Social CRM: Hiring the right definition

There is a huge discussion going on over at thebrandbuilder blog & on twitter too over the definition of social CRM, especially the Paul Greenberg version as adapted by Esteban Kolsky. There is a nice effort at wordsmithing the definition and this is what Oliver Blanchard concludes with in that blog post:

[Social] CRM is a business function supported by a system and technologies whose aims are to improve a company’s ability to derive insights into customer needs and behaviors by adding to their transaction data the lifestyle data they share online.

Free online courses from Stanford useful for Social Analytics

AI Class by Stanford

Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning form a crucial aspect of Social Analytics and is the kernel in many a 'social media listening' solution. And not just in social media marketing, it is emerging as a key skillset of demand in various fields.

Stanford has a set of free online courses that goes in tandem with the actual class room based courses. The Fall class for introduction to Artificial Intelligence (under which NLP & ML fall) starts October 10.

If you are interested please do attend these courses:

• Introduction to AI (CS221): http://www.ai-class.com/ << This is a prerquisite for the NLP course
• Natural Language Processing (CS224N): http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=63480b48-8819-4efd-8412-263f1a472f5a
• Machine Learning (CS229): http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3a6d-4052-937d-cb017338d7b1