One of the things social media allows us to see clearly and instantly is that some people don’t get social media. I see this every day in the CRM Outsiders Twitter feed (we’re @CRMOutsiders, by the way). Many of the people following us and being followed by us pre-date my arrival, including one gentleman who hails from the south Florida area.

I’m not going to call him out by name, but his handle is important. He’s an exec at his company, so when he signed up, he used the name and the company as his handle. If he were me, he’d be @ChrisSugarCRM.

There’s no secret what company he works for, and yet I’ve never seen a post about the company. However, being that we are a continent and four time zones apart, prime time for him is still work time for me. Thus, I have seen lots of commentary on sports, most of it spouting obscenities like a Tourette’s syndrome-afflicted merchant marine with a bad case of the Mondays.

During the NBA playoffs, there were allegations made about Dirk Nowitzki’s mother that would make a hardened veterinarian blush. Dolphins football brings a profane and homophobic running commentary. Even the Florida Marlins, as self-evidently awful as they are, were the subject of an assortment of posts that featured proctological references to batting helmets, challenges to their sexual identities and one reference to Hanley Ramirez resembling an, ahem, lower simian attempting to have romantic relations with a football.

At first these Tweets offended me, but they are so over the top they started top become funny. It’s also not often you get such a great example of what not to do with social media: identify yourself with your business, and then act like an absolute boor.

However, he’s still plugging away, his business still exists, and he’s obviously outlasted any social media manager the company may have had. His Twitter persona is different from his real-life persona – it’s got to be, otherwise he’d be busy flogging his resume in search of a new company he could utterly embarrass on Twitter.

Personas are an interesting thing, especially in the social media realm. The person we portray ourselves as in Tweets is different than the person portrayed in LinkedIn, or Facebook or wherever you may be, and that persona is different than the one you have in person. If you’ve ever read an angry screed on some social media site written by someone you know to be a bashful nebbish in real life, you can grasp this phenomenon.

From a CRM point of view, this raises some interesting questions, like this one: Should you create a different social profile for people based on the personas they adopt in different social media settings? How do you manage your interactions with all these personas? And how do you identify the personas that are most lucrative for you to foster relationships with?

I wrote about this idea a long time ago - so long ago I refer to CRM 2.0, rather than social CRM. The idea is still a bit out there (and immersive role-playing environments like Second Life seem to be fading in popularity, not threatening to subvert real-life reality, dimming the idea of personas a bit), but it does make sense to shift your business’s efforts to the channels where people are more likely to buy. If discerning between their personas helps with that, perhaps it’s something to track, even if it’s only to vary the way you respond to conversations in different venues.

At the same time, it’s important to keep track of the personas that represent your company. The same person who’s a respectful, articulate gentleman on the corporate Twitter account might be an out-of-control wild man on a developer’s forum or vertically-oriented site. Let everyone in the company know that there’s an image you need to project when you’re associated with the company – as in, when your handle or user name is identified with the company – and that, while you don’t want to deny their personalities, you also need for them to realize they’re representing the entire company. If what you’re communicating on social media wouldn’t be appropriate in front of customers in the office, it’s not appropriate in front of customers in social media – as in, potentially thousands of customers or could-be customers.

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.

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?

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.

For example, which word should take precedence?
Merely by its name it would appear that the ‘Customer‘ is the primary focus, probably due to the doctrine that “The Customer is Key”, ‘Management‘ is the end result of how we store the information about the transactions we have with them and the ‘Relationship‘ is how we connect those records to the customer.

However, if we turn the order of the words on its head and think about Managing the Relationship with our Customers we suddenly get a clearer view of how CRM should perhaps be viewed.

We Manage our data (track communications, schedule calls and meetings) in order to form a Relationship with our prospects in the hope they will become Customers.
But CRM is about more than simply being a metaphoric sales pipeline of getting the fish on to the hook and landed into our corporate net.

Once you have the customer, that’s when the hard work should start. Fishermen don’t call the place they put their caught fish a KEEP net for nothing!
Sure, it’s no easy task for the sales team to get the customer on your books in the first place and that is something that should not be underestimated or under valued. But in comparison to the length of the professional relationship your organisation is hopefully going to have with that customer in the long term, it almost mirrors the effort going into the process of convincing someone that they want to go on a date with you, compared with the hard work and years of commitment on both sides to keep the relationship working for more than just that first night.

Relationships of any type are difficult and take effort. Whether it be the one we have with our siginificant other, or with our children and the understanding that that requires, or in the business environment with our customers, we must never lose focus of the fact that we must strive to be the best we can, to help the other party be the best they can, with our support.

In the same way that a teenager keeps a secret diary containing all their dreams, aspirations and events that have happened to them (good or bad) and gets their friends round on a Saturday night to watch films and drink, so a valuable CRM system should allow you not only to keep a record of those crushes (leads), the ones they had dates with (conversions) and the events that led up to them (history log). It should be an ongoing documentary of what you are still doing with them (activities, calls and meetings); a secret diary, if you will, of what business desires (opportunities)you hope to secure with those leads and customers, as well as a way of putting together those invitations in the form of email campaigns.

It’s true that while teenagers develop, with the right input, over time into (one hopes) a valued member of society, so too your CRM system should develop, with the correct data and use, into a priceless part of your organisational procedures and practices.

The discussions clearly delineated the factors that make the move toward social anything difficult. There was a sincere desire to connect with customers and to build real relationships; the era of one-to-one marketing is truly upon us. But at the same time, we’re being asked to do this on an industrial scale – thus, marketing automation, sales performance tracking, sales alerting and so on.

The question becomes this: how do we use these productivity enhancers to get us to the point where we have a one-to-one conversation – or, as Chris Kovac of integrated marketing firm Nicholson Kovac suggested, how do we ultimately drive the conversation off social media and onto a telephone call?

That’s a tough one – because we use social media in our businesses precisely because they are where the customers and potential customers want to communicate. The phone call you hope for as a salesperson can change the nature of your relationship with those contacts. How do you negotiate that transition?

The other aspect of scale that has me thinking is how it can be a conversation multiplier. You’ve probably heard the concept that a discussion on a social media channel appears to be a 1-to-1 conversation, but in reality it’s an 1-to-1-to-many conversation. There’s a direct communication aspect, but there’s also an aspect of broadcasting to it – which fits nicely with our ideas of scaling our efforts in an industrial way.

However, if your responses in a conversation are particularly good (or, heaven forbid, particularly bad), they can spawn an entire new set of 1-to-1 (through channels like email) and 1-to-1-to-many (through social media) conversations. Those are great – unless you lack the capacity to handle dealing with them all. Then you have a real problem. Ignoring conversations you catalyzed through other conversations is a great way to alienate people – you leave them asking, “why aren’t we worthy of your attention?”  You also miss great opportunities to get to the stage Chris Kovac described, and then you’re just leaving money on the table.

I don’t think we’re to this point yet – most social efforts are still hit-and-miss as we figure out what works and what doesn’t. But some time in the near future, a business will nail it, and then fail to plan for its success by lacking a strategy for translating 1-to-1-to many into 1-to-1-to-a-sale.

Have you thought about the ways you can transition from a social media relationship to a 1-to-1 relationship? Have you looked far enough into the future to a point where your on-line conversations may begin to place demands on your team that they can’t handle? Or will technology come to the rescue?

Paul Greenberg, one of CRM’s most respected visionaries, just launched CRM Idol 2011, a wonderful competition from the CRM Entrepreneurs among us.   If you are a young CRM start up with a great idea but frustrated how you can the word out, get some great advice from some of the brightest CRM minds in the world and get market traction, this competition is for you.

A quick overview of the competition (as taken from Paul’s blog post)

The Criteria

This competition is for small companies in the CRMish/SocialCRMish world. – see the categories below for some guidelines though please feel free to make the case if you don’t see yourself in the guidelines.

• You have to have software that is commercially available by the time of the demo – that would be in August – again see below. No betas, alphas, release candidates allowed. If we find that you’re not commercially available, and you have a time slot, you’re out and someone else will fill the slot. So please be sure that you can verify the claim if you want to participate.
• You have to have 3 referenceable customers that, if we care to, we can contact and ask about you.
• You have to have revenue under $12 million U.S. your last fiscal year. As far as disclosure goes, you have the choice of making the claim that you do – though that will have to be stated in your submission and we’ll trust you or you can disclose your revenue in the submission with the knowledge that only the permanent judges will know what it is. If you make the claim, please be prepared to back it up if we ask. Your call on how.
• You have to be willing to make a ten minute video if you get to the finals. More on that later.
• You have to fit a category – though there is some leeway there.

The Categories

The categories that Paul and his team have identified to start are:

1. Traditional CRM Suites
2. Social CRM
3. Sales – Sales Force Automation, Sales Optimization, Sales Effectiveness
4. Marketing – Marketing Automation, Revenue Performance Management, Social Marketing, Email Marketing, Enterprise Marketing Management, Database Marketing
5. Customer Service – all permutations
6. Mobile CRM
7. Customer Experience Management
8. Social Media Monitoring – requires the possibility of integrating with a CRM technology
9. Customer Analytics – including text/sentiment analytics; voice based analytics; social media analytics, influencer scoring, etc.
10. Enterprise Feedback Management
11. Innovation Management
12. Community Platforms
13. Enterprise 2.0 – collaboration, activity streams etc.
14. Social Business
15. Knowledge Management – this one requires the possibility of integrating with CRM systems
16. Vendor Relationship Management
17. Partner Relationship Management

Once again, if you don’t see yourself in this list, don’t worry. Just make the case as to why you have some customer-facing possibilities and the likelihood is that we’ll be cool with it. We’re trying to make this easier for you, not hard.

What Are You Waiting For?

Go to Paul’s blog to learn more and find information on how to enter.

The two main acquisitions by Salesforce that give me pause are its puzzling $250m+ acquisition of hobbyist Ruby platform Heroku that no one was actually paying to use in production. Now, Benioff and Co. are shelling out $276m or so to acquire Radian6, a social media monitoring and analytics company.

What the #$%& is going on here?

Salesforce.com has spent more than half a BILLION dollars on a) platform tools that no one really cares about and b) a “cool” set of tools that really doesn’t add anything major to its core offerings (where, I should point out – Salesforce.com makes all of its money).

I think Radian6 does some cool stuff, really I do. But this multiple is ridiculous – and dangerous for the industry. It was bad enough hearing everyone freak out about Color getting a trillion dollars in funding (OK, maybe I’m off by a hair or two here) – but this type of overspending makes those shouting “BUBBLE!” seem like wise sages right now.

Salesforce paid a ridiculous multiple for a company probably struggling to grow profitably in a space that has not matured into a “must have” portion of the app stack for small and mid-sized businesses and may not for several years. While it is great to get insightful data from social channels, what companies have proven to have the right actionable processes in place to leverage this data in any valuable way?

Agin, social media monitoring is a useful tool – BUT – Radian6 was already tightly integrated into Salesforce.com. AND – I imagine that only about 15% TOPS of Salesforce.com’s user base really gives a damn about the kind of social media intelligence that Radian6 provides. Remember, Salesforce’s bread and butter is still the SMB and midmarket – areas where “brand monitoring” are not as critical as in, say, the Global 2000 (where Salesforce.com pretends to be a big player).

So, to recap, Salesforce.com has spent upwards of $500m+ to bulk up a platform that does not serve its core user base, and for a social media monitoring tool that its core user base has no desire or need to use.

Wow.

Just imagine, if Salesforce.com spent that money making its core CRM product actually easier to use, contain a less “Siebel in a browser” look and more of a modern web app feel, more reliable and less vulnerable to universal outages, etc. Imagine if they kept their actual core user base happy and actually still built CRM tools?

I guess we’ll never know…

Social is a transformative phenomenon – one that is taking businesses from yesterday’s approach to scale (one-to-many relationships and broadcast mentality) – into today’s world of scaling (or at least attempting to) personalized engagements.

So, where does sales fit into all of this? In a well-thought out article, InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti talks about sales and social in a recent Mashable post. Umberto points out an obvious “near paradox” in the sales/social development evolution: that while many sales people are “not technogeeks” – at the same time “sales has always been social.” (Side Note: I do hope and expect that Umberto will discuss these ideas in greater length during his SugarCon keynote next month.)

So, are salespeople ahead of the curve from a behavioral standpoint?  Or are they behind the social media learning curve from a technology standpoint?

I don’t think there’s an answer here, at least not a simple one. For many seasoned sales executives, they probably have the “in real life” social angle of sales nailed down pat: great at cold calling, soft closing skills, relationship management understanding, etc. But many of the new generation of sales people might have some great technology chops: building great online networks, scaling their reach while “keeping it real,” and creating effective outreach strategies to generate interest.

Both of these aspects seem highly complementary – but will one win out over the other?  Also, in time might we be in danger of losing old school “sales skills” due to upstart sales people relying too much on social technologies and not actually being “social” in the true sense of the word? It seems a fitting irony, but one with potentially drastic consequences.

Ultimately, people buy from people, and make purchasing decisions for emotional reasons. So, we can scale our reach, foster social channels as engagement platforms, etc. – but at the end of the day, the sales person with the best sales skills (whether they come from instinct or cool tools like SalesView) are the ones who will prevail.