This is the fifth year that  I’ve compiled a list of the best CRM blogs, and the trend is clear: more and better blogs on the topic of CRM are out there than ever before. In 2008, it was a struggle to find 20 good blogs on CRM; now, there are so many good ones that picking the 20 best is a difficult chore. But the cream rises to the top – using the criteria of content quality, consistency and influence, our list represents the 20 must-reads for anyone hoping to be on the cutting edge of CRM thinking.

We try to present a mix of theory and practical advice. One clear lesson that can be drawn: if you’re an independent business owner (as many of the non-affiliated analysts on our list  happen to be), your blog serves as a combination of calling card, curriculum vitae and cocktail party conversation. It works very well for many of these bloggers, and their sustained success – on the Top 20 list an in their businesses – show how valuable a blog can be.

We also have our share of big-firm analysts, journalists, service specialists, marketing folk and whatever Marshall Lager is. (Kidding, Marshall!)

We disqualified our own blog, of course, and we also kept away from other vendor’s blogs. We also tried to narrow the focus to CRM bloggers, vs. those shifting to collaboration, marketing automation and other CRM-like technologies and practices; that’s a function of the growing number of CRM blogs, not of any diminishing of quality of bloggers covering those spaces.

So without further delay, here’s our list of the 20 bloggers who made the biggest mark on CRM in 2011:

1. Pgreenblog and CRM: the Conversation

How do you outdo yourself as a perennial top CRM blogger? Take the community you’ve built (virtually as well as through tireless face-to-face networking) and create a remarkable contest designed to expose up-and-coming CRM vendors. Paul Greenberg, the author of both of these blogs, drove “CRM Idol” by enlisting help from all over the CRM spectrum; this effort dominated the middle part of the year in his blogs. That gave many small CRM vendors premium placement for their videos and the reviews done by Paul’s expert team of judges, exposure that outstripped anything these companies could afford to generate on their own. By understanding that innovation comes from the small, hungry companies – and by providing a chance for that innovation to shine through – Paul rendered a great service to the entire CRM world, and he used his dual blogs to do it. The contest also helped move the ball toward the realization of Paul’s vision of a Social CRM world; much of the innovation demonstrated in the contest is pushing hard in that direction. So, now that Paul’s effectively described the Social CRM future, now he’s working to make it a reality. Thank heaven he uses his powers for good and not evil.

2. Beagle Research Blog

If you’re confused about acquisitions, feature additions and strategic decisions made by CRM companies, you can bet Denis Pombriant was confused, too – briefly. Then, while the rest of us were still scratching our heads, Denis went over and wrote a blog post that made perfect sense of the day’s news. You may not always agree with him, but if you don’t it isn’t because Denis is provoking you; he can take bold positions without being brash or abrasive about it. He’s also the go-to guy for putting CRM in a macroeconomic context; just as Brent Leary excels at digging down to get to the needs of small business, Denis is great at elevating his analysis to a global scale, often touching on themes of sustainability and energy. Denis also keeps a busy schedule of trade shows, so if there’s an event you wanted to attend but couldn’t, check the Beagle Research Blog – Denis is probably at the show, and he’s also probably explained the major announcements.

3. ThinkJar Blog

With his tongue-in-cheek faux-egomaniac persona front and center, Esteban Kolsky seasons his commentary with both a sense of humor and a brutal honesty, which makes his blog unpredictable in a way no others on this list can be. He’s not really a egomaniac – he actually is as smart as he says, and his knowledge spans the CRM space. He’s not interested in CRM by itself – he’s interested in the entire business software ecosystem, because only by building the complete solution can businesses realize the full potential of the technology available to them. An ex-Gartner analyst, he often offers his takes on the acquisitions and strategic moves made by the big players in CRM, but then he’ll turn around and get much more tactical in his next post. Esteban’s blog is a genuine grab-bag of information, but every time you reach in you’ll pull out something of value delivered with an insider’s insight.

4. Brent’s Social CRM Blog

Brent Leary pushes the definition of what Social CRM is by talking about the larger ecosystem, but he doesn’t do that as a big thinker pontificating about his grand ideas. He’s a small business guy at heart, so if he’s talking about CRM or about any other related technologies – ERP, marketing automation, lead management, or whatever – he’s talking from the context of what they can do to solve business problems. Brent also models smart blog behavior for his clients; the blog is chock full of videos, sound files, graphics and other goodies he collects as he hustles and hurries through the Social CRM world, often with some fairly weighty guests. And, like Paul Greenberg, he sees a lot of value in exposing innovators to the greater world; Brent’s CRM-ISH awards honor companies doing things related to CRM, an area where there’s plenty of innovation just waiting for a boost.

5. 1to1Blog

Ginger Conlan and her team provide readers with a year’s worth of object lessons and expert insight drawing from the experiences and expertise of writers Tom Hoffman, Mila D’Antonio and Cynthia Clark and from a tremendous array of guest bloggers. They’ve struck a great balance between humanity and expertise – the reporters’ observations set off the experts’ well-crafted ideas to provide a readable balance that also carries plenty of value. The blog and the topics it covers demonstrate how the lines between CRM and marketing are blurring in the age of social media, and how this communications revolution is accelerating the impact of customer experience on the bottom line. Best of all, the blog is updated at an almost daily pace – the crew of writers and special guests are prolific and if what they’re talking about today doesn’t hold an immediate lesson for your business, just wait 24 hours. Chances are good the next day’s content will be immensely helpful.

6. The CRM Consultant

Perhaps the most effective tutor of prospective CRM buyers (and those looking to upgrade their existing systems), Richard Boardman draws from his practical experience as a consultant to help head off implementation failures long before implementations ever start. A strong proponent of spending time in the planning stages to define requirements, set goals and behave in practical and productive ways during the early stages of CRM decision making, Richard provides thoughtful useful and eye-opening advice in the form of multi-part guides to these preliminary steps. The sad thing is that he comes to this information from seeing so many businesses fall into the same precise traps; by becoming a expert on what causes failure, he’s also made himself a skilled tour guide for those seeking a path to success. Managing costs, working with consultants, convincing the CEO – Richard provides advice for these very common components of implementing and managing CRM, and then some. If you’re engaged with a vendor or a consultant, you need to be engaged with Richard’s blog, too.

7. Value Creator

Weighing in from the west coast is Brian Vellmure, whose blog reminds me of a versatile camera lens: it zooms in on small, pertinent social CRM details, and can zoom back out to capture the big picture of how the innovations applied to business are changing the world in broader, bolder ways. He’s not limited to talking about the nuts and bolts of CRM – in fact, that’s not his territory at all. Brian is more likely to talk about the environment, the attitude, the strategy and the psychology of how businesses relate to customers than his is about the technology they bring to bear. This year was a busy one for Brian – including a switch of blogging locations – so he had fewer posts than in the past, but his inclusion of the slide decks he uses for speaking gigs should provide food for thought (and should also help you see what a good slide deck for a speaking gig looks like!).

8. A Title Would Limit My Thoughts

Although he holds a significant position at Sword Ciboodle, Mitch Lieberman also maintains this blog for his own independent musings. Mitch isn’t afraid to ask a big question and then let it hang without an answer – some things we don’t know the answer to yet, after all, and Mitch is sanguine enough to avoid acting like he knows the answers all the time. However, he does bring a wealth of wisdom to the blog in the form of well-considered thinking and the voices of other experts when they can help shed light on a topic. Mitch did a great job of talking about the value and the strategies around social media and customer service – as well he ought to, working for Sword Ciboodle – and he did it in great depth and detail. Regardless of the technology you end up using, if you plan on delivering state-of-the-art service, you owe it to yourself to check Mitch’s blog to figure out the best ways to do it.

9. Michael Maoz

Analyst blogs face some challenges – when you’re paid to give expertise to your customers, how much of that expertise should you give away via your blog? Michael shows how it should be done: there’s some great nuggets of data, but the blog deals primarily with Michael’s informed opinions and attitudes about what’s going on in CRM, customer service and social business. No, wait – the blog delivers Michael’s attitude-informed opinions. When it comes to social media and social business, he’s refreshingly free of the euphoric optimism of other observers and appreciates the social revolution for what it is: a hard, long and potentially costly slog to a new way of doing things which shares some difficult similarities with other business revolutions from years past. The nice thing about a mature voice like Michael’s is that it has some context to compare what’s new now with what was new then – and can inform you on past lessons that can you can draw from without making the mistakes that defined those lessons yourself.

10. CRM Search Blog

Chuck Schaeffer is one of the smartest CRM people I know. The former CEO of Aplicor, he’s turned his talents to CRM Search, and in the process built quite a cast of fellow bloggers. In addition to Chuck’s insightful posts about what’s going on in the CRM industry, you also get the likes of Marshall Lager, Blake Landau, and Denis Pombriant on a regular basis (although I had to knock points off for allowing my drivel into the blog on occasion). Chuck understands on a fundamental level what vendors do right and what they do wrong, and he has the ability to intuitively spot vendors’ strategy changes and to explain what they mean. Best of all, Chuck has an insider’s knowledge but no longer is beholden to anyone. If you’ve taken a peek at the in-depth and bluntly honest analysis on CRM Search, which is very much in keeping with the tone of this blog, you understand why the CRM Search blog does a service to readers while making CRM vendors a little nervous.

11. A Software Insider’s Point of View

While Ray Wang’s blog is a little less engaging than the author in person, that still makes it better than most blogs. And, from a pure content point of view, it’s hard to beat Ray’s take on things, from social business to developing a business strategy. Frequently peppered with insights from Constellation Research’s work, the blog is a mix of big thinking and in-the-trenches business news analysis. You’re as likely to get an analysis of Lithium’s latest round of funding as your are to get a comparison of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to the needs of developing a high-level business strategy. Ray also includes a series of interviews with disruptive business leaders – that is, disruptive in a good way. There’s also plenty of Constellation news – hey, this is essentially the research firm’s company blog – but you can work around those posts to find lots of little acorns of knowledge. Want to find a data point to convince your boss to go all-in on a social strategy? Visit this blog, read, and pay attention.

12. Wim Rampen’s Blog

Wim has mastered the twist-ending approach to writing a blog. He’ll often start with a premise – “The Customer is Always Wrong,” to cite one popular post – and start delivering on that premise – only to turn it around and demonstrate why “conventional” thinking leads to folly (in the case of the above-mentioned post, the reality is that businesses define “right” and should be working harder to help customers get to that definition of “right”). That makes for an entertaining read; Win’s nearly 15 years of experience in CRM makes for an informative read. He’s also mastered the art of being a “social” blogger, doing more than his share of reading of other’s work and bringing back ideas and links to his readers (while adding his own take). Doing this results in a lively comments section populated by some of the big brains in CRM and Social CRM. Wim’s insight on customer service, social media and value-co-creation make this valuable reading, and Wim’s behavior as a blogger and member of a wider community make it instructive for anyone looking to develop their own social behavior as a professional.

13. Social CRM Ideas

Mark Tamis didn’t get off that many posts this year, but the ones he did pen took swings at enormous ideas – business process management, social messaging, the meaning of Salesforce’s acquisition of Radian6, and so on. He also gave a platform to a few guest posts from Graham Hill, another well-respected voice for customer collaboration, and he devoted a lot of space to CRM Idol. But perhaps the most interesting thing Mark did was to give a reason for Social CRM that could reach business leaders. Back in November, he wrote that Social CRM was exciting, in part, “Because it will generate many new data points that we can use to motivate and pilot our organizations.” Mark sees reluctance to change and a chronic inability to manage change as dangerous and widespread barriers to fully realizing the goal of customer-centric businesses, and his ability to articulate Social CRM’s value not in grandiose marketing-speak but in terms that decision makers can internalize easily is evidence of the incisive thinking that the hallmark of his blog.

14. Michael Fauscette

Another terrific analyst’s blog, this one is far-ranging and gives Mike Fauscette the opportunity to connect the dots behind his general areas of coverage to provide context for his more precisely-focused customer analysis. But even if you’re not an IDC customer, Mike’s blog gives you great context for the trends that are impacting your decisions. For example, in November he wrote about the concept of innovation management – a topic certainly not limited to CRM but one that has major ramifications in the era of Social CRM, the evolution of the social business and the introduction of myriad new technologies. Same goes for his breakdowns of the what it mean to have a social business, or the underlying tactics needed to create successful collaboration – Mike can connect the dots that explain why you need to do things and the factors that make those things necessary, even if he doesn’t tell you how to do them (but, hey, isn’t that your job anyway?).

15. The Customer Relationship Management Blog

A newcomer to the list, Lauren Carlson, the main voice of this blog, scored bigtime with a satirical post back in July sending up the “unreliability” of cloud applications (as opposed to on-premise applications, which NEVER go down. Right?), but her regular posts are on target and as informative as that one was funny. In baseball, she’d be called a “spray hitter” – her posts are all over the place in terms of topic, but she deals adroitly with all of them. She also talks to some of the brightest luminaries in CRM to gain inspiration and information for her posts, so in many cases what you have is a smart writer adding a new angle on ideas from other smart people. In the Social CRM era, that’s really helpful – the way ideas are phrased may resonate differently with different business people, so Lauren’s fresh takes on these ideas have great value. There are also a host of guest posts from people with practical experience, making this a useful grab-bag blog. Stick your hand in there and see what you pull out.

16. Customer Service Stories… and Other Thoughts

Customer experience is a great buzzword and an inconsistent reality. Barry Dalton is both infuriated by this and the benefactor of a lot of fodder for his blog, which focuses on customer service and the object lessons that real-world attempts to help customers provide. Often, those attempts are hamstrung but improper deployment of resources, bad assumptions about customers, and processes that have gone hopelessly out of whack, but few businesses seem committed to attacking these problems head-on until their effects are brutally clear. If you’re developing a customer service component to your CRM efforts, read this blog, and if you run across something that sounds like your business, start ringing the alarm bell. Barry also delves into more strategic ideas, like customer self-service and the effects that increasingly effective service have on customer expectations and behaviors. It’s a fun read, too – that’s part of Barry’s service to his readership.

17. CRM en Latinoamérica

The most influential voice for CRM in Latin America, Jesus Hoyos’ blog is in Spanish – but it’s readily translated into English thanks to a nifty little button on the page, and the topics Jesus discusses are directly translatable, too, regardless of your geographic location. What’s great about Jesus is that he strikes a precise balance between content creation and content curation – he’ll lay out an idea, and then provide numerous links, lists and other data available on the web to back up his idea and provide additional inspiration. Jesus is another regular on the CRM show circuit, and his many presentations make their appearance on the blog, along with videos and photos – he really understands what a blog can be. An advocate of social CRM, he’s first and foremost an advocate of picking solutions that fit the business needs of the people using them. In Latin America, with a range of different customers of varying degrees of technology sophistication, that’s an essential strategy – and it’s a strategy that Jesus does a good job of exporting to the rest of the world.

18. Forrester Blogs

While they are tossed into the dogpile of analysts that make up Forrester’s somewhat unweildy stream of posts, Bill Band and Kate Leggett make their impact felt through their timely, thorough and readable posts. Bill’s the classic SFA/CRM analyst (with great posts this year about the Forrester Wave results and Forrester’s guide to mobile CRM best practices), while Kate pays attention to customer service primarily, but their coverage areas overlap a little. That makes for some great posts; Bill excerpts his analysis, and Kate creates great lists of rules, strategies and philosophies that are immediately useful for anyone trying to evolve their service organizations. They both understand the value of social media in CRM and service – and they use Twitter effectively to notify the world when their posts appear. Follow them and you’ll be able to read their work as it appears instead of paddling through the larger Forrester blog stream.

19. B2B Lead Roundtable Blog

Adding some additional voices has only made this blog stronger. Brian Carroll of Marketing Sherpa fame is all over the process of collecting leads and ushering them through the pipeline. That’s not as easy a task as it used to be – nowadays, the technology that enables us to collect more lead data also increases the expectations for sales productivity, and thus sales pros are stuck in an ever-steepening spiral of increased quotas and performance metrics. Brian and his team – which includes J. David Green and Andrea Johnson – provide useful advice for managing this steep expectation curve, and they also are skilled at relating to sales people. Part of the beauty of the site is the way it treats archived webinars – not only does the blog talk about the topic, but it breaks out the specific elements of the conversations and gives times. That allows time-pressed viewers to go right to the point in the webinar that most interests them – a very reader-friendly feature that points out how sales benefits from CRM ideas in more ways than just on the bottom line. Between the video, the webinars and excerpts form Marketing Sherpa’s reports, this should be required reading for CRM users focusing on the sales side of things.

20. Third Idea Blog

Although I wish he’d post more, Marshall Lager covers a lot of ground when he does write, and he covers it very well. Few CRM writers give their readership as much credit as Marshall does. That means he talks about complex concepts and vendor maneuvers with both authority and amusement – and he clearly assumes you’re in on the joke. See his insightful and unsparing disassembly of Oracle Open World 2011 – he has little need to fill you in on the soap operatic details of the show and proceeded right to explaining how those activities actually harmed Oracle’s business. Marshall also uses the blog to promote events like CRM Idol or the SuperNova Awards, and his status assures his inclusion among the judges’ panel. And, if you want to know which CRM events are worth following, keep an eye on Marshall’s blog; his analysis of an event indicates that it’s the place to be (for better or worse). Also, I can safely say that Marshall is the only member of the Top 20 to have referenced the Buggles in the last year.

Social media and social CRM are the kinds of things that offer multiple points of value. People who have their throwback CRM hats screwed on too tightly tend to see the formula as data+SCRM=sales dollars as the only metric, which isn’t exactly right. There are other benefits to engaging in SCRM – market intelligence, greater customer data and engagement, and improved customer service.

Engagement can lead to product co-creation, which is especially helpful for software companies. They have the ability to add features (or get rid of useless or annoying ones) with each release, so listening to customers seems like a natural thing to do.

We saw that in action today with the release of Sugar 6.3, which has its genesis entirely in the feedback of users of Sugar Community Edition and Sugar’s Developers’ Community.

The developers are never shy about sharing things they like about Sugar and they’re even less shy about things they don’t like, and they had the feeling that community edition was becoming something of an afterthought – so they spoke up. John Mertic, the community leader, received a virtual earful (eyeful? Comment section-ful? The precise word eludes me just now) and, to his credit, brought it back to the team within the company for serious consideration.

The result is the latest edition, which provides more thorough administrative controls, simpler data importing from a wider array of sources, email archiving, quick-edit capabilities, and simpler data importation. Some additional functionality was added to Sugar Logic and, best of all, it’s all available in the free Community Edition, which you can get through a free download.

The point here is not the new version of the software. The point is that it’s an incredibly valuable skill listen to customers and then act on what they’re saying (which the Sugar team has done) and infinitely more helpful than ignoring that community, or to hear what it’s saying and remain immobile (which SugarCRM did, to varying degrees, before this release).

The amount of goodwill that this establishes is hard to measure, but it’s always a good idea to acknowledge the customers who contribute good ideas. It builds loyalty and it makes them feel like peers (rather than people whose ideas you’ve appropriated). It also paves the way for future collaboration.

This isn’t limited strictly to software companies. Other industries are learning about their own products from the customers who use them and can envision ways to make using them better, ranging from automobiles to sporting goods to plumbing hardware. Instead of relying on just your in-house expertise, you can supplement that with the very best practical product evaluators possible – your customers.

If you are looking into CRM, I’d suggest taking a look at Sugar 6.3. If you’re not, I suggest understanding the way 6.3 came about and applying it to your business.

As I keep saying, there are as many ways to use social media for your business as there are businesses. The best way to use it, of course, will be based on the behavior of your business and on the behavior of your customers. It will not be based so much on the advice of social media experts – unless they’re strongly advocating you to look hard at yourself and the people who buy from you before making any decisions. Those people may know what they’re talking about.

There are other experts out there as well. Take author and founder of Social Media Explorer Jason Falls, who has a new book called “No Bulls#!t Social Media.” (An aside: do female cows find the term “bulls#!t” sexist?—the editor.) He’s interviewed by Michael Stelzner here in a discussion that purports to dispel social media myths.

There are exactly two myths tackled in their take-down. First is the clearly spurious notion that you can’t measure social media ROI (better dispelled by people like Kathy Herrmann and presentations like this). Anyone who still believes this is just grasping for an excuse not to explore how social media and social CRM can help their businesses.

But first, Falls comes out swinging against “social media purists,” who are somehow convincing people to use social media for just the touchy-feely parts of customer relationship building and are never getting to the selling part of the relationships. Who these purists are is difficult to ascertain – they aren’t people in the social CRM pundit-ocracy, surely, since the activities they describe are directly connected to sales.

However, I have heard cautions about some of the things Falls advocates, like not being afraid to include a selling message in a Facebook post. He gives a great example that runs counter to those blanket warnings; it’s about the sale of a remote car starter from a person in a small town to a customer in the same town that that seller already knew.

Or maybe it’s not a great example. The buyer and seller already had a relationship – they’d friended each other. The seller was a small businessman and already knew his customer base well, according to Falls. In this case, suggesting a remote car starter on a frosty winter day is hardly a semi-anonymous act of selling – it’s a call to action directed at people with whom a relationship is already well-established. It’s anything but a cold call.

The trick here is to ensure you have authenticity on your side. I don’t think Jason is dramatically off-base in what he says here – you should certainly take advantage of your relationships with customers to make sales, and if you can do it with a Twitter message or a Facebook post, then mission accomplished. However, i think some nuance is lacking. You need the relationship foundation to be solidly built in order for a social media pitch to work. Without past positive contact, a call to action in social media looks and feels like a sales pitch – and is an inhibitor of building that foundation that’s so critical to a long relationship with the customer.

How do you walk that tightrope? Well, now we’re back to the start of this post. The approach you take to steering a course between the extremes – social hobbyist and social hard-seller – depends on the behavior of your business and on the behavior of your customers, and more strongly on the latter, since they’re the ones who will pass judgment on the effectiveness of your approach. It will require careful writing and proper targeting, but it can succeed – if you’ve already laid the foundation for success.

One of the most memorable wasn’t at all scary. The driver of the late model red pickup truck I was hitching a ride in was an editor at a fairly major technology publication. As the editor of a CRM website, we had plenty to discuss, but she had one question of me: What is the purpose of Twitter?

This was a couple of years ago, and if my explanations weren’t sufficient, I’m sure she’s caught on by now anyway. Technology folks have been forced to come to grips with Twitter, as have millions of others. Whether you use it to broadcast your own daily story, to announce things you’ve done or events you’re planning, to promote content on the Internet, to re-Tweet and share material, or any of an innumerable number of other uses, Twitter has a genuine value to it – and like a lot of social platforms, that value is up to the user to discover.

That’s why a lot of businesses have such a rough time of figuring it out. Just as with Social CRM in general, the value you derive from it is based on three things: how well you use it, of course, but also about the unique qualities of your customers and the unique qualities of your business.

Down at IT Expo a few weeks ago, there were lots of folks in the social CRM track who were asking the same question that that my casual car pool driver was asking a couple of years ago. They were small business owners, people in departmental roles in large companies, and everywhere in between; because of the nature of IT Expo, many came from telecom backgrounds. They seemed perplexed, and concerned about the amount of time social media would take up, how to justify it internally, what to say, and how to tie it to business results to measure ROI.

And those questions are awesome.

Really! They’re awesome. They’re business-centered questions of the kind that should be asked about any initiative a business launches. The big difference here – and the difference with all social media – is that the cost of entry is so low. Getting a Twitter account costs nothing, and you can spend as much time with it as you can afford. The application of some common sense and a little employee time can get the point of Twitter across fairly quickly; then, you can start developing a strategy that takes into account your business and your customers.  For example, if your business has any kind of content it wishes to share with the world, Twitter’s virtually a necessity for getting it out there.

If you want a great how-to (as well as a lot of valid “why” and “what”), you could do no better than this post from the vivacious and perspicacious Erin Korogodsky, Lithium’s social media quarterback, entitled “8 Ways to Subtly Connect Online.” Four of the eight involve Twitter, which should tip you to its importance for business.

If you need more ideas, follow people in your industry (and notables in other industries) on Twitter and pay attention to who’s doing something well. You have a menu of styles and best-ish practices on display through social media; browsing through a selection of them will allow you to create a set of ideas that works for your business.

This is a learn-by-doing medium – the best way to understand it is to commit some time to it and start connecting to customers where they’re already talking.

If you make a business decision that causes your customers to say, “What were you thinking?”— or worse, “Cancel my account”— you probably need to rethink your strategy. This is true especially when the decision involves social media, and your goof is first rejected and then amplified by the very audience you’re trying to reach.

As you file this advice under “blatantly obvious,” consider that this scenario seems to happen  with surprising frequency, perhaps due to a basic misunderstanding of customers’ relationships with social media.

Exhibit A is Spotify’s decision to require a Facebook account as a prerequisite to sign up for their online music streaming service. Spotify believes that their customers should prefer to share their listening preferences automatically on Facebook as part of the music “discovery” process. If prospects want to sign up for Spotify and aren’t Facebook users, or don’t care to share their music with their 761 closest friends, they’re essentially out of luck, even if they’re willing to pay for the service.

What could go wrong with this plan?

A number of Spotify customers have made very clear their displeasure with this policy. Published reactions suitable for this family-friendly blog include the terms “stupid,” “bad idea,” “insane,” “moronic,” “how to ruin a good product,” “how to alienate your users in one fell swoop,” and “pathetic.” Some (former) users have even posted screen shots of their account cancellations.

You don’t need an MBA to know that this isn’t desirable customer feedback, especially for a new service (in the U.S.) that’s just exiting from its “invitation only” stage.

Many Spotify prospects and customers reject the idea of mandatory social media participation to listen to music. Others have security and policy concerns with Facebook in particular, and there’s the underlying reality that social media is essentially permanent. As plainly stated in The Social Network, “The Internet’s not written in pencil…it’s written in ink.”

Spotify forgot to remember that while social media is, well, social, it’s also a personal choice. Some people love Facebook, some live to tweet, some endlessly tweak their LinkedIn profiles, and some are serial bloggers. A common characteristic is that their choice and use of social media is an individual decision.

For every person whose life is a continuous social media post (why yes, that’s a really interesting photo of what you made for dinner last night, and thanks so much for tagging every participant at the Amalgamated Ferret Festival), there’s someone else who’d rather not share their political point of view and favorite inspirational quotes—or their musical preferences—with everyone or anyone.

What’s the key lesson regarding Social CRM to learn from this Facebook faux pas? Simply this: if you force your customers or prospects to modify their personal behavior in order to use your product or service, you risk losing business and alienating a potentially loud and passionate group. Social CRM can be a powerful and effective tool to create and nurture customer conversations, but you’ll need to meet your customers where and how they choose to interact with you. Your role is to create the message; your customers and prospects will determine the preferred medium to make the connection.

If you ignore this lesson, you’ll diminish the effectiveness of your Social CRM efforts and potentially suffer the consequences of being called out via the same media you’re trying to use to reach your market. So make a plan to explore (test and measure) a variety of media and listen to your customers and prospects as you develop your Social CRM policies and procedures. You’ll then be much more likely to find that your Social CRM efforts are spot-on.

It’s frustrating, then, when those same business leaders then wait for the other shoe to drop. They go into what I call “Missouri mode” – “show me,” they say.

The problem here is that the other shoe in this case is on the feet of these businesses. They can either take the ideas they’re hearing and start to run with them, or they can wait until someone writes the one-size-fits-all handbook for the future of CRM within their business. Which is not going to happen.

But I keep saying this – you are the one who has to determine what the best practices are for your business and your customers, since those two intersecting groups are comprised of people with unique desires, behaviors and attitudes. Expecting a speaker at a show or the author of a book to drop a turnkey solution attuned precisely to your customers and your business conditions into your lap is complete folly. And, meanwhile, your competitor may be trying new things and figuring out his own “best practices” for his customer base. Where will that leave you?

I while ago, I wrote a piece about the fallacy of waiting for best practices to emerge for social CRM - in fact, this was last November, and as far as I can tell those best practices have yet to materialize. The story also calls out businesses for being faint-hearted about changing their approach to customers. Nothing has changed in eight months, even though, as Denis Pombriant said at the show, the cost of failure at social CRM is very small right now.

So here’s my advice: just as when you first implemented CRM, look for something your business could be doing better, then think of a way that you can do it through CRM or even social CRM, then try it. Don’t go big at first – use small victories to build momentum for more victories. If you don’t get the small victory then all you have to worry about is a small failure. But you can learn from small failures of commission; failing to do anything is a failure that teaches you nothing.

Finally, sit back and say “Show me.” If someone does indeed show you, it will mean that you’ve already fallen far behind in the race to know and serve your customers better. You should know your customers better than anyone else; now is the time to show them that you’re serious about the relationships you’re building,

Really. No Joke.

The Mobile Applications consultant, from Providence, R.I., has asked that people keep their purchases to $3 or less and that they tweet or blog about his project. He has also put in the facility to allow individuals to “pay it forward” by adding funds to the card if they so wish. His Twitter Account posts the current balance each time a transaction is made on the card.

It was while researching Mobile Payments for a start-up company in Boston that he came up with the idea. He took a screenshot of his Starbucks card on his iPhone and emailed it to himself. He found that by opening the image on any of his phones that the Starbucks barista could scan it and take funds from his Starbucks card account. He then made the image available to the world.

People with no smartphone were printing out the picture and taking that into Starbucks, one person even had the barista scan his laptop screen.

At the start of the project, in July, Stark had less than 100 followers on Twitter, so the card balance was always fairly low. But then, over the first weekend in August, his experiment was discovered and his followers have already gone past the 5,000 mark in a matter of days.

The card is constantly emptied and charged, with anonymous donations being made by those individuals wanting to contribute something back.

Stark has been criticised by some people who say he should donate money to a good cause rather than giving away coffee to people with smartphones, but he sees his experiment more as an example of “humans being good.”

“It’s literally giving people hope,” Stark said. “Ultimately the goal is for more people to do this kind of thing. I admit it seems a little frivolous to give away coffee to people with iPhones. But imagine if you had a CVS card and you could give someone $10 for their Alzheimer’s medication. The concept of frictionless social giving is very attractive. And this is just the beginning of that.”

It may be that, in the years to come, this kind of activity becomes the norm, with businesses being able to “give” their services for “free” – funded, in part or whole, by donations from users or individuals who see it as a worthwhile cause, in the same way that Shareware computer programmers accept donations for their software.

So is this a simple social experiment, or is it, perhaps, a great marketing and advertising ploy? Stark is getting his name known globally for the price of a few cups of coffee and that’s simply got to be cheap advertising!

You can visit Jonathan Stark’s Starbucks Card here.

This post originally appeared on the SugarUK Blogs.

Here’s a list of things you should avoid posting:

1. Party Photos showing you drunk or with a hand somewhere it shouldn’t be.
2. That you are having a party – unless you really want more people than you invited!
3. Passwords – unless you can afford to lose the information or money it protects.
4. That you are planning to take a sickie.
5. Drama with your friends.
6. Issues with your parents or family.
7. How to get more connections, friends or followers – it sounds like spam.
8. Your bodily functions – really, no-one needs or wants to know!
9. Photos or events which reveal your were not sick that day at work.
10. Complaints about your boss.
11. That you hate your job and want to leave – it may happen sooner than you think.
12. Links to personal sites from a business account – keep business and pleasure separate.
13. Updates that you have escaped from jail and are on the run (stop laughing – this has been done!).
14. Pictures of your, or worse other people’s, body parts (unless this is part of your job – tattoist for example).
15. Anything which you are not comfortable with – don’t post it. Chances are that other people won’t be comfortable with it either!

Some of the above list may seem obvious, some not so obvious.
Can you think of any others which are definite no-nos when it comes to Social Networking?

Simply click on “Add Sugar Dashlets” at the top right of your home screen and click on the Web tab.

Enter the URL of the RSS/Blog feed (e.g. www.sugaruk.co.uk/blog/feed) into the News Feed box and click “Add“. It will now appear on your homepage for you to drag to where you want.

You can also add webpages/sites to your homepages too by using the Website box.

Not only this, but you can also change the dashlet’s height by hovering on the title bar of the dashlet and clicking on “Edit Dashlet“. You will then see amongst the options, the height option, where you can specify (in pixels) how high you want the dashlet window to be, in order to show more or less information in the initial view. In version 6.2 a new feature has also been added allowing you to auto-refresh individual dashlets at set intervals to save you having to keep refreshing the entire screen in order to keep up to date with your blogs etc.

This tip was originally posted on the SugarUK Blogs where you can find a whole host of other useful SugarCRM tips.

Relationships are, at the most basic level, a joining of two “things”, whether pieces of information, pieces of an object/building/machine, or even people.

Some relationships SHOULD be stored in your CRM, others are more diverse and need to be looked at as to whether it is relevant to be stored in your CRM system, or just in your personal diary/address book/memory.

With this in mind, I would like to make your aware of a new “relationship” which is happening in the next few days.

On 18th June 2011, the SugarUK “family” will see a new relationship being formed.
This time, however, it’s nothing to do with a business venture, but all to do with personal relationships.

Joe Bushnell (yes, that IS him in the picture above!), SugarUK’s Sales Director, will be marrying Becky Ellis (one of SugarUK’s Admin Clerks) in Felixstowe, Suffolk, UK.
This is not the final stages of an office romance, as Joe and Becky have been together since before Becky joined the fold at SugarUK.

I would like to ask that if you read this, whether you know them or not, that you send Joe and Becky a message of support, condolence, joy, or whatever you feel appropriate. Please send your messages between now and Saturday 18th June 2011 to joe@sugaruk.co.uk and help make the happy couple feel that little bit more special as they start their journey into married life.

I will leave it to you to decide whether you need to add this to your CRM system, update Becky’s record etc.