The Social CRM Zeitgeist

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I woke up this Saturday morning, yet again, to an important announcement that was made the evening of the US' Friday. And I find the world changed yet again. :)

I am of course talking about the humongous report on what consists of Social CRM at the moment that the Altimeter group has come out with - "Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management".

Put together by Ray Wang & Jeremiah Owyang after talking to a huge cross section of the influencers & vendors in Social CRM and a hundred pioneers, the report captures the zeitgeist of the Social CRM landscape and provides the 18 use cases that they recognized! The talking alone would have drained me, but these guys talked & even made sense out of it all! And to top it all, they make it very easy to understand. :)

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The 18 use cases is a good starting point & helps businesses to figure out where they could get started with Social CRM, if they already do not know. Most businesses that I had talked to do have a clue where it could possibly help their business, but not sure how to do it as part of a business strategy. So they are left to resort to some patch work of tactics. The 18 use cases list would help the businesses have an epiphany.

But the report doesn't stop there. It also gives you the state of the IT enablers as of today.

Don't get me wrong. IT has been sullied a lot in the previous round of CRM buzz due to the various failed projects, and then finally it dawned on the business world that CRM is not about the software as the vendors led them to believe, but CRM is a business philosophy.

This does not change with Social CRM - its also about the business philosophy, about being customer centric. However, this round its been forced upon the businesses because of the advances in the social web - or rather the adoption of the advances in technologies by the customers. So it is imperative that IT gets into the equation, however they cannot dictate how to do it. IT's role is to help the business with the infrastructure. And so why IT is part of the decision making process, it does not drive it.

Ok, getting down from my soapbox, lets see why the Altimeter report is important from an IT perspective.

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They actually talked to the vendors in the fray to provide Social CRM solutions (even if they do not claim or realize to be in the fray) and rated their wares. The matrix they have created (Magic Quadrant?) is very good in stating which are the technologies that the businesses can have right now as well as which are the technologies that businesses are willing to buy, by when. A great tool for both vendors as well as businesses [very similar to a MQ I had in our innovations team to help figure out which are the ideas we should invest in to convert them into Innovations].

This is a very key babystep in furthering the field of Social CRM. Comes right next to the stake in the ground on the definition of Social CRM by Paul Greenberg, which I see as an academic definition that most practitioners derive from to fit their purposes, including myself and our team. There is no one present who can cater to the whole gamut that Paul's definition encompasses.

The use cases are a key intermediary step in furthering the understanding of the field and convert into an application in the business.

Businesses need to then figure out how to implement it - whats the methodology, what frameworks are available, whats the governance model. This is what keeps me busy right now. :)

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

P.S.: I am very glad that Altimeter decided to release this report under the Creative Commons license! So please feel free to reuse it, but don't you try to sell it off as yours & cheat Altimeter. Always attribute it to them and don't take money for the report.