Social CRM – more views and thoughts and a little controversy maybe

A Few Weeks of Silence and Then….

Over the last few blogless weeks I have been doing a huge amount of reading the thoughts and musings of others on the hoary subject of Social CRM.  There is a lot of good stuff out there, a lot of what I would suggest is fairly mindless repetition and an awful lot of product placement of the ‘New Improved SocialWidget 2.0′ with its strap line of  ‘Social because we put erm ‘Social’ in the name’.

I’m not going to name products or organisations because that would be unreasonable (and I’m not big on receiving a mailbox full of lawsuits!) but I do want to mention a couple of articles I have read recently.

Tags and Streams and Doing ‘REALLY USEFUL STUFF’

Firstly Ted Boyd’s great article, Social CRM: Mining The Real Power of Social Influence Marketing.  Ted is the CEO of 58Ninety Inc and makes some excellent points about taking the monitoring of brand conversations further.  He talks about tagged and untagged-streaming and says

“Streamed Tagging occurs when a customer or prospect chooses to interact with brand content in the online space and shares some basic personal data such as that required to use Facebook Connect. These interactions and personal data are then captured and mapped against Brand conversations that this same individual may be having and integrated into the CRM database for mining and measurement. Unstreamed Tagging represents an enormous opportunity for marketers but is quite labour intensive. It occurs when a prospect or customer is overheard, usually via a Social Media monitoring tool such as Radian6 or trucast and is engaged by the Brand or Community spokesperson.”

There is a lot of truth in what Ted says, but the missing part is where a Social CRM ‘environment’ takes the labour to a large degree out of the untagged stream and converts it directly to something useful.  This process requires great care.  In an earlier article I warned of the potential issues of letting automation run wild.  However there are already some great tools out there to take a lot of the drudgery out doing precisely this.  The way my own organisation’s product does this is pretty much specifically for things people want, or need (yes, stuff they are asking to buy!) and it works astonishingly well.  It would require little trickery to make the algorithm work in other ways but that is for later.  So in reality, I believe Ted has hit the nail on the head with what he is saying, but it is clear that the message that the tools and methods are out there now is probably less well known than I may have realised.  It is easy to see things from the inside and say, ‘Hey, we can do that now’ if we don’t shout about it loud enough.

Why Constrict the Imagination…Go On, Run Riot!!

I have also spent a lot of time looking at the comments generated by the work undertaken by Jacob Morgan (@jacobm) the principal of Chess Media Group and Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky) with regard to their Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 Experience Continuum which, to me, attempts to codify in some way the constant flow of the E2.0/SocCRM set of processes, which without wishing to seem in any way belittling (which I am assuredly not) seems rather like common sense to me but not something you would build a huge strategy around.  I hope the guys won’t mind me publishing their graphic here but I think it is useful to show.

It all makes perfect sense, I just don’t know what I would actually ‘do’ with it.  I commented on the original post as follows:

I certainly agree that the customer needs ‘the experience’ as much as the sales professional/supplier/whatever needs ‘the relationship’; however I suspect that an attempt to codify (albeit in such a common-sense way (forgive me if that is a bit of an Emperor’s New Clothes type comment) may well turn out to be just a little redundant. We who work in the ‘Social CRM’ arena know a little of what ‘is’ and have our view of what ‘will be’ but it will change at the speed of light. I congratulate the guys on their great efforts to put forward some kind of framework but I still question the actual need for it. Here’s a question; who will actually sit down and use it or build an operational strategy around it? I would argue that what it is is a picture of what actually happens now (or will happen in the very near future. I disagree that ‘the only way…is through a framework’ Why does it have to be? Surely there is some space for original thought here. We are at the very beginning of Social CRM and we are still, I believe at the beginning of ‘Social’…now is the time to innovate and be creative. To listen, to try new stuff and to break barriers…not I would argue to say ‘well, for now, it is and should be like this!’

I am going to make a really contentious point here. SocialCRM is just CRM albeit with MASSIVE bells and whistles. The major differences are that done properly you just ‘get’ all your customer data updated constantly and you have an opportunity to learn and understand what your customers and market want and need, dislike and don’t need and the good and bad stuff they are saying about you, your customers and your competitors. It largely doesn’t matter HOW you find that information (your customers will only care that you are interested) and you certainly don’t need an industry framework to do that. Call me an anarchist in the field if you will but I certainly believe that the more tools and mechanisms you use to connect the better. It is great if they are all in one place but that doesn’t really matter; it is what you do with your information and its currency that does.

I am more than happy to help in any way I can but we need to be very careful about suggesting SCRM is purely a subset of whatever E2.0 is or may become….and we must be VERY careful about disregarding the millions and millions of small businesses and billions of consumers who either won’t or don’t care or who just want good service.

Codifying has advantages at times, I do not disagree but what comes next? Training and consultancy in ‘the right way’ to do SCRM and E2.0 … I for one hope not. IF the next step is; ‘Here are some things to consider…now go do it your own way’ then I am all for that.

I hope that you do not take my comments negatively as I can see some really good work has been done here. I just question again, ‘Why’ because I am still no nearer understanding a true practical application. Happy to learn

At the time of writing I don’t have a reply to my rather long comment but I will try update this blog as I do.  I must stress that I am in no way knocking the effort the guys have gone to and I just may be missing the point big time.  And if I am, I will happily go public and say so.

Time to get back in my box …

So…just a few questions and points from me on a couple of the articles that really caught my eye this week.  There is some great work going on there in the world of Social CRM, ‘technology number dot number’ and the whole social experience.  But the one thing I would suggest we all remember is that NOTHING is a closed loop.  Just when you think you have the whole process taped, something will come along and stick a rocket up its arse (sorry, no apology, I’m English) and make you think all over again.