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This story was originally published on June 9, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

Back in August I wrote about some research I had gotten into mostly for fun. You might recall it. I searched on a company name and the word "sucks" and reported what I found. The point of the research was not to be salacious or to offend anyone. In political circles, it's known as discovering one's "negatives" -- here's how it works: ...

I spent an interesting day at Harvard Law School last week at the invitation of Doc Searls for a conference on the intersection of CRM and VRM, or vendor relationship management. Doc's involved with the Berkman Center at Harvard, which sponsors research into issues of law and the Internet, among other things. He's also one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which should be required reading in our line of work. Lots of other CRM folk were there too, including analyst Mitch Lieberman and Ed Sullivan from Radian6. We tweeted up a storm, and you can search on the tag #VRMCRM2010...

I feel like social CRM has become a burger joint. "You want fries with that?" is the traditional up-sell question made famous in skits and jokes, but now I feel like we need to ask something akin in social CRM. The revised question: "You got any data to go with that?" ...

Part 1 of this two-part series explored the tendency of some disgruntled customers to air their gripes online ...

Last week in New York, I began some field research in social CRM that will result in a longer paper later this fall. One of the things that interested me was the level of frustration and, well, anger that some customers have for some of their vendors ...

Cloud computing is breaking through to the general public. Unfortunately, it's only the most watered down version that the public is hearing about. ...

The new age of sustainability is like a three-legged stool, and over the last couple of weeks I've discussed my ideas for the first two legs, including customers and energy or transportation. The third leg involves products, and this idea takes some thinking to fully comprehend ...

Last time, we explored how we can make IT more sustainable by improving data center energy use. Managing energy use is the most well-understood form of sustainability we have, but it is largely an internal form of sustainability practice. If we intend to make our businesses sustainable -- i.e., able to function for a long time despite changes in the economy -- then we also need to consider sustainability in customer-facing business processes. That's where treating the customer as a renewable resource comes in, and it is the subject of today's article. If you are wondering, the third leg of sustainability practice in business is sustainable products, and it will be discussed later...

The most popular concept of sustainability revolves around energy use, and while I have no issues with energy as an issue, I think in business the idea goes further -- all the way to products and customers. I will leave the last couple of ideas for another time and concentrate on energy today. Actually, energy is a huge topic, and the only thing I want to focus on is the data center, not whatever you have in the garage...

Social media can be wonderful tools for sales and marketing, but so far most companies and most anecdotal evidence that I have seen point to practices that are mired in old-think, with the result that social media is being questioned as a strategy. Here are some ideas that I give my clients when they are trying to figure out an approach involving social media...

Tell them what you are going to say, say it, and then tell them what you told them. ...

Enterprise 2.0 came to Boston this week, and that made me happy because it is one of a very small number of events that I don't fly to. Being a native, it's nice to take the train into the city and to be able to sleep at home. Despite this convenience, I was only able to attend on Tuesday, and I concentrated on the vendor show floor at the expense of missing some very good keynotes and sessions...

It had to happen sooner or later; the only question in my mind is why it has taken so long. It appears that the backlash against social media is beginning. All I can say is, yippee! ...

All is not well in venture capital land; at least, it's been a lot better. In April, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), which works with PriceWaterhouseCoopers to develop industry data, reported its numbers for both fund-raising and investment, and it represents a world turned upside down. Rather than paraphrase, here's the actual data from the press release of April 12:...

Last week was busy in a good way, and also in ways that we have not seen in a while -- and at least some of that busy-ness showed promise for the economy and our industry. In no particular order, Cloud9 Analytics announced it closed its C round financing, SAP held its user meeting in Orlando, Sage held its partner meeting in Denver, and Microsoft sued Salesforce...

Sage's introduction of SalesLogix for cloud computing has caused me to do a lot of thinking. The operative terms we use in the industry for software functionality delivered across the Internet is "SaaS" (Software as a Service), or now "cloud computing," and numerous vendors find themselves twisting themselves and the definition into barely recognizable forms. Enough of this, I say; let's do a re-think...

One of the frustrations of new technology is that quite often even the vendor lacks a coherent understanding of an innovation's business context. ...

I had the pleasure of attending two events last week: Microsoft Convergence 2010 in Atlanta and the Salesforce-VMware VMforce.com announcement in San Francisco. Each event was useful and informative in its own way, and I am pleased to have witnessed each first-hand. I have written exhaustively -- at least I'm tired -- about each of these, so rather than another recitation of events, I want to spend this piece drilling into one aspect...

If you think long enough about acquiring a CRM system, you will come to vendor lock-in, the idea that you won't be able to easily change vendors down the road for whatever reason. It's almost an existential problem, like rent and alimony put together. Every approach to CRM has its benefits and deficits, and ultimately it comes down to what you are comfortable with...