Four Innovation Insights Customers Provide
Customers, properly, have been having a renaissance of sorts in terms of business thinking. Peter Drucker famously espoused a very customer-centric business philosophy. Nowadays, social CRM represents the return of a customer-first orientation. Last year, Altimeter published the 18 use cases of social CRM. Included in those use cases were several that relate to innovation. […]
Sorry Gartner, Here’s the Real Magic Quadrant for SCRM
To understand what Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) is, we have to start with a clear definition. The definition must be clearly articulated and easily understood by individuals in the industry. In the Magic Quadrant for Social CRM, Gartner writes, “Social CRM applications need to be far more customer-centric than more-traditional CRM applications. Without benefits […]
Social CRM. Good riddance. Next: Social ERP?
Paul Greenberg, dubbed by some “the godfather of SCRM” wrote a post on ZDNET about Gartner’s 2011 SCRM Magic Quadrant. Paul is not pleased with the 2011 SCRM MQ, and he wasn’t with the 2010 either. I’m with Paul on all his points against Gartner’s selection and evaluation process, yet against him on berating Gartner. […]
Customer Focus: the Constellation Supernova Awards
Constellation Research, founded by fellow Enterprise Irregular and star analyst Ray Wang has just announced the ambitious Supernova Awards program, focusing on – what a twist! – customer champions of innovation, rather than vendors. Krish and I both feel honored to have been invited as Judges for the Cloud Computing category. Below is the official […]
Three Ways to Use Linkedin for Social Sales
I’m a big fan of Linkedin, I use it several times a week and when I announce what I’m working on (which I will do within a few days) it will become even more clear why it’s been so useful to me. I have three favorite uses for Linkedin: Finding relevant people to connect with, […]
Questions to Ask When Developing a Social CRM Strategy
Social CRM means different things to different people. If you ask three people to explain social CRM chances are that you’ll get four different responses. The thing to remember is that all of this “social” stuff is about solving customer facing problems that address people’s change in behavior, expectations, technological fluency, and communication methods. These […]
The Dangers of Doing What Works
Why is it that in the enterprise 2.0 and social CRM (and probably many other) spaces that we always try to offer a prescription to organizations problems based on what other organizations have done? We always hear about blanket statements such as, “there has to be a center of excellence to manage these efforts,” “the […]
The Social CRM Magic Quadrant
I missed the Social CRM Summit today – twice. Not only did I not physically attend, but I was occupied with work and only found time in my lunch break to quickly scan a few tweets. Now it’s after dinner, there are 700 tweets, and I am ready to analyse away. Of course I use […]
Gartner Says Social CRM Market Will be $1 Billion in 2012
Gartner has predicted that the market for social CRM software will be over $1 Billion by 2012. According to the research firm, social CRM spending will rise exponentially in 2011 and a 3 year shakeout will begin in the space. The huge potential in the space has resulted in over 100 vendors entering the market […]
The Social CRM Oxymoron
The temptation was great of course, a few years back, to invent Social CRM. There was a lot of buzz about Social, social people, social companies, social employees and social customers. It wasn’t a great step from that last one to Social Customer Relationship Management. Last year I piled all that up on the Social […]
Trends for Companies Searching for a Social Media “Something”
I was playing around on Indeed.com which is basically a massive job search engine that also allows you to look at trends for various job titles or descriptions. I thought it would be fun to take a look at what’s going on with “social media” jobs and trends and…well…wow! The charts below should speak for […]
Multiple Perspectives on Social CRM: The Consultant, Analyst, Vendor, and Client
If you put a consultant, an analyst, a vendor, and an end user client together in the same room and ask them to explain or discuss social CRM or social business (or pretty much anything else) you will get very different answers and explanations. Nothing is ever one-sided so why bother trying to look at […]
Why the Enterprise 2.0 Vs Social Business Debate is Really Going On
(Chess puzzle, white to move and mate in 2, can you figure it out?) There’s been some interesting blog fodder as of late around whether or not the terms Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business are more applicable in describing this shift towards emergent collaborative tools being used within the enterprise. Let’s start things off with […]
The Many Faces of Social CRM
I thought it would be very interesting to look at how other people in the world are talking about, describing, and visualizing Social Customer Relationship Management (Social CRM). I found some pretty interesting images out there and compiled some of them below. I also included an image from Chess Media Group. It’s interesting to see […]
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Internal Social Sotware 2010: Valuable or Not?
Gartner recently released their Magic Quandrant report for internal social software vendors. The below images are courtesy of Read Write Web. The first image is for 2010 the second is from last year. You can clearly see that this year there are a lot less vendors featured, you can read the RWW article on that […]
