Social CRM

We've all heard the lines: "blogging is so 2008"; "say that in 140 characters or less," and now, "the feed is the new desktop." This last one is from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and he said it in the context of his company's release of the new version of its enterprise social networking tool, C...

Social media's explosion over the last few years has had some obvious implications for CRM. At first, as in every new thing in CRM, the implications for sales were appreciated first, although they have yet to be fully realized. However, this time around, there are other forces at work -- namely, eco...

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...

Salesforce.com has announced it is making its social tool Chatter available for mobile devices within the next several months. Chatter is a real-time social collaboration application and platform for the enterprise, allowing employees to create profiles, and send feeds and status updates about proje...

About the easiest way for companies to dip their toes into the social media waters is the blog. There are few technical burdens to setting them up, the time needed to create posts can flex with the workloads of the assigned writers, and they can become a conduit for customer conversations through th...

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 ot...

I was at a friend's dual celebration of birthday and wedding anniversary recently, and as part of the occasion someone had prepared two fantastic cakes, which were both amazing to behold and a delight to eat. While the appearance was all to do with the icing, the taste and nutrition were defined by ...

Social CRM has earned widespread appreciation as a real business tool. It's no longer an idea or a theory or a hunch. However, it's still a new idea, and many are approaching it with trepidation because its impact on the bottom line is not yet well understood. I don't believe there's a single set of...

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?" To date, the lion's share of ...

This year, the CRM Evolution event was true to its name. The organization of the show reflected the way thinking about CRM has changed over the years, with a breakdown into three tracks: CRM, Social CRM and Deployment Strategies. Really, the tracks parallel the state of CRM for its users -- or rathe...

There's a slew of CRM applications heading to mobile app format, available at online venues such as Apple's App Store and the Google Apps Marketplace. Social CRM, in particular, is on the vanguard as vendors optimize their applications for mobile use. One example is BatchBlue Software, a company tar...

Every business needs to understand its audience in order to put together a social strategy that makes sense. A one-size-fits-all template fits no one in the social era. Still, there are some things that you don't do. You don't use social data to creep out your customers, for instance, by revealing t...

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 th...

Business software has long been described as "front office" and "back office," which essentially mirrors the arrangement of real-world processes within most businesses. That arrangement made sense in the past -- what went on within the business was usually shielded from the customer. That dichotomy ...

By this point, most businesses understand that they exist in a new reality -- the reality that allows customers to communicate with them and with each other in new, faster and in a more pervasive way. Some businesses are actually doing something about it, too -- hence, the emergence of social CRM, s...