But looking at Michael Maoz’s recent blog post around customer service vs. social. He makes a great point: good service is a must-have goal of any company and you need to man the phones, handle email well and essentially do all the traditional customer service channels well if you want to be a great company.

All to often, both companies and consumers are finding themselves accepting social as a band-aid to bad service rather than an additional tool to extend the relationship. This is dangerous: simply clinging to a new trend could be damaging to your brand, and how your customers see you.

The “Comcast cares” initiative is a great one. While yes, the Twitter users may help some customers – the campaign’s popularity is a glaring indictment on how bad Comcast’s traditional customer service is, and how low in esteem consumers hold the brand.

Sometimes, cutting the corners can be an efficient means to gaining new capabilities. SaaS CRM is a good example of that development. But with customer service, we can not simply jump to social alone. There are far too many people and processes that need to occur via traditional mediums and with the help of real people, etc.

And ultimately, this could be said about all areas of CRM: sales people are not ONLY going to use social tools to ferret out leads and try to close deals. And marketers will still mail, email and perform webinars and ads in addition to Tweets and Facebook campaigns.

After getting frustrated with these events – I did what any social media geek does when annoyed – I tweeted. While I expected the usual “Comcast cares” Twitter users (as described in Paul Greenberg’s latest version of CRM at the Speed of Light) to reply – I was surprised that Webex very quickly replied to my snarky tweets with an offer to help.

But what followed – in my opinion – showed the importance of having strong core CRM and tight escalation rules to supplement a twitter-based support team.

It was nice to get a response from the Webex Twitter handle – asking about my issues – and I responded. While the actions did placate my anger, my issue fell into the common “Twitter vacuum:” I never heard back from that account again. However, “ComcastBonnie” friended me, asked for some account credentials and came back shortly with a direct message explaning that there was an area issue and it was being worked on. Swell.

The point? To bring Paul Greenberg back into it – the “blocking and tackling” of CRM is as important as ever even as we discover new channels and processes to both sell to and support customers. I am not saying Cisco/Webex has a bad CRM system in place – I just did not see strong CRM 101 in place during the Twitter exchange.

I am often asked how we see SugarCRM as a social CRM tool – what “makes us a social CRM product,” etc.  My answer is always that we specialize in the core CRM, but provide simple tools and the flexibility to add ANY channel to core CRM to make an intuitive and valuable approach to social CRM. I do believe that for most businesses – this is key. Brand monitoring, deep relationship analysis and inbox analysis – all cool stuff for sure. But when it comes to simply being able to reach prospects and customers – and either provide them relevant information or a delightful experience – core CRM can not be forgotten.

During my demos with analysts and press, as well as an interesting on/offline recurring convo I’ve been having with Sugar co-founder Clint Oram – and interesting thing appeared to me.  Several analysts asked me to demonstrate the social aspects of Sugar 6 and how it could consume data from Facebook. I showed them some basic mashup capabilities – but there was no real “reason” behind what I was building for them on the fly and it all seemed superficial.

Just linking to sites, or data feeds, will not make your sales people social sellers.

There seems to be two sides to social media and how it powers sales and marketing initiatives. On the one side, we can glean a ton of interesting demographic and other targeting and segmenting data from the vast amount of social data people freely give up about themselves. This can “point us in the right direction” in terms of finding leads, feet in the door, etc. Of course, how this information is leveraged in terms of the conversation involves a whole ‘nother series of arguments – as per the “insightful vs. creepy” debate Clint, Mitch and myself have been having.

On the other side, sales and marketing professionals can leverage social media and networking tools to connect with potential, new and existing customers and build stronger relationships with less effort than could previously be achieved. As Clint noted in a tweet to me – “Really leveraging the social profile well for [social CRM] purposes is the key to putting the R back into CRM.”

Social selling is a skill, and I think some will “get it” and leverage social in many different ways to their benefit. Some won’t. Just as call center agents talk about “soft skills” that great service reps have; skills that in some ways can not be easily taught – great social sellers will have a similar skill set.

Many of the great social sellers are already doing a lot of what it takes to leverage social in a powerful manner. They have been “social” without the easy tools for years – now they are more empowered.

Where do you fit in this model?  Are you a social profile aggregator, or do you leverage social data to enhance real engagements, or both?

Really, what is the ideal role for IT when it comes to adding social tools into the day-to-day life of sales, marketing and support agents?

I am not saying I have the answers. )If I did, I wouldn’t be blogging about it while shirking my duties getting Sugar 6 out the door ) But it is an important question to ask, and I think your previous IT decision (especially in CRM) will dictate how much IT should or must be involved in this stage of your CRM lifecycle.

What I mean by that is that many older, and current proprietary approaches to CRM make it very hard for the end-user to add full featured tools like Twitter or SalesView into their CRM interface and processes without jumping through hoops with IT. For some, this is a good thing. For others, it is a headache.

It all depends on how you view the concept of control. Do you want to lord it over your employees, or do you want to empower them?

I use the SalesView example because it is a great one in terms of playing both sides of the field; it took me about four minutes to get SalesView installed into my SugarCRM installation. But that is because I had admin rights. As an average everyday CRM non-admin user, I can consume the valuable data in SalesView without embedding it in my CRM system – but the overall value and productivity gains are diminished.  So, I can expand beyond my IT-controlled database and circumvent IT in some simple ways – but to fully gain the value of social CRM and sales 2.0 – IT has to have some bit of involvement.

There are a LOT of “social CRM” projects and offerings popping up.  The pro is that they are simple to get up and running and can help a business professional make sense of his social web as it pertains to his work life. But the downside is that these are not true CRM tools, and can not replace the strong, centralized CRM system’s value.

Again, I don;t have the answers. But for now – it seems that to truly drive the most value out of social CRM – a balance must be struck between empowered individuals and the governance of IT.

I don’t think anyone would disagree with these tenets of social CRM.

However, a lot of these points apply mostly (if not only) to B2C operations. In the B2C CRM world, the customer is an individual – someone who acts as a complete entity in the social world: easier to track, engage and maintain a relationship. Social does not offer up as many challenges in the B2C world as much as it solves them. Prior to the social revolution it was difficult for consumer products firms, for example, to engage directly with the buyers of their wares. There was wayyyy too much fat in the middle: brokers, distributors – and marketing was done in a broadcast manner. The sell through model made engagement nearly impossible – until the internet shattered these boundaries. Hooray.

But B2B is different. In B2B, while we “sell” to a person or decision-maker – the entity we recognize as the target of our activities is a business (or an “Account” to use B2B CRM terms). Engagement and social engineering for sales, marketing and support is vastly different. Companies themselves do not post on Twitter, the “company” cannot be reached on LinkedIn to get a foot in the door. This “once removed” nature of social CRM for B2B makes things a little sticky.

Or does it?  In some senses, B2B social CRM is easier, in that we as users of B2B social tools can simply consume data from social sites and leverage it for our own benefit. And this data can be pulled internally, without having to be placed back into the social realm. As an example, I can leverage data from many sites like Hoover’s, LinkedIn, Jigsaw, CrunchBase, Twitter etc. and see it neatly in my CRM through tools like InsideView – but have I actually performed any “social CRM” activity form a “customer engagement” standpoint?

It is more “take” than “give” right now – B2B CRM is the vampire of the social economy in a lot of respects. (Not entirely true – as many B2B providers make up for this by tweeting and blogging useful remarkable content – and even if this is done as soft marketing – there is some “giving back” here.)

So, enter Salesforce.com’s Chatter concept. It is simply a tool for internal collaboration – none of the transparency between company and customer as required by B2C social CRM. There are countless tools for doing this type of enterprise 2.0 collaboration – CubeTree, Bantam Live, Jive, Sugar Feeds, etc. – but very few enable a company to transcend the firewall between the “customer” as an individual and the CRM system. Salesforce’s Chatter is guilty of this gap. But so are most other B2B CRM systems.

Why is this? Perhaps our reliance on selling “seats” rather than total business value makes it hard to open the floodgates of customer activity into a CRM system. Maybe we haven’t figured out security concerns.

Or, maybe the nature of B2B selling, and where social CRM is right now in terms of B2B, dictates that we do not need this type of transparency. Is it enough to have all of your employees on the same page, provide a consistent response to any customer inquiry, and consume data from social media rather than engage directly inside the networks where they are created?

It is too early to tell. The success or failure of Chatter as a concept will be a bellwether. Do B2B CRM users want real social CRM?  Or is internal collaboration – while consuming static social media data – enough to enable B2B sales, marketing and support in the dawning age of social?

Wim and I were discussing the opportunities in Holland for social CRM, and apparently business is booming, so to speak. But what Wim pointed out was that many of the brands he is working with are ones we would easily recognize, and often use, here in the US. However, interestingly, Wim is only working with them to connect with customers in the Netherlands.

Hmmm. At first, I thought: “Why would a global brand want to think about s small country when it can scale to global levels without any major incremental investment in social?”

Then my puny brain kicked in to gear, and it all made sense. The fact that you do not have to spend a lot on local or global means that you can target MORE effectively in a social manner by staying local. I mean, after all, shouldn’t there actually be a “social” angle to all this? Does a huge, global campaign over social channels run the risk of being anything but social and simply a bland, watered down engagement strategy that has to take into account all cultures (and time zones)?

In marketing, we have been forced over the years to seek the biggest bang for our marketing buck. Segmentation was sought after, but only in a manner that was cost effective. Personalization – in my mind – is a myth for many B2C marketers.

But now, we can actually connect directly with customers and prospects in a two-way dialog on their terms, in their language (in every sense of that phrase), and in their regions – without spending a ton of resources to do so. And, to bring back Mike’s points – we can actually better follow up and respond to local social campaigns on the “human level” because we can dedicate proper resources to those campaigns to align with the more common “business hours” of those regions. (Though, as I’m sure Mike would agree – we should all be aiming for a round the clock approach to social engagement – though I don’t have too many answers here.)

The internet has enabled a lot of companies (us included) to go global in a time frame previously unthinkable. But now, it seems, we can use the internet to do the opposite. We can take global brands and make them relevant in key markets – with strong engagement strategies localized for those markets focusing on different buyer interests, needs or tastes – for the same effort we would use for a multi-channel mass marketing campaign.

Mitch’s post this morning got me thinking. Mitch makes an excellent point around the value of “Initiative” and how empowering your employees to go out there and do the legwork of the early stages of a social CRM initiative will reap dividends down the line.

I agree 100%. Of course, there needs to be some guidelines and a unified goal here – but overall, it is the heroes that “get it” in your organization around social that need to be identified and nurtured into your social branding champions.

But, as Mitch notes, this takes TIME. Sometimes, a lot of time. Take Outsiders as an offshoot of SugarCRM branding for example. You would think that with the most popular open source CRM app on the planet – the Outsiders blog would have simply taken off overnight. But in reality, the blog is just hitting its stride – thanks in part to a lot of hard work, great content (thanks again Mitch) and some legwork to network in some great observers and practitioners for comments and conversation. This actually took almost THREE YEARS to do!

It is an odd irony actually. I mean, as a consumer of social media we are accustomed to instant gratification: finding answers, “jumping the queue” when it comes to customer service, connecting with people across the world in seconds.But, when we are the creators of social content, with any attempt to create a consistent and meaningful conversation – the amount of work and time to get there is almost daunting. (If I was better at remembering and collecting figures I’d note a more exact amount of abandoned blogs in the world after only a few posts – again I don’t know the exact figure but it amounts to roughly a metric crapload )

Again, creating remarkable content on a regular basis is sometimes a pain. Most of us (I know myself included) are just expected to create and permeate our social brands, in addition to traditional engineering, sales, marketing, support etc. duties. It can feel like there just isn’t enough time in the day to create thoughtful content.

But my only advice is to resist the urge to “phone it in.” Don’t simply become a re-tweeting machine. Don’t make all your corporate blog posts simple “round ups” of other peoples’ ideas. The hard work, and patience, will pay off. I think Mitch Lieberman is a great example. He has worked hard and created an amazing network and level of respect around himself in this space. That definitely did not happen overnight, right Mitch

As they say, patience IS a virtue…

Mike asked: How do we prioritize our social media responses if we have no clue about the influence clout of the source? (paraphrased)

Great question – on so many levels. I mean, isn’t customer service supposed to be blind? Shouldn’t we be treating all of our customers the same? meaning – treating each one as if they were the most important?

But it sadly has shifted away from that notion of “the customer is always right” and into a more jaded “the customer who makes the most noise wins.” Through sites like Twitter – if you have a huge following and make a stink about a product or service – you will get a faster response and a little more love. But what about the loyal, high profit customer who does not play the social game? Does he or she simply lose out in the age of social?

So, does social CRM play to the hand of your worst customers? Or, at least the most whiny? (Thanks to Mitch Lieberman for putting me down this path…)

I think the answer is yes, and no. On the one hand, yes, squeaky wheels get the grease. But, squeaky wheels in the social media sense can also be early indicators – allowing you to avoid potentially huge problems before they become just that. Also, providing service through social channels is a new challenge and opportunity – while we may cater to the squeaky wheels, once that wheel is oiled they may go from whiner to evangelist – letting many more people know just how well they were treated.

In time, I think we will get to a sort of balancing point – where influence is better calculated and we are not operating in such a reactive mode via social media. Instead, we will be leveraging social channels to provide proactive service, or simply leveraging it as another channel in our support arsenal.

Again, the goal is not just to avoid potential PR nightmares – it is to provide great experiences for your customers.

While in NYC, I personally had the opportunity to speak, engage with and listen to Clint Oram, Greg Kieser of The Robin Hood Foundation and Arkady Kleyner as well as an active audience, willing to jump into the conversation. On the panel, we dug into topics like adoption and value to the end users, it was a good conversation. After the event, I was able to spend some further time with Clint as we dissected our own topics, and CRM ‘next’. The theme there was, ‘we have been at this so long, how do we make sure we have not lost touch’ and ‘is “Manual” a bad thing; but more on that in a couple minutes.

I spoke on the topic of ‘CRM in the age of Social’ – this is the kissing cousin of ‘Social CRM’. I chose to alter the title of the presentation, and it will also likely be the topic of my book, as soon as I get busy writing it. The distinction is that while Social CRM is receiving a lot of attention, the basic ‘blocking and tackling’ of CRM is still top of mind for many. As a matter of fact, many, while interested in the artifacts of Social CRM; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others, are even more are concerned how this fits into their organization.  Clint did a stellar job of talking about the CRM Adoption curve and in a way organizational readiness. The audience was engaged and the topic hit home

Is Manual a bad thing

After the event, while we were discussing and dissecting our own talks, Clint and I began to wonder out loud. Two CRM veterans, with battle scars to prove it, trying to figure out what impact over engineering processes, and optimizing front office and back-office to point of pure optimizing was really about. Is process efficiency getting in the way of focusing on your customer? How can that be?

I am not going to put words in Clint’s mouth here, these thoughts are my take away from our conversation. Part of the ‘People, Process and Technology’, which we all talk about is, the process part, of course. More often than not, process optimization is completely Inside-out, hard to argue that. You can try and we would love to hear it. So, what? Well, how is this for a thought: what impact does your process optimization effort have on the Customer Experience? Is it all good? To certain folks in your organization, saving 10 or 15 minutes, multiplied by 10 a day, a hundred a month has to be good, right? Or, are you passing on an opportunity to spend some time on the phone with your customers?

I do not have the answers right now, but it did get me thinking…

Atlanta – Social CRM in the South

While Mitch was up in NYC, I was speaking on an interesting panel at the Silverpop annual Client Summit in Atlanta. The panel covered the topics of social CRM, inbound marketing and lead generation for modern B2B organizations.

The panelists were great – we had David Raab of Raab Associates, who I see as a godfather of demand generation, in short a very bright guy. Also, Jep Castelein from Lead Sloth also added some great insights for the audience. Rounding out the panel was moderator and B2B marketing evangelist at Silverpop Adam Needles.

Before taking audience questions, we went through some of the issues facing marketers today, and talked about some of the ideal (or less than ideal) processes and systems we now need to consider on an everyday basis. I offered up this tangled model – to show just how much technology and process we must be tracking in the age of social:

The audience was great – and if you were in attendance, thanks for your great questions and feedback. I got the feeling that marketers are now starting to think about HOW to add social media monitoring and inbound/outbound social media strategies; were are getting past the IF, WHY and “Is This Valuable?” stages.

I had some side conversations with attendees representing some Sugar customers, as well as some interesting brands like Muzak – all interested in keeping a nice balance between broadcasting brand messaging and actual lead management in social channels. Some great ideas out there, and glad to see people are getting the idea that they simply have to apply social concepts to their business – there are no magic bullets – and this is not a rip and replace by any means. We are simply adding new channels of communication to our marketing activities.

In all, a great panel at a great event. I think Silverpop is doing so cool things in terms of empowering B2B marketers with a broad tool set. It’s a nice complementary solution to their more B2C focused offerings.

Unlike some marketing presentations – we were simply using a live version of Sugar 6, and taking screen shots. Two marketing professionals were making customizations (mostly Jan – I am useless at that stuff) and turning an out of the box demo account into a social CRM platform. One used to track leads and accounts via sites like LinkedIn and twitter – and with tools to assemble a portfolio of social media information around a contact or account, or lead or whatever…

Did we build a new CRM application to do this? No, we just leveraged a powerful tool set (Sugar 6 and the Studio admin panel). Will the features we stumbled on today trying to make cool Power Point slides make it into the feature as a set product?  Probably not.

What I mean to say is that, right now, there is NO social CRM product out there. There are platforms, tools, analytic and monitoring engines etc. (And some, Like InsideView, Radian6, and beRelevant – are VERY cool and valuable tools.) But ultimately – it is up to you to apply these tools into your CRM strategy. Just as your traditional sales, marketing and support processes are unique to your business, so will your initial SCRM initiatives.

I am not saying we will not have packaged SCRM tools in the future, near or far. But The good news for us is that no one else has anything near a comprehensive solution either. (And maybe there will never be one.) But for now, I like the idea of a flexible set of tools to adapt your business to the Era of the Social Customer (to loosely quote Paul Greenberg).