An alternate view is that the best context for teaching your kids table manners is to invite someone important over for dinner.

Maybe what you describe as a need you sense above is at the core of the CRM-problem. Not the fact that you sense a need, but the fact that it is the need from the corporate IT-departments. What one should really ask: what are the needs of the business, or better: what are the needs of the business Customer’s.

From my own experience I can say, most corporate IT departments have needs that are not in line with business needs, let alone Customer’s needs. They have their own agenda, their own priorities and their own desires.

My advice for any company that wants to sell technology that enables a Social CRM strategy: focus on the needs of your Customer’s Customers, not on the needs of your Customer’s IT department. And: you should be enabled to listen to, engage & collaborate with Customers to better understand those needs. If they won’t allow you, you know how successful their Social CRM Strategy will be.

Thx for “listening”
Wim Rampen´s last blog ..What A Social CRM Strategy is all about..

I couldn’t agree with you more that (Customer service) communities should not be closed shop. No argument there. Customer services is also just a part of the Social CRM cake.

What I’m saying is that I would like to keep the focus of Social CRM on the Customer cake, just to prevent the cake from getting to big to digest. This most certainly does not mean that others can’t have part of the cake. To the contrary: listening, engaging and collaboration between (Potential) Customers, Employees and Partners is at the core of a Social CRM Strategy. They need to join in!

Thx for your comment on my comment on..
Wim Rampen´s last blog ..What A Social CRM Strategy is all about..

That is an excellent point, I will paraphrase a bit: ‘Until you learn some table manners, do not invite guests over for dinner.’

Mitch
mitch lieberman´s last blog ..mjayliebs: .@tnemelka: Lots of great comments and feedback: Social CRM or Social Business? http://bit.ly/Msoti #scrm #crm #e20 | commented

Maybe companies need to learn how to collaborate internally before trying to include the ‘outside world’. Implementing Enterprise 2.0 could be carried out in parallel (or in some cases could be a prerequisite) to implementing Social CRM tools. We could add to Paul definition something like “The company’s coherent response…”?
Mark Tamis´s last blog ..The Paradigm Shift is in the People, Social CRM is a Response to it

I too have been “good chunk of time recently on the other side of the fence”. I am collaborating with Prem on something that we will talk about next week. But, the precursor is my post SocialCRM and Enterprise 2.0 and convergence model

There is no doubt in my mind that Social CRM and E2.0 are absolutely slaying the same dragon (nice quote).

Mitch
mitch lieberman´s last blog ..mjayliebs: .@JohnFMoore: Anyone have a dictionary? | Think that was hard, I dare you to read it out loud! (@prem_k, @CRMStrategies)

Of course, what I’m referring to is salesforce.com, and with the benefit of hindsight we understand that the transformational aspect of what they did was not in the application itself but in the delivery and business models. And now they are a cloud computing platform company! So it’s really important to consider what innovations will enable rather than simply how they are currently being positioned and marketed.

So let’s apply this to an online support community.

If you have most of your customers regularly logging onto your community portal to interact with you, your partners, and other customers in order to maximize the value they receive from your products and services, what do you really have there? A support community? Well, yes, you have that. But what you really have is a hugely valuable asset that you didn’t have before–one that can be used in an infinite variety of ways to improve just about everything a company does–not just support. And it doesn’t take long for people outside support to figure that out.

Sales reps can follow the activity streams of their customers to find out what’s on their minds. Product managers can interact with people in the community who have demonstrated deep insight and expertise in using their products. Marketing folks can analyze activity streams to spot trends in value creation and unmet needs. Top executives can pinpoint trouble spots without filtering through the management chain. The list goes on and on.

Is that CRM? Is that SCRM? Is that part of being a socially-driven business? I think it’s all of the above.

As you can tell, our prior conversation about Social Business has had a big impact on my thinking. And I agree that the E20/SCRM divide is feeling more and more unnatural.

I’ve been spending a good chunk of time recently on the other side of the fence — with my friends Eugene Lee and Ross Mayfield at Socialtext. Their transformation from being a best-of-breed enterprise-class wiki company to a best-of-breed enterprise-class social platform company is amazing. Kudos to Eugene and Ross for pulling that off. But when I compare what they are doing to what we were doing at Helpstram, it’s very clear that both sides of the E2.0/SCRM divide are slaying the same dragon.

As for people being able to be social and collaborative without technology, you make an excellent point. It’s easy for us technology folks to think that this is all about technology, but of course it’s not.

I think Lithium is a good example of delivering horse and cart in the correct order. Though they’ve built some very cool technology, what they’ve really mastered and figured out how to deliver to their customers is a deep understanding of how to create and maintain positive interaction and collaboration among members of a community. The underlying principles have nothing to do with technology–the technology is only an enabler, though a pretty powerful one. These social technologys are doing for community collaboration what the airplane did for overseas travel–make it a whole lot easier.

I’m often refer exclusively to “businesses”, but you’re absolutely right–we’re really talking about every type of organization, not just businesses.

I, too, like to narrow the scope of problems we’re trying to solve. It tends to be the best way to solve them well. That’s one of the reasons I focused Helpstream on the customer service problem within social CRM, which perhaps is part of being a socially-driven business. I thought that would be the best place to both create compelling business value AND deliver the greatest cross-business impact.

But having worked directly with big corporate IT departments for most of my career, I think they are right in being concerned about the proliferation of disparate social systems. I sense the need for an underlying social technology platform that can be shared across multiple narrowly-focused processes. A Social OS if you will. What do you and others think about this concept?

In prior generations of business process innovation, the technology innovators assumed that eliminating people was the primary objective. Fewer people involved meant lower cost and fewer errors. This has been a basic assumption of technology-driven business process optimization for a very long time.

But that assumption is being challenged, if not proven completely wrong. Web-driven business process innovation is about the fusion of people, process, and technology. That’s what makes the Web unlike any prior generation of technology. People aren’t just a necessary evil, they are the most crucial element in the design of the system.

This change is causing business innovators to go back and revisit many of the basic assumptions about why and how companies do things. Of course that’s why we call it a paradigm shift (though I know many of you hate the p word). Once you change the basic assumptions, all prior conclusions need to be revisited.

Sid

When we met a few months ago, we talked about the term “Social Business.” I liked it then, and I still do, because it’s not a TLA and doesn’t immediately lead people to think only of software.

In fact, last year we settled on Social Business as one of our key editorial themes (http://www.customerthink.com/editor_topics/social_business) and defined it to mean, “Social media and customer co-creation strategies and technologies.”

Is it just me, or have we forgottent that people can be social and collaborate without technology?

Technology vendors seem to be positioning as either Enterprise 2.0 (internal) or Social CRM (external). Some vendors have told me that requirements are different, but I’m not entirely sure about that. Jive, for example, seems to be positioned a bit more on the Enterprise 2.0 side (by their competitors, anyway), but I’ve talked to customers that use it for customer communities, too.

Anyway, I think Social Business should include a company’s entire ecosystem of employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Maybe the term is an opportunity to bridge the E2.0/SCRM divide?

Many times companies will decide their Customer Service communities have to be gated, and will strictly be for Customers. They fear a lot of things which we won’t go into here.

What they miss by doing that is the opportunity to get their customers helping to influence the influencers, prospects, partners, and the rest of the ecosystem. BTW, CRM deals with all of those constituents today anyway, but now we’re talking about being Social. Private clubs are a two edged sword in terms of how they’re perceived: great if you’re invited, annoying if you’re not.

You don’t want to create too many communities either–each one is hard to build and hard to keep vibrant. Your customers won’t go to too many communities.

The answer, if you want to move beyond just using social for customer service is you want finer granularity of visibility, process, and operation in the Social CRM software so that these different roles can be realized in the fabric of the community.

It’s essential to the overall user experience.

To David Raab’s point, this controlled comingling eventually extends to every business function, and to linkages between internal and external communities. The interface between each has to be definable so that the right nutrients can pass the membrane and the toxins are minimized. That’s part technology (many tools lack the requisite permissioning subtleties) and a lot strategy and forethought about how you set things up and integrate.

Cheers,

Bob Warfield

PS Great post, BTW, Tony.
Bob Warfield´s last blog ..The Experience Portfolio: Thinking about Customer Experience Strategy