By Chris Bucholtz

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 “We used to have the typical shop front office that was cluttered, out of date, and parts laying around.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?

By Chris Bucholtz

A few years ago, I did a webinar with some respected thought leaders in the area of sales about the impact data was having on selling. No one was willing to use the term “data-driven selling” – that was too much for sales people’s sensibilities. But the guests were willing and able to admit that the new way of selling revolved around relationships and the only way to increase sales productivity while at the same time building stronger relationships was to rely on data – and, more specifically, rely on data that was organized and ready to use.

Fast forward to the deja vu I experienced in August this year, when I had a chance to moderate another webinar, this time with Tony Hughes, SugarCRM’s country manager for Australia and New Zealand. Tony’s an author – he’s written a couple of books on selling topics, including the well-reviewed the Joshua Principle: Leadership Secrets of RSVPselling. Tony is all about the relationship in sales and so it was no surprise to hear Tony say that the key to selling still resides in the sales person and the need to establish trust and value in the prospect’s mind.

But, with my CRM hat still perched atop my head, my mind keeps drifting back to the data. The information you know about a customer is the secret weapon that helps you build rapport and leapfrog ahead of your competition (who are also desperate to gain that relationship advantage). Sales departments are really in a data arms race, based not around who has spent the most but around who has spent the best on technology to arm their sales staff with that precious data.

But it’s not just about the technology and the data. As my other writing specialty has demonstrated, it’s not the plane but the pilot who wins the fight – selling skill plays a major role. The sales person is still the make-or-break variable in the sales equation. Tony made that point eminently clear in tracing how sales has evolved into what it is today. The relationship and the sales person’s need to cultivate it is one of the few constants.

Before the webinar, Tony wrote up his thoughts in a white paper that we were proud to publish under the CRM Outsiders banner. It’s called “The Evolution of Professional Selling;” you can get a copy of it here and, once you’ve downloaded it, you can participate in our brief survey to determine just how exactly sales pros are selling today. Not only will your participation be helpful (we’ll publish the results, so you can get a feel for where you are along the evolutionary curve) but the first 200 to take the survey will get a copy of Tony’s book in the quickly-becoming-quaint print format.

Selling will always be more an art than a science, but it’s a poor artist who doesn’t take advantage of the science around him to create better art. Check out Tony’s white paper (and webinar, and book while you’re at it) to see how neatly technology and sales talent can dovetail together.

By Chris Bucholtz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Bucholtz

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.

By Chris Bucholtz

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.

By Chris Bucholtz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Chris Bucholtz

I never get tired of talking about CRM as a discipline, not a technology. Yes, yes, yes – the technology allows you to scale the discipline, but ultimately, the ideas, initiatives and actions that result from CRM and reach customers are not executed by technology – they’re executed by people. (Clint Oram, SugarCRM’s CTO, riffs on this a bit in today’s IBM Smarter Planet Blog, with his phrase “focus on the opportunity, not the technology” showing up in several Tweets as a result).

This is why I always advocate for paying attention to those non-technological aspects of the chain of events that runs from contact acquisition through sales and then across the entire lifetime of the customer’s tenure with your business. Imagine this chain as something hung across a low bridge running across a river. Parts of the chain dip in the water. These links are the ones that you as a CRM manager can’t see – they represent sales people, delivery staff, contact center agents, and other people and things in the chain that your CRM technology has no control over, but which can spoil the customer experience and break the chain.

Here’s an example: a couple of months ago, my washing machine blew a seal. The utility room caused me to have a flashback to my Navy damage control training days; the thing apparently gave up right at the height of the cycle and dumped multiple gallons of water on the floor.

After much cursing and mopping (two more skills learned in the Navy), I needed to buy another washer. Instead of jumping in the car and making the rounds, I hit the website of Costco. I like Costco – they do a good job of customer service, and a decent job of managing their millions of customers. Soon, I found the one option that would work, a nifty Whirlpool washer, and pushed the shiny button to make it mine.

Delivery, however, had to be facilitated by a third party. Here’s where it got weird. I received a message several days later to set up delivery, and returned the call shortly thereafter. The woman on the other end said that they only delivered Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it was now too late for a Tuesday delivery. Okay, I said – how about Thursday? At this point she became a bit flustered because she didn’t have the schedule for Thursday and asked to call me back. Why begged the question: why did she call me when she had no ability to help?

A couple of hours later, she called, and I got on the schedule for the next delivery day. That was Thursday, according to what she said. Accordingly, I rearranged my schedule and worked at home Thursday, but as the hours ticked by with no sign of my washing machine, I decided to call someone. But the only number I had was for Costco. The rep there was dismayed that it was now 4 p.m. and the washer was nowhere to be seen – but she had no way to know who was delivering it. She was effusive in her efforts to make up for the delivery issue, but really what I needed was a washing machine.

Through the Costco rep’s detective efforts, she soon had the delivery company on the phone. The same somewhat bewildered woman told me they didn’t deliver on Thursdays – just on Fridays. Okay, then: can you deliver my washer this Friday? She “pulled some strings” and got me on the schedule, much to my feigned joy.

The next day, sure enough, the washer arrived. The delivery guys then spent several tense minutes trying to figure out how to get the old washer out, which I found weird since I wrangled the darned thing into the house on my own when I got it seven years ago. Ultimately, they took the back door to the house off the hinges and took out the expired machine, then brought the new one in before replacing the door.

And so, after two days of working at home and some aggravation, I had a washing machine.

Whose fault was it? Costco’s chain of little customer events started out well, then reached one of those links they had little control over – the delivery company – and went awry. Then their rep did everything she could to get things straight, and another dip with the delivery guys battling my utility room door.

Costco had very little control over these aspects of the customer experience. Their part of it was very pleasant, in fact. But the next time I made a major appliance purchase, did I go to Costco? No. And it was because of these links in the chain that they had little visibility and little control over.

Are there invisible links in the chain of your customers’ experiences – and do you know where they exist? Getting these things wrong will undo the good will your CRR efforts build, so follow the chain, spot the areas that can cause problems, and partner with the people who are in charge of them so that you can all be part of the greater CRM effort. The technology is great, but without people living the CRM discipline behind it your efforts may come to nothing.

By John Mertic

“Open Source” was the term coined that triggered a revolution in software.  Then came terms like Open Data, Open APIs, Open Architecture, and more. What do they all mean? Are they just like Open Source?

I spent time recently at the Open Source Thinktank in Paris, where we wrestled with this very question. Does the term “Open” have a clear definition? And in relationship to all these new “Open” terms, do they all have the same properties and expectations? We came to these conclusions:

1. The generic use of the word “Open” has no clear definition, thanks to marketing people trying to get an extra buzzword in to their product’s marketing materials. This is OK, as it’s probably a bad idea to control a word like that anyways
2. When using the term “Open,” you should really quantify what that means, and not just use it as a buzzword.

There’s something pretty important about #2 above. Think of how many times you have seen the word “Open” thrown around without any definition to it. Clearly they are just trying to piggyback on the term “Open Source” here, and using that to imply the standards they are imposing match those of open source. This can be a pretty big fallacy, depending upon what the person behind this truly has in mind.

Looking at “Open Source,” I think there are two important tenants that really define what is expected.

-       Accessibility, meaning that you have the ability to freely access the data in the application without any sort of restrictions

-       Freedom, meaning that you have full control and visibility into your data and your code for the application.

When you are looking at things claiming to be “Open,” most often the accessibility tenant is what is being implied.

But what about freedom?

This is too often ignored, as it represents a threat to the proprietary way of building and selling software. Companies would rather build a walled garden with small holes in it that you can barely get a glimpse through, as anything more jeopardizes their lock on their customers. And as a customer this hurts even more, as you are stuck in that garden with few to no options for getting out. It takes the control away from you and gives it to the software vendor. It takes the ability to have the application fit your business needs away, making you fit your square peg processes in the round holes they provide.

So when you are shopping for “Open,” make sure you know what you are getting yourself into. Make sure that includes both accessibility and freedom. Accept no substitute.

A few years ago, when I worked over in San Francisco, I would occasionally  commute using the “casual car pool” system – in other words, at a designated congregation point, I’d get into a vehicle with a total stranger so that person could save bridge toll and I could save bus money.  It was less scary than it sounds – obviously, I didn’t end up in a shallow grave somewhere – although there were some memorable, white-knuckle-inducing drives.

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

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

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

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

And those questions are awesome.

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

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

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

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

(Editor’s note: chatting around the office can result in outbursts of coherence like this one, from David Bockian, who recapitulates this story and distills it to its essence – and even mentions ferrets in the process – the editor)

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

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

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

What could go wrong with this plan?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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