My video interview with Lithium Tech - all about Social CRM

As an innovations manager at the Customer Solutions Practice of Cognizant, I had been enabling the teams to come up with new ideas, build on them, provide support to develop them into offerings, market them, the whole shebang.

We even built a system that allowed people to submit ideas, comment on them, rate them, categorize them, allow the management to evaluate them (Neuron Magic Quadrant), provided a hosted project environment for collaborating on the building and an application exchange for the finished offerings.

Thats how the whole idea of integrating social technologies with CRM systems came up. I took a personal interest in it & started looking into it in full earnest & over time with passion and increasing conviction & commitment.

Lithium is one such organization that has the conviction, commitment & passion in leveraging the power of the communities for business.

I had been to their offices during my San Francisco visit earlier this week to discuss on our new partnership & chalk out joint strategies to help our customers dig into the whole social thing.

I met with a lot of people there with whom I have been conversing over twitter, mails, etc. and it was all a new kind of deja vu. Meeting people in the flesh after long interactions over the digital medium is not new to me (thanks to the onsite/offshore model at Cognizant) but the interactions that we have over twitter is not really a "professional" relationship.

And I am glad to say that this new way of communicating brings in that extra social touch that sometimes is lacking in the professional email interactions.

Paul Gilliham, Lithium's Director of Customer Marketing interviewed me when I visited their Emeryville offices. It was fun (lots of passersby interrupting the interview for one) and revealing to me. The setup was all so very simple - just a camcorder, a flip cam, a lapel mic and two tripods - and yet am impressed with the quality of the video. Take a look for yourself:


Thank you Paul for the honor! :) (And thanks for introducing me to a new term - whistlestop tour!)

Dumbing down Social CRM

White House after the blizzard (pic by mkrigsman)

I have been in the US this past week. The journey from Bangalore to Washington DC in itself was quite interesting. A three hop flight journey (BLR-DBX-ATL-IAD) that took away ~32 hours of my life, but since I traveled west (& I gained time) I lost only about 21 hours. Yeah, I know, convoluted. (This is similar to that guy Louis Wu in the Ringworld series who kept traveling west to extend his 200th birthday celebrations!)

The reason I am here in the US is to 'evangelize' Social CRM. But before I got to tell parables of the 'Customer' gospels to the flock I went for my baptism by the Pope of Social CRM - Paul Greenberg. :)

Ok, enough with cliche and cryptic ranting.

I came to US to attend what is now being called the #SCRMSummit and follow it up with meetings with my peers, clients & partners to discuss & get things done around Social CRM.


I got caught in the worst blizzard in more than a century at Washington DC, cooped up with other thought leaders, analysts, consultants, systems integrators, vendors & practitioners of Social CRM. We were 68 of us and if you hate Social CRM, this was the place to obliterate it. Sorry, you missed the chance though we have been talking about it for weeks now.

The blizzard was actually something that happened ultimately for the good (baring some set backs, like the absence of Esteban Kolksy). The original venue was closed because Federal was closed. And thus we had the venue shifted to the hotel itself where most of us were put up. That gave us all a LOT of time to catch up after the classroom sessions too. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner ... all were in the company of these brilliant brains & great friends.

I will only say that it was AWESOME to finally get to meet all the folks with whom I had been conversing all these months on the social space & it was really really great to meet Paul Greenberg in real space! And we were all acting like a bunch of school kids meeting after the summer break. Only regret, we didn't have a group photo & I didn't get autographs of all these folks! :(

Read more about the event, our learnings & our feelings from Brian, Brent & Kathy.

So from this highly intellectual dosage of futuristic concepts around Social CRM, I had to shift my focus to the realities of life and actually think about getting a few wins around Social CRM. Social Media is easy, but maturing that to Social CRM is tougher. When you look at the whole "social" thing with a SCRM lens you need to consider organizational vision, mission, goals, objectives, etc. Aligning the org structure to these (that might mean restructuring), changing the org culture. Developing new metrics/KPIs based on the goals (not the other way round please, always have the goals in mind first). Figure out the channels (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Youtube, etc.) where one needs to concentrate on. Figure out what to do in those channels - listen, engage, influence? Get newer systems setup, get things integrated (multi channel, cross channel, closed loop, etc.). Set governance in place, build policies for the employees. Educate them. Synergize with the ecosystem (only the business getting social doesn't bring the best benefit, partners, vendors, distributors, etc. need to too).

But how to put the above in a structured way? So that enterprises can lap it up easily? Thats my next challenge.

As Mike Boysen says, and Esteban too, I need to dumb them down, make them simpler. (I still get questions if it is ok to get the tweets & other user generated content from the social web into the enterprise, considering the privacy issues, etc.) Or if it were Graham Hill, I would have to learn Cognitive Fluency. ;)