"Social"ing the email - openly!

This week has been rife with raves & rants about Google's Wave & Microsoft's Bing. Adding my two cents to it.

Someone told me that Bing was "But its not Google". Don't know the sentiment behind it, but for me its been a let down. Go to the site & you get only a coming soon message. Hit the link there to watch a video thats promising the stardust from the Andromeda galaxy or the magazine both in the same place under different categories. Watch the video to understand what I mean, it shows off what can be done with Bing. Still waiting for them to deliver. I've become resigned to their failing servers, remember their recent product launches?

BTW, Bing seems just a re-branding exercise by MSFT for their existing Live Search. But wonder why they chose such a word that has lots of negative meaning attached to it!

Wave too is currently a vaporware but at least the site has a video that is more than mere teaser/marketing & gives you links to other places with info related to it. To give credit to the MSFT marketers, they have done a far better job than the techies at Google, by keeping the length of the video pretty short.

Now I'll delve a bit on Google's Wave since its all about "social"ing the email! What exactly is Wave? And why is it such a big deal even though theres nothing in it to show off until later this year?

To get some more background on Wave hit their About page or Mashable's guide to Wave.

Google defines Wave thus on its site:

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

The above diagram from ZDNet blogs tries to define whats happening in Wave. Its a very interesting post by Dion Hinchcliffe. But if the terms Wave, Wavelet, Blip confuse you look at the below graphic:

Still confused? Well you just need to read that Mashable Wave Guide. Yet all these are mere technicalities.

The real crux of this post is to scrutinize the "social" aspect of Wave. Though Google likes to define wave as a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, I like how Mashable has put it:

It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

As per the "social"ing of enterprise apps description, an application becomes social if it allows its users to share & network. And this the Wave allows us to do by the cart load. It remains to see if it allows people to "follow" or "friend" inside an enterprise. I have not been able to figure this one out, but I hope that its "follow" rather than "friend". How do they differ?

In a "friend"ing app one needs to take the permission of the other person they want to network with & only upon agreement by both parties involved is a "connection" created, over which sharing happens.

In a "follow"ing app one keeps sharing stuff & others listen in. If others find the shared stuff interesting then they "follow" the person. This person is now under no compulsion to "follow" back. So the networks are more value based & not imposed.

It would be great if the shared stuff is by default available to the whole enterprise & restrictions have to be explicitly imposed, say to keep the discussion within a project team due to NDA agreements with the customer for whom the project is being executed. The conversations are then discoverable by the others in the organization & experts, otherwise not known to the initial team, could join the discussions. Also, others interested in a topic but not with much knowledge could just listen in to the conversations & learn from them.

The same when applied to the enterprise & customers, then the open conversations forces the enterprise to always be truthful & accountable. Privacy issues can be overcome through private discussions anyhow.

So no wonder am looking forward to the Twave extension for Google Wave. :) There are lots of other promising examples of the Google Wave. Do have a look at them.

Last but not the least, Wave is based on an Open Protocol! :D Not only has it created an open protocl, Google has also contributed the patent covering Wave to the public domain! What more can one say? :)

If you are interested in implementing the wave protocol in an application of your own or are interested in building the Wave API or using it in your client applications, please do feel free to read the Google Code page for Google Wave API. :)

Mysore palace? No thanks ...

... I'll take my mom any time, day or night. ;)
Om in his trademark bearhug stance, with Shalini, in front of the Mysore palace.

Om's first vacation

And mine too in a long long time!
Om plays in the baby pool while Shalini enjoys a rest.
We are at the Cicada resort, Bandipura.

"Social"ing the applications

The term "Social" in digital technologies applies to the social "Activities" & "Networks" that people perform & build in these platforms.

By Social "Activities" I mean the various functions like sharing, commenting, rating, reviewing, etc. (also called lifestreaming) and conversing on these platforms. It also includes actions like "friending" or "following".

One could argue that what I present as social "activities" is what is already very well established as Social "Media". What I would like to argue is that the term "Media" is a plural of "Medium" and that it refers to the channel that the users use to do the Social "Activities" between themselves.

The outcome of the social "activities" is what is also called as Social "Data" or "Metadata" - shared content, comments, ratings, reviews, friends, followers, etc.

By Social "Networks" I mean the network of people built either explicitly (by friending or following) or implicitly by becoming members of groups, communities, tribes, forums, etc. in these platforms. Social "networks" tell us how the social "data" flows across the users and how the various social "activities" of the individual users influence the other users' activities.

Most "social" sites allow people to build their networks first and then let them do activities. Most of these activities relate to sharing information & conversations around the shared stuff. Even the numerous games, quizzes, etc. apps that members use on Facebook and other such networking sites allow them to share the results with their friends & most applications also ask of them to share it with their friends so that the usage of the applications increase.

There are however sites that allow a conversation to happen around shared stuff and then the relationships between the members builds over time based on these conversations. Twitter immediately jumps to the forefront here. However, all the bulletin boards & forums of the old come under this category too. Many of these old systems did not allow the users to "friend" or "follow" others but there is no denying the fact that networks existed on these boards/forums albeit implicit.

I am of the opinion that relationships that are built upon conversations and interactions of the members prove far stronger ties than the networks that people build for the sake of building a huge network. Communities with a shared interest, one that they are passionate about and communicate a lot tend to grow in quality and quantity over time. Seth Godin would like to put in the need for leader(s) to tie the community & provide it with a sense of purpose, thus making it a Tribe.

So applications that aspire to become "social" must provide a social "medium" to its users so that they share what they have done using the application and have conversations around their activities in the application. The "social" features should also allow the activity of "following" so that networks are built.

The above not only applies to web sites but also to any traditional groupware or traditional enterprise applications. This idea of extrapolating the "social" to all & any application was conceived and propounded by my good friend and our CKO, Sukumar as what he called Social "Working".

Oracle's Social CRM confirms to Sukumar's views since it allows the sales force to share their accomplishments and customer data with others and also "friend" colleagues. The networks are built based on these social activities of sharing, conversing & friending. This leads to greater collaboration as well as knowledge sharing among the sales force, usually far flung and cut throat.

Being a CKO & responsible for the organization's Knowledge Management Sukumar espoused it from "within" the firewall POV. I however feel that this is true for anywhere and it is actually very effective for building communities even outside of the firewall.

Forrester's Sr. Analyst Jeremiah Owyang's recent report on the Five Eras of Social Web talk of the imminent era of social "colonization". Jeremiah says that new social technologies like OpenID, OpenSocial, Facebook Connect, Google, etc. will make even normal sites into "social" sites. I see that this is not going to take off until these new technologies do not allow social "activities" to happen.

Widgets from Facebook & Google allows the users to brings their friends to the sites that include these widgets, but currently doesn't allow them do much. There are however services like Disqus, etc. that allow people to converse over various places as well as bring their network with them to these various sites.

Meebo's Community IM allows conversations among the network but is low on the other social activities. The Firefox add-on Glue makes it easy to share, rate, review and network around stuff on the net but is bound to only Firefox.

The Flock browser takes it all to an even greater level by incorporating all these social "activities" & "networks" into the browser itself. Here again it is a browser specific feature. Glue & Flock needs all the members to be using the same tools on the client machine.

All of the above seem to concentrate on social "activities" or social "networks", not both. However, AOL's SocialThing for Websites seems to be an all-rounder but seems a bloat and there are not many people using them yet.

So for the moment it is "activities" vs "networks" faceoff among the social apps. I am not betting on either of these parties just yet since they have to beat out a lot of kinks in them and make them uber simple for both the webmasters to implement in their sites as well as make them intuitive for the users to use them.

This is a

mango.
Om poses in front a mango tree laden with raw mangoes.

Auto with dual license

and both of them expired!

Why Social Media folks misunderstand CRM?

Let us not even consider the fact that CRM is a business strategy. Let us only confine ourselves to the prevalent view that CRM is software.

This CRM class of software is classified as Enterprise software and not Consumer software. And whats the difference between the two classes?

I will limit it to two distinctions:

1. Enterprise softwares have HUGE implementation base, running upto 100K seats even! Whereas consumer software is sold in smaller numbers, mostly in 10s.
2. Enterprise software is bought by the CIO & "pushed" onto users. Consumer software is bought by individuals or smaller groups.

Now consider the professional social media folks (professional bloggers, etc. who are very vocal on social media & can attract a lot of eye balls & influence a lot of buyers too). They are paid to get more traffic on to their blogs (calculated by advertisers as CPM or Cost per Thousand viewers). Consider TechCrunch or Mashable or such kind, they are examples of blogs that track consumer software. On the other hand are sites like ZDNet blogs where people mostly blog about Enterprise Software.There are many other blogs too, however, they all get too focused & classified by the class of enterprise software. For CRM, you have blogs under destinationCRM.com, insightCRM.com, CustomerThink.com, etc.

Who do you think gets more viewership? And what is the kind of viewership the two kinds of blogs get?

The consumer technology blogs are more akin to the dailies or at least like say the Chip magazine (pls put US equivant here) thats read by users of software. They reach a lot more people than say the CIO magazine which is mostly read by people who make the buying decisions of Enterprise Software.

As Robert Scoble tells us, Enterprise Software is not sexy! (But please do read Vinnie's response too!)

Don´t you think I´m SEXY?

 Image Credits: http://www.worth1000.com/contest.asp?contest_id=19102

Now most Social Media folks come from the earlier category (both authors as well as readers). Apprently they get their knowledge of CRM from what news strays into mainstream media or the receptacle of all wisdom - Wikipedia - since most prominent bloggers with most readership dont write about enterprise software.

So when social media experts (I mean real experts, not merely proponents or those who claim to be but can't prove as one) say that social media tools like Twitter can transform into CRM based on what visibility/insights they have had into CRM, everybody starts repeating is as a chant, without really understanding the depth of the matter.

(Slightly OT: I guess Twitter does a great job of creating small enough headlines & the RT-ing permeates the small headlines, which then gets transmogrified into a mantra like chanting. A mantra is essentially some small word or phrase chanted repeatedly.)

Thankfully some of the social media experts recognize the need to make CRM & Social Media fall in love & marry them off, like many of us in the Social CRM buddy group do.

Wish more such collaborations happen between the social media & CRM experts, especially those who understand that Social CRM should not be lead the way of traditional CRM.

Finally, a few thoughts about what should happen to CRM (without getting too hung up on the nomenclature - call it CRM 2.0/Social CRM/SRM/SR/Whatever):

From trying to "control" the customer experience, CRM will have to shift to "providing" customer experience & "enabling" collaboration on multiple levels by "participating" in conversations with the customers across various new social media channels and new locations on the online socnets/communities.


The businesses that understand the above need & incorporate it will come out winners, the rest will become whiners since they will be forced to incorporate those changes. Because of the onslaught of the technologies that are putting the power into the hands of the customers.


The new stuff will be about engagement, collaboration & co-creation with the customers by the business.


Social CRM is the peace pipe from businesses to customers armed with social media & VRM (vendor relationship management, which Paul equates to the Labor Unions!). But rather than pitting against each other, Social CRM should be able to bring together all the parties in a business ecosystem for collaboration & co-creation. It is no longer only business to customer but also the other way as well as customer to customer too.


A lot of clarity arises (at least for me) if we consider the M is CRM as "organize" rather than "control" over C, R or CR.

Do you think the above can help the Social Media folks & other CRM unintiates "get" it? What simpler way would you put it across to them? Please do let us know. :)