Walk The Talk '09, The Lalith, Bangalore

Image by ScorpFromHell via Flickr

Last Saturday I was invited to a panel discussion on Social Media for entrepreneurs where I shared the dais with Professor Suresh Bhagavatula - IIM Bangalore, Sanjay Mehta - Founder & CEO of Social Wavelength, a Social Media Outsourcing company and Vijay Rayapati - Strategist at GizaPage.com.

The event called "Walk-The-Talk '09" was organized by the Bangalore Business Network and had awesome talks from various entrepreneurs.

The panel discussion started off with Sanjay (whom I met on Twitter) sharing some interesting statistics about social media & networks some of which are given below:

• Social Network has surpassed porn as the #1 activity on the net!
• Some timelines w.r.t. getting 5 million users are compared:
  
  
  • Radio: 38 years
  • Television: 13
  • Internet: 4 years
  • Ipod: 3 years
  • Facebook: Added 100 million users in less than 9 months
  • iPhone Apps: Hit 1 billion in 9 months

and for more such stats watch this AWESOME youtube video about the Social Media Revolution.


I started by emphasising on the parallels between the real world networking that entrepreneurs do, like in the current event we were all present & the online networks to increase it in size & speed. I talked about social media & networks mostly from a social CRM perspective, most of which I have already shared on this blog.

I used the threadless.com example to explain how a pure online company makes & sells awesome t-shirts by getting the community to submit & rate the t-shirt designs, pre-order the t-shirts so that threadless.com makes only as many t-shirts as required & how the customers are their biggest advocates since they take pictures of themselves posing in threadless.com t-shirts and thus eliminating the marketing costs too! Talk about customer co-creation & keeping the costs to the minimum!

I also shared a bit about how social media & networks affect the core functions of CRM - Marketing, Sales & Customer Service. And how it even goes beyond that into co-creating offerings & experiences with the customers (on being prodded by Prof. Suresh about Ram Charan's book about the same).

Image by ScorpFromHell via Flickr

Someone in the audience said that they did not understand how can a site where people talk about what they ate for breakfast can help in building a business & I, rather than taking the examples of Comcast or Jetblue, etc., told of my own experience in networkin in Twitter, where I have nearly 2000 people following me & follow a bit more than half as much. I get to learn so much from them, and that alone is worth the effort! Others agreed to it & took it as a great insight.

Sanjay explained about the 4 Ps of social media & I explained about our three phase approach of Listen-Engage-Influence that is supported by Measure & Analyze at all the stages.

At the end of the panel discussion, that overran the time limit by a bit, Mr. Tarun Hukku presented us mementos (no, momento is actually a misspelling, but its quite common and thus some sources refer it as a proper spelling). BTW, in the picture it seems as if I am presenting it to Tarun. ;)

Bye bye Ganesha!

The festival celebrating the elephant headed God culminates with the ceremonial drowning of the idol.

This panoramic shot was taken in Ramanagaram near Bangalore at the Rangarayaru Doddi Kere.

SFH blog moves a notch up in Google Caffeine

Image by eyeore2710 via Flickr

You might be aware that Google has previewed a newer version of its search engine, code named Caffeine. There are some major changes under way that affects how websites are ranked.

Though I did take a look by searching for the term "social crm", the changes in the rankings were not easy evident to me.

Now it is easy to compare them side by side using this cool tool that I got to know from labnol.org.

Interesting changes for the term "social crm"! The following are what I found out a while back.

I see Michael Moaz's Gartner blog moving up while Brent's blog has gone down. Surprisingly Paul's ZDNet blog does not make it to the top ten at all! Jeremiah's blog too goes down a notch but he now gets two entries in the top ten!

Oracle seems to be slowly crawling to the top, which is still held by Filiberto Selvas. Most interestingly this blog moves up & makes it to the top 30! ;)

Among the most vocal vendors in social CRM, Helpstream pips both Radian6 & Lithium. Click on the below image to find other changes.

But does this mean much for those in the social CRM game? Or do you want to be discovered via the social web - blogs, twitter, social bookmark sites, etc.? What is your take? Which is higher priority - SEO or Social Search?

Enterprise 2.0 vs Social CRM - Fight or Tango?

There is either a new storm brewing in the horizon or may be just a mirage, it is unclear as yet. I am talking about the enterprise social software of course, couldn't you figure that from the heading of this post? ;)

With the recent grouping of forces around Paul Greenberg's stake in the ground on the definition of the term Social CRM, especially with the claims of various social technology companies as being Social CRM, there are some confusions and ribbing in equal measures.

The witty, nutty & immensely influential Enterprise Irregulars have joined the fray after Ross Mayfield of SocialText blogged a great megapost on Social CRM iceberg, making it a very interesting discussion in the immediate bloghood. Well, it isn't very popular in the blogosphere since you know ... enterprise software is not exactly sexy ... and so many people do not take such a keen interest in at as they take in consumer software. :)

Ok, let us look at what is defined as Enterprise 2.0 by the fountain of knowledge - wikipedia:

Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen defined Enterprise 2.0 in a report written for Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM)as "a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise".

See? Even wikipedia doesn't have one! But thats still far better than Social CRM since it doesn't even have an entry!

What I want to say is that though the people who follow Enterprise 2.0 & Social CRM understand what it is in the hearts of their hearts, there is not any widely agreed upon definition. In fact I have come to believe that it might be very difficult to define them as yet, this might be because these are still evolving fields.

Please do not get me wrong or misjudge me. I have had experience in implementing & using social software in the enterprises for the past four years. And I do "get" the thing about using social software in the enterprise.

I however like to differentiate between the social software implementations per the audience - internal facing for employees, external facing for customers, partners, etc. in the business ecosystem.

Let us see what the Andrew McAfee, who coined the term, defines it as:

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

So clearly the use of social software for customer facing purposes is also Enterprise 2.0. So does this not prove Social CRM to be a subset of Enterprise 2.0?

Not so fast there! Issue is that the term Enterprise 2.0 has predominantly been used to denote the internal facing social software, with internal collaboration, knowledge management/sharing, productivity, agility as the goal. So for the sake of this post let us treat Enterprise 2.0 as the use of social software within the organization. In such a case I believe Social CRM has an area of intersection with Enterprise 2.0 rather than being a subset. But lets not get too tied up with the semantics or get too pedantic. :)

I believe that there is a clear necessity for Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM to co-exist, since efficient employees lead to better customer experience.

Technology wise too there is overlap in many aspects if you consider the usage of blogs, wikis, forums, microblogging, etc. in both internal facing & external facing aspects. But the way the blogs, wikis, etc. are managed for internal & external use is clearly demarcated and is not advisable to be handled by same people.

There are many differences in privacy, rights, roles, permissions, integration & other perspectives that make a huge differentiation in the base technologies. In an internal implementations you do not bother about the personal privacy, but do take care to provide access rights & permissions based on roles & team/department one belongs to, where one is in the organization structure. The permissions are set either by the user or at a system level by the administrator or even a manager. In an external implementation personal privacy of the users is paramount (Marshall Lager has a great post about that on the CRM Playaz blog). Also, the rights & permissions are set by users based on the degree of separation in their social relationships, not team/department/organization structure.

Additionally, for a social CRM implementation, the kind of integration with other enterprise systems is different from that of an internal implementation. For internal implementations you do not need the feedback loop to be completed by the social media monitoring tools nor do you need integration with the user components like OpenID, OAuth, Facebook Connect, Google Connect, etc. So there are differences in architectural considerations too!

In Cognizant we have various Enterprise 2.0 tools like our ChannelOne forums, Ch1blogs, Cognizant 2.0 collaboration & project management platform, wikis, etc. But they cannot be used for an online customer community involved in customer advocacy, brainstorming, resolving issues, disseminating information, etc. nor can we build a Ideastorm like community or a Coca Cola Facebook community. Nor can the team that implemented the internal tools do the external implementation. Just because a mallet & gavel are related does not mean you can always use them interchangeably. :D

I believe Enterprise 2.0 (internally focused) & Social CRM need to tango, not fight. :)

How about you? What do you think? What has been your experience?

Responding to the conversations - social CRM

We have now more or less agreed that social CRM is the response by the business to the control of the conversation & ecosystem by the customer. So it is now imperative that we help the businesses in responding to the customers in a valuable yet scalable way.

The way I like to look at my social CRM options is in terms of a 2x2 grid of real-time & community based conversation axes. It is all about when does a customer get a response & from whom. The medium is immaterial, could be an archaic forum or nouveau twitter. If you get your query answered within minutes its real-time. If you get it answered by someone not with the business, it is community based.

Community based conversations are the new outside-to-outside conversations that are happening and alarming the businesses. These cannot be controlled, only be influenced and that when the business has engaged itself in the conversations & built relationships with the community on trust & transparency. Look for help in this form of conversation from folks like Jive, Lithium, SocialText, etc. We merely need to integrate these systems with our traditional systems like CRM, DW/BI, etc.

Businesses need to take decisions only for non-community (which actually means a paid representative of the business) based conversations be they real-time (twitter, IRC, etc.) or not (forums, youtube, blogs, etc.).

For non real-time conversations, businesses can take some time to react to the people, thus allowing the business to gather some more data & analyze & review & approve the response(s). Here we can build very many systems using existing DW/BI technologies. Just need an NLP piece in there somewhere.

Real-time conversations call for quick thinking calling for deep experience about the business (organization, culture, financials, etc.) & its offerings. This is human intensive, for the time being, quite expensive & not too scalable. Explicit & clear guidelines are a great way to scale the conversations by roping in more people from the organization (or outsourced) who are not too deeply mired in the organization culture to handle easy conversations & routing it to the superstars for the tougher ones, usually requiring deep insights as well as authority to decide standing-on-their-feet.

Another way to make them (real-time non-community conversations) slightly more scalable is by using realtime sentiment analysis & other NLP techniques. Look at peoplebrowsr or OpenAmplify or the open source twitgraph.

Real-time-community based conversations are something that we cannot decide or control in real-time. These are only stuff that organizations can aim to influence over a period of time by building relationships with the community.

So how does all this responding affect social CRM? I guess we need to look at Mitch's post on social CRM data for more inspiration. :)