I recently wrote an article about what an Experience Continuum is –published at MyCustomer.com – and how organizations can go about adopting the model.

It is not as simple as snapping your fingers, but it is part of the planning process that organizations are undergoing right now with the advent of the social customer.  It is part of figuring how to stop pushing “stuff” out to the customers, stop trying to obligate them to do things in a certain manner and instead try to partner with them, work together, and leverage communities to build a better business.

The problem that most organizations have in embracing this new model is that they are still doing business based on the traditional sales cycle of target-acquire-support-retain, which obligates them to think of the customer as being ready to enter, or already in, one of those stages.  If the customer behaves in a different manner (customers that know more about the business and the product based on their participating in communities, for example), the cycle breaks down and is unable to perform as expected.  The new “social model” where customers are more-knowing and feel more-empowered to deal with the organization in their own term, not the business’ terms, mandates the lifecycle to change.

And this is where the continuum comes in.  The continuum assumes that the customer is going to interact with the company, at any time, via any channel of their choice – and they will provide feedback on how to do it better next time.  They are no longer just looking for support information post-sale, they are looking for marketing materials to purchase the next item.  Retaining them is no longer limited to providing good service, it is now imperative to integrate their feedback into out methods for creating better processes.

The customer is no longer just waiting for the business to tell them how to interact and through which channel, they will come across all channels they have available and expect impeccable service, personal interactions, and to be listened to – both directly and indirectly via their communities.

How can a lifecycle do that? It can’t.

Welcome to Customer Experience Continuums.  Download this white paper to learn more about them.

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Intriguing title, right?  Promise, there is a method to the madness… stay tuned.

One of my clients (Ciboodle – officially known as Sword-Ciboodle) launched their community platform yesterday (Ciboodle Crowd).  You can read more about it and watch a video here.

That is the “official press-release” part of this post — but it is also related to the rest… read on.

Now, when I was at Gartner last week I stopped by their booth and we did a short video where they asked me for the relationship between cheese and customer service.  They did the same with other wonderful friends like Paul Greenberg, Michael Maoz, and Mitch Lieberman (there may be more, they are being stingy and releasing only two each day).  You can go here to view the rest, they are all quite remarkable and creative in how they establish a link between cheese and customer service.

My answer, in case you don’t want to see my beautiful face and hear my sultry voice: there are many types of customer service you can provide and, just like cheese, not one will please everyone.  Some prefer a sharp Cheddar, some a blue Stilton, and some an American radioactive orange (trust me, that is not cheese — ask anyone outside of the US).

There is not a single way to do customer service.

And that is the key to this launch, as well as what few  other smart vendors are doing in customer service.  It is not about how many channels you have, how you create knowledge knowledge, do integration, or manage rules.  Nor is it  about being able to do Twitter, Facebook, or even communities — it is about leveraging all those resources and channels and doing it equally well for all segments.  It is about effectively delivering to customers the proper solution.

I talked about segmentation before and how it is the secret to doing cross-channel and multi-channel CRM.  But until recently, there was no technology platform that would allow an organization to do that.  Now Ciboodle joins the ranks of the handful of vendors that allows any organization to serve Camembert next to Ementhaler.

How cools is that?

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I had to write this short post, I just had to…

You are probably as tired as I am of seeing the tweets  from people you follow (or used to follow in some cases) asking you to click their link so they can show their influence in the dumbest project since SXSW voting (I was going to say Enterprise 2.0 voting, but fewer of you might have gotten the reference – Mark Tamis blogged about that one).

I did participate in Enteprise 2.0 voting as I had a vested interest, and I did pester people who followed me at the time (some of them who don’t any longer) into CMS (click-my—– stuff, yeah- that’s it).  I apologized at the time, and I do again now.  I had a purpose, and I played the game as it was laid out in front of me.  My intentions were pure, spread the message and build a bigger pie, but the implementation lagged due to lack of judgment.

Now that I have my mea culpa out of the way, I would like to address the issue of influence, as Fast Company defines it, and how it is not influence.  I have said to as many people as they were willing to listen in the past that the killer app for the Social world is a universal reputation tracking engine.  Your influence both varies and carries across all your social networks and fluctuates almost by the minute based on your last (and next action).  There is no reliable way to measure reputation and influence – either on one channel or across multiple ones.  Virtually all algorithms you see there assume that the number of followers (or retweets) you have is the key to measuring influence.  Which of course, it is terribly wrong.

If you and I are members of the same community (one where followers are measured and reported, like Twitter or Facebook, or LinkedIn) and you have 10,000 followers and I have 50 I could have a lot more influence than you.  If your followers are not decision makers, recommenders, connectors, or people with influence in the same industry, you are just having a conversation among friends as it is very likely that no action will come out of that.  If my 50 followers are the people who make the decisions and set the wheels in motion and follow me because they trust me, I am ahead of you.

That brings us to Fast Company’s project.  It does not measure influence, by any stretch of the imagination,it simply measures reach (as well as how popular people are).  I could mount a campaign across networks to get people to click on my link, my reach across all networks is close to 120,000 people (I think I got this from some web-based tool or another).  Does that mean I am influential to 120,000 people? Or that I can get 120,000 people to do what I ask if I ask often and nice enough? How does affecting the actions of 120,000 people for something that has not benefit for me or the world make me influential? Who gains and who loses from this?

I am not going to bore you with influence and reach, I will direct you to Dr. Michael Wu’s excellent series in the Lithosphere (and continuing work), or I could tell you to listen to @TheMaria (Maria Ogneva, from Attensity360), who said this morning:

(I think there are a few more criteria to it, but that sums it up very well in a short 140 characters or less).

So, going back to the title.

Fast Company is a magazine that I respect, trust, and had some influence at some time or another in my life.  I wrote a few blogs in a now defunct blog I had there some time back, and I got good response.  All in all, we had a good relationship — until then went stupid. How so? they decided to throw their reputation and their influence behind a high-school popularity contest.  Alas, that is not the worse part — the worse part is that they call that popularity contest a measure of influence.

Sad, truly, that they are willing to lose their reputation over a stupid thing like this.  Hope they reconsider – or at least that they put some serious content that distinguishes reach and influence in their November issue.  Right after the pictures of the most popular people in the world…

Am I wrong? Right? What says you?

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Missed me? Come on, only been a month — OK, promise to not go away for so long again.  Scout’s honor.

Part of the reason I was gone so long was the Gartner Social CRM Magic Quadrant (paid subscription necessary) published last Monday.  I had to work with clients on the positioning, the arguing with Gartner before publication, and then attend the conference to see what came out of it.

The report came out, and as usual 99% of readers ignored the 25+ pages of text detailing inclusion criteria, evaluation criteria, market description, perspectives for the future, and vendor analysis only to focus on the chart.  So, let’s get it out of the way: Jive and Lithium came up as leaders (congratulations to both) and there is a field of 17 other vendors split between “… social media monitoring, customer- and partner-hosted communities, enterprise feedback management, product reviews, ans sales contacts.” (taken from the Gartner document).  That is all I can say for the chart (Jive is offering a free download just for opting-in.  I don’t endorse doing that — but you would’ve found out about it any way).  Update: Lithium is also offering the report in their web site.

Many assumptions were made from that little chart, and the few nuggets of information shared by Gartner at the conference, leading to some statements that I would like to  ”clarify” (and by clarify I mean provide my opinion as a former Gartner and current independent analyst).

So, let’s debunk these myths.

First myth, Gartner said that Social CRM was going to be a $1B market by 2011.

Hmmm, that is not what I heard.

I heard that there was going to be around $1B invested into Social CRM  through end of next year.  This would encompass software licenses, maintenance (or not if SaaS), consulting, process changes, culture changes, hardware, etc.  Basically, that is how much we should expect to see coming into the CRM market in addition to the traditional CRM expenditures (Gartner placed the CRM market at $9.8B currently) in the next 18 months.  I could not find a single Gartner analyst, or report, that talked to the SCRM Market as an independent entity worth $1B.  There is no $1B market being created, there is money being added to CRM to make it social.

Second myth, by putting this out Gartner validated the market.

Ah, no.  They did not.

They validated the concept, but not a separate market.  They said many times, as most people who have been working with SCRM from early days have said – this is not a separate market — this is a market extension for CRM.  Why, even during the keynote Ed Thompson  said so when he described  CRM as having three modes: transactional, analyitical, and social. Why they did do was validate the concept of Social CRM.  They said that not only does it exist, but it is becoming the third mode  for CRM implementation.  And, as such, it requires rewiring of the strategies, the implementations, and the tools — just like we did when we moved from transactional (called operational back then) to analytical CRM.  Good friend Paul Greenberg wrote on his summary of the event that Gartner is a market-maker, and I would concur with caveat — they can build the CRM market further, but they cannot build a separate SCRM market.  No one can do that.

They did, however, draw the line in the sand (I am thinking they had the stake that Paul Greenberg put there first as a guide — but that is just me) as to where Social CRM starts and where it goes from here.

Third myth, Gartner said  communities are the core of Social CRM.

Oh boy, I hate to get in trouble with some of my clients — no, they did not say that.

They said it was an important part of it, and they said that among the components they selected (see introductory paragraph) hosted communities were the key to getting value of Social CRM into CRM.  And I agree with that (and not just because I have clients that sell communities) and I said so before.

Gartner forgot to add the most critical part of Social CRM – social analytics to the list.  Of course, the assumption they made is that the modules that are used for analytical CRM are sufficient for Social Analytics — and the answer is no there as well (could be, if you figure some way to do sentiment analysis with it, and leverage social media monitoring to bring in the raw data to them).  But they did not add Social Analytics to the list of solutions they were considering as SCRM – so yes, communities is the most important part of those highlighted.

So, where does this live us?

I must say I was slightly disappointed with the social content at the conference.  I do truly admire Gartner for being the first of the major research houses (without counting my good friends at Altimeter) that have come out and embraced the concept of Social CRM and laid down some perspective on it.  At the same time, I was hoping for a little bit more direction than “there is a bunch of vendors that do something social, we have not yet figured it out and we will do so in the next 12 months”.  I was hoping for a little bit more avant garde thinking, some serious thought leadership.  I was looking for them to regain their throne as the undisputed thought leader for enterprise applications — and I did not see that.

I did see some very well executed, on-target messages aimed at people trying to figure this out.  I heard some very good advice about doing things slowly, taking the time to understand what is going on, and only then try new things.  I did hear all this messages we have been saying in several communities around the web — outside of Gartner and without their involvement.  What I am not sure: were they repeating what had already been expressed — or were they talking, as they are supposed to do, from their experience and exposure to several layers of the CRM Market.

I am hoping it was the second — what do you think?

“This MQ represents a very precise, small portion of one specific market (as defined by me) in one specific time (when I collected all the answers to the questions).  It is in no way a fair representation of the entire market, nor is it the one that applies to your particular situation (unless your evaluation and inclusion criteria, as well as timing, match mine).  It is to be used ONLY as one tool in an arsenal of many to understand a market, vendors in it, and where it is going (if you read the text that surrounds the chart).  If you make a decision solely based on whom the leader in the MQ is when you read it, you totally deserve what you will get in return.  There is a fair chance that one of the leaders may work for you — but there are also many chances that other vendors, even those not in here, can do the same or better.  If you really want to know how to interpret this to your particular situation, and how to use the tool appropriately — please do schedule a call with me and I will be happy to run you through everything you chose not to read in the report.”

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Before we begin, two caveats:

1) When I said I would never write another series I was so sure this would not happen — then, this became too long…

2) Social CRM is not a technology, never will be.  This is the vendor complement to The Roadmap to SCRM series I wrote before — you will need technology to deploy your strategy, this is what vendors should offer you.

Sometime ago I wrote this series of posts called “The Roadmap to SCRM“, five parts (plus an extra one added for lack of clarity) that explained how organizations can build their strategy from CRM to Social CRM.  It is based on years of experience and many deployments of CRM, and it is still applicable (by the emails I get about it).  Warning: It must be adapted to your needs, it is not ready to go as is — same as CRM, there is no one size fits all.

I also talked about what vendors need to do to become SCRM-ready when discussing the recent acquisitions (Attensity acquiring Biz 360 and Lithium buying Scout Labs).  Even better, right before releasing this post (which I wrote last week and was trying to make it a complete post, not a series — before I ran out of time) I noticed that fellow deep-thinker, practitioner, and exceptional CRM-meister Filiberto Selvas wrote a similar post to this (now you get to compare, how about that?) which you should read for more perspective.

I have been mulling this post for some time and I want to talk about what different vendors are doing to deliver Social CRM ( that is the next post on this series).  Let’s get into what vendor-driven SCRM should look like…

The attention on SCRM has not been on the strategy side; it has been on the technology.  This is unfortunate, but not unexpected.  I wrestled with the concept of writing this post, I did not want to cement a notion of “what the technology for SCRM should be” in either vendors; or users’ minds, but I feel we are at a point in the evolution into a market (we don’t yet have a SCRM market, here is why) where it is necessary to do so as the direction is starting to become more clear.

First things first, what does the SCRM stack look like?

Vendors venturing into the SCRM world today come from many areas: some of them provide communities, some of them social analytics, others do — well, not exactly sure what they do, but they call it Social CRM — lots of options out there if you are looking.  Remember, though, that we are not talking about technologies — Social CRM will require changes to people, process, and technology to be implemented — and that is where the stack comes in.

You will need technology to deploy SCRM functions, no questions about it.  However, you will need to do most of the heavy work (remember CRM? customization was the hardest part of the implementation) by leveraging a platform or architecture, and building on top of that.  The stack pictured below is the core platform or architecture you will leverage to deploy Social CRM functions.  Let’s examine it a little closer…

First, let’s talk about the essence of what SCRM will bring to your company: people’s perspectives dressed as actionable insights.  The Social Evolution (of Generation C as Paul Greenberg and Mike Fauscette call it) means that people aggregate into communities.  OK, fine – they were aggregating into communities before, the concept is older than — well, older than sliced bread, for sure.  However, the social evolution brought them to use online communities and store the shared knowledge in electronic form.  This is a major, major difference.  That means we now have access to this data and we can use it.

And use it we will, that is where the second layer comes in: analytics.  We can try to dress it up as a new concept also, call it Socialytics, Social Media Analytics, or something similar — and some of the tools we use are fairly new, to correspond with the newness of the social channels — but the truth is that this is still analytics, same as before, same as in the future.  You can leverage your analytics engine, you can add a social analytics engine, or you can do both (probably what I would recommend in most cases for now).  However you do it, make sure you do it — without actionable insights, the outcome of analysing the information, there is no Social CRM.

I have written some articles on how to leverage analytics better in the Social X world, you can find them here, here, and here.

So, here comes the tricky part — this is the layer-to-be-named-later (feel free to drop some naming suggestions in the comments below).  This is where we actually take action — where the company implements the actionable insights and improves the processes, the products, the services — the experiences.  For lack of a better name right now, I will call it the Actionable Layer Unit (ALU – if you know the acronym, you are as geeky as you think — not fair to use google or wikipedia).  And even worse than the name, there is no software that you can buy to do this — this is all elbow grease basically.  You have to take the actionable insights and make something with it — else, why collect the data and analyze it?

(hint: if you would’ve followed the recommendations I made way early in the roadmap to SCRM for companies, you would already know what to do — the picture below is a reminder and I also talked about it at my Collaborative Enterprise post in TheSocialCustomer)

Finally, the missing piece-de-resistance — the cherry on top of the sundae of sorts.  The integration layer.  Yeah, no more silos, no more standalone solutions, no more — well, whatever you want to call it.  Social CRM must be integrated.  Let’s say you collect the data, and you analyze it, and you decide to take some action on it — what do you with it then? Easy, put it in the system-of-record — the good old CRM (or SCM, or ERP if you are talking Social Business or Collaborative Enterprise) system.  You need some way to integrate the Social CRM platform or architecture to them, some way to send the insights, resulting actions, and data to store with the corporate information.  If we were to leave in an ideal cloud world, that would be simply a question of doing some PaaS to PaaS calls and voila!  We don’t live in that world — so we need connectors, API calls, or whatchamacallits to do the job.

So, what do you think?  Too simple? Will this put the argument of Strategy versus Technology to rest once and for all? Can that argument ever be put to rest?  Would love to hear what you have to say…

(remember, there are other parts to this series, so don’t overexert yourself by commenting on this one only)

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I know I have been — what’s the word… haphazardly? sporadically? — writing lately in the blog because I have been quite busy working on materials and deliverables for my upcoming month-on-the-road.  I have some very cool things coming up, lots of work and effort that went into producing it and would love to share them with you — if you want to join me.

Check it out…

Social Media Readiness Assessment

I spent a considerable amount of the time the past four months working on a Social Media Maturity Model and the associated Social Media Readiness tools.  It is pretty cool, and it can help you organization understand where you are, where you are going, and what you are going to be doing in Social Media.  I have always said that Social Media (the channels) are going to become your basic infrastructure (just like phones or emails) — but there is a proper way to do this, to integrate it with other tools and architecture in your organization, and to understand where things like Social CRM, Social ERP, Social Business come in.

Would you like to know how it all fits together?

Would you like to use an online tool to see where your organization stands in relationship to the model?

Join me and Visible Technologies at these dates and locations (links are to sign-up pages for each event).

Oh, did I forget to mention that there is an ROI calculator that was developed by Dr. Natalie Petohouff that will help you justify how you can bring Social Media to your organization?

Silly me… all these tools, all this knowledge — all this hard work… how can you say no?

Join us on June 2nd in Los Angeles for a breakfast on Social Readiness, Adoption, and ROI http://conta.cc/buWIQO

Join us on June 3rd in San Francisco http://conta.cc/cLi3zm

Join us on June 17th in New York http://conta.cc/dd4pFA

Join us on June 22nd in Chicago http://conta.cc/c3vJ1i

Join us on June 23rd in Atlanta http://conta.cc/cYvcfI

Lei Parla Italiano? Lei Parla Enteprise 2.0?

I am presenting at the International Forum for Enterprise 2.0 in Milan, Italy.  Beyond the oh-so-cool factor that I am going to Italy for a few days, I am going to be bringing the voice of Social CRM to the Enterprise 2.0 world.  I am co-presenting with Mr. Mark Tamis, of Enterprise 2.0 and SCRM fame, and we will be talking about how to make it all work together.  Not only that, but we were also given the closing panel for the conference — talking about “Enterprise 2.0 is from Mars, Social CRM is from Venus — bringing the two together to make a Social Business”.  It is going to be awesome.

Sameer Patel (fellow presenter at the conference) wrote a great post with far more details that I can fit in here.

One if by land, two if by water (and three if by Enteprise 2.0).

OK, corny title — but I am coming to Enteprise 2.0 in Boston, doing a panel, and having lots of time.  What else is there to do at a conference of people that believe in collaboration, in working for the customer, and in innovating their operations?  Why, evangelize, of course!  Want to meet at the conference?  Email me and we can set some time… I am going to be there 15 and 16, looking forward to it.

Who Said You Can Never Go Home Again?

Gartner’s CRM conference is coming — and I am making the trip  to meet with former colleagues, fellow thinkers, and to see what they have been up to in the past 2.5 years since I left.  Have they embraced Social CRM? Have they adopted new models for collaboration in the enterprise? Is there a Social CRM Magic Quadrant being introduced (rumor has it)?  I am going to be there just for one day (June 28 – email me if you want to meet while down there) since I have to fly out to make it on time for…

Hablas Castellano? Quieres Hablar de Experiencias del Consumidor?

Sorry, just keeping international.  I am going to be part of an extension course / summer seminar in Madrid, Spain talking about customer experiences for the next few years, what to do, how to make it better, etc.  It is going to happen at the Universidad de Madrid, on June 30 through July 2.  I have a lot of work I have put into creating the new model for Customer Experience that I will be unveiling there.  Want to come?  Sign up and join me!

(July is going to be off-the-road, while I prepare to move, August has some events, so does September, October, November — and then off for the month of December — at least hoping that’s how it works)

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I am doing a Webinar with the incredible Brent Leary and Jacada Wednesday on the topic of Social Experience.

Preparing for this was quite interesting.  I was working with some of the slides I have on Social Experience (available on Slideshare) and thinking about the questions that I get almost every day on this topic:

Obviously, the first question is always “what is social experience”, followed by the traditional “and why do I care”.  Those are questions that everyone is asking.

But, did you ever think of the following questions…

“How does the Social Experience affect my organization?”

“What do I need to do about the Social Experience?”

“Why is it called a Social Experience, and how does it differ from the traditional experience?” (excellent question)

“Should I worry about the Social Experience?”

and, my most favorite question — “what if I don’t do anything about it?”.

There is a lot of be said and done, still, about the Social Experience.  We are past definitions, we are past acknowledgements of its existence, and we are starting to figure out what we need to do about it.

Want to know what to do?

Here is the link to register for the webinar (told you this post was a teaser)

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Forget my MonTwit experiment, or my contribution to it.

This is what I really learned in the past 9,999 tweets….

You truly, honestly don’t care what I had for breakfast. Or lunch.  Not even dinner… but someone will always take pictures of their food and tweet it — and I will always look.  While I don’t care what it is, I like to live vicariously.  Twitter is about sharing, and gossiping, and just plain out living your life in different ways (some of which you may not do in real life).  That is OK.  You are encouraged to share as much or as little of your life as you want — just don’t expect it to remain private if you share it.  Think of Twitter as an electronic postcard that is immediately read by 100 million people.

Not everyone will agree with me.  I made my share of friend-nemies, and plain out enemies, based on what I tweeted at one time or another.  No worries though, it just accelerated what happens in real life.  I made friends also, many more of them.  I am very grateful to both good and bad people (bad is those that don’t agree with me).  Twitter has been an incredible place to cross-reference what I know, to learn a lot, and to share what I learned.  People are mean? sure, as they are in real life.  People are nice? same, as they are in real life.  If you had enough of someone or something, simply use the filters that Tweetdeck gave you (or your favorite client), block them and go on with life.  Just like you would do in the real world.

Everyone wants to collaborate in Twitter.  Even if it is the old high-school concept of team (one person works, the others take credit) for very few of those “collaborators”.  Coming out of Gartner I missed the 6×24 (noon Saturday through Sunday afternoons were very slow or dead) global collaboration environment with smart people.  It was a very challenging and nourishing environment.  Think of Twitter as a mega Gartner.  Don’t like that reference? I could’ve said mega-Forrester and you would’ve really shuddered… (BTW, this may also explain the low incidence of analysts on Twitter, but that is just a working theory).

Twitter is a microcosm.  Twitter is a world in itself, and it has dramatic representations of what happens in the real world as well.  You want to see a computer pioneer get 30,000 followers before even the first tweet? Bill Gates did that.  How about see a Latin America dictator convince his dictator friends to join Twitter (and tweet under the name of the devil)? Hugo Chavez did that.  Seen a celebrity whose tweets can be worth $10,000.00? Kim Kardashian did that.  Did you notice that anther celebrity’s empty-content tweets are re-tweeted 350,000 times within 5 minutes? Ashton Kutcher would be the one (even if you don’t count the millions that follow him now.

In short, I learned that Twitter is a representation of the real world, no more and no less, and it requires the same commitment to get value out of it as you do from the real world.  Simply said, Twitter is another GIGO model.  Garbage In? Garbage out!

PS – I also learned that if you make a mistake and re-tweet something it does indeed goes against your tweet count, and if it was your 10,000 one you have to delete it, get a mulligan, and then re-tweet it again.  Just like in real life, you do get second chances .

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What do Ourobouros, Moltke the Elder, and the Battle of Waterloo have to do with Social Media?  What is a Community Focus Platoon? How can a path take two opposite directions at the same time?  How do Social Business and Moebus Strip compare? How does the game Towers of Hanoi can make your business social?

These are all questions that are answered in my latest slideshare contribution (and element of torture at Lithium’s sold-out 2010 User Conference).  Would love your comments…

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Lithium (a client, don’t forget to mark that column in your log) acquired Scout Labs (a vendor specializing in Social Media Analytics and not a client).  The deal was estimated at around $20MM (not that makes any difference, but am reporting the news here), and is expected to overcome all FTC objections (not that they would get involved, but again – reporting the news).

This is a terrific move by Lithium (and I would say the same if I did not tell them some time ago to do something like this, not that they would listen to me on these matters) and it positions them very well in two markets – for different reasons – and prepares them for an interesting convergence play.

As far as the SCRM market is concerned, they are growing their presence by acquiring the second of the four modules they will need to become a complete SCRM application (communities, analytics, feedback management, system of record – more on this soon) and by distinguishing themselves from the rest of the communities and analytics vendors in doing so.  In view of the recent spate of acquisitions in this market (such as Attensity acquiring Biz360, Jive acquiring FiltrBox, and RightNow Technologies acquiring HiveMind) this acquisition shows the commitment from Lithium to remain in the leadership position they have carved in the market.

However, most notably to me is that this makes them a very interesting play in the Enterprise 2.0 market. No, it is not heresy.  My view has been that these two market will converge eventually and that vendors will come from different sides to embrace the Social Business market (or whatever we will call it once we get there).

I wrote before that leveraging the content created on communities is one of the critical uses of analytics.  With this acquisition Lithium creates a very interesting combination of power bringing communities and analytics together, taking the first step towards creating actionable insights — the only purpose for building a SCRM (and Enterprise 2.0)  system.

Are they the first one to become a certified SCRM player? No, there is no one there yet (I said four modules, they have two as does everybody else — still room to grow).  However, they are the first ones to leverage communities as generators of content, feedback, and insights — and take the first step towards unlocking that power and converging SCRM and Enterprise 2.0.

Looking forward to what the world will make of this combined product (as soon as I can, I will talk to people taking on the combined entity and let you know).

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