What is Social CRM? Major New Tech Trend Takes Hold

February 15, 2011

If you haven’t heard about “Social CRM” yet, get ready. Predictions are this will be the “technology trend of the year” for 2011.

Simply stated, Social CRM is the marriage of your Rolodex with Twitter. The Rolodex represents your Customer Relationship Management system, or CRM: your database of contacts, clients, prospects, employees, customers, or anyone else your organization keeps tabs on. Twitter represents the social side of these contacts, whether they express themselves on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, through comments on blogs, or other ways online.

When you merge your CRM system with social networking, what you get is an amazing lifecycle understanding of how your customers were influenced to contact you, what they purchased once they did, and how those purchases worked out for them. Imagine being able to ask a customer, “How did you find out about us” and “How is that purchase working out for you” without having to ask — and being able to rely on the answers as honest and real. That’s the power of Social CRM.

Social CRM begins when an organization starts to listen to what people are saying about it online, and posts its own messages through social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Social CRM deepens when organizations go beyond watching themselves to watching their customers, employees, and other contacts. According to CRM expert and Inc. magazine reporter, Brent Leary, “2011 looks to be shaping up as the year companies go beyond focusing on marketing and promotion” with Social CRM.

Leary is on the board of the Customer Relationship Management Association and editor of its newsletter, “Insights.” His article for Inc. magazine reviews a conference on Social CRM at the University of Toronto held at the end of last year. The conference was the inaugural event for the new Center for CRM Excellence at the University’s Rotman School of Management. Leary debriefs several experts on Social CRM including Greg Gianforte at RightNow, Marcel LeBrun at Radian6, Alex Bard at Assistly, and John Bastone at SAS.

Social networking gives organizations the opportunity to eavesdrop on contacts as they reveal their opinions through actions and comments online. Social CRM gathers those tidbits of information and combines them into reports about contacts that are far more elaborate than professional profilers ever could have imagined. Social CRM makes it possible to, among other things, fix a customer’s problem before they even know they have a problem, or before they report it. That’s powerful marketing!

Another excellent article comes from Maria Ogneva at Mashable, a site not known for deep articles. Ogneva has an interest in the subject, as the director of social media for Nimble, a social relationship management firm. Still, Ogneva intelligently lays out the fundamentals of Social CRM:

The social customer may go to Twitter with a question, a user forum with a customer service query, Facebook with a compliment, or Yelp with a complaint. The processes you establish will largely determine your ability to respond quickly and with the relevant information, while uniting all of these interactions under one customer record.

If you think Social CRM is just another fad that will soon disappear, maybe Gartner will persuade you otherwise? In a study released this week, the giant IT research firm predicted that Social CRM sales will exceed $1 billion by 2013. Spending on Social CRM is expected to double this year, from 4% to 8% of total CRM spending.

Chris DiMarco, Web Editor for TMCnet, nails the significance of Gartner’s report when he writes, “The utility to include and target individuals based on information they’ve provided voluntarily on social media sites will likely be necessary to compete in the very near future.” In short, if you don’t get Social CRM, you don’t get the customer. And that’s the simple reason Social CRM is shaping up to be the app of the year for 2011.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “2011: The Year Social CRM Goes Mainstream,” Inc., December 27, 2010
Source: “Why Your Company Needs to Embrace Social CRM,” Mashable, May 21, 2010
Source: “Gartner Says Spending on Social Software to Support Sales, Marketing and Customer Service Processes Will Exceed $1 Billion Worldwide By 2013,” Gartner news release, February 8, 2011
Source: “Social CRM to Explode in the Immediate Future says Gartner Study,” TMCnet, February 8, 2011
Image by nerissa’s ring, used under its Creative Commons license.

Intelligence Economy Has Arrived, Says Gartner Guru Sondergaard

October 21, 2010

Peter Sondergaard, head of research for consulting giant, Gartner, Inc., in his opening remarks at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Florida, on October 18, forecast that “we are on our way to an IT-driven intelligence society,” according to Michael J. Miller on PC Magazine‘s Forward Thinking blog.

Miller is the former Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media and the editor of Forward Thinking. His coverage of Sondergaard’s remarks is extensive and compelling. He quotes Gartner guru Sondergaard as saying:

By 2012, the Internet will be 75 times larger than it was in 2002.

Gartner’s Symposium doubles as an Information Technology (IT) expo. Ten days ago, Gartner released its much-hyped Hype Cycle, boosting visibility in advance of the big event. We criticized the “emerging technology” Hype Cycle here for excluding social networking.

According to Miller, Sondergaard included “social computing” in his list of the top four trends driving IT in his opening remarks. The other three are context-aware computing, pattern-based strategy, and cloud computing, which Gartner’s own HypeCycle says is “past its peak.”

Miller quotes Sondergaard:

Information will be the oil of the 21st century.

In their book, MINITRENDS, John H. Vanston and Carrie Vanston cover the Minitrend of  Increasing Use of Electricity in Industrial Processes, where they discuss the concept that the value of goods increases with the amount of information contained in them:

Manufacturing can be defined as the transformation of materials from one form to another more valuable form using energy and information. In general, the greater the information content of the process, the greater the efficiency, the smaller the waste of material and energy, and the smaller the pollution-producing side streams will be. For example, sand can be used as filler for asphalt, as a component of fine china, or as a ingredient in an electronic computer chip. The basic difference between these uses is the amount of information embedded in the silicon (sand) during the production process. Electrical processes can be used to materially increase information content to material.

That mindbending little excerpt comes courtesy of the Edison Electric Institute. It’s one of the interesting trends John and Carrie have uncovered in this book.

If you are looking for a Minitrend Adventure, think about how you can increase the information content in the things around you — before someone else does.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Four Big Trends Changing Computing, Gartner Says,” PCMagazine, Forward Thinking Blog, 10/18/10
Source: Gartner Symposium Live Blog (SymLive), 10/17/10 – 10/21/10.
Image of the Gartner Symposium 2010 logo is used under Fair Use: Reporting.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle Says Cloud Computing Has Peaked

October 12, 2010

The analysts at Gartner have released the latest version of their much-hyped Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. The report indicates that poor “cloud computing” has entered the long, disappointing phase of technological maturity, though “private cloud computing” is still ascending the pinnacle of hype.

The Gartner Hype Cycle describes a curve of technological adoption. It plots nearly 2,000 new technologies at one of the five phases of evolution, which Gartner colorfully describes as:

1. Technology Trigger
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations
3. Trough of Disillusionment
4. Slope of Enlightenment
5. Plateau of Productivity

Gartner bunches the 1,800 technologies it tracks into roughly 80 groupings by technology, topic, or industry. One of the most popular groupings is “emerging technologies,” for which Gartner releases a free Hype Cycle chart (shown above).  Gartner Vice President Jackie Fenn summarizes the emerging technologies cycle:

High-impact technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 2010 include private cloud computing, augmented reality, media tablets (such as the iPad), wireless power, 3D flat-panel TVs and displays, and activity streams, while cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among enterprise users.

How quickly the cloud moves along! Last year, “cloud computing” was Gartner’s most popular Hype Cycle. Downloads of the Cloud Computing report, which retails for $1,995, have led all other reports, according to the company’s website.

In trying to determine the source of Gartner’s Hype Cycle, I couldn’t gather much information without paying thousands to download actual reports. On the blog called Mastering the Hype Cycle, Mark Raskino, co-author with Jackie Fenn of the “2010 Hype Cycle Special Report,” explains the process this way:

We have multiple review stages. Each individual technology profile is reviewed by peer specialist analysts, each hype cycle is then reviewed by a wider group of domain analysts. Then those of us in the hype cycle special report team check each area has understood and applied the method properly… to avoid local group think or cross-research inconsistencies.

They make sure the “method” has been applied properly, but they don’t tell you what the method is. How did someone discover this curve? Was this pattern revealed by the analysis of data, or is it speculation? Are technologies forced to fit somewhere in this preassigned sign wave? Who assigns technologies to these positions, if it’s not an analytical process?

British computer scientist and author Richard Veryard, a specialist in the economics of information systems, sized-up the Gartner Hype Cycle on his blog, Demanding Change:

All the points are perfectly on the line. To a scientific mind, this indicates that the coordinates are not based on any real objective measurement, and that the curve itself is not subject to scientific investigation or calibration.

In the most recent Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, shown above, Gartner uses essentially three different measures for the X-axis. The Y-axis is simply labeled “Expectations” — the higher the point, the greater the expectations for that technology. The base of the X-axis is labeled “Time,” but immediately above it, “Time” is broken into five stages of development, which take varying amounts of time. Also, the icons used to plot each technology have their own time constraints, indicating how many “years to mainstream adoption.” The result is a confusing popularity contest, not an analytical tool.

How would Gartner account for the decline of MySpace simultaneously with the rise of Facebook? I notice that social networking is nowhere on the emerging technologies chart, even though virtual worlds are, and blogging is too.

Gartner produces 75 Hype Cycles a year, retailing at $1,995 each. It charges the same for outdated reports going back five years. Where do you think Hype Cycles fit on the timeline? Are you in the “trough of disillusionment” or the “slope of enlightenment” with Hype Cycles? We’d like to hear your comments on how useful these reports are.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Gartner’s 2010 Hype Cycle Special Report Evaluates Maturity of 1,800 Technologies,” Gartner, Inc., 10/07/10
Source: “The 2010 Gartner Hype Cycles Are Getting Closer,” Gartner’s Mastering the Hype Cycle, 07/08/10
Source: “Technology Hype Curve,” Demanding Change, 09/16/05
Image courtesy Gartner, Inc., used under Fair Use: Commentary.