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?

But, truth be told, the kind of data services story (and the implications of data ownership in a social/cloud world)  behind the Jigsaw deal has been on the minds of us social CRM thinking types for some time. In fact, at SugarCon last week I even brought the subject up during my panel after thinking of some open-ended questions with Mitch.

Mitch has distilled a lot of these ideas into an interesting blog post on his own blog – which enlists the ideas and feedback of two of the social CRM panel members: Esteban Kolsky and Sameer Patel. I’d like to personally thank them for their continued great insight, both in the panel and just in general.

I could have easily just re-ran Mitch’s post here, and be done with it. But, I think there are some subtle differences between my ideas and his. Well, in truth I think that my ideas are probably more influenced by the Jigsaw deal than Mitch’s.

To that end – before we really start to discuss the “ownership” issue around social data, I think we must first define what we are talking about. Now, you may use tools like Jigsaw, Hoover’s CrunchBase, ZoomInfo, InsideView etc. to get updated data – but is all that data really “social data?” I do not think so. And this, my friends, is where an ownership issue really matters most. When we are talking about company data – addresses, personnel info, phone numbers – these data sets are prone to use and of course misuse. Thus, ownership and how this data is leveraged is a big issue.

But is this what we mean by social data?  I don’t really think so. I would in fact define social data as any data given up by individuals that is anonymous in nature (meaning – no address, phone, email etc. data involved) and only adds color to a company, a trend, topics, etc.

Adds color?  What is this clown talking about?

To define color, let me use an analogy. When you watch baseball, many stats and numbers will be thrown around – either on screen or spoken. That is like the company data (in fact most of those numbers are the intellectual property of the Elias Sports Bureau). Now, all the cute stories and fluff of the “color commentators” (see where I’m going here) is more like the social data that is piling up in databanks around the universe.

Call it conversational, call it social…call it hearsay. The fact is, this type of highly unstructured and highly unqualified data is hard to really “own” – mainly because it only holds value in very specific circumstances. (think: Citing Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average versus simply saying – Pete Rose was an awesome ball player! – While both are true, which one is an actual qualified fact and an own-able statistic?)

What I mean is that some social data will be highly valued…a lot is useless noise…and some is just, there. Now, the wise souls who sift through the garbage and find the valued gems thrown in with the banana peels and coffee grinds of social interactions – they can take that data and use it to do all the awesome stuff of social CRM: sentiment analysis, feedback management, keyword trending etc.

Am I saying no one owns social data? Not necessarily. I think there are implications around data mining when the origin of the data is a corporate owned network (one that is not your corporation especially) or even a broad-based network like facebook.

Really – I think we are just at the beginning of this type of discussion, because we are really just at the surface of doing cool stuff with all this information. I welcome any and all comments, your own definitions, name-calling, etc…

Today Salesforce.com announced it will acquire business contacts data service Jigsaw for $142m. The move leaves Salesforce.com with the ability to pre-load CRM accounts with data – OR – which is more likely, charge a premium for that type of data service. Whether it is pre-loaded leads, or data quality, Salesforce.com adds a nice service, with a ton of great data in its service base, to its arsenal.

::Golf clap::

Why such muted applause? Well, on the one hand I agree totally in terms of what Salesforce is doing here. End users could LOVE the idea of not having to add a lot of data – simply having it pre-loaded on their accounts could be huge. The ability for marketing to have lads and other targets in the system without a lot of demand gen work could be a great asset as well. Biz Dev types will love this – and this adds stickiness to the Salesforce app. Good thinking by Benioff and Co.

But, this deal reeks of old style, proprietary computing and business.  Why buy one data service, when if your product is open enough (as Salesforce always claims it is) you can consume any data service? I guess the answer here is – Salesforce has the size and influence to make people think that paying for Jigsaw services is worth whatever they decide to charge, versus simply doing a little tweaking to consume Hoover’s data right in your CRM, for example.

But, I guess that is why Salesforce is so impressive. Only Salesforce can take a proprietary road in the midst of an open, social revolution, and probably do a good job of making this seem innovative and user-focused – not a money grabbing plan. It’s an amazing feat. I mean, Salesforce took simple RSS tools and turned it into Chatter and claimed to change the CRM world…and chatter isn’t even cross platform nor can it be used to leverage customer conversations.

I am always of the notion that “more is better,” especially when it comes to social media, data feeds, etc. I won’t make assumptions as to how Salesforce.com will play out its total social and data services strategy – but $100+m acquisitions are not the best way to aggregate content in my mind.

All in all, the Jigsaw deal will probably be a net positive for Salesforce.com. After all, they do a great job of marketing to business users – those people who are either too time constrained or inexperienced to set up their own data feeds into a CRM. So, instead of doing it for free, the nominal fee just might be worth it to them, and it just might not. We’ll see.

If I had more time and moxie, I’d write about how this potentially screws long time Salesforce.com partners like InsideView (even though what they do is vastly different in terms of value and scale from Jigsaw) – but perhaps I’ll save that for another post…

This reminded me of an interesting talk I had at Paul Greenberg and Co’s last CRM Summit in DC. (Or as I like to call it – SCRM Snowtopia ‘10) The interaction was with a very bright guy named Mark Tamis (@MarkTamis on Twitter, follow him if you’re not already) and we were talking about how for many customer support reps – they are incented to do well less to help “the company” as they were to establish and further their own careers.

This is not a new concept, at all. But people can now leverage social in a way that enables them to both help the company that employs them, but also create a personal brand for themselves. Case in point -SugarCRM’s own Mitch Lieberman (and Outsiders cohort). Mitch is very much an advocate of SugarCRM, and a great CRM expert. But Mitch has leveraged social in a way that has allowed him to transcend just being a “vendor guy” and is now seen as a generic expert on social CRM – one without a vendor slant or bias.  That is rare and worth noting.

And there are a lot more tools today to help an individual rise above their corporate associations and better brand themselves. I spent a lot of time talking about this with social feedback platform beRelevant’s CEO Randy Hamilton last week (note: I am an advisor to the company). Randy noted that part of the idea of beRelevant is to allow individual users to take the tool and make surveys, enhance their fan pages, etc. It is this type of individualized social CRM that allows the individual to be more powerful than a company in a lot of ways.

Social has revitalized the concept of the individual as it pertains to the way we work, interact, and progress through life. That is undeniable. In the business sense, we as individuals are more agile, nimble and inter-connected globally – moving faster and reacting more readily to market shifts than any corporation could.

To my point in the post title – is the social revolution going to change the way we think about the way products are conceptualized, brought to market and sold? Instead of a “company” creating a product they hope someone will buy, then marketing it to targets – will the norm instead be companies springing up based on like minds getting together, crowd sourcing their product ideas, and marketing them via engaging conversations that create a buying culture?

What I mean to as is, ultimately, will social CRM allow us to break down the barrier between a company brand – revealing it (hopefully in a positive way) as a collection of individuals that are simply trying to create a decent product and a consistent customer experience? Will social strip away all the marketing BS (that, of course, I am guilty of as much as anyone)?

It might be a refreshing change…

In that vein, a major trend we are seeing among users and in general is the need for more fluid tools to support the highly versatile forms of collaboration going on around sales, marketing and supporting customers. Gone are the days of information silos – where a sales rep or manager reigns supreme over most of the interaction data surrounding an account; nor is it sufficient to only arm support agents with the data and tools to solve customer issues.

MindTouch is a company with an interesting take on collaboration and data sharing (and what’s even greater is that Mindtouch is a commercial open source company). I caught up with CEO Aaron Fulkerson recently to discuss his SugarCon presentation around Collaborative CRM, and the conversation quickly opened up to include concepts like the convergence of enterprise 2.0 and social CRM, as well as how cloud computing is affecting modern CRM deployments…

Aaron, your SugarCon session is around “collaborative CRM.”  Can you give a quick definition of collaborative CRM vs. traditional CRM?

Terms like “social CRM” and “Collaborative CRM” are being used a lot these days and it seems as if the products in this space grown daily.  MindTouch has a very specific view of what Collaborative CRM needs to be.

I can boil down the biggest difference in two words: Information Asymmetry.  Let’s take a common CRM use case – managing a specific transaction.   This transaction has a lead account manager, perhaps a sales rep who helped qualify the deal, a pre-sales engineer, and possibly a services manager engaged.  All of these team members have various contact points inside the prospect.   These multiple contact points can quickly create an information asymmetry situation where data that might be held in the form of emails, documents, phone call notes, etc., isn’t as accessible as it could be, and that could be to the detriment of the transaction.

Our vision of Collaborative CRM is to create an information advantage for all of the team members involved.  I’m excited to share this vision at SugarCon.

So, where exactly does “Enterprise 2.0” meet with CRM? Are they two separate things?

To realize the ‘information advantage’ I mentioned before, the CRM system must embody Enterprise 2.0-type attributes – that is to say, to openly and easily interface with other information-rich systems, to support the collaboration amongst team members, including those who wouldn’t traditionally interact with a CRM system.

A lot of CRM systems are great with structured data, but how can users better leverage unstructured data like emails and PDFs etc. in their CRM initiative?

Great question.  Unstructured data cannot be overlooked, as they are vital pieces of the activity stream.  All too often, aggregating the data in those activity streams is overlooked, this is especially true for purely ‘social crm’ solutions.  These emails and PDF’s are typically relegated to your desktop or your inbox.   Emailing these documents back and forth has to be the single most inefficient way to share documents, and everyone does it.   MindTouch ensures these types of data points are not overlooked, by integrating them directly into the activity stream, making them collaborative – easy to find, share and act upon.

How does it benefit a user organization to have open collaboration tools versus proprietary alternatives?

No two organizations are the same. You can definitely provide customers with purpose-built and feature rich solutions – but there will always be the desire on the customer side to perform their own customization.  Most often, this occurs with a custom application they’ve developed in-house.   With rigid, proprietary offerings, this might not even be possible.

Finally, how are you seeing “the cloud” change the way businesses collaborate with each other, and their customers?

MindTouch is web-based, so we’ve always had the benefit of providing our customers a solution that could cross boundaries – enabling internal teams to collaborate with partners, vendors and customers.  The big benefit we see in the cloud is that it becomes a great equalizer.   No matter how easy you make your product to download, install and deploy, there will always be that slice of the market that doesn’t have the IT wherewithal to make it a reality.  With the cloud, any size organization can simply sign up and be up and running in minutes.    This means a company of any size can now leverage the same enterprise collaboration solution that companies like Mozilla, RightScale, Intel and the WashingtonPost rely on.

Wait, was that a bait and switch? Did I just market to you with the pretense of being “Social”? How did you get here, to this page, to this blog? Did you follow a Tweet? A ReTweet (a pseudo recommendation from a peer)?  It is a blog, does that make it Social? ( I read a blog that said blogs are social) If SugarCRM is using Google Analytics, like the rest of the technology world, where will you go from here? Is this a Social Interaction, or just you reading a blog? Let’s call a spade a spade, the first paragraph is a marketing message – no escaping it – does that make this post anti-social?

Wait, hold on, it can be Social, or pretend to be anyway

See that box at the bottom – the one that says “Leave a Reply”  and “your comment”. Please leave a comment, let me know what you think. At SugarCRM we have topnotch sales folks and great partners, I promise, that your email address will not prompt a direct message <snicker>. If you leave a response, I will feel better, and since I am writing, this is all about me, right?  If there is a little bit of back and forth, I can tell the powers that be that my post was a success, because I engaged and we had a conversation – maybe they will even stop by and comment. If you sign-up for SugarCon, they will like me even more.

After you leave your comment, maybe, just maybe I will be gracious and say “Hey thanks for stopping by”. Is this a social response, or just good etiquette? When I call up my bank, or insurance company they always start the call with “How are you doing today sir?” and end the call “Have a nice day?” Is that a social response, or again just etiquette? If someone writes something that is highly inappropriate, what action should I take?

Is every Interaction a Social Interaction?

The question was prompted by a question. Bob Thompson, CEO of CustomerThink asked a question on a Social CRM forum where I participate as well. The question is: “Can you do Social CRM without Social Media/Networks?”. Further on in the discussion thread, Chris Selland made the comment “the use of social tools doesn’t necessarily imply social interaction” – I agree with that comment. Mike Boysen, made a comment as well “Developing a framework to align your business to your customer takes real interaction and real relationships” – I agree with Mike too, where does that leave me?

Here is where I think it leaves me, I am almost convinced, but  I do want feedback so you can tell me I am wrong. If social tools do not imply a social interaction, then traditional tools should absolutely be part of your Social CRM strategy – Quid pro quo. Professionals, from the CEO down the chain are humans. We all go to bar-b-ques, cocktail parties, birthday parties, conferences, etc… We interact with friends and peers all over the place (I will mention golf too). My point is that we have been Social since the beginning of time – Face-to-Face, Phone and dare I say, Email (taboo, I know) are important Interaction channels in your Social CRM strategy.

(BTW – your email will not be shared, I would like you to come to SugarCon, and I have no predictions for the final four)

I am also very much looking forward to the discussion around social media and inbound marketing at our CRM Acceleration event next Tuesday in Boston. There will be some great presentations from Hubspot, InsideView and SugarCRM, but I am most interested in seeing how real business people are digesting all these new concepts.

In throwing around some ideas for discussion with the speakers, a topic came up around social networking – namely “do users of these services just want to talk to each other, or is this an expected channel to hear/see brand messaging?” In short – are we jerks for intruding on these social interactions?

I don’t think we are jerks. Here’s why. (And it is not just because I am a social marketer.)

The social web is where things are happening.  This means that our entertainment, socializing etc. is happening on various platforms.  Broad-based social networks like Facebook are “free” to use s an end user, but that freedom has to come with some expected “cost.”

Take Hulu as a web 2.0 provider of premium TV content. Just as people watching over the air network TV over the past 50 years expected advertisements in return for programming, Hulu viewers sit through the ads to see their favorite shows on-demand, while they should be hard at work.

I see Facebook and Twitter having a similar trade-off. But in a much more immersed manner. To leverage these broad networks, and consume our bit of bandwidth on them, we must expect to have some marketing thrown at us. It is a little more complex than embedded commercials, because we have to re-create this marketing as relevant engagements, not unidirectional messages.

I will continue to repeat this mantra over and over – as marketers we have to learn to create buyers, not simply push products. By leveraging these networks as the medium, we can craft the right kinds of messages that identify, engage and convert in a very natural manner that can begin a much more seamless and profitable customer lifecycle.

So here goes…(I apologize in advance for the parts that don’t make sense.)

…If you are a B2C company, and you are getting excited about being “social” with your customers, you are 200 years too late. You should be excited about being able to better manage and measure the results from the fact that you (hopefully) already interact with your customers in various channels, and for various reasons.

I’m seeing that a lot of the “social” companies that have a good footing right now – Jive especially – stem from internal social collaboration concepts. This needs to be pushed outward. I think they get that and I look forward to seeing how that progresses. Lithium does a good job of creating a manageable customer community – so it will be need to see how those two drive each other’s innovation.

Social monitoring and “listening” tools are great. But we need these to be simple enough to plug in to platforms and channels/networks to inform active decisions, or at least let us know that something might be “about to happen.”  Radian6 – I believe – is on top of this, but frankly I am too socially illiterate to really know right now.

From a B2B sales perspective – how does social media and other web 2.0 data make a sales person’s life useful? I look at tools like Insideview’s SalesView and that makes a lot of sense – showing me aggregated data, but also the hot spots (so to speak) in my networks as they pertain to my contacts, prospects and accounts. Of course, all of this stuff is best viewed from inside a CRM system. While that is great news for companies like SugarCRM, I hope that doesn’t make companies like InsideView too dependent on CRM systems (which are so moored to relation databases and static data) for distribution and relevance. Or it gives InsideView a huge ace in its hand – bringing crappy old CRM products like Siebel up to date.

Back to B2C – when it comes to “social CRM” you have to think about your goals, not just “metrics” in a generic sense. Are you trying to create communities?  Or, are you trying to glean feedback from people “out there” and then aggregate that for valuable use? Just “getting people together” is kinda useless. I wrote a few weeks back about beRelevant. I just met again with their CEO Randy Hamilton and they really understand the concept of generating value among the social consumers in the world – creating either endless or purpose-driven feedback loops for brands in a very cool user format. They have a ways to go in really launching that concept, but it’s a very compelling place to start.

Ok, glad I got those out of my head…I’ll probably completely disagree with myself by the end of the weekend…but please, I invite you to comment and help me get some more grasp on a lot of these concepts…

This monthly poll asked: “How does your organization improve the quality of its CRM data?”

The choices ranged from essentially having no data quality measures in place, up to having a sales intelligence initiative in place that provides more consistent, quality sales and customer data.

I am not sure if I should be surprised or simply pleased that an overwhelming majority of respondents noted that they, to quote the poll, were “Sooo 2.0″ and had a sales intelligence product in use to better control data issues. I mean, call it stacking the deck, but I’d like to believe that most Outsiders readers and Twitter followers are some of the more advanced CRM users out there, right?

The good news is that it is really easy to get tools like Insideview’s SalesView tool embedded in your CRM to better equip sales and marketing agents with better quality data at various stages of the customer life cycle. (As noted in recent posts – myself and InsideView are actually presenting on this very topic at a free event in Boston on March 23 – join us if you can.)

Again, almost a quarter of the respondents noted they use some form of external data aggregation – such as Hoover’s. I think this is a simple and smart start – leading up to the kinds of aggregated views and value that InsideView embedded in a CRM system can provide.

Several people noted they use traditional merge/purge tactics and some other innovative methods. But really, the responses (I think) tell me something about how companies are looking at data, and data quality, in the modern age.

More companies can perform greater data aggregation, and manage greater sets of data attributes around prospects and customers, for little investment. The web 2.0 world has opened up a service-based network of useful data (and some not so useful) that is easier than ever to consume and sift through to discover value. Companies do not (always) have to perform high-level, IT intensive ETL initiatives to create useful customer data pools.

And in my mind -  faster, simpler and cheaper is always a good thing.