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"They have done a super job building a configurable UI," Denis Pombriant, principal with Beagle Research, told CRM Buyer "Almost any user can set up the screens and windows," he said. "Once that is done, the streamlined flow shaves some time and provides efficiency -- and, mos...

RightNow Technologies certainly has come a long way in the last 10 years, and the company used its industry influencers day in Colorado Springs this week to remind us. ...

Sometimes I feel like we're stuck in the weeds with social CRM. Hopefully I will get a lot of mail for this, LOL! ...

My favorite scene in "The Social Network" is when Mark Zuckerberg's character has an epiphany that Facebook's screen should have a field to designate a user's status, as in relationship status or availability. ...

This story was originally published on Jan. 20, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. ...

A lot went down at Oracle OpenWorld. Some very good reporting and analysis has come out of it all, and you can easily find it online if you wish. I was impressed with several things that Oracle did, including making strides in sales and marketing software and in introducing two new lines of compute servers. ...

I don't know how much Oracle spends on research and development each year. I know the biggest piece is being spent on CRM these days, something that warms my heart. The R&D number is in the billions of dollars, and though I cannot confirm it easily, the number seven seems about it. Judging by the turnout and the number and quality of sessions available at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this week, the billions buy a lot, and they are well-spent...

In a Ted Talk from 2004 that I watched a the other day, Malcolm Gladwell spoke about Howard Moskowitz. You might recall the New Yorker writer made a name for himself with the publication of The Tipping Point and several other works that focus on the unpredictable things that people do in the course of normal lives. Gladwell's Ted Talk gave me an insight about CRM...

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: ...

"Today, mobile malware is real and in the wild, and that's why people should be aware of it," Denis Maslennikov, mobile research group manager at Kaspersky Lab, told TechNewsWorld. "A lack of information and ignorance only helps the bad guys." The Developer Dilemma...

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...