides a way to break up larger programmes of work into manageable projects, to manage them aggressively to ensure they deliver on-time, in-full, to-budget, and to harvest tangible benefits from them as quickly as possible. And it works."

Hill's CLM/CRM in 100 days is in turn part of his "Vision, Values, Venturing" approach that he suggests for Social CRM success[8]. Very similar to the agile practices in software development.

Is that what we need for Social CRM implementations? A simple strategy & short iterative cycles of implementations? How do we define & calculate ROI in such cases?

--References--
[1] http://heroesnotzombies.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/the-s-curve/ OR http://books.google.co.in/books?id=v1baPx03VpwC&lpg=PA49&dq=curve%20charles%20handy&lr=&pg=PA49#v=onepage&q=&f=false
[2] http://books.google.co.in/books?id=v1baPx03VpwC&lpg=PR9&ots=xghjkmmXX_&dq=curve%20charles%20handy&lr=&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=&f=false
[3] www.cognitive-edge.com/podcastdetails.php?podid=93
[4] http://cioinnervoice.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/s-curve-r6.jpg
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miwb92eZaJg
[6] http://www.customerthink.com/blog/customer_lifecycle_management_in_100_days
[7] http://www.customerthink.com/blog/how_vision_value_venturing_drives_social_crm_success

--Image sources--
[1] http://cioinnervoice.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/the-dark-art-of-it-investment/

Read the full story »

All roads lead to Social CRM; But "Hanoz Dilli Dur Ast"?

Image by libraryman via Flickr

The accidental community around twitter hashtag #scrm has been pretty busy these days.

John F. Moore (CTO, Swimfish) asks a great question regarding Social CRM, as a follow up to Ed Thompson's (VP, Gartner) view of the future of Social CRM in the next 10 years that he shared with Esteban Kolsky.

This is what Ed foresees:

"I’ll look out 10 years. Social CRM will move from 0.1% of CRM application spending to 10% of all spending by then. Still not anywhere near as big as traditional SFA, Campaign Mgmt, Customer Service but vastly bigger spending than today. I don’t think it will be revolution but it will be a big change from today. Personally I think 2020-2030 will see the bigger transformation of CRM applications and processes."

John feels 10 years is too long a period to wait & gives businesses an interim option of Social Support Communities, which, AFAIK, is providing customer service leveraging the power of online communities & other social media. And then John asks a pointed question:

"Will you invest your time and energy on a vision that is a decade away or will you will you choose to invest in technology and services that will make you successful today?"

And then there is the guest post by Anthony Nemelka (co-founder & ex-CEO of Helpstream) on Esteban's blog where he asks pretty poignantly:

"Will Social CRM eventually be viewed as an extension of existing CRM or as just one critical component in adapting to the realities of a Web-connected world? Will companies deploy SCRM as a result of thinking “how can we improve customer relationship management?” or will they deploy SCRM as a result of thinking “how can we transform ourselves into a socially-driven business?”"

Another must read post on Esteban's blog (which is not?).

And this set the gears in my tiny brain whirring! Let me try wrapping my thoughts around this profound debate. For that, lets start at the basics of Social CRM.

---

I agree with Paul Greenberg on this one, Social CRM is a strategy first & the one thing that makes it different from CRM is that it is a reactive one. Customers are talking about the businesses & their offerings, both good & bad. This is not exactly news, its been happening ever since the first business was done by man, the social animal. But the internet did something very disruptive to that age old tradition.

The internet, especially after creating content was easy for every human with a net connection, made it possible to share views with more people, faster. [N.B.: More & faster - pretty key here and remember that ALWAYS!]

So businesses rather provide better customer satisfaction - at all stages of their experience with the business, mostly covered by the buying decision process. This has nothing to do with social media at all! But social media forces the businesses to stay true to that axiom.

Businesses are slowly yet surely losing control over the conversations that are happening around their brand &/or offerings. And its not just the consumers who are talking away to glory. Its the others in the business ecosystem too - partners, distributors, analysts, governments, key opinion leaders, etc. - are all using social media heavily (well, not all over the globe, but pretty much everywhere in the digitally connected regions of the world).

Add another side effect of all the digitization & connectedness - Gen Y. They are a pretty big unknown, but they are slowly unraveling themselves in very interesting ways. Who'd have thunk of a Whuffie?! But the times are a-changing!

So though there is no fundamental (paradigm?) shift in the business axioms, there are very disruptive forces at play.

I believe that social technologies are shifting the equilibrium & it is imperative that the businesses brace themselves for whatever they might face.

Social Support Communities - sounds like a support system for forlorn people, which in all probability is how the customers feel - are the lowest hanging fruits. Forums have existed for quite some time as a means to chat together for the people and have already been in use by the businesses too for some years now. It is no wonder that they are now being touted as Social CRM technologies. I admit there are some value adds over plain Jane forums - like the ability to manage the reputation of the members, build knowledge bases out of the conversations using a mishmash of forums threads & wiki features, many best practices for building & maintaining a lively community using Community Health Index, etc. Or by providing Crowd Service like what GetSatisfaction.com does.

But they are just one aspect of how businesses can leverage social media & communities. There is the aspect of marketing & brand building espoused by the social media marketing agencies & PR alike. Though this field abounds in witch doctors providing you social media as the panacea for all business ills/ailments, there is wealth here too. We just need to use the proper means, but they are all tiresome, not the quick fix solutions of the witch doctors - like get a 1000 twitter followers in a day kind (why bother about all the spam accounts anyway which you will get as followers?).

And then how about recruitment, or rather, addressing your talent market? Its not only about sending out links regarding your openings or tweeting & retweeting about openings, though that helps. Look at this Orkut community of more than 17,500 members that I have been maintaining for the past 6+ years. Here its predominantly the college grads who interact the most & their questions range from when will I get my joining date (those who were selected in campus) to what is the promotion policy of the organization to what do you think of the avatar of the above person in this thread.

Sales is a bit tricky for me. The best use case for me is the one being built by Oracle - more & better internal collaboration among the sales force. Another is getting leads, but this is trickier & needs a separate post.

And to answer John's original question - I will draw up a vision which is nothing about using social media or social CRM, it will be all about really, really wanting to be customer centric, not just paying lip service. And then weave an enterprise architecture which leverages the social technologies.

And here is where things begin to get interesting & we face some confusions & draws in the terms enterprise 2.0 & social business - both of which encompass social CRM, but I believe the vision would still be the one drawn as per my suggestion above.

Businesses need customers to exist. They also need employees to run, unless its a one person outfit. And since both the customer as well as the employee is a human, they can both be affected by the social technologies.

Leveraging the power of the social technologies by business, be they internally or externally is Enterprise 2.0 in terms of technology and Social Business in terms of business.

And Social CRM is a part of both Enterprise 2.0 as well as Social Business, since Social CRM is about the strategies as well as the technologies.

The internally facing social technologies like those provided by Socialtext & Jive software help in better collaboration across the organization & sharing & managing of knowledge.

I have been a beneficiary personally of such an implementation. We have a blogging platform in addition to wikis & forums in our organization. There are various business benefits, but the most lively & intangible boon that you just feel in your gut, yet cant derive an ROI for, is our blogging platform.

You just got to believe me when I say it makes people work together & teach each other and cross pollinate ideas and pass on business opportunities across silos and geographies.

So internally & externally facing social technologies will have an interplay & tango with each other. And as for the strategies, I will only repeat myself - efficient employees can effectively satisfy customers. So prepare your strategies in such a way that you enable your employees to be more social with each other within the organization and with the customers.

And that leads to the second part in the title of this post: "Hanoz Dilli Dur Ast" or "Dilli door hai" or "Delhi is still far" - which is an euphemism for stating that the goal is still far. This can mean two things: there is a long way to go yet, so lets cross the bridge when it comes (to borrow another idiom) or that there is no need to be complacent just because the goal is far. The origins of the idiom are attributed to saint Nizam-ud-din Auliya but the stories differ.

The one that states that one need not worry about the future right away is something like this:

In the 14th century Nizamuddin, a sufi saint, was building a mosque in Delhi at the same time that the sultan Tugaluk was constructing a fortress on the south side of the city and the two were in constant competition for workers. Tughaluk was often out of the city waging wars and expanding the empire while Nizamuddin was expanding his spiritual practice. On one of Tugaluk's military excursions Nizamuddin took away all of Tugaluk's workers and set them to building his mosque. Eventually word reached the sultan as he was finishing a campaign in Bihar and he sent a message back to Delhi that said that he would "deal with" Nizamuddin when he returned. This of course meant that Nizamuddin's days were numbered. But when Nizamuddin heard of Tugaluk's plan he was not concerned. Instead he sent Tugaluk a one line note in Urdu that read "Hanoz Dilli Dur Ast" or, "Delhi is still far."--meaning that Tugaluk had to be in Delhi to exercise his powers. Tughaluk headed back to Delhi while riding on a war elephant and had started to set plans in action to kill Nizamuddin. However, when he was only a day's ride outside the city his elephant was crossing over a bridge which gave way under the animal's weight. Both Tugaluk and the elephant perished and Nizamuddin was safe.

The other meaning comes through because of another legend which states that Nizamuddin kept on saying "hanuz delhi door ast" until the emperor reached Delhi and he had not done anything to save himself.

Like the legend & the saying, it is perfectly fine to either delay the decision or to be forewarned & prepared!

And finally, again, don't forget to read the excellent posts that triggered this long post as well as the excellent discussions happening out there in the comments: John's #SSC vs #SCRM & Anthony's Social Business vs Social CRM.

P.S.: If you are still wondering what is the bottom line of my post wrt the two questions: #SSC is a step to achieve #SCRM & #SCRM is only the public face of Social Business.

Read the full story »

Social CRM: some temporary definitions

Frequently, when I am in discussions around Social CRM, there are a lot of related terms that are often used pretty interchangeably, often leading to huge confusions & thus an inability to grasp the message that is being conveyed.

Social CRM is a new field & its jargons are not yet neatly laid out. However it very imperative that we agree to a few dirty definitions, especially to remove the chance of getting confused with the terms.


Social Media, Social Networks, Online Communities, Social CRM, Social Media Monitoring, Sentiment Analyzer are all different terms. Just want to ensure we understand each other properly when we use the various new terms & jargons. There is no academic rigor behind these, nor do I think these are actually definitions, may be descriptions.

• Tools like Lithium, Jive, Drupal, etc. help build Online communities of consumers for a particular organization, brand or even product/service. They differ from Social Networks or Social Networking Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, which are public sites allowing people to connect with each other.
• Social Media comprises of both the medium & the content that are generated & shared by the users. So they are also alternatively called as User Generated Content or Consumer Generated Content. There are different types of content on different kind of sites: text (blogs), videos (YouTube), pictures (Flickr), audio (podcasts), bookmarks (digg), presentations (slideshare), etc.

Social Networking Sites like Facebook are trying to become the preferred destination for all kinds of content.

• Social Media Monitoring is the new breed of tools that allow organizations to listen in to the noise generated in the Social Web for any mention about their brand, offerings, industry, competitors, etc. that could provide them early signals/warnings.
• Sentiment Analysis is used in Social Media Monitoring tools to figure out the sentiment behind the content. It is an upstart technology & IMHO, not very reliable despite many claims to the contrary by various vendors. The false positives are too many & human resource deployment is very high. Ensuring continuity in the teams is also coming out a crucial issue.

Read the full story »