PGreenblog: Signs of Life Discovered in CRM Biosphere

Heading out to Naples, FL for a speaking gig at the Executive Summit of Neighborhood America (flying U.S. Air. Yechhh.), lovely day calm skies. This is about 12 hours after my return from San Francisco where I spent an entire day with senior folks at Oracle - my lips are sealed, zipped. Sorry. SF had just been hit by 70 mph winds, hail, sheets of rain and godknowswhatelsenaturedumped but I snuck in after that storm and left before the next one due yesterday afternoon (haven't checked to see if it hit).

I'm not sure if my current emotional state also known as optimistic is being driven by my tiredness or by my prospects for this year which are looking very sunny, but the roiling skies and cumulonimbus big black clouds of the San Francisco last few days are not at all what I'm seeing in the CRM world. I'm actually, within the bounds of my impossibly large sardonic/satiric/sarcistic framework, very very upbeat about what I'm seeing.

Now, let me momentarily define "upbeat" for everyone before we all go skipping through clover fields hand in hand. I'm not looking at the likely business revenue success of the CRM software market which as you remember Gartner thinks will increase around 11 percent over last year which increased 13 percent over the year before. I'm also not ecstatic about the sudden epiphany that CRM companies are having - because they're not all that sudden - in fact took a LONG time - about the integration of social tools into their offerings.

But I am excited by the fact that mega-giant companies like Oracle and SAP are integrating those tools because they see it makes good business sense. I'm excited that NetSuite went public and was successful as was salesforce when it went public a couple of years ago as was RightNow when it went public in 2006. Meaning that not only has the on demand market arrived but it has its own suburbs. There is a real place for software as a service or even simpler for data and applications being hosted on someone elses servers that is being provided for an affordable price. Its the real deal fo' shoh, Jack.

I'm excited because I see the term CRM 2.0 being used everywhere and to a lesser degree but probably even more importantly Social CRM being used. Now, a little bit of a rant here. CRM 2.0 is not being used well everywhere. More typically than not, its being used the way CRM was used - as a self-serving supposed "differentiator" by companies who have no actual clue as to what they are saying. There is no standard definition for CRM 2.0 - as I hoped to establish with the CRM 2.0 wiki. But its used a lot because it exists as a concept, regardless of the hijackers. Here's are a couple of hijacked uses of the term which, if you read them, you'll see really are self serving marketing.

First here- a good group of folks actually, but this is CRM 2.0, how exactly?

Second here- While Conversational Relationship Management sounds like a cool term, when you see CRM 2.0 reduced to the level of call center advances, you can only marvel.

I'm thinking at this point, Social CRM or maybe even Vendor Relationship Management might be the way to go so we can stop the hijacking in its tracks. But its exciting to see that a "New Wave" CRM based on social/customer engagement models is finally not a fringe idea but pretty much the direction the entire industry is moving.

(listening to Flood's They Might Be Giants on my iPhone. These guys are just outright cool and have a really interesting sound. A hat tip (as Chris Carfi, star of the Social Customer might say) to....Chris Carfi for turning me on to them)

Another thing that is anecdotally kind of exciting is that I've gotten several inquiries - some informal and even a formal one or two - from social media software/service companies on how they can penetrate the CRM marketplace. They see what they're doing as a "natural bridge" to CRM and they want to partner with the CRM vendors to offer enriched tools to the practitioner companies trying the engage the new breed highly expectant customer in the ways they so love to be engaged. Sigh. That was wordy but I'll leave it anyway.

Additionally, the Washington Post of December 29 did a really good piece on specialized social networks that are fluorishing. You know the type - MyCRMCareer, one that I'm seriously involved in is one and its doing very well. But there are a myriad of other out there and the major players are doing heavy hitting stuff like Microsoft's devotion to social networks for financial communities. T

What triggered this whole sunny tirade was something I read in the Wall St. Journal yesterday. Cisco, yes, THE Cisco (THE Bruce Dickinson), is entering the fray by making long term investments that will allow them to provide both software and hardware tools to further the CRM 2.0/Social CRM/VRM/Customer Engagement fracas. They've announced EOS - the Entertainment Operating System. The purpose of EOS is to provide media companies with the total packages (I presume of a turnkey sort) they would need to capture the data and feedback they need from their customers who are engaging in what is typically unstructured conversation about them - meaning from user communities. Keep in mind, over the last couple of years, Cisco purchased Utah Street Software - a company that not only owned the social network "you-can-make-your-own" site Tribes. net but also the applications and services that did the social network/user community building; they then went and bought Five Across which provided the rest of the social media tools - blogs, wikis, you know the drill already. So they are looking to go big time over the long term here. This is just their beginning but it's important because the non-traditional vendors - the not-necessarily-CRM vendors or not-really-social media vendors are getting involved in a big way.

So I have to say that I'm starting out the year as edgy as ever but happy-edgy. No grumpy stuff yet, though I know I'll find reason for it later on. Its early but.....

It's all good.

Technorati : CRM, CRM 2.0, Nei, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, Social CRM, customer relationship management