Anyway, the analyst and I were talking and an interesting point was made. The analyst noted that with all these social silos being built up, and the potential for users and companies to see little value out of this disengaged approach – a lot of negative backlash could occur.

I agree – and I quickly made the analogy that the whole social spectrum of startups might suffer the same fate as the e-commerce pure plays of 1999.

Huh?

Let me explain. While we did see some really well done pure play e-commerce companies come out of the dot-com boom n’ bust, like Amazon, there were a lot of stinkers: Pets.com, Webvan, DiapersDelivered, etc. (ok I made that last name up but I think there was a diaper e-commerce play that went nowhere – but you get the point.)

These pure plays lacked a lot of things: solid revenue models, business savvy and, well, customers. They were gambles made on hype and speculation. And so many of them faded before the ink was dry on their VC checks.

But a lot of brick and mortar firms made strong headway into the e-commerce world early on: Barnes and Noble, Walgreens, Gap.com are all examples of strong brands expanding into the early world of web commerce. I think social will play out in a similar vein.

We will have some big social standouts – maybe we already do in Twitter and Facebook. But I think when it comes to companies that thrive around social media – existing technology plays with sound business models, flexible products and strong core customer user communities are set up to win.

In the “social CRM” world – traditional CRM players already “get” CRM, and are simply adding new channels to support the way customers want to interact. They are not re-inventing the wheel, just adding new features to an already well-functioning vehicle.

Ultimately, when it comes to a concept like CRM, there is way too many traditional (or should I say eternal) features to consider for any pure social media play to unseat the leaders here. We may see a lot of CRM providers acquire these small guys, or see some fizzle out, but CRM as we know it is not going away, just evolving.

I think that whole line of thinking is flawed, for many reasons. The very nature of a successful relationship is the fact that it is made up of a balance – effort being put in by both parties. While the customer may be in control of the conversation, neither customer or vendor is in control of the relationship.

Even on the most base terms – customers and vendors need each other. The vendor obviously needs revenue to survive, but customers need (in varying degrees) to objects or services offered by the vendor.  Basic economics, right?

But the internet changes a lot of the moving parts in the real world application of this paradigm. In the B2C world, the relationship between vendor and consumer has long been mediated, but retail operations and other intermediaries – until now. The power of the social web brings manufacturers right in front of consumers – this is scary to some but also presents huge opportunities (all of us in the social CRM world have been talking about this for years). E-commerce has allowed buyers to (if they so choose) to skip the retailer and go to the source.

In B2B – e-commerce has essentially only made existing processes a little easier. It is strange that we have no redefined B2B marketing, sales and support all that much in the age of social – simply tried to make it a lot more cost-effective and powerful. I think that is because the “relationship” aspect of B2B has been strongly in place for some time. (And this is why CRM has always succeeded most in B2B in my mind…)

Perhaps it could be argued that the internet has changed the nature of B2B relationships in that the web allows buyers (and perhaps sellers in some degree) to be as fickle as B2C buyers. The ease of research and negotiation in today’s web-driven economy has streamlined the process of vendor evaluation and decision-making to the point where relationships alone will not save a deal or secure loyalty.

But at the same time – the web enables more pricing transparency and levels the playing field, allowing vendors to differentiate on service, engagement strategy – all the things that make up a strong relationship.

Just like the old saying goes – “the phone works both ways” – relationships are not “owned” but nurtured. Both parties get out (depending on their needs and agenda) exactly what they put into them.

Looking over the results – it is clear that ERP and E-Commerce are the main areas where people see the benefits of an integrated approach to their business processes. Both ERP and e-commerce took 32% of the votes each.

I am inclined to agree with the poll respondents. SugarCRM’s partners have been doing a lot of great stuff around linking Sugar with both e-commerce tools, as well as great ERP solutions such as Compiere. I’ll have some more info on this exact topic to share soon.

Other systems included in the poll were content management systems (CMS) – which received 20% of the votes, and project management which grabbed eight percent of the votes.

There were some write-in candidates, so to speak. The clear winner was “email.” And I guess it was my bad for not including email/Outlook as an option. My defense: I think most of us old salts in the CRM world simply assume any valid CRM tool will work with your email system.

Google Sites was also brought up as a potential integration point with a CRM system. This tells me that while we have not really seen critical mass around the Google Docs and other offerings, it is on the minds of a lot of people – and could be an interesting area of innovation in the CRM world soon.

The most interesting item not mentioned?  Social media. Surprised (or maybe not) that no one thought these tools should be integrated into CRM.

Thanks again for participating, and I’ll have a new poll up shortly.

As Colin notes – this a great way for SMB’s to cover a lot of bases with one low monthly fee, and very little technical work needing to be done to make all this happen. The cloud is the enabler here.

But what is important to see is that the cloud also brings together open source, and proprietary software in a seamless manner. The end user simply gets great feature functionality – needing only a web browser to get started. This is truly the next level of development following the SaaS revolution of the early 2000s.

We are beyond having a single provider have to offer a complex platform in order to get ERP, CRM, CMS, E-commerce etc. together in one cloud-based experience. End user organizations no longer have to do any of the heavy lifting to get these systems to talk to each other in the cloud – it’s all out of the box.

And the fact that it has really become a non-issue that these proprietary and open source tools can interoperate with ease is a testament to the fact that it is not about licenses or buzz words – it is about great, flexible software that meets your business needs and your budget.

Here you have the ability for a small biz to get an integrated suite for email management, contact, accounting, Website management and sales, marketing and customer support via a cloud-based service that also adds the flexibility of the open source model if need be. In short, enterprise-grade functionality and integration at a fraction of the cost, and all thanks to the concept of open source and proprietary software coming together into a single platform via the cloud.

I’m not a big fan of tooting our own horn, but this is a perfect example of how open source is helping to lower the TCO of software for businesses. In addition, I also love the fact that it’s tailored for SMBs out-of-the-box. For years I’ve heard a lot from industry pundits that open source isn’t for smaller companies with little to no IT support. I see the concept of cloud computing and open source helping to buck that belief.

But with the push of what I like to call “e-CRM,” I see integrating online shopping carts as only the beginning. Integrating Web 2.0 and other user-generated content into both online and offline marketing and feedback materials, such as product reviews, will be key. Increasingly, these are acting as facilitators where consumers can garner just as much info about a company’s product or service as they would at the businesses’ own Website.

Increasingly, I see the online benchmark by which companies are measured by as being the ability to integrate the community across the realm of different online mediums, with those that don’t sinking to the bottom of the competitive pool.

But a blog post from one of SugarCRM’s key partners Levementum caught my eye. The post notes that Levementum aids organizations of all sizes deploy and manage most of the open source Bossie winners, including Compiere for ERP, Pentaho for Business Intelligence and Magento for e-commerce.

Think about it – ten years ago it would have been impossible to find a VAR or SI that was heavily invested in deploying open source components for end user organizations. Sure, Linux may have been an area of competence, but I doubt you’d find many companies with more than one open source software package in their arsenal.

Today, innovative firms like Levementum are creating an entire open source stack of sorts – covering many of the bases of what enterprises need to function. This way, Levementum can offer a wide range of versatile solutions at a much lower entry point costs. Then their clients can spend more energy and resources customizing and creating a truly differentiated IT strategy.

The great thing is, the end user wins big here. The promise of open source – greater flexibility and control while keeping costs in check – is realized across the broad set of open source specialists like Levementum.

Over the years, we’ve seen that Amazon is a workable model, and have seen even more losers, and a few winners in the e-commerce space.

The winning formula, it seems, is almost too simple – provide great customer experiences – and you’ll win. Zappos.com was a small company based on providing items you could get at a lot of other places (both online and in regular stores) but quickly and usually for a little less. The return policies favored the customer, and items were usually highly available. Simple, yet a highly effective model.

So I must say I wasn’t surprised when I saw that Zappos was acquired by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars.

Amazon is smart to even further expand its offerings, and really locks into a community and culture of Zappos users that are highly loyal and repeat shoppers.

The key here is for Amazon to continue this culture of exceptional customer service that users expect when they purchase from Zappos. The company has worked hard to earn that trust from its buyers, and it can all too easily be broken.

E-commerce models have created a number of easy ways for retailers to differentiate themselves. But I do believe the most successful e-tailers will not win on price alone. Zappos has proven that – to a very large payoff.

I must say – I was not surprised to see that sales automation tops the list, followed by customer data and marketing tools. But what is important to note is the areas of sales that respondents were equating with CRM. Order and contract management are listed in the “sales” side of CRM, as is e-commerce and even service.

Just like I noted last week that social media cannot live apart from your core CRM system – there are many aspects of the sales cycle that may not necessarily be part of a core CRM package, but must also be considered as part of the core CRM processes – and integrated as needed.

As best-of-breed approaches and phased rollouts prevail in this economy, it is very important in the decision-making processes to understand the importance of connecting core SFA systems to order and contract (and e-commerce) processes. More and more, deals that begin on the phone may be completed in a self-service format on the web (and vice versa) and without proper planning, it is easy to lose sight of the deals as they move between these systems.

These are not new concepts, to be sure, but all too often systems get implemented without consideration of how the true people and process will flow between them.

You can find the details of the report here, but in a nutshell, a survey of Google Analytic users found the need for more proactive techniques to target the individual Website abandoner. Now in Google’s defense, Google Analytics is primarily an SMB software package and shouldn’t be confused with high-end solutions equipped with more robust predictive capabilities. For SMBs, Google Analytics works just fine.

But I do think the results bring up some interesting points about the struggles companies are facing in servicing and appeasing their customer online, which include placing an increased emphasis on individual shoppers via one-on-one selling and marketing and real-time intervention. The problem is measuring and predicting online customer action can be fickle, but remains important because a customer’s attitude at any point can influence their actions across other channels.

I think Web 2.0 is at least helping to solve some of this, as the proliferation of these solutions within service interactions is allowing for real-time intervention and communication with customers while online. But in terms of being more proactive on the Web, it comes down to companies identifying and measuring the right metrics to garner an accurate view of a customer’s – beg I say it – lifetime experience on the Web. For a retailer, that would revolve around the shopping cart processes, or for a bank the account processes.

Doing so should allow the business to identify where the performance problems are and who is affected, and thus become a little more predictive by initiating remedial improvements for future customers.