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I read and appreciated an article in the WSJ this morning - “Facebook: Can it be Tamed?“. Combined this with a many of the great discussions taking place on Twitter via #scrm and Blogs and it got me to thinking. How can CRM learn from a personal approach to Social Media, are they really that different?

Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for personal use represent a microcosm of the evolution of CRM within an enterprise. Too much information, not enough filters. In the case of Facebook, the article speaks to the redesign causing angst and too much data. I have posted before, each of us need to consider our own Social Media strategy. For me, LinkedIn is strickly business, Facebook is strictly friends (some busines associates do fall into that category, and it is where we have fun). Twitter, for me is business, with color commentary.  From the article:

“In essence, the News Feed was my own personal Google search. Like Google, Facebook calculated the relevancy and authority of information before deciding to display it to me. The News Feed was shockingly complex – calculating and ranking more than a trillion items per day – and the results were very satisfying.”

It is interesting, as we are all treating social media platforms like our own personal CRM systems. Not trying to be cras, but we are making determinations of the ‘value’ of our time and what is important for us to hear, and whom to listen to - sound a bit familiar? In case you were wondering, Mom is a Platimum partner!

Enterprises have this exact same problem, as they try to jump into the next generation of CRM (SocialCRM or CRM 2.0, naming battle at 11) As @TriSynergyLL posted yesterday, while at a conference (I will use full words) “A point was made that Customers do not ask nor will they ask you (company) to join a social media (platform), they start without you”. This begs the question, which platform(s) should an Enterprise monitor? That is the hard part, International companies will not have only one, two or three answers.

What to do?

Another playa from the #scrm space is A Prem Kumar - I like his approach and he has put forth a logical foundation for all of this, you can find his musings on his blog, or follow on Twitter @scorpfromhell. Each business needs to develop their strategy. A tactical approach will fail, for sure. Once you jump in, you are in. You have just reset the expectation with your customers, backing out would be a bad idea.

To jump in without a monitoring strategy (where are my customers?) and filtering strategy (how do I pull information from data or make sense of noise), would be a mistake. While there seem to be a whole lot of tools on the market that help the analysis from a marketing perspective, putting the right tools in place from a true CRM perspective are not yet there.

David Baker says it quite well in his article, The Last Quarter Mile of CRM:

The skeptics and measurement-minded professionals scoff at the vagueness of measuring influence through social media interactions in a traditional CRM view. While the principles of CRM don’t change with social media strategies, the control of the content, message and interaction can leave strategists grasping at straws when they try to measure results — or, better yet, consider how and what to optimize.

It seems that I offered more questions than answers, but that is what keeps it interesting I suppose.

A crucial step in the deployment, or redeployment of any application requires a heavy dose of end-user involvement. We do not need to go too far back in time to find good examples of this; i.e. the recent Facebook changes that were not very popular. Even more recently, the a popular social site, FriendFeed, introduced changes that are causing a little bit of a stir, not as bad a Facebook though, is it was soft-launched as a beta. The simple fact is that we can learn from others, within our domain and outside of it, in order to avoid these pitfalls. Finally, while the examples used here are on a grand scale, when deploying your own solutions, the same rules do apply.

Two key messages I am hopeful are supported within this short post:

1. Ease of use, on the first use, is not always the end goal - said with caution and caveats
2. Change management is a practice unto itself with good reason

Bringing three accepted tenets of application development/deployment together in support of my key messages:

• The processes (thought and action) required to introduce changes are important and necessary.
• Involve your users/customers, ask them what they want, listen to the answers.
• Look outside of your core businesses or domain; you can learn from other lines of business.

(ok, that last one is not yet a ‘tenet’ but we are working on it)

A fun example brings us back to the old Pepsi Challenge.  A few years back, Pepsi supported a blind taste test, to prove that people liked Pepsi better than Coke. I am not a marketer by trade, but smart enough to understand what happened, or at least the analysis. The summary version (with a reference here - warning it is a pdf) is that Pepsi won the challenge based on the ’sip’ test, Coke reacted (New Coke), and then realized that people do not drink one sip, they drink a whole can.  Further analysis showed that people actually liked a can of Coke, better than Pepsi.

This study hits 2 of the 3 tenets -

1. Coke reacted and did not do effective change management,
2. Coke reacted and did not talk to their customers,
3. What they could have learned from another business?

I am sure you can think of a few examples outside of the soft drink industry that if Coke had looked at, would have taught them a thing or two. Lucky for us, we can take this example and learn from it; First impressions do not always represent the end-game, and involve your customers before acting.

In designing systems there exists a critical balance between feature rich, sophistication and ease of use. Of course it is easier said, than done; It takes time, thought and a lot of skill. Iterations and incremental changes, based on customer/user feedback will provide guidance. I do understand that it is a balance, because if users or customers cannot get past the first screen, they will simply stop and not use whatever it is you are building.

Systems (applications and hardware)  that demonstrate ‘too well’; with eye-candy and overly simplified user interfaces often fail once the user community reach a level of competency. This rings true more for applications designed for internal enterprise use, but may be carefully applied to consumer facing applications in a given context.

The timing of this muse may seem odd, given my recent research on Cloud Computing, SaaS and SocialCRM (CRM 2.0).  But, I needed to remind myself that we need spend time looking back every once in a while in order to move forward. Given the power to reach nearly any customer base or user community, through a variety of channels, with unprecedented speed, we all need to have an action plan in place to consumer the information. Planning and strategy have taken on a whole new meaning.

I would like to note that this thought was is actually inspired by 3 independent conversations occurring through blogs and twitter - thanks to @GrahamHill, @scorpfromhell and @pgreenbe

You cannot blame this on Twitter, nor the companies who are just trying to stay ahead. But the fact remains that the “squeaky wheel” definitely gets the grease on Twitter.  On two distinct occasions today, people I follow were making their, not-so-great customer service experience known, in a public fashion. In the end, each was given preferential treatment by the provider. 3 ‘rants’ on Twitter, one big “Thanks” also on Twitter and everyone is happy - except me.

Twitter is enabling poor practices in CRM - but no one really has a choice right now

SocialCRM at its best

Also today, Paul Greenberg posted his “Is Twitter Social CRM, Nope” blog. I happen to agree with Paul in many ways. It is a channel - an important one - but simply one channel, or is it? But it is more than that - It is the single most relevant example of ‘customer service is your most powerful marketeer’ around. Yes, bad emails written poorly make their way onto the Internet (Blogs, Mail lists, etc.,…) but, Twitter travels much faster - and more broadly. The reason is that, as a social network, Twitter is more far reaching** than any other network.

**by far reaching I am referring to the breadth and depth on the social graph created by connecting the dots between and among users or keywords.

• I can ‘watch’ any user, anywhere who makes their tweets part of the public timeline -
• I can filter on any hashtag (all tweets for #comcast - for example)
• I can reply to a tweet to anyone, regardless of if I am following or not
• There is a willingness to follow/be followed like no other social site (age, relationship, location)

As Jeremiah Owyang suggests in his blog (also today) Twitter has some key components of CRM - but it does not have the key one - the relationship. A relationship is two ways. Twitter is a customer skewed relationship at the moment. Twitter does not have the ability to manage this relationship either. It is a great source of data. The key is turning the data into information.

How would this scenario go;  if in order to get your cable box fixed you needed to go down to the local office and stand in line for an hour or more. While in line, the person 3 behind you in line started to yell really loudly about poor service. They would either ask him/her to leave, or be quiet. Would we cheer if they were pulled out of line and helped first? On Twitter, this is exactly what happens - you just do not know who you jumped in front of in line.

Same scenario, except the line is not at the local office, but at a fair or conference of some sort. Lots of people there for many reasons. The line next to you is the sales line (get new service). Oh, and the vendors biggest competitor is a couple yards away. How would it go down? - I am not sure, but it makes you think.

No scenario can perfectly represent the Twitter scenario in real world. But how would feel if people further back in the queue were given preferential treatment because - no offense - they throw a tantrum? Are Twitter users playing the system or cheating the system?

As the Twitter user population grows as well as Facebook and others, the call center and help desk models will simply not be able to scale. They use predictive models to determine staffing and there only so many ‘A’ players (the ones the vendors are using to filter and watch Twitter). For now, ‘ranting’ on Twitter will get you attention.  Maybe more vendors will have to follow the Zappos model and find success, though I think it will be hard for other industries to follow suit, it is just not that simple.