A Sneak Peak at CRM at the Speed of Light's 4th Edition Introduction

As sort of promised, almost, not really, but I shoulda, and with the permission of my publisher too since I'm not an unruly rebellious outlaw, with this July 4 celebratory entry (I'm friggin' working on the book), I'm publishing an excerpt of the Intro to the book. It is not the complete intro by a long shot, just a bit of the intro that will 'splain why I decided to write the book, tho' the fact that this is going to be a book that is UNLIKE THE FIRST THREE EDITIONS AT ALL is detailed in later parts of the intro.

This way, I can get feedback from you on the style and ideas on inclusion, though admittedly, I'm not giving you the whole thing or the whole picture so it might be unfair. But that's okay with me!! I hope with you. Feel free to criticize (I'll only cry a little while) and to suggest anything you care to. When I'm happy with a chapter, I'll do the following as I'm doing with this:

1. I'll announce the excerpt with a Wordle.net pseudo-tag cloud (not really tags, cloud of all the words in the chapter) of that ENTIRE chapter.

2. Immediately below the Wordle will be an excerpt from the chapter

3. Comments will be welcomed.

So enjoy and start commenting now if you don't mind.

HEY! You HAVE to Read This Introduction

I lied.

Yep, I did. In the third edition, which I'm sure all of you read, I know you remember these absolutely memorable words, the ones branded into your cerebrum right from the first paragraphs of the introduction:

"This is going to be the final edition of CRM at the Speed of Light. And please, I'm not coming out of CRM at the Speed of Light retirement to write it after the public clamor for the fourth edition gets so great that I can't ignore it. First, I can ignore it. Second, it's easy to ignore when there is neither hue nor cry."

Well, it turns out to be pretty rough to ignore, despite no hue and cry. Well, maybe a little cry. Mostly me doing that, though. Hold on! There is no crying in CRM - or, wait, is that baseball?

But there is a reason that I (inadvertently) lied. I really had no intention of writing a fourth edition because things in CRM had matured, other things had dramatically changed and all in all, I felt that I had a different book in me.

I thought it was going to be a novel on baseball and the Negro Leagues, but as it turns out, this is the different book.

When I wrote the 3^rd edition, I underestimated the social transformation that was going to take place, largely spurred by the political and economic environment that was beginning to roil right around the time that the 3^rd edition came out. I thought that CRM itself was probably going to be transformed by something thus the title of the last chapter of the book "Bye Bye CRM Sort Of…." What I didn't realize is that the many of the world's social, political, government, economic and business institutions were going to be irrevocably changed, that the way we communicate would undergo a dramatic transformation and the expectations we had of both individuals and institutions would be altered in ways that would be unimaginable 5 years before.

Do you remember that Saturday Night Live skit with Chris Farley where he would be the host of a TV show and would interview celebrities like Paul McCartney and say things like, "Hey Paul, 'member when you were, um, in the Beatles? Remember that?" Then he would hit himself on the head and go "IDIOT!! STUPID!! IDIOT!!"

I'm that kind of idiot. I REALLY thought I wouldn't be writing this book, but the changes in the world dictated it and here I am, like it or not. (Of course I like it. If I didn't, I doubt I would have written this anyway. Writing a book just isn't that easy.)

Want some proof of those changes, oh, pragmatic skeptical one? Let's look at the research methodologies I used for the 3rd Edition in 2004 and then in 2008 to cure you of your cynical streak.

Third Edition Research - 2004

I did several kinds of primary and secondary research. If you were to categorize it (and, take my word, you should categorize it), it would fall into place something like this.

The primary research consisted of email and phone interviews and some face to face interviews with key industry leaders or practitioners who were doing intelligent things with CRM or thought leaders in the field. It also was reviews of hundreds of software applications over time via either visits (physical ones - yes that primitive method) or more frequently, via WebEx or other collaborative site demos and live demos via the Web. My direct consulting experience and other's actual consulting or vendor related or writing experiences played a significant part.

Secondary sources consisted of books, magazines and web sites with some visibility into user groups and discussion areas for specific things like say, the investor discussions on Yahoo Finance about Siebel or something like that. I used Google search to find multiple sources and links from those sources to do further resource. I read the standard CRM sites like CustomerThink or SearchCRM and would "locally" search them to find out what I needed.

That's about it.

Fourth Edition Research - 2008

All of the above played a part without a doubt. None of it went away.
But, what else is what makes this incredible. I used social media, crowdsourcing and peer-to-peer communication in digital real time.

Before I get into it, you know what just occurred to me?

A Momentary Digression….

The first two editions of CRM at the Speed of Light were subtitled "Capturing and Keeping Customers in Internet Real Time." Then for the third edition we changed it to "Essential Customer Strategies for the 21^st Century." The irony is that the original subtitle (which is NOT the subtitle of this edition) is more appropriate now than when we named it for the first two versions. Weird.

Back to the Subject At Hand

In addition to all of the above, I used social networks - particularly LinkedIn and Plaxo - to ask questions of the communities in general and specific groups within the communities such as the CRM Experts Group within the cyberwalls of Plaxo's communities. I asked questions of the people I follow or who follow me on Twitter - all with 140 characters or less. I did the same via groups and in general on Friendfeed and on Facebook. I was able to set up a wiki that was put out to get input on the book using the hosted wiki service PBWiki (which stands for Peanut Butter Wiki, by the way. Great name). I was able to use research that I had done and written on for my blog, PGreenblog (http://www.the56group.typepad.com) which has won all the awards ever given to CRM blogs in the course of all the years since 2005 - which is when I started writing it. That would be three of them. Ahem.

But it goes so much further than that. I was able to draw on intelligence from a significant number of well respected blogs that are out there, being produced not just on CRM but on the social customer. I have been able to use Wikipedia for a knowledgebase drawn up by us common folk (as we'll see it's called crowdsourcing) that is as accurate as any that the planet has produced since Encyclopedia Britannica. I was able to use not just the search engines of Google that found web archived information but also search engines (some of which are highlighted in the book) that grabbed unstructured information from social networks and communities. I had a much higher degree of participation from that abstract yet real community of CRM interested folks out there who gave me great suggestions via email, phone calls, wiki participation, blog commentary, Twitter responses, survey results, community conversation threads - in fact in all means of contemporary communication but a snail mail letter - that are attributed in the book in various ways.

Plus I had much more access - partially because of my increased "status" and reputation within the CRM community (I was named the #1 (non-vendor) influencer in CRM by InsideCRM in 2007-08) but even more so because the social barriers that were in the way of direct communications that were there four years ago, are no longer there and access is easier than ever. In fact, it's seen as "good business" to be more accessible.

Oh yeah, just to show you the evolution of all this even more - the 3^rd edition of this book is now a book that is in the Amazon Kindle format. For those of you who don't know what the Kindle is, shame on you. It's a wildly popular though ugly e-book reader released by Amazon that has a high speed free EV-DO wireless connection so you can literally download books on the fly and on the run right to the Kindle. CRM at the Speed of Light, 3^rd edition is one of those. Though the downside is that I had to pay for my own book to get the Kindle edition. Nothing is free. Sigh.

Actually, as we're going to see, that's not true, but it helped the section's drama to say that.

So you can see why I needed to write the book just due to the startling difference in research methods and available knowledge. The difference in CRM community participation in this book was staggering. Or maybe, I'm the one staggering…..

Technorati : CRM at the Speed of Light, Social Customer, Wordle