One of the unexpected pleasures of my job is to act as the session chairman for SugarCon 2012. I get to solicit, pick and otherwise decide what will be in the breakout sessions and the keynotes for the event (which is coming up April 23-25). As a social media aficionado (not an expert!), I’m trying to throw some social aspects into the show; that’s led to the unconventional process we’re using to generate ideas for the sessions.

A lot of vendor-sponsored shows are done for the benefit of the vendor. That flies in the face of the whole idea of CRM and being customer-centric, and SugarCon’s been perhaps the least guilty of this in the past. Taking it to the next level, we’re making sure the content of the show is what the attendees want by allowing the attendees to program the show.

Here’s how it works: if you go to the show page, and click on sessions, you won’t see a formal agenda yet – you’ll see the list of submitted sessions. If you click on the session you’re interested in, you can vote on it if it sounds like something that will float your boat. We’ll give those greater scrutiny than others when making the final cut. And if there’s a session you’d like to present, or one you’d like to see, throw it up there. Voting goes through Feb. 15, so you still have time to make your voice heard and influence what SugarCon 12 looks like.

To be honest, we’re not letting them program the entire show – only because you need some lead time to get on the calendar of people like Guy Kawasaki, Paul Greenberg, Paul Gillin, Michael Fauscette, Brent Leary, Jesus Hoyos, Esteban Kolsky, Chuck Schaeffer, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff and Michael Wu. I went out and pleaded, cajoled and wheedled ahead of time to get them on board – well, to be honest, it was easy. All these folks are proof of my theory that anyone who succeeds in CRM must be at heart a good, friendly person, and they were happy to throw their hats in to our three-ring circus.

But SugarCon 2012 is not about my theories – it’s about you, the CRM user. Take a peek at the site, make a contribution to our session ideas, and get your spot reserved today. We’re looking forward to seeing all of you in San Francisco in April!

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.

There’s a term that has been stuck to me at times that makes me cringe, although it probably also helps me get paid better. The term is “thought leader.” That sounds as if people reading my stuff have thoughts that can be led, like I’m some kind of intellectual and metaphorical dog walker and y’all’s brains are on the leashes. “Thought leader” makes me think of something out of “Village of the Damned.” I assure you that I am not, in fact, a small telepathic British child with glow-in-the-dark eyeballs.

And yet the term is prevalent in technology. Ick. I prefer “influencer,” because I like to think that people sharing ideas can and do influence others. There are a mess of CRM influencers out there (often branded as “thought leaders”) who have contributed a lot over the last decade toward making CRM more successful, more universal and more accepted as they way businesses manage customer relationships. (I’ll call some of them out in our year-end list of the top 20 CRM blogs of 2012, which is coming soon.)

Today, Michael Brito wrote a blog post called “New Thought Leadership is Needed for Social CRM.” Not only does it perpetuate “thought leaders” as a phrase, it makes a serious error in its urgent pleas for the next wave of ideas about social CRM (SCRM).

To make it short, Michael says that the “thought leaders” (ugh!) of the last few years have stopped offering new ideas. They’re cheerleading for their past ideas rather than contributing innovative thinking, and thus it’s time for a new group of innovative thinkers to come on the scene.

The world can always use more innovative thinkers. But to say that the influencers in SCRM need to be replaced is a bit silly. Here’s why.

SCRM is not a wholly-new discipline. It’s built on the foundation of CRM, which took almost two decades to turn into what it is today – a reliable and in many cases undeniable necessity for maximizing the productivity of the sales, marketing and customer support force. SCRM takes advantage of the social media revolution and provides a new series of channels of communication between the business and the customer – but data still has to go somewhere to be stored, sorted and distributed, and that somewhere is the CRM system. Suggesting that you can have SCRM without the CRM foundation is like saying you’re going to have a hybrid car without the drive train and chassis – in both cases, you aren’t going to get far. To bridge the CRM-to-SCRM chasm, you’d better know CRM.

Those pundits who aren’t vaulting far enough into the future for Michael’s tastes know that. SCRM is an enormous jump for businesses – especially those whose CRM operations weren’t up to snuff before the social media revolution was upon them. The percentage of actual customers using CRM as a share of the number of potential users is amazing – internal noodling here suggests only about 15 percent worldwide – meaning that there are a lot of people who need to learn a lot, starting with the basics. “The basics” have changed with social media’s arrival, but there are still basics that need to be learned.

What we face is a phenomena I dubbed “the slow revolution” back in April of this year. That’s a situation where social media is causing thinking to race ahead, and technology is almost keeping pace – but the organizational ability to absorb, understand and react to these changes is significantly slower. Thus, when there are revolutionary breakthroughs in thinking, the pundit class can sprint ahead, but the people charged with implementing these new ideas trudge through the task at a much slower speed simply because it takes longer to “do” change than it does to talk about it.

What Michael really expresses in his blog post is a desire for more “how to” from the influencer class and less “what to do” – but he’s never going to get that. The people who are figuring out how to do things in SCRM are not pundits but business people. They are figuring out very specific things about their businesses and how SCRM fits into their unique customer audiences and internal practices. These are real and genuine competitive advantages, and as you’d expect, many people who are succeeding with SCRM are not eager to share that with their competitors.

There are case studies out there, however, that point at the ways SCRM succeeds. Again, they aren’t written by the pundits, who speak to broad cross-sections of business, but by the businesses themselves (or, in a case like this one, by the vendor and the implementation partner). The thinkers think (and blog), while the doers do (and use what they’ve done to run their business). It’s all about what you get paid to do.

Those businesses who are choosing to be “doers” in SCRM have a lot of work ahead of them. So do the latecomers to “traditional” CRM – and the distance between the beginners and the cutting-edge practitioners gets greater every day. That’s why I have no problem with influencers looking perhaps not five years out for the next revolution but maybe one year out to see how the revolution we’re in plays out, or even looking over their shoulders to help slower businesses catch up.

Suggesting the current crop of thinkers should step aside for a new generation of thinkers assumes that there’s a new generation ready to take over. A new generation will assert itself – individually, over time, and as business, customers and technology evolve. In the meantime, pay attention to the people whose advice has gotten you this far, and realize that putting ideas into action takes much longer and demands more patience than explaining those ideas in the first place.

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.

Let’s face it – most people have but a passing notion about the cloud. That’s thanks to marketing people, mostly, and their nearly pathological need to take today’s hot buzzword and attach it to whatever it is they’re selling.

This is not exclusive to technology; five years ago, the real-world analog was the word “extreme,” which started out as a prefix for things like snowboarding, base jumping and street luge. Soon, we had extreme soft drinks, extreme down pillows and extreme pencil erasers.

The difference here is that “extreme” has no real definition in this context, but “the cloud” does. Even so, thanks to marketing mammoths like Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle and others, the term “the cloud” has been slapped on many non-cloudy things to the point where the average SMB user – ostensibly, the fellow who could benefit most profoundly from cloud computing – is at a loss as to what it actually is.

I liken the cloud marketing tragedy to the metaphor of the blind men feeling the elephant – each describes an animal very different from what’s really in front of him based on the unique body part he’s feeling – trunk, tusks, tail, feet and so on. In this case, however, the companies doing the feeling can see just fine, but they choose to describe the cloud based on the one aspect that they are “feeling” – and usually, it’s the part of the cloud that makes them money. Some companies contend the software’s the cloud, others say the hardware’s the cloud, still others look at the services that ties things together as the cloud.

None of them are “the cloud” by themselves. Some aren’t cloud at all (I’m looking at you, ad agency who threw together Microsoft’s TV commercials). Some are cloud-like, but are really traditional distributed SaaS vendors. We’re planning to help define for users what the cloud – and especially the public cloud – really is, and what a modern cloud-based application looks at. To do that, we’re enlisting a lot of our friends among the expert community, starting with Esteban Kolsky. And, we’re enlisting you.

To get the ball rolling, and to set a baseline for our understanding of the cloud in a CRM context, we’re polling our readers to see where their understanding of the cloud is, and to get their takes on some cloud-related issues of business value and perception. It’s just nine questions long, and once you’ve completed you’ll be among the first people to see the new white paper on the cloud by Esteban. To take the survey, go here;  I’d appreciate it if you could click the boxes and help us understand how well the cloud is understood.

One of the key features of this survey is that we’re asking users, pundits and deployment partners the same questions. I suspect that there will be some questions where the different groups will give very different answers – those areas of divergence represent opportunities to further educate CRM users about the cloud.

It’s an exciting opportunity – and one that should have been seized upon long ago. I’m still looking at you, Microsoft’s ad agency.

The auto repair industry can’t boast a history of great customer relationships. Part of it is customer-based – no one’s really in a great mood when their car breaks, and it’s hard to deliver a great customer experience when the customer’s in the midst of a bad experience. But a lot of it is because of the auto repair industry’s own issues – bogus repairs, misleading estimates and the general attitude that customers are ignorant about their own cars can lead to an adversarial relationship between customers and repair shops.

Larry Bloodworth is dedicated to making sure that’s never the case with his shop, Certified Transmissions in Draper, Utah. He has some things going for him; perhaps most importantly, he loves fixing transmissions. He started doing it as a hobby, and 37 years ago he went into business.

He’s also a huge student of the concept of the customer experience. I first got to know him through a discussion of “The Experience Economy” by Pine and Gilmore – how many auto repair shop owners can discuss that book?

Taking the concepts in the book to heart, Larry created a customer experience around getting your transmission repaired – which, he admits, does not usually start as a good experience. He says, in the past, the customer’s initial reaction was akin to someone engaging a funeral home. “No kidding – there are amazing parallels in the (customer’s) demeanor, sales psychographics, sales cycle,” he says. “Nobody is happy when they walk into a typical transmission shop.”

So, Larry says, that meant the first step was to avoid being the typical transmission shop.

“We moved to our current location for, among other reasons, to change not only the customer’s experience, but our work environment as well,” he says. “We used to have the typical shop front office that was cluttered, out of date, and parts laying around. Less than optimal, to say the least.  Now, everything the customer sees, touches, hears, and even smells, are all small parts of our overall marketing plan, which centers around the customer’s experience.  If we are putting ourselves out to the public as being the best choice, everything has to match.”

The office, Larry says, used to be “DOA.” Not any more. Instead, he’s turned it into a gearhead’s classroom, with displays on how the transmission works and what can go wrong. “We call it ‘edutainment,’” he says. The experience goes from one of dread to one where the customer learns something.

But it doesn’t stop there. After the car goes into the garage and the customer goes home, the experience continues. During the repair process, the staff shoots short videos about each repair, showing damage or worn parts and the repairs the shop is making. The videos are e-mailed to the customers, continuing the education process and also helping to foster a sense of transparency and trust. “We can have the world’s best online marketing, a remarkable CRM system, and all the bells and whistles in the world, but it all boils down to trust.  We have found through the simple elementary school exercise of what we call our ‘Show-N-Tell,’ virtually all fear and uncertainty disappear.”

None of this happens by accident. The business’s processes are well planned. For example, the shop takes customers by appointment, because the chief cause of delays in calling customers with updates on their repairs is interruptions from walk-in customers.

“Having a system in place is critical to customer satisfaction,” says Larry. “The more thought-out and automated, and less dependent on somebody remembering what to do to give the customer a ‘wow’ experience, the better.  That’s hard to pull off in any custom made-to-order service business.”

That was where Certified Transmissions’ CRM application (which just happens to be SugarCRM – although I learned this only after starting to write this post) proved helpful. “We knew nobody does business like us and so there’s no way to buy an (out of the box) system to fit our business.  I knew we had to buy something as close as possible to what we wanted, then had the flexibility to hire people cost-effectively to mold the software around the way we do business, not the other way around. It’s mass customization for a local service-oriented business.”

Developing a strategy boiled down to charting the customer’s journey through an interaction with Larry and his team. “It started as a hand-drawn flow chart that I eventually had a contractor on Odesk convert into a Vizio flowchart,” he says. “It’s extremely hard to put into writing, but rather easy to draw the flowchart for the first time once I had the time to focus.  I had been a one-man customer service department for most of my career and there was never a need to teach anybody or put it down in writing. When I realized I had to train others to do what I took for granted, I realized how hard it really was to teach, and drawing a flowchart seemed easier than trying to describe it in actual words. Additionally, as I later discovered, a flowchart is easier to teach.”

The impact has been better business, and a relationship with customers that’s more rewarding for both sides. “Our image now is that of a new car dealership.  We look so professional, we quite often get asked if we are a franchise,” says Larry. “That’s a compliment.”

For a peek at Certified Transmissions’ operations, take a peek at the Larry’s YouTube channel. Then ask yourself: if a company in as customer-unfriendly a business as auto repair can do this, why can’t your business?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been seeing a bunch of stuff about Klout come across my desk. For those of you who are unaware of what Klout is, you can visit the website try to figure it out on your own, or you can go with this brief synopsis: It’s a measure of your social media reach.

The website says that reach is measured on “True Reach,” or the number of people who respond or re-send your content; on “Amplification,” or how many people respond or re-send your content; and on “Network,” or how often people respond or re-send your content. I hope to heaven there’s more to it than that, because it sounds like they’re measuring the same basic thing three times. (These are their words – check here.) In the company’s blog yesterday, Scott Kleinberg (an influencer, not a Klout internal guy) summarized it much more effectively by describing it as a measure of how many people you influence, how much you influence them and how influential they are. Still a bit murky, but at least it goes from volcanic mud-clear to Colorado River water-clear.

Anyway, I’ve long been dubious about Klout, but, as I said, I’ve been pelted with stuff about them. First, a friend gave me a K+ for my CRM knowledge (why, thanks!). Then, my boss Jan Sysmans got a little Klout crazy and K+’ed me and several other related accounts via those other accounts in a kind of influence daisy chain.

Jan’s actions show one of the failures of this kind of metric: when people have an incentive to change a metric, and you give them an opportunity to do so, they will. But by doing that, you contaminate the metric, thus rendering it useless. Gamifying a measurement system is a really dumb, dumb, dumb move.

I also find that Klout fails at doing what it’s supposed to do, primarily because it tries to automate the idea of “influence,” which is a supremely human thing. It’s not just the volume of re-Tweets that indicates influence – it’s the impact they have on those that receive them, the timing of their reception, and ultimately whether or not the cause someone to behave differently. (Want more – much more – on this? Read Michael Wu’s blog.)

Without those admittedly hard to measure factors involved, Klout becomes a popularity contest. For instance, the very influential analyst Ray Wang of Constellation Research has a score of 60. Paul Greenberg, the most influential voice in CRM, has a 54. Comedian Norm MacDonald has a 64. Snooki from “Jersey Shore” has an 86. The squirrel that ran on the field during the National League playoffs has a 27, perhaps being chased by the Cobra that escaped from the Bronx Zoo in 2010. That reptile has a score of 57. So, according to Klout, a venomous serpent has more influence than the author of CRM at the Speed of Light.

The worst part of this is that some folks are taking this measurement seriously. Some writers I know are reporting that publishers are questioning their social media bona fides based on their Klout scores. So, because it’s the only game in town, this fictitious, Cosmo-quiz-level metric is now being used to make decisions that involve real money and real people.

And really, they ought not to. Paradoxically, those with high scores often know better than anyone the absurdity of the number attached to their influence As noted freelance technology journalist Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier (Klout score: 60) said, “I blame my high score on the fact that I spend a lot of time chattering on social networks and I don’t have housemates or co-workers to jabber with – and my cat hasn’t started talking back. Yet.”

So while comparing Klout scores is a nifty little social-era parlor game, making decisions based solely on a Klout score is a terrible idea. The door is still open for a legitimate, widely-available measurement of reach and influence, and maybe that will eventually be the Klout of tomorrow. The Klout of today is a long way from being that metric.

(And I’m not just saying that because my Klout score is 37. Just 37? Really? Come on…)

ADDENDA: David Strom threw up this nifty post just today, “17 Alternatives to Klout.” None of them are a one-stop solution, but the points he makes are great.

Back when people were pooh-poohing social media and social CRM on the grounds that it was too difficult to determine return on investment (ROI), Kathy Herrmann was one of the few coherent voices in the crowd shouting back, “Yes! Yes, you can!” SCRM ROI has become slightly less mysterious and slightly better understood in the last couple of years, but Kathy’s still on the forefront of helping businesses realize that there are techniques to measure the effectiveness of SCRM and to put it into terms even your accountant could understand.

Working with Dr. Natalie Petouhoff – another early advocate for SCRM backed by business metrics – Kathy’s consulting practice includes a center of excellence in the business of social business. Already a co-author of the Simplifying Social Business series of ebooks (available on Kindle and Nook), she has volumes in ROI for social customer service and social marketing and PR in the works.

I chatted with Kathy about what it took to develop an ROI strategy for your social CRM efforts. Since every company’s social CRM initiative is different, it’s not possible to crib it from a business book or swipe it from a competitor – but there are some elements that are constants.

CB: In order to establish an ROI measurement that makes sense for any business, is there a starting place? Is it based around the goals of the SCRM effort, or is there another initial consideration?

KH: Like any other corporate initiative, social CRM is no silver bullet. Like any other corporate initiative, you should expect to demonstrate the business case for your social programs which means defining/determining (in this order):

1.      Objectives,

2.      Strategy,

3.      Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and

4.      Expected business results (cost savings or revenue generation), including demonstrating an ROI.

What this really means is the rules of business remain in effect when your undertake an SCRM initiative. Additionally, the reality is there is no one way to implement social programs, so any path your company takes should be thoughtfully undertaken – and should also be an outgrowth of your overall corporate strategy.

The ROI is your narrative or underlying story that supports your strategy – and it’s nothing more than a numerical view of your strategy. It reflects monetary gains versus costs. And to determine either monetary amount requires you to have an understanding of your initiative’s potential cost structure and expected outcomes. You can only know the potentiality after you define your strategy.

CB: Does the ROI model vary in complexity with the number of social channels an SCRM effort employs?

KH: Absolutely. Calculating the ROI of social media requires that you can hold three different concepts in your mind at once:

1) Traditional operational activities and metrics (for example, marketing or call center metrics).

2)  Social metrics.

3)  Business results when social media is applied.

By understanding their interrelatedness and dependencies, you can connect the dots and gain insight into the activities, reach, relevance and behaviors of customers.

My collaborative partner Dr. Natalie Petouhoff and I develop ROI models for companies. We always start with our base methodology but then each company requires customization to their respective smROI model. And the reason is because each social program has its own characteristics that impact the ROI.

For example, a customer service versus a marketing initiative will have different operational metrics impacting the model. ROI will also be impacted by the social channel. For example, determining the ROI of an initiative that is centered on a community versus Twitter activities requires different social metrics.

Our model is always evolving because corporate social programs are as well. In our base ROI model, though, Natalie and I focus on the following areas of potential gains:

1.      Increased revenues (from marketing and PR activities).

2.      Increased savings from:

a.      Call center operations.

b.      Customer insights.

c.       Brand protection.

d.      Lead generation.

e.       Product development

f.        Internal collaboration.

How many of the above gains a company accrues will depend on the nature of its SCRM strategy.

CB: How difficult is it to “tune” an ROI model to fit SCRM campaigns?

KH: Determining a social media ROI can have challenges, because it requires you to aggregate data across multiple sources including departmental metrics (like marketing or customer service), social metrics, and business results. And no, not everyone can do it because not everyone has the right experiential mix of understanding of traditional business, social business and financial analysis. However, and this is important, social ROI can be determined.

CB: What’s the source of the assumption that ROI is impossible to compute – laziness, a failure to understand the variables, an absence of an understanding of the goals of SCRM, or other factors?

KH: Whew! I face this wrong-minded assumption a lot. I’m starting to think of myself as a cousin to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only in my case it’s Kathy the ROI Myth Slayer.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking why so many folks believe the myth of ROI impossibility and I think it comes down to several reasons.

First, as I discussed in the other questions, calculating an smROI has challenges because you have to hold three complex concepts in mind – traditional business, social business and financial analysis. There are a lot of smart people in social circles but many don’t have the necessary expertise to tackle the calculation. So for them, determining ROI seems impossible. That’s not a knock on those folks because they can have great experience in other areas of social business activities (and I for one, can’t always do what they can).

Another common reason that many folks say ROI is impossible to determine is because there can be a lot of unknowns associated with social initiatives. And yes, that can be true – but this is true of any corporate initiative. Dealing with unknowns in calculations like ROI is a combination of science and art. Again, it’s an experience factor.

One of the reasons I manage unknowns so well is because I started out my career as a petroleum exploration geophysicist. The geosciences are an interpretive science and I spent years in the oil industry learning how to convert interpreted geologic data into monetary investment potential. So for me, the unknowns associated with social programs is business as usual.

More recently, I’ve also come to believe the ROI myth persists because of chasm that exists between the “buy” and “sell” side. On the “sell” side are vendors and agencies that have a lower incentive to determine the ROI. In some cases, it can be because of a fear the ROI of their solution or services won’t hold up. And that’s too bad, because in well-designed social programs, the ROI can be quite high. Also keep in mind, that many of the social pundits saying ROI can’t be determined are folks coming out of the creative side of social – and in many cases, they lack the needed expertise to determine ROI. Again, not knocking them because their experience is their experience.

On the other side of the divide are the business leaders on the “buy” side of business. They’re the folks writing checks for service (think agencies) or buying social tech solutions. And because these are the guys and gals paying the bills, they do want to understand the potential business results.

And here’s something to keep in mind. Social media is in a shift right now, moving from the Early Adopter (EA) stage in the lifecycle to the Early Majority (EM). In the EA stage, there’s lowered concern for considerations like ROI. Why? Because programs are lower risk because the initiatives are experimental, smallish, and isolated to individual departments. As an example, think in terms of marketing campaigns here and there.

However, as social moves into the EM stage, this is where companies will get more serious about implementing more holistic, corporate-wide social initiatives. At that level, SCRM becomes a change management opportunity and challenge. And when it comes to change management, the impact will be greater because of the span across people, processes and technology. That’s why the interest in smROI is picking up as well. Before companies undertake such change initiatives, business leaders want a clear understanding the potential business results.

CB: What reaction do you get when you demonstrate your ROI models to business leaders?

Dr. Natalie and I receive initial skepticism when we say smROI can be determined. It’s because there are so many nay-sayers out there. However, once our clients see us perform the analysis, they get excited because they gain a tremendous amount of insight into their social programs. And they gain more confidence in their program’s viability.

Paul Greenberg wrote about the quadrant itself here and he raised a number of great questions about it, most importantly this one: does this Magic Quadrant help clarify the confused SCRM picture for users? I wish the answer was yes. Unfortunately, by having a variety of different kinds of product in this comparison, Gartner’s created something like a Can-Am auto race in which multiple classes of cars are on the course running multiple races at the same time – who’s the real leader? Who’s leading the classes? It’s very easy for spectators to become confused.

For example, only three vendors are in the leaders’ quadrant, and they’re perilously close to the center of the graph.

Esteban Kolsky also wrote about this and cast a similarly critical eye on the idea of a Magic Quadrant for SCRM.

I think that it’s very possible to do a Magic Quadrant-type evaluation for SCRM tools – especially if you break them out by the type of tool. Then, you’re engaging in an apples-to-apples comparison. I also think that if you’re going to do such a comparison, you’ll need to scale back your revenue and customer requirements for getting into consideration; this space is still rather new and the best ideas may be with small companies, or may not have yet been turned into products.

As for a Social CRM application – in other words, a CRM application that’s gone fully social – that animal doesn’t exist yet. What you have is a number of CRM vendors who have introduced social components to their applications, but they’re still not full-on SCRM turnkey solutions. Salesforce.com is on the quadrant, and it has Chatter, but that’s a collaboration tool (Salesforce also has the abilities of Radian6, which are considerable, but how these will be integrated is unclear and will hopefully be articulated next week); RightNow’s on the quadrant, and they have a big jump on coordinating peer-to-peer service. Other CRM companies have introduced social components, but did not make the quadrant. But all of these are just CRM products with some social components – they’re not really SCRM tools, and lumping them in with Jive and Lithium (which are not CRM applications) is an unfair comparison to all involved.

Here’s what I see as a true social CRM product: something with “traditional” CRM at its base, with the ability to automatically process and organize large volumes of social data (the sources of which can be selected by the company) and add them to customer records where appropriate. But it can’t be simply a tool to scrape data off social media and dump it into CRM. The next parts are what make it truly SCRM and not just CRM with the ability to suck up data from new sources.

Next, it’s got to have a way to scale social behavior. This is the two-way part of SCRM. I envision a system that can be set to look for conversations, keywords or sentiment that then creates a priority list for social managers of the places where they should be engaging with customers. Then, these conversations need to be tracked, along with overall sentiment and the data that they generate. The effectiveness of responses needs to be measured just as closely as the overall sentiment present on the web about a business; the latter is a baseline, and the former is the measurement of how effective a company’s social engagement efforts are.

Finally, the collaboration aspect needs to be present. This can’t be simply internal collaboration – there needs to be a permeable membrane between the inside of the company and its customers and partners. We already have internal echo chambers in our businesses, where the best guesses of executives are backed up by their subordinates’ equally conjectural postulations; social gives us a chance to inject the voice of reality into those discussions and can spare us from making mistakes even as we make our customers happier.

This will be a social CRM product. It doesn’t exist yet, and what form it will take when it does appear is still uncertain. Until then, SCRM is still a do-it-yourself project involving an assortment of tools. That makes a Magic Quadrant very hard to build just yet. My suspicion is that when we get a really valid MQ for this space the players will be very similar to the ones on the existing CRM MQ’s – because without the CRM underpinnings you don’t have SCRM.

That was the message I heard today at CRM Evolution from Dr. Daniel Ziv of Verint. Verint is all about speech analytics – CRM Evolution’s concurrent sister show, SpeechTek, is a major event for that community – and their product line spans everything from homeland security to call center optimization. One of the emerging markets for the company is the use of voice to determine the sentiment of customers calling service.

Naturally, most of that sentiment is not of a happy variety – but some unhappy customers tell a more important story than others, especially when they call in significant numbers. The Verint product allows managers to search conversations for key works, and after aggregating the conversations that contain those words, allows you to play them back. The text of the call is displayed, with a color-coded system of emphasizing emotion in the text as the call plays.

A neat trick, eh? But, like in all things CRM, the business use is far more interesting than the technology. By examining calls on a regular basis for certain keywords, IT managers can monitor processes and make modifications to improve the customer experience. For example, if the word “password” comes up an inordinate amount in calls, then it might be time to examine the password process on the site and look for ways to improve it.

The system can also bring in sentiment monitoring data from social media channels, so that a more complete view of customer reactions. As useful as that is, said Ziv, voice has a quality all its own.

“Executives seem to have the ability to dismiss social media complaints,” he said, “but if you can play back one or two or 10 calls complaining about the same thing, then it’s impossible for them to ignore it.”

Thus, voice monitoring can help with executive buy-in to help remedy service process issues, which in turn reduces pressure on your contact center (and social media managers). That can translate into bottom line savings and an improved customer experience.

Verint’s product is a bit outside of the CRM box, but it’s the sort of thing that can be a budget saver for the right company. Not surprisingly, some of the bigger users of the technology are telecommunications companies, which have used voice as a source of searchable data for some time. But how about your business? Do you find yourself trying to nail down problems in your service processes, or responding to large numbers of calls and social media messages focused on the same issue? If that’s the case, a product like Verint’s that collects, collates and presents those calls could help shorten the time needed to deal with them.