I have been on Twitter since 2007 — well, almost.  I signed up with a bogus account in May 2007 to see what the buzz was about (there were so few people really doing it back then, it almost sounded like a porn place — was not going to use my real name for that… there was also some privacy fears).  Used it for 4 days — but not sure the word used is the proper one to describe my behavior.  Posted some breakfast and lunch things, exchanged a few messages with some people I never knew – but most of the talk at that time was not about technology or business, rather between friends and with some little professional chatter mixed in.  Left it behind, thinking it was interesting, but was not sure how it would actually make it to the next step.

Then in 2008 the noise was too high to stay out and jumped in.  Still, I was clueless as to what it was (I think it was in May of 2008).  I read about it and learned as much as I could: you have to follow to be followed, you have to listen before engaging, you have to put interesting stuff out, you have to build you presence… you read all the advice.  I turned into a generic Twitter user: no purpose, no reason, just follow the “basic rules” that everyone was touting.

I could not see the value of being another voice in an ocean of millions — I started to experiment with it.

Follow people who are different, with lots of followers but that have something interesting to say, participate of events, follow links, RT different things to see the reaction, and many other things.  A picture began to emerge of what Twitter was, what it can do for me, and how to use it better.  Slowly started to change my follower/following ratio, using searches more and more to find the right people and the right content.  Began integrating Twitter with other social networks, with blogs and other places.  Started to admit I was a Twitter user at meetings, explaining to people what it does and watching their reactions.  It was all data that contributed to my learning about Twitter.  To understanding what it was, how to use it, what it does.  It was the preamble to these three key things i discovered about Twitter:

1. Twitter is what you make of it. Twitter has no life, nor purpose, no direction, and no idea of who you are.  Sorry, hate to break the news like that to you – but that is it.  It is a platform that just sits there and waits for you to do something with it.  Approaching 100 million people quickly, it is a very large platform actually.  True, there may be 20-25 million active users — but that is still something.  However, it won’t wait for you or guide you to accomplish something. If you know how to get value out of communities, then you are going to enjoy Twitter.  If you enjoy listening to people talk about — well anything, you are going to get value.  If you know what you want to do in Twitter, you can get it.  Twitter has nothing prepared for anyone, it is what you want to make of it.

2. Twitter is a community.  Shocking, I know.  There are no forums or ideas or structure (well, you could try hashtags — it worked very well for the #SCRM Accidental Community), but it is a community.  I wrote about this a couple of times.  The main difference, and the great part about it, is that each person gets to build and mold their own community – and change it at the drop of a hat if you want.  You can create and follow lists, groups, searches, hashtags, and people for The Red Hat Society today, and for Punk Rock tonight – without much effort.  You can create several IDs and follow people in different ways, have several personas here and still be you.  It is a great build-it-yourself, shape-it-as-you-go community.  Just be yourself in as many ways as you want.

3. No one is ever wrong about Twitter. There is no right and no wrong way to do Twitter, since it is what you make of it and what you build around it.  So, don’t tell anyone how to do it right, or wrong, or better or worse.  What works for you, or your organization, may (probably won’t) not work for someone else.  Share your experiences and lessons, but make sure that you understand that it is just that  - yours.  As with any communities, the ideal outcome is gained knowledge from tribal sharing, or gained power from aggregation.  The way you go about doing that is going to be different, so don’t expect other people to do it same as you.  Share your knowledge in your community, learn from them, and always look for new ways to use it and get value out of it — then you’ll be right about it.

What do you think? What have you learned or discovered about Twitter? How was your experience different from mine?  Would love to hear your thoughts…

This is a personal post, and way overdue.  Feel free to tune out if you prefer, no offense.

Today, December 19th, is Paul Greenberg’s birthday.  You may have known that, if not – feel free to wish him a very happy one.

The reason I am writing this is because I am at a loss as to what you could gift someone who seemingly needs nothing.  So, I am going to use the only two gifts I have to give: writing something, and making a fool of myself in the process.

As you probably know if you read this blog, Paul Greenberg wrote in 2000-2001 a book called “CRM @ The Speed of Light”.  Paul wrote a seminal tome on a then fledgling enterprise application called Customer Relationship Management.  I had been doing that thing, CRM, for about 2 years then – selecting and implementing it at my then employer.  It had been out for about 10 years (Tom Siebel wrote in the S-1 for Siebel that they invented it in 1991), and really available for little more than a couple of years.

What Paul did back then was to, in the words of Siebel executives repeated many times since then, “validate CRM as a business”.

Of course, being an analyst at the time with Gartner I dismissed the book since — how could he know more than we did?  We were THE hottest team in the world when it came to CRM.  Turns out I did read the first edition sometime in 2002-2003 and I was surprised.  The book was good (yes, we had more material in some areas, but not bad for a “civvy”), informational, but more than anything else – entertaining.  You could read it and understand it without a problem, you had a feeling that he had suffered understanding the basic concepts so he could explain it “for dummies”.

It was a good book.  I must confess I skipped version 2 and version 3 was a skimming thing mostly.  Alas, Paul was doing very well building his reputation and influence, educating tons and tons of executives, and making sure they all knew what CRM was and what it did for business.  While, we even had him keynote at one of the Gartner CRM conferences (or two) back when version 2 came out (OK, second edition – sorry).

Fast Forward another few years and I am leaving Gartner.  As I was doing my studying to become an analyst again (mostly reading about the market and talking to people), I came across his blog.  He had posted a good article on whether he was going to adopt the Social CRM name or not for the fourth edition (he was favoring CRM 2.0 and I was with him on that – yet another time I was wrong).  I commented that I’d prefer 2.0, then he replied something and asked for my email, we started corresponding and talking, then exchanging information, meeting at conferences, etc.  Throughout all this time I was trying to decide what to do with my life when I grew up (IF is a more fitting description, per my wife) and talking to Paul about it.

Why am I telling you this?  Because Paul became a very good and true friend.  I am sure if you ever met Paul you would agree that he is the nicest person you will ever meet in this industry (probably outside of it as well).  He knows everyone, everyone respects him and adores him.  He has been called the Godfather of CRM – and never has a name been more fitting.  He truly cares and grows this industry like no one else.  I cannot find a single person that will openly express a single bad word or thought about him (and, trust me, this industry likes to gossip like teenage girls at the mall).

It was this Gentleman who made sure we all had a market and an industry to express our craft and our passions.  Would things have turned up the same way without him writing the book and tirelessly working to grow CRM into what it is today?  Maybe, but it would not be even close to being as  interesting as it is today.  I cannot find anyone that compares, in any other place, to Paul.

He is a consummate professional who cares for the career well-being of everyone whom he calls his friend.

He is a true friend to those who take the time to get to know him, as few good friends could be.

He was a true mentor and my biggest supporter while I was deciding what to do.

He is very generous, almost to a fault, and very friendly — even to those who waste his time (alas, he is always learning so not much is a waste of time).

He is a role model, and what I aspire to become.

And, without him I would probably be at some company doing something else I hate.  So, my gift to you, friend, is a very public and heartfelt Thank You, and a promise to not waste what time and patience you have given me, and the certainty that if I could be at 60 half the person you are today I will have fulfilled most of my personal goals.

Happy Birthday, Paul.  Thanks.

I spent the past four months talking to as many people as I could about Social CRM.  I talked to thought leaders, analysts, vendors, consultants, C-level executives, corporate managers and directors — anyone who wanted to talk about it.

We discussed definitions, and models, and strategies and plans.  What they are doing, what they want to do, what they would love to do. Ended up with a great view of where the market is now from all different perspectives.  There are three different views of SCRM.

Before, we start — do you want a refresher on what SCRM is? How to make it work?

The Vendor Reality

Vendors are rushing, well walking very fast or running at the very least, to call themselves SCRM vendors.  Are they correct? Yes. And No.  Since there is no defined SCRM market beyond taking on the social channels and integrating them with CRM, they are all right.  What they call SCRM is an integration between Social Media (Channels) and CRM functions (Sales, Marketing, and Service).

Alas, none of them provide more than one single function well enough to earn the label of complete CRM solution.  Actually, I would even go as far as to say that there are any that provide complete functions, they all provide parts of a function (for example, using the customer history via Twitter or Facebook is something I have not yet seen – yet, that is a critical function of service).  I already covered via different interviews and articles how to attack Social Sales, Social Marketing and Social Service and talked about what vendors are doing.  It took us almost 20 years to perfect,  well optimize is a better word, those same functions via old-fashioned channels — why shall it take only 6-18 months to do the same for social media?

Are vendors moving towards bigger targets?  Sure, Helpstream showed they want to do more than simply social support by adding  social marketing to their social service tools, Oracle and SAP unveiled platforms that allow them to tackle any function – even end-to-end processes, and Salesforce showed how to move the social network to the platform and forget about business functions altogether.  There are many other examples of vendors figuring out through integrations and partnerships how to offer more complex SCRM solutions (Radian6 and Lithium come to mind right away as an example).

This reality will start shifting in 2010 as consolidation starts to take over and a market begins to materialize (led by customers spending again, slowly at first), and larger and well-funded vendors begin to look for tools to complete their suites.  We will see a lot of movement in this market as we approach the summer, and very heavy towards the end of the year.  I will be talking about a very different reality in 12 months.

The Provider Reality

Just to be on the safe side, providers are consultants, integrators, analysts, and other people who help organizations adopt and deploy SCRM.

This group tends to be rather skeptical (pragmatical may be a better word) on anything new – at least until proven (which of course never happens since no one installs it as they wait to be proven – just kidding).  Alas, with SCRM without being a defined market yet, and with little to go beyond one-channel, one-function implementation (usually without ROI or strategy), you can expect a lot of negativity in this field.

But that it not entirely the case.  Sure, there is some skepticism on whether SCRM will succeed, on what it is, and failure versus potential success.  Alas, this is all mitigated with a heavy dose of reality this time.

There is a realization that the shift to social will happen – no matter what.  There is a realization that beyond the hype, vendors and organizations are actually beginning to understand that, and starting to see the path.  And the echo chamber (what happens when visions of the future and how to achieve it become common speech among practitioners and no one else) is quieter than usual. We also see more organizations embracing the concepts early on.  Encouraging.

There is one more thing that I am seeing among practitioners that also is encouraging: less hype.

The comments on what is possible are based on the reality of what vendors are delivering today, and what organizations are focused on.  Not really on what could, may, or should happen based on vendor promises and pie-in-the-sky visions.  It is certainly interesting to see more of a reality-based approach to SCRM than what I have seen in past iterations of  CRM.

The Organization Reality

The organizations are going wacko (my wife is a physician, that is a medical term – look it up)  and it is our fault.  On one hand there is a group of people led by those inexperienced in the enterprise applications market that is screaming at the top of their lungs how you have to engage, you must listen, become social or begone.  On the other hand we tell them they must create a strategy, that it is all about a strategy and everything else falls into place, don’t worry about the social aspect yet.

So, what do they do? What they can, namely Twitter and Facebook.  I cannot even count how many meetings and conversations I had in the past four months with executives who wanted to talk about SCRM – only to be asked how to setup Twitter or Facebooks Fan Pages.

There is an interesting and growing movement among organizations to control the “rogue” deployments within their organizations.  They may see a potential for them to flourish, or maybe started to see results – but now they want them to conform to the rules and guidelines they have for the organization.  Social Media guidelines are sprouting like mushrooms after a spring rain.

Is this good?

Some of the emerging programs have been curtailed severely, while others have benefited from this control and the resource allocation that comes with it.  It is all down to what was the intended purpose and goal, how structured it was, and whether there was an alignment with the organization’s overall strategy for that specific function.  In other words, if they can stamp the seal of approval on top of a good program, it will grow — most others, not so much.  It is indeed, all about the strategy.

Where to now, captain?

That is the reality from my side of the world.  The common thread? well, no one really agrees on where we are – but most agree on the future being full of possibilities.

So, where does this takes us in 2010 and beyond?

I see three trends that will impact SCRM in the near future, and one pattern for the long term:

Trend #1 – Market Consolidation.  What? This early? Really?  The market is not even defined yet, but we are already going through consolidation? Yep.  We have too many vendors defining SCRM in too many different ways and we need to consolidate.  A wave of vendors beginning to offer truly competitive solutions (as opposed to the disfunctional setup we have today) will emerge half-way through the year and bring some interesting offers to compare to each other.  I twitted earlier today than predicting a consolidation in a market of several hundred different vendors is not a prediction, it’s an overdue reality.  So, it is a trend that will continue and y’all can see that – right?

Trend #2 – Organizational Control.  Control was made to be the evil word of 2008-2009.  Guess what? organizations won’t simply empower an employee or group to become their social voice without some degree of control.  Rogue programs are becoming corporate programs, people-as-brands are becoming workers-for-brands, clear guidelines and rules are becoming more common, and roles for social networks are becoming a reality.  This is good, very good actually for corporate adoption of SCRM and the social channels.  This trend will result in a large number of formal SCRM strategies created and implemented in the second and third quarters of next year.

Trends #3 – I Now Know What to Do.  We are (finally) beginning to get away from ComcastCares, Ford, Dell, Coca Cola, etc. as being the only citable case studies in the world of SCRM.  We are seeing some real results from real companies that are going beyond PR and marketing their brand (why, even Comcast is going beyond Twitter now) to extending CRM to work for the social customer.  This will translate into best practices, clear case studies, and how-to-guidelines becoming commonplace.

These trends probably will hang around longer than 12 months.  How about longer term?  What is going to happen to SCRM in three or five years?  There is one pattern beginning to emerge:

Pattern #1 – Loud and Proud.  CRM is not going away.  Nor is SCRM going to replace CRM.  Neither is Social Business going to make CRM and SCRM irrelevant.

CRM is loud, in your face, with good results (now), and going to stick around for a while.  Did it fail in the past? You bet!  Up to 70% of implementations failed.  Then they recovered and did wonderful things — case studies in most cases.

I dare you to find one single failure from the early years that has sworn off CRM forever.  You won’t.  CRM  failures were part of the early days of moving one million miles an hour and shooting from the hip at the same time.  That is behind us, the bubble exploded and collapsed and we don’t need to support gazillion dollar implementations anymore.  Now we do what we need, pick the tools and technologies that work, and make it happen according to our strategy.

Do some people still fail? Yep, and they will continue to do so.  Why? Because, such is life, because we don’t define success and failure before starting, and because enteprise-class applications are very, very hard to do.  And, more importantly, because someone out there still believes that CRM is simply technology.

I now want to hear from you, with one caveat.  I am not going to engage in a SCRM is dead or alive debate here, but would love to hear why I am wrong, where I may be right, and overall what is your sense of SCRM’s reality today.

Thoughts?

When I was a Gartner analyst I owned the eService magic quadrant.  The process was quite arduous; worse part was listening to vendors hype their offerings.  No vendor was quite good at it, but SAP did a poor job of explaining and showcasing what they had and their marketing message was a mess, often failed to cover what I was evaluating.

I still remember the time we had a heated exchange on Knowledge Management (me: you don’t have it, them: we are the best).  I challenged them to produce either a client or an internal resource that could convince me.  SAP came back with PhD in Linguistics that worked in their lab, with extensive academic and commercial experience in knowledge, knowledge management, natural language processing, linguistics and related fields.  I was overpowered and became a lot smarter about opening my mouth to challenge vendors (i.e. only when I knew I would win) and was introduced to the SAP Reverse Dichotomy: our technology is better than what we tell you we have.

Most vendors say one thing, usually over-hyped, and the product delivers something different, not so advanced.  While marketing usually wins at most vendors, SAP suffers from the opposite: they often have more in their labs and in their products than what they sell.

And the next generation of applications, based on what I saw the Influencer Summit, is no exception.

Their message talked about retaining the in-premise core product, using NetWeaver for integration to other systems, embracing non-TLA end-to-end processes as the core, and using analytics (present everywhere).  They expanded their message with the old-tried-and-failed approach of pre-packaged end-to-end processes (which I would have never recommended),and  a poorly-worded conflict between private, public, and hybrid clouds as the main excuse for not going in that direction.

The demos showed a very different product from the one being discussed in PowerPoint .  They showed use of REST interfaces, mobile platforms, incredible speed through the use of in-memory analytics and data manipulation, complex transactions and integration, and even support for the cloud.  They showed embedded analytics being a critical part of everything they did.  It was a competitive product.

Of course, this was my interpretation – not their exact words.  I did not attend the entire summit, just the keynote presentations via the virtual summit  which had the main message.  It is my understanding, by following some of the other sessions via Twitter that they went into deep details into Small and Medium Business Strategy, Use of Embedded in-Memory Analytics, and different delivery platforms – including onDemand.  I don’t have details on any of those, but the following reviewers can provide more details:

• Paul Greenberg has not yet published his review as of this writing.  But being Paul Greenberg, you know it is going to be good.  Look for it later today (Thursday) at his ZDNet blog.
• Jesus Hoyos did a quick review via Radian6
• Dennis Pombriant talked in more detail about the cloud and SaaS versus on-premise
• Excellent summary of their message via Ventana Research

Bottom Line SAP has a good chance to become a competitive force if their marketing messaging does not get in the way (and don’t forget execution — even on reduced expectations you still have to deliver).  Having a strong product with good features, and bad messaging, is the opposite of what you see in this market.  SAP has been working on fixing their engineering-as-lead-feature core message and hopefully they will get better during 2010 at presenting their product.  Then we will have fun next year at the Influencer Summit (which I hope to attend in person).

What do you think of SAP? Did you evaluate, test, or implement it and found it to be different from their promises (better, actually)?  Would love to hear your thoughts…

At the end of the year I work on my wrap-up for the year, and prepare for the year ahead.

I go through my notes from conversations, oft-forgotten “blogs that I must read”, books, and everything else that  has a tangential effect into my research for next year.  I end up with my “predictions” for next year and the next five years, and a wrap-up of what mattered in the year past.

These are the five bullet points that are getting more and more momentum as the key issues for next few years:

1. Generational Shift – This is the one where I am reading more and more off-topic information.  Anything from Zogby’s book  ”The Way We’ll Be” and academic research dealing with the coming generational shift from the Generation X and Baby Boomers to Generation Y Digital Citizens.  This is the root cause for the “social business” coming of age.  Our responses to this are evolving and it is becoming quite interesting.  It is not what we are thinking, but what we are doing about it.

2. Experience Continuum – I started to talk about the social experience and the change in the customer experience when I wrote “A Brief History of SCRM”.  I started this blog to dig deeper into customer experiences and the coming changes in organizations, and it remains the focus of all my research.  Social businesses’ goal is to co-create ever improving experiences using feedback from customers – the biggest change brought on by the Social Evolution has been an increased and faster influx of data to co-create these great experiences. It is this faster change to experience management that becomes interesting.

3. Communities – I am not thinking how to create better communities, or how to be a better community manager.  Plenty has been written (wrongly, I might add) about that.  My thought process on this is how to make better use of communities (Brent Leary wrote a great short post recently about what he considers communities – I agree with him) that already exist, how to leverage the knowledge created and how to do it better.  Communities are not managed, nor created ad-hoc – you can only leverage them.  It is leveraging communities outcomes that will make a difference for organizations.

4. Analytics – I was recently asked what was the biggest change we experienced in the last five years, and what will it be for the next five.  The biggest change has been the change from “drinking from a firehose” of data produced by CRM to “surfing the tsunami” of data produced by the social evolution.  And this is where Analytics is critical.   The input from SCRM into the organization is actionable insights – and analytics is the only way to do that.  It is about creating actionable insights in a timely manner.

5. Data Management – All the data we are capturing is becoming too much for our antiquated models of data management to handle.  There are three areas that matter: the speed of analytics (stream flow analytics), the capacity of the store-and-retrieve models (theory that goes way beyond relational), and the actual storage medium (the hardware).  All three must work together for us to be able to realize real-time (or near-real-time) benefits.  It is about using what we have, better.

What are your top-of-mind issues right now? How about for 2010? Did I miss something big in my thinking?

There is a lot of noise on whether or not Twitter should be used for Business.

On one hand we have examples like ComcastCares, DellOutlet, JetBlue and many others that have been used as case studies.

On the other hand, there is me.  I wrote about not using it, about treating it as an IVR, and even getting rid of Twitter altogether.  I have had reservations about it from the beginning (can you really have a conversation in 140-characters? What happens to loads when you start to escalate all your interactions? How do you measure successfully?  How do service outages affect your delivery? And so many other questions).

Last week, my reservations moved to certainty.

I spent the past six weeks or so attending conferences.  I live-tweet them as a means to both provide a service to my followers who want to know what is going on in real time, as well as electronic note taking.  I put a hashtag to my tweets, and when I need to write a blog post about the event, simply get a transcript for the hashtag (I use WTHashTag, there are other tools) and my post is mostly written.

I was at Dreamforce 2009 this past week live-tweeting the event.  I was not keeping track of how much I was tweeting – but apparently Twitter was.  About an hour or so into my live tweeting I get an error message through my client.  It happens.  Conferences, especially large ones, bring Twitter to its knees and the famed Whale makes more than one breach.  I just go online and put a few tweets online until the volume slows down and I can use TweetDeck again.

This time was different.  Whenever I entered my tweets online and press submit, I would get an error message that said that I had exceeded the Status Update Limit and that I would have to wait several hours to resume.  I tried to look it up online to see what I had done wrong – but could not find any more information on their web site on that specific error.  I know that fellow blogger and friend Marshall Lager had the same problem.

(I found out later on that the Status Update Limit is 1,000 a day — nowhere near where I was.)

I went through frustration, anger, and resignation (cannot remember the other stages of grief — but probably went through all of them – including a “negotiation” to let me send just one more tweet).

Then started thinking. Not being able to live-tweet was detrimental to my business. Twitter is NOT a business tool.

It was not only the limits – but how Twitter handles users having problems:

1. If this was a serious issue it should be very well documented in a easy-to-find place.  I did not go back to the original terms-of-service — but relying on a TOS as the sole documentation is a bigger failure than to lock me out.
2. I am assuming that Twitter runs on pretty smart computers.  Could they not figure out that the status updates were all different, had the same hashtag as a lot of other traffic, and maybe – just maybe – look it up against a master calendar of events and hashtags and let it be?
3. Similarly, could they have potentially sent me a message (oh, I don’t know something short, like 140 characters or less, in electronic form) to warn me?
4. Once the problem occurs, the online self-service should have the answer — or support should reply rather quickly (this is a perfect example of running support with automation tools – I would have gotten my answer).

I would have been willing to consider using Twitter for business (yes, there are problems but they all have problems).  Alas, If I can be locked out for an arbitrary and undocumented reason – why would I rely on it as a business tool? If service is not where it is supposed to be – should I make a more sensible choice?

I will continue to use Twitter, but I won’t be rely on it for any critical business functions.  I guess it is true, you get what you pay for.

What do you think? Am I being too harsh on them? Another chance?

Well, as usual I am late to break the news.

Salesforce introduced Chatter with great fanfare — and most everyone covered it in detail and analyzed it (Dion Hinchcliffe, Sameer Patel, and Michael Krigsman provided some of  my favorite coverage).

I am going to tell you what I think most people are missing and the reason it really matters.

Chatter is not Salesforce’s response to the social prowess of Microsoft, Yammer, Sharepoint and friends.  Yes, I know that Marc Benioff said that — but he always goes after Microsoft.  It is also not a leap-frog to get ahead of SAP and Oracle in social functionality.  That would be short-sighted and naive, as either one of them can then do pretty much anything they want  to get ahead in turn.

The key to understanding the value that Chatter brings to the table was evident on the second-day keynote, when we talked about platforms.  Deep within the many amazing demos we saw from customers was the answer of why Chatter matters:

It is part of the platform.

It is not a feature or a function that becomes part of an application, it is part of the basic infrastructure that Force.com provides.

I have been saying from the very beginning that you won’t be able to prove ROI for your investment in a social network if you try to get beyond the initial listening and reacting.  This is one of the main reasons why organizations have not gotten past this point: they are being asked for a return on investment that is not there, cannot be calculated.  You can do some calculations for basic functions you will perform – but there is nothing really that talks to the infrastructure investment.

My answer has always been: you won’t get an ROI, but you need to invest on it as if it was infrastructure.  Who computes an ROI for more storage? or an additional laptop? a printer?  Those are infrastructure components that your organization must have and you just invest in them without expecting a specific return on the investment.

Back to Chatter.  By integrating it into the Force.com platform Salesforce accomplished three things:

1. It changed the conversation from reacting to social events to making social part of the architecture.  We have advanced from trying to figure what to do to making the people and the applications within the organization become social.  When applications and systems can talk for themselves (as they can with Chatter) the conversation changes.
2. They have shown that the cloud is indeed in progress, and that they are no longer just a SaaS or on-demand vendor with a cool marketing term.  The cloud is a series of interconnected platforms, and Salesforce has gotten closer to it with this move than ever before.
3. It has essentially changed the game for all the feature vendors with social tools. No, they won’t put them out of business — to the contrary, they have enhanced their chances for survival (if they are smart).  They no longer have to worry about the underlying architecture and infrastructure of their product, they can ride on the cloud and just focus on the features and improving them.  This is the true meaning of working on the cloud – not worrying about the technology underneath but actually being able to focus on improving the Experience Continuum.

I know there are at least two to three years before we actually see this implemented and see more details (Chatter is not expected until late 2010 to begin with).  I know that it may not happen (yes, I read the Beta Agreement — sorry, Safe Harbor statement that Marc displayed on screen as well as everybody else).  And, yes, I will be disappointed if it does not happen — but even if that is the case, the milk has been spilled.  The path to the cloud has been uncovered.

I have sustained for some time that Salesforce was focusing on the applications too much and not enough on the infrastructure, and I finally got the sense that they are turning that around (of course, they will continue to make applications and sell them).  I see them as a platform provider with some decent to good applications.

Alas, by making the cloud matter they are not merely catching up to their competitors — they may even be leaping ahead… stay tuned!

So, what do YOU think of chatter?  Is it really a revolution in the basic infrastructure? Or an underwhelming set of social tools that are not even up to par with the market?  Please let me know your thoughts…

Salesforce has taken two separate paths in their progress towards becoming a established cloud vendor: separating the platform and the application.  Although they are not two separate companies, that begins their path to becoming an enterprise-class provider, allows us to analyze both separately, and marks a milestone: they have finally grown up into a world-class vendor.

This is an analysis of the applications announcements.

To begin, I would like for Salesforce to get rid of the marketing phrase “no software”.  With a reported 188 million lines of code, there is no way that this qualifies as no software.  True, there may be no customization necessary but maintenance of 188 million lines of code qualifies as software for any vendor.

The interesting thing here is what they have done with all that code.

Service Cloud 2.   I saw this demo a few times already including the now (in)famous jaunt at Oracle Open World earlier this year.  The demo plays well, the features are quite in line with what the rest of the market offers, and they really have managed to do a good job, led by Instranet’s former CEO Alex Dayon, to integrate that acquisition and grow it.  While not revolutionary and market-changing, I am glad to say that after 10 years of following them they finally have a competitive entry in this market.  They claim 8,000+ clients for the original service cloud, and even though there are no announced clients yet for Service Cloud 2 there are some implementations underway.

Three things that stuck out the most for me: the knowledge base integration, Salesforce Answers (a model that needs some work but certainly holds promise to draw in community participation across all social networks and partners’ knowledge bases in real time for the best answer), and the integration with Cisco’s unified communications platform (to create  complete customer interaction solution) certainly looks interesting.  It must be noted that even though Cisco’s offer is not the market leading one, it is fairly simple to replace (in theory) with any other.

This release makes them a competitive vendor among a decreasing group of vendors that can solve the problem of traditional multi-channel service solutions.

Sales Cloud 2. This was the major step forward in this announcement.  Pretty much redone both at the interface level as well as features, and made to work more the way salespeople actually work.

I really like items like the scheduler, the storage of files in the cloud, the integration with outlook, but more than anything I think that the new Genius mode (where it finds similar deals to the one being worked on, takes best practices and materials from it, and allows the sales person to leverage that into the new deal) holds the most promise.  I was also really impressed by the new Quoting interface and functionality, I think that it holds a lot of promise (still need to see integration into price books and price lists to declare it a winner).  Finally, the charting and report builder that comes with it (and the so simple to use drag-and-drop interface — clicks, not code is the slogan) is something that must be seen to truly appreciate.  There are other improvements to it, such as mobile interface, social network integration, and – of course – the integration with Chatter (more on that later).  All in all, this is the product that is going to both solidify their presence in the market and holds the most promise. If they can in the next couple of years bring their service cloud to the same level as sales cloud is today it would certainly be impressive.

Chatter.  Chatter is, as Marc Benioff introduced it, a facebook and twitter look-alike solution for enterprise applications.  Dion Hinchcliffe wrote a very good post on this that will give you more information.

This is what the convergence of an enterprise 2.0 and SCRM implementation mixed with a a social network could be.

Deeply integrated with Salesforce’s products, it allows users to subscribe to activity streams for each client in the database.  Activity streams will be one of the most important aspects for the next 2-5 years for organizations to tackle and by introducing Chatter, an activity stream consolidator, Salesforce puts themselves in competition with the likes of Socialtext, Socialcast, Cubetree, Yammer, and other similar solutions for the enterprise.  One big difference: it is already integrated with the business functions for Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2.  This could prove to be very, very big for them.

My biggest concern: it introduces another social network that will in time need to integrate with partner’s activity streams, and external solutions. While it is an interesting announcement and it puts Salesforce in a different category (for now), it remains to be seen how successful they can be without creating or embracing open standards for inter-enterprise collaboration (which the other tools accomplish through APIs and by not being “married” to any particular vendor).

Bottom Line:  Sales Cloud 2 remains the most solid release among their lineup. Service Cloud 2 is, if it proves to work in real world situations, an interesting addition to the market. Chatter — well, time will tell the wisdom of their ways in this undertaking.

As I wrote in the final part of the Roadmap to SCRM series, we are plunging into an era of community participation.

Communities are so much more than the traditional forum-like model.  It is necessary to build good communities to get value and a return on the investment you put into it.

There are plenty of common wisdom sayings we use in our everyday life to guide and explain our actions.  I have found three popular sayings that apply to community building that can be used as rule of thumb.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

I know this will come as a shocker, but there are lots of charlatans and “snake oil salespeople” out there.  People who not only don’t have experience and knowledge but they say with such authority and conviction that you are tempted to believe them. Alas, if you go beyond the soundbite there is no substance, no value.

These are the people that hurt a community the most since they tend to throw themselves into the role of leader or super-users.  I wrote before that communities are self-policed and self-managed, but when the community is too small it is hard to spot and “control” these charlatans.

Avoid if you can these people.  Until we have a reputation system based on more than noise made and buzzword compliance, demand and expect credentials to back up everything said.  Just because anyone can get a twitter account or a blog, does not mean they deserve to be heard.

Provide Sex Education, not Sex Training

This is a deviation from the Chinese-attributed story of teaching a man to fish versus giving them food.  This adaptation was first uttered, that I heard, by Mike Muhney in a webinar I attended – and I think it is a brilliant way to describe what your communities should be about.

Even in support communities you have to ensure that all members learn and grow.  The purpose of being a member of any community is to grow by sharing.  However, the growth should not be tactical (training), but rather methodical (education). Would you prefer that I solve your technical problem today, or that I teach you how to solve them yourself next time?

Good communities are made of people who want to extend their knowledge and both learn as well as impart valuable lessons.

A rolling stone gathers no moss

I wrote in my roadmap to SCRM series that communities are created and dismantled in short term, few of them live to be long-term.  Don’t be afraid to participate in different communities, to expand or contract them as the purpose is served or changes.

Keeping constantly moving is a way to ensure that you learn, grow, and reach new people for the different communities in which you participate.  You benefit yourself and others by cross-pollinating and frequenting different communities, by inviting new members in your communities.

Make sure to take advantage of that.

What are your favorite sayings to describe – well, anything and everything you do?  Are mine off the mark?  What do you use as your rule-of-thumb to build your online presence?

Alas, the last part of this series (and my favorite) communities.

I do believe that communities are going to become the most important part of any social business – even to the point of quasi replacing the customer as the recipient of products, services, and experiences.  I said this in my first long post on SCRM (A Brief History of SCRM), and I still maintain it.  It is one of the two pillars of my research into 2010 and beyond.  There are three things I want to cover at this high level:

First, why communities and not clients.

A very common assumption from organizations is that communities are nothing more than groups of customers.  I defined communities before as

a like-minded group of individuals that favors two-way communication as a way to increase their power and knowledge

The critical parts of this definition are the increases in power and knowledge, not the aggregation or grouping of individuals.  Individuals will remain as they are, single entities that purchase products, receive services, and interact with the organization.  That is not going to change, nor is the delivery of experiences to customers going to change.

What must change is the way organizations interact with communities.  Until now the collective thought is that communities are “owned” by organizations and that they are entitled to the knowledge and benefits derived from them.  If the organization provides a support community, the knowledge generated by it is now part of the corporate knowledge-base.  If the organization sponsors a marketing community, it can be used a focus group.  Nothing is further from the true.

There is a lot of value to derived from a community, but none of it comes directly from the community (OK, some of it does probably — a support community will reduce the number of support tickets, a marketing community will provide insights into R&D needs, and a sales community does reduce the cost of sales – but the largest value you can obtain is not from “owning” the community).  The major value an organization can derive from a community is that it knows who the influencers for their customers are.  What better value can you obtain from a group that to know who the influencers to your customers are, and have the ability to influence them, change their mind, an even obtain a referral.

This is similar to outfitting your house’s basement with all the amenities so your high school-age son or daughter brings her or his friends over all the time.  What better piece of mind as the parent of a teenager that having them at home – and with their influencers (sorry, friends).  This is the way you should think of the communities: as the points of influence for your customer, and the people you need to interact with so they, in turn, influence your customer in your favor.

Second, purpose of communities in SCRM.

The best implementation for any community, regardless of the purpose is to provide a platform and let the users define and use their own communities.  Let them self-police and regulate their own communities (preserve the right to close communities that are offensive or otherwise detrimental to your business or society but let the community manage their own users), and you will notice a much richer knowledge and participation.

There are three purposes for communities as part of an SCRM strategy:

Ideation and Innovation - generate ideas related to product, services, features, good and bad.  Either use the information provided to innovate and improve existing components or to create new products.  The organization can participate as a member, but ideation communities are better served by letting them freely express ideas and features, acknowledge them, inform on the progress, and provide news and information about other products – not as marketing, rather as informational channel.  The role members play as active two-way participants and co-creators make them very different from focus groups (which are exclusively one-way offline communities).

Service and Support - these are traditionally forums, but are not the only example.  The idea is to have the community members assist each other, and generate knowledge that can be leveraged by the organization to augment their existing knowledge-base.  Participation from the organization as super-users or admins is necessary to maintain the community active and engaged, although heavy recruitment of super-users is an alternative, as the members don’t care where the answer comes from as long as it is correct.  A reputation system is mandatory for trust in the answers to develop.  A very important part of enlisting the community to create content is to ensure they are also there to assist in the maintenance as it changes.

Feedback - we traditionally see these communities develop as subsets of the other two, when people begin to express their opinions about product or service as a result of a service transaction or ideation implementations.  The main role of these communities is to monitor people’s feedback and respond in teal time to problems or situations that arise. Twitter is probably the best known example of how these communities are used today.  The critical aspect is to capture and act on the feedback, then use it internally to improve the underlying processes.

What’s about Sales communities?

Not part of an SCRM implementation; they tend ot be internally focused, collaborative groups that offer the ability for salespeople to collaborate and improve their jobs – but no measurable direct sales benefits to the organization.  For organizations to be able to create and perceive value from sales the current sales model of one-to-one, privileged relationships between sales people and customers must change.  No one in the organization owns the customer, the customer owns the organization.  Alas, I Don’t see that happening anytime soon, but would love to see it.

Third, what types of communities are we talking about?

Sure, when I say communities you immediately think of the traditional model of forums – but there is so much more than that to consider.  Yes, forums are one part of communities — but not the best or more important one.  They serve a specific purpose and they do have a place in your community sub-strategy, but there is so much more to communities.  Consider these community models:

• Forums – the traditional, continuation from the old BBS (bulletin board systems) and Compuserve Forums except that these are in an open network (Internet).  The idea is to offer a place to have themed, threaded conversations.  Most often used in service communities since is easy to segment by product and problem-type.
• Wikis – although not generally thought of as communities, the fact that they can store knowledge and share it among their members makes for good communities where collaboration and content are more important that the conversations.  Yes, they do allow for conversations, but they work much better as content manager framework than as a conversation manager (forums are excellent for that),
• Blogs – yes, they are communities.  Sure, they tend to be weaker than wikis for content management, after all there is only one author and the content is mostly static after publication, but the serve well as a tools to reach more and more people, and enter into conversations.  The threaded comments section is very similar to a forum, but the need for content before the conversation and the static segmentation by posts makes them not very efficient for lengthy, multi-topic conversation.
• Newsletter – this is the perfect example of a one-way community used to spread knowledge.  It severely lacks on real communities options for two-way conversations and the spreading of knowledge from all members to all members, but it works very well for passive communities of people that tend to not get engaged and mostly read (you did hear about the 90-9-1 rules – right? newsletter cater to the 99-1-0 rule)
• Offline – I know, incredible that I would mention a community that has no bearing on technology-driven implementations.  But that is because SCRM is NOT a technology-driven implementation, and if you follow the basic definition for communities I used, and the fact that organizations are trying to reach all the communities that influence their customers, offline are the ones that deserve more attention than online, since most people spend far more time in offline communities than they do in online communities.

After you select a purpose for the community and a model that caters to that purpose, you need to define the model of community you want to leverage.  There are three types of communities to choose from:

• Task-Driven – short-term communities created and used for a specific purpose. Also called ad-hoc communities, they focus the interactions in a specific event or situation.  An example is a feedback community prepared for the launch of a product.  When the product is launched, the task is completed that the community disappears (although, sometimes it changes into a support community – but the conversion rates are not as good as recruiting rates for new support communities).
• Objective-Driven – long-term, established communities with a specific objective (e.g. collect ongoing feedback, provide support).  They don’t have specific end-dates (e.g. an event occurring), and they have large quantities of active members participating in them.  Good example of this is a service and support community, where new members join periodically and even though the product may change versions or features, the community continues to provide support.  Over time it becomes a recognized element in the experience of owning that specific product.
• Impromptu – these are the ones that show the most promise.  They come together without notice, for a specific event or task, and they are created by their members without prodding or help, there is not maintenance or rules to abide by, and the organization is not aware of their existence immediately.  The promise for these communities is for organizations to be able to capture real-time actionable insights that would change the way they act in light of those insights.  A sports game community built up and discarded shortly after the game, providing wisdom-of-the-crowds to coaches and analysts?  The feedback affected people can provide back to the company during a PR crisis?  The use of twitter during the recent Iranian elections?  All examples of impromptu communities with great value.  The best way to sponsor them is to provide the platform for communities to come together without notice, carry out their short-lived purpose, and then move on.

The community is the basis for Social CRM to exist and for Social Businesses to grow.  There is no social without the communities.

I know, you are going to tell me how social is all about the customer, not the community.  However, show me a customer that functions without a community and I will agree with you.  Would you rather aim for managing a relationship with a single customer at a high cost? Or would it be better to engage with multiple communities and affect the same customer via them in an organic form at far lower cost?

What do you think of this post? the entire series? is there anything I am missing in the series or here? are you working on your roadmap to SCRM? would love to know more about it…