Social CRM - A probable architecture?

This is an architecture I came up with to explain a Social CRM solution. There are a lot of details left in the abstraction I had to use. I leave that to be worked out by the reader.

Is this architecture in alignment with what you view as a Social CRM solution? Is this achievable? Please let me know. :)

Update:
@mjayliebs, VP, SugarCRM, was kind enough to point out that I did not do a good job with the arrows. I will request the reader to consider a two-way arrow between the ext. systems (user components) & service/case mgmt boxes (traditional crm systems), until the time I am able to update the diagram & upload it.

Update 2:
I have posted the updated version of the above diagram on Flickr as well as Friendfeed. An explanation of the updated diagram is provided as a slideshare presentation in another post in this blog.

Social Apps for Social CRM - some options

We saw some characteristics of the Social Apps in an enterprise in my previous post. In this post, I will restrict myself to Social Apps in a Social CRM context and give you some options for their implementation.

In the Cloud

There are many social apps in the cloud, here I mean the Internet. I guess you are very well aware of most of them. The "Conversation Prism" by Brian Solis of the PR 2.0 blog should serve our purpose pretty well, since Brent Leary  says Social CRM is all about conversations. :)

Any which way, the apps in the above diagram are a good representation of the social apps available up in the cloud.

But how do we get them to server our purpose here, which is Social CRM? For that we need integrators. And we might also need to open up our firewalls, albeit selectively & cautiously.

When our CRM app is also in the cloud, like with salesforce.com or SugarCRM based on demand CRM services, we are a tad well off in implementing the integrators. We don't have to deal with opening up firewalls for one, and we don't have to undergo the hassles of setting up the integrators as another.

For salesforce.com we have connectors to Facebook & also upcoming in the near future is a connector to Twitter. FB connector lets you pull in profile details of your customers provided they friend you & allow you to pull in their data on Facebook. Twitter connector will allegedly allow you the service/support personnel to respond to customer tweets in real time and also incorporate them into the Knowledge Base as well as share them with partners.

Please bear in mind, I have not tried out any of the above. So if there are any incorrect statements please do let me know.

On terrafirma

The toughest is setting up social apps on premise & integrating it with the existing CRM apps, also installed on premise. This would be huge exercise and a great opportunity for any integrator. (Disclaimer: my employer is one such integrator with offshore options & I myself lead the CoE for CRM 2.0/Social CRM for my employer.)

Freedom to choose

Being an open source enthusiast, I have tried many open source social apps. I had posted some tweets too about some of them. :) Let me elaborate on them & some more.

BuddyPress - This is a still in beta social n/w app built as a set of plugins for the immensly popular Wordpress platform, specifically the Wordpress MU (multi user) platform. Its got the usual suspects features of profiles, friends, groups, status updates, etc. And of course, its got a splendid blogging backend along with all those other plugins for wordpress.

Enterprises would like to use this if there are lots of creators or at least have majority above the joiners level in the Social Technographics Ladder of Forrester. Since this is difficult to expect from the customers, might be a great internal facing app. But thats just my guess.

There is however no monitoring features in it as yet nor has any integration with tradition CRM systems attempted to the best of my knowledge.

Elgg -  This is a robust option for building social networking sites either on premise or recently, on demand.

Elgg has profiles, friends, activities, notifications, groups, blogs & microblogging. Much like BuddyPress.

I guess its lure will be for those who would prefer a cloud solution that is provided by elgg.com.

Joomla - Though this is technically a Content Management System, it does have many extensions to provide it social capabilities - both networking as well as media.

Joomla Community Builder is the most popular of the communities extensions that provide n/w features like profiles, friends, groups, etc. CB has also spawned many other extensions that build on top of it and thus provide more social features. One of the most popular is the Twitter connector that allows displaying a user's tweets on his/her profile.

Since Joomla is a CMS, it can also be used to run the social media campaigns. Text, images, videos, audio all are covered. So evidently this is an ideal choice for marketers!

However the best compelling aspect is the availability of CRM bridges! They are all however only about lead generation in SugarCRM. :(

I look forward to a connector between one of the forum extensions in Joomla (preferably one thats integrated with CB, like the Fireboard forum) and the service module of SugarCRM.

Get me the scapegoat

Many enterprises are still not comfortable with open source options for various reasons. One that stands out as a sore thumb is theres nobody to take the responsbility for the product, though many service providers are coming forward to support the FLOSS options, its yet to take off big time in the CRM perspective albeit the small success of SugarCRM and such.

In such cases, enterprises go for proprietary options, even it means license costs, et al. along with support costs.

I will try & cover some proprietary social apps in the next post soon. So hang on tight and let me know how you liked this post. :)

Social Apps in the enterprise

Social Networking Systems (SNS) & Social Media Apps (SMA) collectively form the Social Apps. Social Apps form a sub set of what are called the web 2.0 technologies. They provide the capability to connect, find, aggregate, filter, and share on the web. Social Relationships, user generated Content & open conversations along with social metadata consisting of user reviews, ratings, etc. (as called by Oracle's VP for Social CRM, Anthony Lye) are what can be collectively called the Social Data.


In an enterprise context the Social Apps can be either internal facing (for employees) or external facing (for customers). Sometimes it is very easy to differentiate - the two are present on the two sides of the corporate firewall: confined to intranet within the firewall or open to the internet beyond the firewall. But sometimes, the difference can be in the user definition - employee or other. Either way, integrating the social data with the enterprise data is the key challenge from an IT POV. [I have already covered about Social Data & CRM Data in an earlier post.]

When used inside the enterprise, social apps are typically extolled for their collaborative powers & are claimed to be great for Knowledge Management among other things. (Disclaimer: My employer uses social media, esp. blogs & forums pretty effectively.) The use of web 2.0 technologies, including the social apps, inside an enterprise is generally termed as Enterprise 2.0.

The other side of the firewall or the outside world sees the Social Apps as customer channels. If these channels are tied in traditional CRM systems, it then becomes a Social CRM. Some people prefer to call it CRM 2.0, but IMHO, CRM 2.0 is much more than mere integration of Social Apps from an IT POV. Whatever it is called, in the external context, the Social Apps are used primarily to influence the buying process of the customers. [View this earlier post to know more about how social apps align to the buying process.]

There are quite a few Social Apps available in the market. Though they started either as internal or external facing apps, they seem to be providing features allowing the use of the same package for both purposes.

It would be interesting though to see how they allow for the integration of the Social Data with the enterprise data, for both Enerprise 2.0 as well as CRM 2.0.

In the next post, I will try & compare some of the social apps from the vendors available today.

P.S.: Since I am not too aware of enterprise data from a Enterprise 2.0 aspect I would like to ask you the readers to help me with this. :)

Are they really "social"?

I have deep interests in FLOSS, open standards, social media, online communities & social CRM. And this is pretty evident even in this blog of mine.

I am a staunch believer that knowledge is a wealth that grows by sharing unlike other wealths, that can only diminish. And probably that's why I have a more than passing affinity to the stuff mentioned above.

And web 2.0 driven by social media (or is it the other way?) is supposed to be a paradigm shift mainly because of "user generated content".

What that means is that with advent of some new ways of using existing technologies, the users (as opposed to the web masters) can now create or generate content in the form of blogs, comments, tweets, ratings, reviews, polls, links, images, videos, etc.

The whole web 2.0 world is supposed to be one "free" space that is enriched by the concept of crowdsourcing, which believes that people in the online community are usually as good or even better than experts!

The basic premise of all these:

• the ease of producing content 
• the freedom to share them
• the trust to connect with the community.

However, we still have the demon of copyrights & intellectual property rights to deal with. Add to it the concerns of privacy, DMCA, et al. and it starts getting pretty dark & forbidding! A lawyers heaven.

And this has been responded to in two major formats. One that allows freedom, other that prohibits it in theory but not always in practice.

The individuals on this "writers' web" are pretty open & contribute their stuff mostly as per one of the Creative Common licenses. This usually means that you can share & redistribute their content with varying degrees of restrictions. But, share & redistribute you can. Many provide stuff using the GNU Free Document License, like the wikipedia, that allows you lots of freedom with the content. These and some other such licenses are called progressive licenses.

The most commercial sites & communities however adopt the overly protectionist means w.r.t. content. They all seem the same & predominantly mean the following:

1. You cannot share or distribute any of the content we own & provide on this site, ever, anywhere. You cannot also create derivative stuff from them.
   
2. Any content that you submit here are ours for ever & everywhere. We can deem use it in any form, either in original or in any derived means.

The above terms are what I like to refer to as the "All your base are belong to us" (AYBABTU) terms. ;)

So heres a list of Terms of Use from various social media & community sites, where content is shared and how they seem to treat user generated content (If I am wrong, please do let me know. I am willing to stand corrected):

Twitter (What's Yours is Yours) - User is owner of their content. Suggest users to contribute to public domain or use progressive licensing terms.

Facebook -  AYBABTU. You still own your content though.

Mashable - AYBABTU.

Wikipedia - Copyleft. GFDL. Content is free to share & redistribute.


SAP Developer Network - Mine is mine, take permission to use it. Yours is yours.

IBM Developer Works - Pretty complex for my limited brains!

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer & the above opinions are to the best of my limited knowledge & are not meant to serve as a legal help or to slander any body or entity or concern.


What other sites should be evaluated? Please let us know through your comments. :)

Social Media & Social Networks in Social CRM

There was an excellent discussion around the place of Social Media in CRM last week on the #SCRM channel on Twitter. The agreed consensus was that Social Media should be treated as just another customer channel in CRM system as initially suggested by Jesus Hoyos.

This inherently means measuring the effectiveness of the channel. And Jill Dyche too agrees with that in her latest post today. She also talks about the talking-listening-acting stuff that I covered in a slightly different manner in my last post on Trust & Reputation in Social CRM as listen-analyse-influence.

And then yesterday I had a conversation with Fabio Cipriani about including set up of blogs/wikis/networks in CRM 2.0 strategy, not just using Social CRM tools. This was quite the other end of the spectrum from where Jill was approaching the issue of Social CRM.

To add more depth to Fabio's query, let me state what is coming out as a key point in the current Gartner CRM Summit under way in UK (emphasis mine):

"In '99 it was Y2K, technical uncertainties and anxieties around technical capabilities," Kaila said. "You're seeing a similar level of anxiety today, and it's really around the rise of social networking. Customers are really empowered. Companies are not the first place people go for information. From an enterprise perspective, they're becoming a little insecure about how to support or integrate it. In my
opinion, apart from the global economic crisis, companies are most worried about social networking and how that impacts how they interact with customers."

This fear stated above is in fact supported by survey reports too. As per a recent study by Coleman Parks Research (get a summary of it here from Avanade):

1. More than 75 percent of companies worldwide admit that social networking will come into the business undetected if not pro-actively managed.
   
2. Approximately 60 percent of respondents say integrating social media technologies is not on the agenda.
   
3. Only 18 percent of respondents have any kind of strategy in place to integrate these technologies within the company for employees.

If that was not damning enough, the real deterrents seem to be perceived fears (at least to me), especially of the unknown, though I do not blame the risk averse IT:

1. Concerns about security (76 percent).
   
2. Senior management apathy (57 percent).
   
3. Fear of using unproven technologies (58 percent).
   
4. Half of companies fear a negative impact on productivity.

Concerns about security diminishes if businesses implement social media & networking apps within their firewall rather than rely on external sites/services. Business can certainly build niche brand centric communities & in fact profit from it! These are what I call at my work place as "gated communities". These gated communities would provide both social networking features as well as social media for user content creation. The gated communities have to be integrated with CRM systems obviously and there needs to be ETL of Social & CRM Data.

The rest of the deterrents need just plain education.

Finally, I posted my first attempt at mapping the stages in buying process of a customer to Social Media yesterday, with some inspiration & examples from searching & discussions in the social web as well as more traditional means of reading dead tree materials, etc.

To summarise this post, my reading from all these recent conversations around Social Media & Social Networks in Social CRM:

1. Social Media is just another customer channel in CRM & needs to be measured for its effective use.
2. Social CRM is the effective use of Social Media, out there on the Internet as well as gated communities, aligned to the customer's buying process.
3. Listen, Analyse & Influence are the three golden tasks of a Social CRM process.
   

P.S.: If any proprietary information has been posted, pls do let me know & I will take it off if required.