PGreenblog

Life's Philosophy; Science's Purpose

Much as I like to think and act exuberantly in the celebration of the abundance of life, I have days where I recognize that I’m 64 years old. Some of those days, I embrace the fact.   Some of those days I just feel it.

When I embrace the fact, I also embrace one of the things that the older among us can claim, that our younger brethren can’t yet.  I can contemplate not just the present and my plans for the future, though I do that always, but also the legacy that I’d like to provide as I leave my footprints embedded in time.

In the course of mulling this over a few weeks ago, in the midst of recovering from vocal cord surgery, I began to think about something that often comes up from my storehouse of memories – the work I did many years ago on 13^th century science and culture and in particular, a medieval friar of the Franciscan Order, Roger Bacon, someone, who when I was writing my varying tomes on the period and the man and on science in general, I began to believe and still do, might have been one of the greatest scientists in the history of our species. 

My purpose in writing about this is not to debate with you whether or not he was or is great – or, honestly, even to care what you think about that – or for you to care what I think about it. That is both a debate beyond the scope of this post and beyond any contemporary research anyone reading this (or writing this) is likely to have done. Its also one that regardless of outcome, won’t move the chain in human thinking one iota.  So please treat what I’m going to be saying about Roger Bacon and his role instead as a both data point and a metaphor for what I’m want to actually talk about.

Continuing on….

All this mulling led me to what I wrote years ago to understand my present behavior.  It gave me a little more insight into the legacy that I am trying to leave. But it reminded me of something else too. Something that perhaps we often forget in the course of our very lucky lives as people who have a shot at helping to transform the world we live in.

Here’s what that is:

The very hallmark of continued human social existence has been that each of us as a human, has an infinite capacity to create something that in some way, incrementally and on occasion profoundly impacts the continued existence of society and the human species.  It’s happened frequently enough throughout history, with the right combinations of people and resources, to so far, ensure, at least for now, the continued existence and even flourishing of humanity and the cultures and society associated with it, with all their problems, glitches, denial of opportunities, errors of judgment and action, and even criminality. Despite the bad, we survive as a species and grow.  Because the good always outweighs the bad, and over time, even if it doesn’t seem so, overcomes the bad. That tells you something – human beings, as a rule, are good, not evil, despite the cynics who would have you think otherwise. Complaining doesn’t solve problems – finding solutions to the problems solve them.

So, in the following paragraphs, please bear with me and take to heart if you can, what Bacon and (if I’m not being too presumptuous) I are saying about invention, the human spirit, the art of science and the abilities of each and every one of us as a human being to transcend and master the course of our own existence in a practical way, not just via some flight of fancy. Please keep in mind, as you read this post, Bacon’s speech is couched in religious terms (e.g. God the Creator etc.) as well they should be since he was a Franciscan friar in the 13^th century. But the content and the principles should be taken in a secular light. My voice, on the other hand, is not religious at all.

Here we go.

The 13^th Century – Cultural Optimism Drives the….Horse

Throughout his entire adult life at the core of his very being, Roger Bacon (1214-1292) believed that human beings had the ability to not only master the laws of nature but to even change them through invention and creation. His approach though wasn’t something carved from fantasy but was rooted in a rational science that was both derived from universal principles and supported via experimentation. In fact, he’s often called the Father of Experimental Science (a lot more important than the Godfather of CRM. J). This idea, completely radical for the 13^th century, was something that is now self-evident to us – the verification of hypotheses through observation, experience, methodological rigor and discovery.  You might think “bad start, Paul, what’s the big deal about that?” For the 21^st century, thanks to Bacon and his successors, it isn’t a big deal. It’s what especially contemporary scientists do. But in the 13^th century, this was revolutionary and would, if it gained popular credence, overturn the bulk of so-called scientific approaches at the time. Science at the time was based more on argument and natural philosophy, rather than a rigorous approach that used the actual practical testing of hypothesis to verify or deny the hypothesis.  To super-simplify (again, this post isn’t meant to be a highly detailed post on areas that I’m not an expert in; but I do know something of the era) the accepted approach to science when the 13^th century began, it was debating and arguing the hypothesis and the more “rational” argument won.  Experimental science changed that.

What made this so exciting was the 13^th century was a century that civilization began to advance with these kinds of ideas in mind for the first time at scale.  They were premised on a broad cultural optimism, which when articulated, said that each and every one of us was capable of what was called special revelation – a creative spark that could generate a new idea that could impact the course of things up to and including all civilization. Though God may have gifted us with that creative spark, the idea that was generated was generated via an individual human being’s thinking process. The advocates of experimental science were effectively saying, “Okay, we think that this idea has some merit. Let’s take it, test it and see if it works and if the results have applicable value.” This concept germinated in a Europe that was undergoing what might have been a renaissance before the Renaissance we know in the 15^th century.  The flowering of the arts and the sciences and desire to discover were given scale and, equally as good, funding, in places like the courts of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, who was the Holy Roman Emperor and his cousin, Alfonso X, also known as Alfonso El Sabio (the Wise) of Castile. These leaders weren’t just conquerors and heads of state; they were patrons who funded scientists, engineers, artists, philosophers and others who were generating new ways of looking at the world and who created new tools and products that would make the world more productive.  For example, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was the sponsor at his court of Salerno, the leading medical school of the 13^th century.  Alfonso X, not only sponsored original experimentation and research, but also was a hands-on researcher himself.  His Libros de saber de Astronomia, which were astronomical tables that he and a research team he led compiled, were the industry-standard until Tycho Brae revised them in the 16^th century.  In conjunction with this research, scientists and engineers at his court invented a mechanical clock to measure time with more precision.

But the inventions weren’t just for a small group in a royal court. There were practical technologies that were created and applied to the larger world – and, were, in context of their era, far more important to the continuation and evolution of the species that the things that we tend to call “disruptive” or “innovative” today. (On a whole other subject, we throw around the terms “disruptive” and “innovative” far too much for things that are neither) For example, during that time, the leather yoke, far more flexible than the yokes of the past were used to drive horses, rather than the oxen used in the past to do agricultural work.  The results were spectacular.  Man, doing the agricultural work produced 45 foot-pounds of work per second.  Oxen with the rigid yoke produced 288 foot-pounds per second; the horse with the flexible leather yoke produced 432 foot-pounds per second and could work 2 hours longer than an ox – an work efficiency increase of 65% in the fields. 

The other agricultural breakthrough of the period was the widespread adoption of three-field crop rotation, a significant change from the centuries old two-field crop rotation. I won’t go into what this is in the interests of space but if you are interested, check the short and sweet explanation given here. Suffice to say, it protected and even replenished nutrients in the soil rather than just drained them.

A third breakthrough, which added to this agricultural boom, was the introduction of hydraulic power via the waterwheel (which also had huge industrial impact, too). For example, in Flanders, sandy marshland became fertile cropland as hundreds of waterwheels irrigated thousands of acres. 

The combination of these three breakthroughs, when applied to agriculture, led to grain yields increasing from an 11^th century high of 2.5 measures per measure sown to 4.0 measures per measure sown, which amounts to 100% increase in disposable foodstuffs.  Talk about disruptive!  Many more human beings got to eat more healthily thanks to this technological revolution.   I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but compare that to what I’ve heard called “disruptive” over the last few years. Uber.  Better taxis?  Groupon. Delivering discount coupons?  Not disruptive. Sorry.

But it wasn’t just the breakthroughs themselves that characterized this era. The 13^th century was also a period of self-revelation, when the human species began to realize that it was special.  It had the power to transform nature, not just react to it, as most animals do.  It also celebrated that special capability.

Let me explain it another way.

I would imagine that many of us, given our somewhat privileged existences and the commoditization of international transportation, have been to Europe and seen in one place or another gothic cathedrals – and if you have any sense of wonder whatever, have been in awe at the size, complexity and sheer magnificence of the creations.  Many of these, the first groups of them, were built in the 13^th century by cathedral builders who were often called master masons or architect engineers, with the express purpose of celebrating God and Creation.  But one thing that may not be as obvious is that in almost all of these timeless magnificent buildings, if you look at them closely, man is placed at the apex of creation.  Man is central to the creation of the building and to the celebration of God and capital C Creation. For example, the interior of the Cathedral at Reims was a maze that represented a holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  When a visitor to the cathedral solves the maze, they arrive at the center of the cathedral.  What that visitor finds at the center of these homages to God and Creation are not the names of any disciples, nor Jesus or Mary, but the names of the master masons that built the cathedral. These architect-engineers saw themselves as central to the creation of this New Jerusalem, this new and refreshed world of invention, celebration and abundance.  God, in this central area is portrayed on stained glass windows as an architect engineer with a compass in his hands. 

This spirit of creation and invention was infectious among at least a small group of people who had a significant impact on the health and well-being of the world that they lived in.  Witness my man Roger Bacon’s inventive mind – and keep in mind this is the 13^th century. This is a famous passage of his foresight that comes from his work Opus Tertium.

“Machines of navigation can be constructed without rowers, as great ships for river or ocean which are borne under the guidance of one man at a greater speed than if they were full of men. Also a chariot that can be constructed that will move at incalculable speed without any draught animals…also flying machines may be constructed so that man may sit in the midst of the machine turning a certain instrument by means of which wings artificially constructed would beat the air after the manner of a bird flying. Also a machine of small size may be made for raising and lowering weights of almost infinite amounts – a machine of the utmost utility. 

Machines may be also made for going in sea or river down to the bed without bodily danger…and there are countless other things that can be constructed such as bridges over rivers without pillars or any such support.”

What’s utterly fascinating is, in his “Letter Concerning the Marvelous Power of Art and Nature and the Nullity of Magic” Bacon claims to have seen all of them, except the flying machine, which of course shows up 300 years later in Da Vinci’s Notebooks.  Is that the case? I don’t know and I doubt anyone ever will. But what makes this incredible regardless is that even if he didn’t see them as a realized work, each of these imagined (or real) inventions has a practical purpose aimed at the betterment of the lot of humans on the planet at that time and in the future. In other words, he was applying a scientific method to providing invention that was practical i.e. of real applicable value to the advance of society.  Utility in the service of knowledge is essential.  There has to be some actual purpose to the creation of knowledge and for its verification. It isn’t created for its own sake. 

But you might argue, what about brand new fresh ideas? Aren’t they sometimes valuable and yet, unique and new so their application isn’t so apparent?

The answer to this is well put indirectly, by the poet, Charles Simic, in a recent New York Review of Books article entitled “The Prisoner of History”

“I live between two worlds, the one I see with my eyes open and the one I see with my eyes closed. Unlike other people, I regard the two as equals and trust my eyes as much as I trust my imagination.”

In other words, of course we have to continually try to imagine the new but it has to be in context – the context of the world as it is and as we imagine it to be with the realization of those new ideas. The key is “realization” – the practical application of verified ideas to solving a problem or advancing something in the real world.

This could easily characterize Roger Bacon, or any of the visionary thinkers of the 13^th century. Or any of us, regardless of era, who want to make what we imagine we can do, real, rather than just continue to imagine it. This is vision and imagination applied to real world problems and needs.

All of this – agricultural advances, cathedral building, Roger Bacon’s vision, reflected a broad cultural optimism. This optimism, a transformation of thinking about the place of humanity and individuals in the grandest scheme of all – the evolution of life, and the universe, drove a 13^th century technological revolution that increased the capacity of the human species to grow more safely and to utilize its gift more actively in a way that was unmatched until the Renaissance.

Roger Bacon’s contribution to this was the creation and initial application of scientific method to the evolution of science.

Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon, labored through life as an almost heretical Franciscan friar, persecuted by his own order, and died in 1292 at age 78, despite being imprisoned for a while by his own order. I’m not going to go into the politics of that or the life of Bacon per se, but instead focus on what he said and saw. Because what he did, reflects what each of us as an individual has the capability to do in his or her life. Personally, it affects how at least I’m thinking about what I might leave behind, even as I continue to concern myself, as most of us do, with my present and future.  I think it’s important because I also think we underestimate exactly who we are and what we are capable of because we get caught up in the minutiae of our everyday existence. We often forget not just the nobility of our own capacity but the actual tools and practices that are there to effect those proficiencies and possibilities. 

We are armed with:

• The knowledge of what the human species is
• Who we are as individuals
• The existence of a philosophical framework that gives us some context to work within,
• The ability to reason and
• Tools and practices,

Having all this makes us responsible at some point in our life to choose a way to use all of this amazing potential and engage with the world to realize that potential and benefit more than just ourselves.  We are each at different levels in our journey to figure this out and each at different degrees of commitment to actually trying to benefit others, rather than just intend to. 

I’ve reached the age where at least for me, I know what I want to do and how I want to do it and am beginning to consider what kind of memory it will leave when my time on earth ends.  It’s a bit frightening to be honest, because I don’t want to consider it, but considering it I am.

In that consideration, Roger Bacon has been a paradigm for me, because of how he thinks about knowledge, science and execution. 

I’ll explain.

The first principle of knowledge in the mind of Bacon was virtue.  That, translated into 21^st century lingo is that we have to be good human beings. Bacon understood that there is a clarity that goodness provides that allows one to understand truths – not necessarily or only big universal truths but scientific truths. A good person, because their intent is good, is prone to knowledge, because they are emotionally connected to doing good things.   His way of putting it:

“For it is not possible that the soul should rest in the light of truth, while it is stained with sins…Virtue therefore clarifies the mind so that man may comprehend more easily not only moral but scientific truths.” (From his 1268 Opus Majus).

But it goes further than that. None of us, and, I fervently believe this, are devoid of the potential for creativity.  We all have an infinite capacity to create and for applying that creativity in beneficial ways, what Bacon calls “special revelation” or what the incredibly underrated philosopher Philo Judaeus calls “a miniature heaven” in his “On Creation of the Cosmos According to Moses.”

In Bacon’s Opus Tertium:

“...Therefore, this way, which precedes special revelation is the wisdom of philosophy and this wisdom alone is in the power of man, yet supplemented by some divine enlightenment which in this part is common to all, because God is the intelligence active in all our souls in all cognition.”

Bacon is saying what I said – each of us has that divine spark, the potential to create but it also is a potential that has to be realized by the individual. God will not do it for you.  God grants you the capability and the broad opportunity to act on it.  You are responsible to realize your potential and then put it into action in a way that is beneficial. Again, Opus Tertium:

As God wishes all men to be saved and no man to perish and his goodness is infinite, He always leaves some way possible for man through which he may be urged to seek his own salvation…For this reason, the goodness of God ordained that revelation should be given the world so that the human race may be saved. But this way, which precedes revelation, is given to man so that if he does not wish to follow it, nor seek a fuller truth, he may be justly damned at the end.

Putting it simply, it would be a horrible waste of each of our lives if we don’t apply this gift in a way that benefits each of and all of us.

I know that this may be arcane for some of you (though, those that it is arcane for probably have stopped reading), waxing too philosophical for others, and maybe you think this is self-indulgent, which, admittedly, it might be.  But, aside for what I’m wrestling with as I enter the last third or, with a LOT of luck (and working out and eating right) 40% of my life, what Roger Bacon established in the 13^th century via his philosophical framework and the creation of experimental science and what the application of practical science led to with the technological breakthroughs and conjoined cultural optimism of the era, is one of the reasons we are able to continue to claim innovation and disruption and technological breakthrough and scientific achievement in the 21^st century.

So with that in mind, I’m going to go through one more thing (there is SO much more that I’m leaving out) about Roger Bacon concerning experimental science and then close this out with some of why this impacts me so, so much and how it has impacted what we all do, so that we can see things in perspective – or in the context of the biggest picture of all – the continuation of the human species for the sake of its own growth.

Roger Bacon and the Integritas Sapientiae

Roger Bacon’s approach to experimental science was driven by a framework and a methodology grounded in a deeply rooted philosophy that was verifiable through research and testing – or disproven as such.

In Bacon’s case the philosophy was defined by the concept of God as the Creator of all things in an orderly fashion. What that implied was that all things were related in some way via the laws that governed them. That meant that while God created the heavens, earth, man and woman, the trees and the fruit that grew on them – all of which were different in visible ways and fashioned for different reasons, they were related to each by the universal laws of creation and the Creator and governed by those same laws.

To Bacon, this translated to eight clearly definable branches of science; the laws of each of them were discoverable with a single, universal method.  The sciences (for those of you interested) were:

1. Common principles of natural sciences and philosophy
2. Optics
3. Astronomy
4. Barology (science of weight and its relation to gravity)
5. Alchemy (actually chemistry not magic)
6. Agriculture
7. Medicine
8. Experimental science 

Bacon called these sciences the integrated sciences.  Each of the eight had a unique position in the pantheon of science but at the same time all eight played a central role in the body of principle and practice that gave the human species hegemony over nature – the ability to alter it to their benefit. 

What in the name of … do I mean by this? (Hey, don’t shoot the messenger).  For example, to understand agriculture, you had to know botany, soil testing, animal husbandry and horticulture. Your knowledge as an agricultural scientist had to span the interactions between climate, vegetation and animal populations. This allowed you to figure out how to improve the conditions that would benefit organic life.  Think about the example earlier of the leather yoke, horses, waterwheels, and three-crop rotation that disrupted all previous models for growing food and improved the lives of people everywhere by providing more food.  This was a systematic, practical, applicable science.

Science had a timely prudence too. For example, he was a strong advocate of military research because of the imminent threat of the Mongol Empire and Genghis Khan who he saw as the Anti-Christ.  By 1241, they had reached the Danube in Europe, so researching war weapons became paramount.  Based on both the Opus Majus and another of his works, De Secretus Operibus, there is evidence that he invented gunpowder (according to arguments made by several scholars).  He didn’t envision it as needed for bombs or bullets per se, but he did see it as something that would defeat the Anti-Christ, Genghis Khan.

This great achievement, the beginnings of a rigorous method for experimental science, was first proposed in both his greatest work, Opus Majus (translates to Great or Big Work, ironically), and in his less well known, Communia Naturalium. While its true value wasn’t realized until the 17^th century really, its seeds were planted in the 13^th century’s cultural optimism.

There is so much more to Bacon’s experiments. There is some evidence that he invented a telescope and a compound microscope hundreds of years before the accepted dates of their invention. He did what can be seen as seminal work in optics and in light and radiation. I could go on. But, to close this out, I want to focus on something I think even more important – his passion for finding the truth – in things, in laws, in natural law, in the universe and in life – and the lessons that I’ve learned at least in the search that he has helped guide me on for my life.

Roger Bacon, on truth and humility.

Bacon understood that truth wasn’t only the property of the renowned – all humans were possessors of truth and thus deserved the respect of their peers.  Without that humility, not only weren’t you acting as a human being according to what God provided to you, but you also were denying yourself the opportunity for learning some of the truths that are being made available to you.  Look at these passages in Opus Majus:

• “The wiser men are, the more humbly will they submit to learn from others; they do not disdain the simplicity of those who teach them.”

• “Just as man’s conduct towards God is regulated by the reverence required, so is his conduct toward his neighbor regulated by justice and peace and his duty to himself by integrity of life.”

• “It comes to pass that he who ceases to be a man by the loss of his goodness is turned into a beast.”

Lessons Learned

So, what does all this rambling on about Roger Bacon mean – at least to me?  Let’s bring it in.

Since I found out about Roger Bacon and was drawn to him, he has been a guidepost for my life – a hero that framed much of what I’ve done with my life.  He’s given me guidance in how be what I hope is a good person, a practical foresighted thinker, and someone who will accomplish something of value on the planet to be remembered by.

Guideposts

1. The universe is governed by a natural law that affects all things regardless of apparent differences. 
2. It is the continuous discovery of that universal natural law and how it works that drives and sustains the human species, whether or not its conscious goal.
3. Each human being on this planet, each of us, regardless of life’s station, has been granted an infinite capacity to create and is a possessor of truths that each of us can learn from.  Titles and position don’t matter.
4. With that creative capacity, comes to the responsibility to actively seek to use it in a practical way to benefit others – either the species as a whole or groups or individuals. We are granted the gift; doing something with it is up to us.
5. We each are able to gain more and greater knowledge if our purpose for gaining it is good (virtuous).  That means that we are best served as people if we are driven to do good for more than ourselves.
6. There is a rigorous method of going about applying that creative gift – proving what you think, regardless of where you apply it. Bacon’s desire to prove what he supposed and the method he developed, can appropriated by how we produce content, develop technology, and do anything else with our lives. For example, when I write, I am always able to defend what I say.  I’ve counseled those of my younger brethren who tend to be strong-willed and opinionated that they can write whatever they want, but they need to be prepared to defend whatever they say, which, to be blunt, many times they can’t. You have to be able to show that what you say is defensible by its truths.  If it isn’t or you can’t verify the argument, then don’t say it.

 

Our lives today were nourished in the wellsprings of prior centuries and the prior achievements of our forebears. On the one hand, we should respect that past, but we should never live in it.  Because if there is one other thing we learned, it is that our wonderful species is constantly evolving and changing and we have to both drive that change in order for the species to continue and respect that change as it occurs.

Roger Bacon was a major influence in teaching me all these things. I don’t know if any of this resonated with you. I don’t know if this was an exercise in sheer self-indulgence. I do know that the impact on me has been to make me think about what I do and who it impacts, act in a fashion that supports reason and truth as best as the flawed creature I am knows how, and at the same time, provides me with a moral compass. I hope that when I finally go, my epitaph does not read, “he was #1 in CRM” or “He was the Godfather of CRM” but instead it says, “He was a good person” or “He did good.”  Then I’ve fulfilled my life’s purpose and what has been my dream for many years.

Footnote

For an interesting look at the recent biographical material on Roger Bacon, take a look at this 2013 work that is fairly simple and probably a bit too speculative but good enough to give you a decent idea of who the man was.  The book is “Roger Bacon, The First Scientist” by Brian Clegg. (The link is for the Kindle version)  For anyone interested in Roger Bacon at all, it’s worth the read.

 

CRM Musings, Miscellany and Doings

CRM Musings and Miscellany: Short Bits

Every now and then I get a hankering to just do these short, pithy (there’s no lisp involved here) things rather than my usual long-winded posts.  This is the result of one of those hankerings.

CRM, BPMonline, Kiev

For those of you that don’t follow CRM Idol, shame on you!!  Actually, that wasn’t what I wanted to say, but what I was thinking. For those of you who don’t follow CRM Idol, BPMonline is a company, owned by UK-based Terrasoft, that was one of two winners in 2011, our first year. They are a company that has grown dramatically since then, being recognized by Gartner, Forrester and other analyst firms and individuals as a player in the CRM space. They also are an exceptionally warm and friendly company, run by Katerina Kostereva, co-founder and CEO and ably supported by a terrific young staff. 

Recently, I had the great pleasure of helping them celebrate the opening of their new office in a 7-story glass building in Kiev (they own it) with an incredible rooftop view of that historic (more than 1100 years old) city.  I was there for both an advisory day and to speak to customers – roughly 250 or so – who came from multiple republics in and around Ukraine (by the way, NOT “The” Ukraine. Ukraine). Even though I had a massive recurrence of an upper respiratory infection (long story) the night before, here is the speech I gave for your listening…pleasure…or pain if that’s the way you want to be about it.

The Onion on the Cloud

What can I say? I love this video.  No disrespect intended to HP (by me anyway. I can’t speak for the Onion) but this one is AWE…some! And about at the level of knowledge contained in a buzzword.

HP Offers 'That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About'

HP Offers 'That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About'

Salesforce Acquires EdgeSpring: News Almost Lost in the Marketing Cloud

I think you have a cogent idea of what I thought about the acquisition of Exact Target, salesforce’s marketing cloud acquisition that had the airwaves – social and traditional - buzzing and at times stinging. Lost in that – almost, since nothing salesforce.com ever does get actually lost – was their acquisition announced the following week of analytics platform startup EdgeSpring.  Note something here. I say analytics platform, not application or cloud service.  This is an important distinction for salesforce.

The reason is simple; they haven’t been able to compete with their larger industry brethren such as Oracle or SAP when it comes to analytics. That was the other great hole in the salesforce ecosystem. They have the Radian6 Insights Platform, which as cool as it is, doesn’t substitute native analytics that can be built to spec depending on what the purpose is.

That said, because EdgeSpring is coming out of stealth mode and has been immediately acquired, (run by a former salesforce employee now returning to the fold), its hard to say exactly what the quality of the platform is. I haven’t seen it, nor had I heard of it. But the idea is at least the right one for salesforce at this juncture. If the product has the capabilities, then salesforce continues to go down the path to becoming an all-encompassing ecosystem for customer-facing applications and services – which, for them, is what they need to do to fulfill their vision.

The Oracle-NetSuite; Oracle-Microsoft; Oracle-Salesforce Alliance

Everyone and their mother (if she is an analyst) had some hypothesis or speculative notion about this alliance. Here are some of the ones worth reading:

1. Frank Scavo, Constellation Research, On the Oracle/Salesforce “détente”
2. Dennis Howlett, Diginomica on the Oracle/Salesforce partnership
3. Stuart Lauchlan, Diginomica, on the Oracle/Microsoft alliance
4. Denis Pombriant on the Oracle/Salesforce deal
5. Larry Dignan, ZDNet on Oracle/Salesforce thing
6. James Staten, Forrester Group, on Oracle/Microsoft together at last
7. Esteban Kolsky, ThinkJar, on the whole Oracle-Microsoft-Salesforce-NetSuite shebang

These are good starts.  My opinion here would just be either corroboration of some of these or noise, so I won’t offer it yet. I’m also still thinking about the implications, some of which are not clear to me. So give me some rope (and time) to hang myself with. I’m sure I’ll speak to it at some point. Read these in the meantime.

Customer for Life:

Esteban Kolsky, one of the world’s leading analysts and one of my closest friends, and I had a discussion a few days ago on the nature of customer engagement and customer experience. Even though we have somewhat different metaphors that we present with, it is sort of scary how closely aligned our thinking is. Both of us had the same perception when it came to how to begin to think about engagement, experience and customers.  I’m going to give you all a short précis on what we discussed but please understand this is a mere representation of the richness of the subject matter. Maybe it will be my next book.  Then again, maybe not.

There is a strong tendency that companies, when they are planning their customer strategies and technology vendors when they are thinking about developing their enabling applications, tend to think about the customer engagement as a momentary one. That means that if I interact with a company about something and there is this intense emotional involvement, well, that’s engagement. Or, another variation would be if I talk to the company and finish the conversation (regardless of intensity) the “engagement” is over. But that isn’t the nature of engagement. In fact, engagement is characterized by the customer’s ongoing interactions with the company – an ongoing interaction that he or she (meaning, the customer) chooses to have. At any point in the life of that ongoing engagement, it can be intense or casual or intense and then casual, or something in between. The level of emotional involvement is the customer’s choice. The decision to continue the engagement is the key to it. The customer stays engaged because they want to have a relationship with the company that provides them with the results that they want to get from the company.  Keep that “ongoing” part in your head for a minute.

Customer experience suffers from the same kind of, though not identical, misperception. Most people think of the momentary experience – the one event driven experience that occurs as the interactions happen. It might be that it takes about 3 or 4 calls or communications of some kind for the event to start and end. That short-term experience is often what businesses are planning for and around.  That’s a limited approach and pretty much not the way to think about it.

Another way that customer experience gets shortchanged is when “the” customer experience is misidentified as being what I call a consumable experience.  A consumable experience would be the effect that the American Girl doll retail store has on your daughter when she goes there with her doll and gets her doll’s hair done, eats lunch with her doll, watches a play about her doll (or a doll in the American Girl line) and accessorizes her doll – for the price of about $400.00 for the visit.  It creates a memory for her that is unmatchable, no doubt, but it is only an aspect of the broader overall customer experience, as we have to think about it, if we’re building programs around it and strategies for it. The customer experience that goes beyond the event would include (for example inclusively but not exclusively):

1. The American Girl retail store experience (as outlined above) with your daughter
2. The storybooks and history and accessories associated with the doll which you can read about via print, or online and/or buy it in the store and/or online.
3. The ease of the transaction process for the “buyer” i.e. the parent
4. The type of customer service you get at the store, over the phone, via the web
5. The store associated interactions with you and your daughter that lead to follow-up activity of some kind – e.g. an invitation to an exclusive event related to the character of your daughter’s doll – and the history of your store visits.
6. The web presence of American Doll.
7. The availability of the products themselves when there is an interest in the acquisition (e.g. would you like to be told, sorry its out of stock – and available in two months – and then have to tell your daughter that?)
8. The ability of the tools to customize the experience (not the customization itself)

There is much more involved but you get the idea. This is an overall customer experience that in the long run leaves you with a feeling that you want to continue your relationship with the company – meaning buy stuff and do things for a long while to come. 

There is this saying (which I have to admit, I’ve had some responsibility in propagating) that “the customer’s experience is only as good as their last memory.” While that’s somewhat true, there are multiple nuances to this.  The most important nuance is this:

If your customer has had a long-term overall good experience or bad one, it will color the effect of the experience of last memory. Brush strokes color the pencil lines.  To put it in practical terms.

1. If I’ve had an ongoing excellent experience with the company and something bad occurs, I’m likely to forgive the problem or at least give it a lot of leeway without much impact on the long term as long as the problem is solved. If it isn’t solved, I’ll still be with the company
2. If I’ve had an ongoing average experience with the company, the issue is likely to carry more weight with my long term involvement than if #1 was in play. That means the problem better be solved or it will weaken my resolve to stay with the company.
3. If my ongoing experience has been poor, then the issue is likely to be the breaking point, even if resolved. Even if I stay, the slightest problem and I’m gone.

In other words same experience in the short term, very different outcomes due to the long term experience – which is the one that ultimately matters more.

Stuff I have going on

Just to keep you up to snuff and to get you going, some stuff I’m doing that I’d of course like your involvement with in some capacity;

1. CRM Idol 2013 – CRM Idol is now underway. We are evaluating the references of the contestants who, once again, represent multiple countries and regions.  We have nearly 80 extended judges representing influencers in the vendor, buyer, media and analyst world. We have those fascinating emerging tech companies that are willing to take a bit of risk to potentially be the breakout CRM company of 2013.  For more on this go to the CRM Idol site (duh.)
2. CRM Watchlist 2014 – Unlike CRM Idol, this is for any company that a. wants to take a shot at being recognized as an impact player; b. is willing to make an effort to do so; and c. wants me to track them in 2014.  The enrollment period is still open and will be right up to October 31, 2013. The submission period for the questionnaire is November 30, 2013.  If you are interested in contending, please send me an email requesting the CRM Watchlist 2014 questionnaire and in return you will a. get the questionnaire; b. get the 172pp CRM Watchlist 2013 Yearbook; c. start being tracked by me; d. be put in a Google+ group that will activate in the late summer some time and where I will be more than normally accessible. However, given how much I have to do, my expectation is that if you request the questionnaire you’re going to submit the questionnaire and not just do it as a ruse to have me track you. Please don’t disappoint me. My email is [email protected] if you want to be part of this. So far, I have 113 applications, well ahead of last year’s pace, which led to 173 requests and 153 submissions. I’d love to have you. The company size or state of being doesn’t matter. But be aware that this is an impact award and small companies without much of a history have a tough time winning. Though there are 4 or 5 each year that do – based on as much immediate potential as history.  Plus, if you enter, I do track you. If that means anything at all.
3. 3.    CRM Evolution, August 19-21 – As I hope you know, CRM Evolution, put on every year by InfoToday/CRM Magazine, has been the premier CRM conference – the one industry gathering where buyers, vendors, and influencers co-mingle in a given year.  The networking for varying purposes is outstanding and the content is good and the energy is always high.  I have had the honor of chairing it now for my fifth year and never, ever lose the excitement.  It’s a great place to be.  I’d love to meet you and if I already have, to see you again.  Come.  It’s in New York at the Marriott Marquis Hotel August 19-21.  
4. 4.    The 56 Group website - Truthfully, I haven’t ever really needed a website. I have been blessed with the good fortune of not having to really sell or work hard at promotion. But there are a lot of things I have always wanted to do that I haven’t been able to do because I haven’t had any place to “go” that was mine. I’ve been a nomad, residing on many other sites, getting friends to graciously allow me to squat on their land, letting me rest on their real estate for a little while as I continued my travels without any place to call my own.  However, that will be ending soon.  With the amazing work of DRI Global, one of my favorite CRM focused consulting firms (they are in Lisbon), I am getting very close to launching a site far too rich for one person but one that has a somewhat different purpose than the norm. I realized, as my nomadic life continued, that I don’t want a virtual house; I want to live in a skyscraper, a condo building with other people. So my website, built in Joomla (because I know how to use the administrative back end) will be a place where any person or organization that is the in the customer facing world will have a home. Among other things: It will have a community platform that will allow a CRMish person/company to have their own facilitated (by them) community on whatever topical area they want; Selected people will be able to have a microsite for selling their wares with their own catalog and payment system; there will be a loyalty program tied to my services and products with points awarded for not only buying stuff but for participation in the CRM industry and for being socially conscious and/or philanthropic.  The site will be able to aggregate content of all types – including videos, audio assets, slideshows, documents, links, you name it. There’s even the capability to take premium and free online courses – and I can write them from the back end of the site. So be ready. The site goes through a run through this week and then it’s a couple of months or more of populating it and then, welcome to your community, if you care to participate. If not, well, I tried.  If you are interested in hosting a community, let me know even starting now and let me know what it is going to be about. The rules are: follow the rules of the site and facilitate your own community. While it’s pretty open, I do have the right to reject it out of hand or shut it down. But I’m easy. I don’t know if it will work. There are some interesting questions that aren’t answered yet and won’t be until the communities start.  But all in all it should be fun.  Lots for you to do. Registered members of any community can accumulate points in the system for the loyalty program.  WAY more later but feel free to let me know you are interested in facilitating a community on something related to CRM now if you like. Contact me at [email protected].   
5. 5.    SEAT 2013 – I’m guessing that you never heard of the Sports Entertainment Alliance in Technology (SEAT) conference.  This is between 300-450 sports executives who gather annually to discuss how to optimize their use of technology in sports. It’s CIOs, CMOs, VPs, and Senior Directors of team after team, league after league, sport after sport. There is a substantial discussion of CRM (2.5 day track) and this year I have the distinct honor of being the subject of a keynote interview for the CRM track.  Russell Scibetti, one of the best CRM practitioners in sports (he’s the NY Jets guy) and one of my friends, will be the interviewer. I expect, since I love sports, it will be lively and fun.  Just wanted to tell you about it, because I think it’s really cool. 

 

A Guide To Influence(rs) Chapter 1

What this post is not is a discussion of how to determine influence. I’m going to leave that to my dear friend and brilliant scientist, Dr. Michael Wu, the Chief Scientist at Lithium.  He, far better than Klout, PeerIndex and any of the other so-called influence indices, knows how to look at and determine the nature and value of actual influence, not engagement masked as influence.

However, what this is going to be is a series of posts that will provide whoever reads it with the rudiments of how to deal with and think about influencers and the basics around building an influencer/analyst program. Personally, I live in the world of enterprise software, especially CRM influencers.  But it generally applies to anyone who needs to reach individual industry influencers.  I’m guessing 3-4 posts all in all should cover what I need to.  I’ll turn it into a freely downloadable book/guide when I’m done. 

To set expectations, you won’t come out of this with a full-blown influencer program, just the basics. But you will have an idea of why you might consider one, what the dos and don’ts are when it comes to dealing with influencers and an understanding of the “types” of influencers.  Plus the kinds of instruments you need (besides calipers) to deal with influencers and some of the reasons why.

This series will be organized around questions as “chapters.”

1. Chapter 1 – The intro and what types of influencers you might be dealing with – with some names of those.
2. Chapter 2 – what are the dos and don’ts of influencer relations.  Is there an influencer community? What
3. Chapter 3 –Who should I consider engaging and why? The rudiments of an influencer program.
4. Chapter 4 – an update on the Who I Follow on More Than Friday post I did on Influencers a couple of years back.

I can’t tell you with any certainty when these posts are going to come out, only that they will and will be done before the year ends.  And that it will be converted into a freely downloadable book.

So, let’s kick it off.

Let Me Tell You A Story…What I Mean By Bad

I want to start off by reading something to you. As some of you know, in a given week, I get between 30-50 requests for:

1. Demos to me of some sort of software
2. Interviews with some company’s senior execs based on a press release that I’ve been sent which may or may not have something to do with my world, but most certainly has to do with PR team outreach quotas.
3. A story pitch in my capacity as a ZDNet blogger (these are the most irritating as we will see in one of the next two or three posts)

Because I want to have a life, plus, the PR requests are as often as not irritatingly thoughtless – again more on that later – the bulk of them get rejected or remain unanswered – which doesn’t mean that I don’t look at them. But it does mean I might not get far enough into them that I even know the name of the company they are supposedly pitching for.

Occasionally, there is one that is SO bad, so blatantly horrid, that it deserves some press – without trying to embarrass the individual that wrote it.  I got this email in August 2009 and I’ve kept it as the benchmark for bad.  This is the industry standard for “never do this, PR pro.” Let me read some of this to you: 

“Dear Paul –

I just discovered your blog and I want to say how much I appreciate your insights. You are teaching people to want what we offer.

As I read people who dream about CRM-TNG I don’t see any evidence that anyone (other than my company) is addressing the impossibility of bridging gaps from 1.0 to 2.0 without getting a handle on how people discover, propagate and analyze their own, company-specific best practices….

(The person then goes on to describe their product which I will leave out here because a. it would give away who and what they do b. it isn’t that great in any case and c. there is no way I’m helping this person get exposure)

…We have a demo on our site that introduces some basic concepts, however I think the best use of your time is to work through a webinar with me. You’ll see the latest version as you fire all your toughest questions at me.” (He then closes the email)

I have to presume you see what’s wrong with this email, right?  What’s right with it?

Its got to be – and I still marvel over this to this day – the most arrogant PR pitch I’ve ever gotten and as we’ll talk about, I’ve gotten (and I can speak for my bruthas and sistahs in the analyst/influencer/journalist world here, I think), more than my share.

 Let’s briefly dissect this, since it is incredibly instructive on what not to do and, to me at least,  still remains a source of open-mouthed, wide-eyed wonder.

 What’s wrong:

1. The first paragraph pretty much tells me my value is that I spend my time telling people things that sell his company.  (My intent exactly the pitch purveyor says sardonically.). What is amazing is that he doesn’t see that this isn’t right.
2. The second paragraph pretty much relegates all other companies to the dung heap.
3. The final paragraph from this person who has never spoken to me at all tells me the best use of my time. I’m glad this person knows that. Thank god one of us does.

This is easily the best and classic example of someone who will end up on the lowest possible place on the rungs of influencer hell.   The arrogance is a complete turnoff because it presumes something that this person doesn’t have – a say in the life of the analyst/influencer in any way without any relationship whatever.

That said, I don’t want to get into that part of it yet. I just thought that this is such an egregiously bad example I would air it so you can see it and then you’d know, in your heart of hearts, that you would NEVER do anything like that.  Right?

Whew. Okay. Now that this is out of my system, lets devote this post to two things:

1. Why do you even need to bother with influencers? Why should you care? Should you care?
2. What types of influencers are there, given the 21^st century’s shifting business landscape

Why Bother?

The answer to this is kind of sad in a way. Its “because you have to.” To be blunt, there is a game that has to be played. That game goes to the heart of influencer relations. They are people who can impact:

1. The purchasing decision of a prospect
2. The thinking of an entire industry (vertical, horizontal)
3. The mindshare that a company will have which indirectly influences the purchasing decisions of a prospect
4. Institutional and individual investors – e.g. large possible and existing shareholders and those considering investment

While I make a lot of my living that way, it’s a bit stupid that someone’s opinion, albeit informed, can have enough of an impact on a company’s future to be worrisome to a company. 

 But it can. So you have to.  Engage with influencers one-way or the other, I mean.

What Should You Consider When Engaging An Influencer?

Good question – and, with the growth of digital media, and attempts out of desperation as often as not, to redefine or at least come up with a meaningful definition of what an influencer is, not as simple an answer as it used to be. 

Question #1: What Kinds of Influencers are Out There?

The influencer landscape is getting increasingly confusing, especially with the rise of the independent influencers as a force – for good or evil is something that you have to decide.  In the CRM/Social world, aside from the digital brand influencers like Chris Brogan or Gary Vaynerchuk, who we won’t cover here, there are a significant number of variations on the theme, depending on how granular you want to get, how sophisticated a program you want to have and how much you give a crap in the first place.  I’ll give you some idea of what the categories of influencer are, describe them and give you a few leading examples of who excels in those categories.

Just to be clear, none of this is so neat that you can tie it in a bow. There are multiple overlaps – while I put someone in one category, they are also part of or could be part of another.  For example, Mike Fauscette, who runs IDC’s Enterprise Applications practice is part of the institutional group, but is typically thought of by other influencers as an independent due to his thought processes and his spirit.  It can get complicated.  And, the reason that matters to you is that you have to deal with behaviors and psychologies, not just categories. Here is the single most important piece of advice I’m ever going to give you when it comes to this kind of work.

Know who the influencer is, not just what s/he is.

Look, what you do with this information is up to you.  I don’t care.  I’m just the messenger. I thought it would be helpful. I hope it is.

Institutionals

These are the longest established beasts of the industry. Gartner Group is the $1 billion, 800-pound gorilla, with Forrester Group and IDC the next two in line. There are multiple other organizations like Aberdeen Group, Nucleus Research, Yankee Group etc. all of whom provide similar sets of services ranging from market research to consultative.  From the standpoint of influence, which is what we want to cover, there are several things that you have to consider. First, customers call these companies to find out whether or not your company is a good enough vendor to be on the list. Second, their varying technology ratings, ranging from the famous or infamous (depending on where you place) Gartner Magic Quadrant to the Forrester Wave, has a big impact on customers, whether you like the results or not.

In recent years, the institutionals stranglehold on influence has been diminished though they still reign as the most influential category.  There are a number of reasons for their wane.

1. The locus of power is shifting to individuals, be they at the large firms like Gartner or solo practitioners.  Some of that can be attributed to the tenor of the times because peer trust has become the dominant form of trust when it comes to expertise and influence.  In what is something of an analogy, the same way now that in many companies, the salesperson who sold the products to someone is expected to be the account manager for all things including service – by the customer – even if the company isn’t set up that way – is the same way that influencers are now looked at.  “I trust Michael Maoz, not Gartner per se.” I trust Kate Leggett, not Forrester, per se.” On the other hand, some of the reason for the individual influencer trust is simply a matter of TCO.  The larger institutions are considerably more expensive than the independents. I’m not speaking to the quality of the work because, like anything else, that’s a matter of individuals.  But the options especially when the price is factored in are greater than ever, and companies are taking them up. The law of diminishing returns can sometimes set in – regardless of the brilliance of the institutional influencer’s work.  It can simply cost too much.
2. The kinds of expertise needed are broader than ever and no one institution can cover all of them so it often is a matter of going where the expert you need is – the best of breed approach. There is no reason to do things all Gartner, all Forrester, or all any group or individual. Go to the expertise not the company is becoming more the norm than it has been. 
3. The organizational structure of the larger companies has been much slower to change with the times. They have baggage. That doesn’t make them bad or good. Again, that’s the purview of the individual analyst/influencer. But that baggage can make dealing with them slow, rigid and frustrating some times.

This is not to say, don’t deal with the institutionals. Some of the best analysts and most influential people in the customer-facing world reside there.  Some examples of the greats.

Michael Maoz (Gartner Group) – Michael might be the best analyst in the CRM world. He is certainly one of the most highly regarded. He is honest, forthright, and tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear or, for that matter, what Gartner wants you to hear. His advice is, even if it is brutal at times, (delivered with good humor though), right.

Ed Thompson (Gartner Group) – Ed is one of the stars in the customer experience firmament and Gartner’s best speaker.  He is the only speaker to consistently kick my ass in speaker-ranked events.  J.  He has a strong CRM knowledge. HQed in Europe, he is in demand a great deal as a speaker and consulting analyst – when it comes to the customer journey. Count on the dude.

Mike Fauscette (IDC) – Mike runs the IDC Enterprise Applications Practice and has a great big picture perspective that gives his customers a way of tying what they do to the market as it moves – a gift. An independent spirit in an institutional role, he is known for his creative way of reconfiguring the business universe you thought was the one to the one it really is

Kate Leggett (Forrester Group) – Kate, who has real world practitioner and vendor experience is known for her work at Forrester in the customer service area. Where she stands out is her ability to craft the multi-channel strategies which treat social as a component, not a gift from the gods.  She is also well regarded among all the other analysts and often is grouped with the independents.

Bill Band (Forrester Group) – Bill leads the CRM practice at Forrester and does strong work when it comes to the nitty gritty of CRM. Because he has a consulting background, he is able to delve deeper than most analysts in helping companies define programs, not just strategies.  Something a bit rare in the world of market research – which, incidentally, he does very well.

Let me reiterate. This is by no means even vaguely approaching what is an exhaustive list (duh!). There are other excellent institutional analysts like Ian Jacobs at Datamonitor/Ovum; Mary Wardley at IDC,  Sheryl Kingstone at Yankee Group  and Martin Schneider at the 451 Group to name a few more.  I just don’t have the time to lay them all out.

Boutiques

The boutiques are essentially the intermediate answer to the institutionals.  They are often ex-institutional analysts who found the larger companies stifling for one reason or another so they took their already considerable influence with them and formed a small firm. Interestingly, this goes to the heart of what I said earlier. In the case of many of the influencers, the customers they have travel with them – and have no qualms abandoning the companies that the influencers left and joining the new firms.  At the heart of this is still, regardless of where you are, the trust in the individual influencer, not the firms that housed them. 

The boutiques are rooted in sound methodologies, usually modified versions of the approaches that the founders learned at their original companies. But the boutiques are tougher to type because their business models and purposes are vastly different; none of them necessarily even compete.  But what they have in common is that they are, for the most part, less pricey than the institutionals.

To determine how to deal with them requires some serious research on your part. That’s because the services that they offer vary as widely as the boutique firms that exist.  For example, Altimeter Group provides consultative and thought leadership services; Constellation Research is more research focused, than consultative with a strong thought leadership service component; Dachis Group seems to be migrating to a combination of consultative services and products. It goes on and on. 

Do NOT underestimate their influence. Some of them like Ray Wang of Constellation Research and in a very different way, Brian Solis of Altimeter Group are among the most influential analysts/thought leaders in the business world.

Since this is a piece on influencer relations, I would be remiss if I don’t mention some representative standouts when it comes to boutique influencers.

Ray Wang (Constellation Research) – Ray is a former Forrester analyst who created Constellation Research, focused on market research (as opposed to consultative work) by the seat of his pants in 2011 and has made it into a real success. Some of that is due to Ray’s seriously huge influence and his quality as an analyst and market researcher. Some of it is due to the quality of his partners and principals. His personal focus is more enterprise than pure CRM but he is also seen as a leader in Social CRM. Among his many accomplishments – Analyst of the Year for the Institute for Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR) in 2009..  

Brian Solis (Altimeter Group) – Brian going to Altimeter Group, founded by Groundswell co-author Charlene Li, was a huge coup for Altimeter Group. Brian literally rewrote the rules of public relations during the early part of the 21^st century and the use of social tools in the agency world is largely due to the strategies he developed early on. He has migrated successfully to the larger world of social business and the enterprise and is a leading speaker and thinker there too.  Interesting thing about Brian is that even though he is occupies rarified air (take a look at the forewords to his books. Here is a review of his latest, “The End of Business as Usual”), he is among the kindest people I have ever met.

Dion Hinchcliffe (Dachis Group) – Even when he ran his own boutique firm, Dion was a leading light in the world of enterprise collaboration a.k.a. E20.  He has since become one of the leading proponents of social business – that unique combination of E20 and social CRM (to simplify it). He is known for his ability to develop a fully fleshed out strategic picture of both the business end and the technology components of that business end in a social business. Some of the best blog posts I’ve ever read for their content and completeness. He is highly respected for good reason. A recent author, get his (and Peter Kim’s) book, “Social Business By Design”

Laurie McCabe (SMB Group) – Laurie is one of the few true small business CRM thought leaders.  She might be the only one who isn’t independent. Her market research has been exceptionally strong along with her technology product knowledge and there are few who excel more than her in these areas.  Helluva nice person, too.

Again, there are others in this category – Susan Scrupski, also of Dachis; Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group; Anneke Seley founder of Reality Works Group, among several others. This post would be 20,000 words rather than the 6600+ it is if I went into the entire list of excellent influencers in the categories I’m squeezing them into.

Independents

This has been the area that has seen the greatest increase in “power” over the last few years. I would suspect the reasons are that there has been (see above) a shift in who and how we trust with 65% of the respondents in 2012’s Edelman Trust Barometer saying that “a person like me” is their most trusted source – meaning an individual that they perceive to have similar interests. That level of trust invested is much easier with an individual than a company – any day of the week.  Plus the independents are free of the constraints of the other categories of vendors and thus are able to write more, attend more events, keep their visibility high – without worrying about who they are accountable to for billable hours.

The trust in the independents has grown also, in part, because the advice that they’ve given to their vendor clients has been sound. They have often been around for years in the industry and have grown up with their clients and have grown up as the industry itself matured. They are trusted because they’ve been tested over time – often having come from the practitioners or the vendors themselves.

With the growth of Social CRM and social media usage, there has been an outgrowth of an entire new generation of business influencers who have been outspoken, intelligent and more often than not, right. They have also been “inducted” into the more established influencer circles (more on how all this works in a future post. But trust me, mentoring the younger influencers is something that goes on all the time by the older influencers. However, there is a bit of a dark side to this too. More on this in that future post). When it comes to price, their overhead is not that high so therefore they are the least pricey of all, but there is no consistency in how they charge either.  Each to his own. 

Here are some of the independent stars. 

Established

These are the ones who have been around the block a few times. More than a few times. Have run at least a marathon’s worth of trips around the block.  At it for a while with their reputations and practices well established, they are in demand constantly for one thing or another.  They need to be tracked if not engaged.  Or engaged.  Get to know them.

Me – My ego demanded my inclusion – and who am I to ever deny my ego?  So I included me.

Esteban Kolsky – Esteban is a seasoned influencer with a strong focus on customer service. He is a former Gartner analyst with formidable research skills and a wide influence net. He is trusted by the industry and the influencers alike. Read his two page notes and you’ll see what I mean. A member of the Enterprise Irregulars (this will be meaningful later)

Denis Pombriant – Denis is unique, the only influencer of any “type” who sees the macroeconomic and social issues that often envelop the things going on in the enterprise software industry. A long time analyst, business development and market research guy, who headed up Aberdeen’s CRM Practice until shortly after the millennium turned. A member of the Enterprise Irregulars.

Brent Leary – I’d love to leave it as he and I being the CRM Playaz, but there is much more to Brent than that. He is arguably the leading authority on small business CRM and his influence runs to both the CRM and the small business (even when non-CRM) world. He is a specialist not just on Social CRM but also on music, but that’s a story for another day.

Vinnie Mirchandani – Vinnie is also a former Gartner analyst who is an eminence grise in the world of enterprise software. He is widely read, highly trusted and well liked in the technology industry. His scope is beyond just technology though. He watches and comments on innovation with his blogs deal architect, and New Florence: New Renaissance and his books, The New Polymath and his just released “The New Technology Elite.”  A member of the Enterprise Irregulars.

Josh Greenbaum - Josh has been an influencer and an analyst for 25 years, though if you saw him, you’d think that meant he started when he was 8.  He is one of the toughest and fairest of the influencers, with a very deep and knowledgeable analysis of the nitty gritty of the technology industry, at a level I can only imagine. He can frighten vendors with the dead on accuracy of his analysis and his very tough questions but they know he’s always fair.

Others: Graham Hill, Dennis Howlett, Michael Krigsman.

Newly Emerged

These are the younger set, who have just become players in the influencer world. Companies that are smart will start courting them now as they grow into their role as the now impending new generation of influencers, analysts, and consultants.  The earlier you meet them, the better for you.

Brian Vellmure – Brian is becoming increasingly visible to the technology vendors, having been known to the practitioner community for a little while now. He is now being recognized as one of the up and coming thought leaders especially when it comes to all things Social CRM.  Key to Brian? He gets the technology and the strategic reasons for it.

Mark Tamis – Mark is making his mark in Europe. Paris based, Mark is being seen as someone who can move companies to adopt social and CRM technologies. That’s not surprising since he’s been in technology for years – with major stints at BEA and Oracle.  Guy is smart, really smart, and yet manages to stay a good person despite the brains.  Read this man’s posts and hear this man frequently at industry conferences. Lots do.

Silvana Buljan – Silvana isn’t truly an up and coming star – she has been a star in Southern Europe for a long time. One of the foremost authorities on change management, this founder of the Buljan Associates consultancy is becoming known well beyond Southern Europe. Watch for her scheduled appearance at CRM Evolution 2012.  Change management is one of the most undervalued areas in building a customer-centric company, yet the most important. Silvana is one of the few that knows it and knows how to make sure the world does it.

Others: Wim Rampen, Mike Boysen, and Scott Rogers

Vendor Influencers

Again, we’re into the granular world.  Vendor influencers are a tricky category. The reason is that there are two types of vendor influencers – those with only a little or no agenda who have strong independent credentials, mostly established prior to their joining the vendor, and those with a more concrete agenda who are not pure of motive but have enough independent chutzpah and are universal enough thinkers to garner the respect of the industry and customers to begin with. We’ll call the former Type A and the latter Type B. Not at all related to their psychological profiles.

Type A – Little Agenda

With one notable exception these tend to be the former external influencers who, even upon joining vendors, didn’t lose their credibility or their caché. 

Chris Bucholtz – Chris is currently the editor-in-chief of CRM Outsiders and resident thought leader at SugarCRM. He comes to SugarCRM from InsideCRM where he established himself as a significant thought leader in his own right. Even while working for a vendor, Chris maintains his independence and is trusted by the industry for his cogent pieces on the nuances, the concepts and the benefits provided by Social CRM.  He is a mensch.

Michael Wu – He is another one of the exceptions to the rule. He is homegrown – meaning he wasn’t an influencer prior to his stint as Principal Scientist of Lithium. He has zero agenda, being pure of heart and a pure scientist. His work on influence, gamification, smart data (rather than big data) is superlative, groundbreaking stuff. 

Sameer Patel – Sameer is a veteran. Even though now he runs collaboration as a GVP at SAP, for years, Sameer has been one of the most important influencers in the enterprise 2.0 world. Thing about Sameer though, is that he gets the convergence between Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 – one of the few.  His work at SAP, though relatively new, has hand no impact on his status as an independent influencer. That’s a good thing.

Mitch Lieberman – Mitch is one of these amazing influencers who has managed to stay an influencer despite spending a significant amount of time at vendors to begin with such as VP of SugarCRM and currently a Vice-President at Sword-Ciboodle. But this hasn’t silenced his voice at all. Highly respected fella.

Jeff Nolan – Jeff actually was an insider prior to his stint at Get Satisfaction. He’s managed to retain that status. He (along with CEO Wendy Lea) is also the major spokesperson for the company and yet remains he is dialed into an incredible number of significant networks. An unbelievably knowledgeable guy, he has a sharp analytical mind and is definitely one of the most influential guys in the industry as well as one of the kindest ones.

Type B – A More Significant Agenda

These guys tend to be people who have gone beyond their leadership position at a specific vendor. They have established enough independent credibility to stand out even though they are typically responsible for their corporate agendas.  These guys might have been independent prior to their “vendorhood” Jeff Nolan at Get Satisfaction or they became influential while at the vendor – Anthony Lye of Oracle; Laurence Buchanan formerly of Capgemini. 

Anthony Lye – Anthony runs the Oracle CRM global practice and has a huge corporate portfolio with the most recent acquisitions of Endeca, InQuira, ATG, and RightNow all under his purview. Clearly, he has an Oracle agenda, but he also is a highly respected industry veteran who has understood the twists, turns, and trends in the CRM world, and has been willing to present his thinking on them without selling.   We all think a lot of him as a truly independent mind, regardless of the required agenda.

Laurence Buchanan – Laurence recently left Capgemini EMEA and went to the management services group at Ernst & Young Advisory as a Director in the Customer Centre of Excellence for the EMEA region focused on Digital Transformation, Social Business and CRM. This was a coup for Ernst & Young, because Laurence has firmly established himself as an independent influencer despite his required corporate agendas.  He has been a leading voice for social CRM, customer experience and has a vast knowledge of the technology landscape.  He is firmly on the cutting edge of social business though, as a wise person, knows that traditional channels are still  part of the equation.  He is also a helluva writer and speaker.  

Others – Umberto Milletti, Mark Walton-Hayfield, Prem Kumar, Steve Gillmor and John Taschek

Media Influencers

This one is perhaps the most ironic.   I’m a J-school graduate (that would be journalism school).  I’ve had multiple jobs in journalism ranging from a low paid proofreader to a low paid managing editor.  But the one thing that I learned in journalism school – aside from spell names right, which I do less frequently as I get older – is that we should write unbiased pieces.  Does anyone whatsoever believe that’s true?  Not me.  All pieces are a matter of opinion up to and including the selection of what pieces make it into a publication and which ones don’t. 

So why is it that we think that journalists aren’t influencers?  They are – obviously so, if you think about it for a brief moment. What we have to look at when it comes to the CRM/Social world is not whether journalists are influential – they are – but which journalists are the most influential. The reality is that there are key publications and key writers whose primary profession is something in the journalist world from writer to editor to publisher that influence buyers and our industry.

David Myron – David is the editor in chief of CRM Magazine and someone who is greatly respected throughout the entire industry. He tends to operate behind the scenes but his opinions when he states them – matter. He has a VAST knowledge of not only who is who and what is what in CRM but also how it works. He chooses to be an editor/journalist; he could be a consultant/analyst if he wanted.  Just a really nice guy, too.

Ginger Conlon – What can I say about Ginger? As editor-in-chief of 1to1 Media, she is a long-standing insider in the CRM and now social world with a great deal of clout with a “c.”  Aside from being a superb and exceptionally bright journalist, she is someone who has a lot of experience in seeing how the pieces work in CRM so she is able to provide a cogent viewpoint on how the world views CRM.

Barney Beal – Barney, the News Director of TechTarget’s SearchCRM has made it into the widely read property it is now. Barney’s power is not only in his knowledgeable writing on CRM but in how he constructs the SearchCRM. He makes sure that we all understand how it works, why its here, and what it is and is highly influential in the way that he frames that.

Chuck Schaefer – Chuck, the owner of Vantive Media, which owns CRMSearch, the new kid on the block, is actually not a new kid on the block himself – though I don’t mean to say he’s old.  He was former CEO of Aplicor and has recently become a thought leader in his own right with his cogent opinions as expressed on the CRMSearch site. People listen to this man – and he is a genuinely good-hearted human being, which makes listening to him a pleasure.

Gerhard Gschwandtner – Gerhard is the founder and CEO of Selling Power and is one of the most influential guys in the sales world.  Among the keys to his influence is his stewardship of the Sales 2.0 Conference, which is the crucible for contemporary thinking on sales and the place where one goes to see the leading minds.  He seems to follow the influential journalist pattern right down the center because he, too, is a truly nice person.

Gary Lemke – Gary, a long time industry veteran, has been the long time editor of CRM Advocate, a voice for the customer that has been around for more than a decade. A media influencer who takes a reasoned and sometimes provocative approach to industry thinking, he is highly respected among his peers and the customers who read him. 

Neil Davey  - the man behind UK-based Sift Media's Mycustomer.com, Neil commands enormous respect among the influencers themselves and the general "in the know" CRM community because of the quality level of his content; the contemporary nature of the site and the honestly of his editorial outlook. He is someone who is paid attention to especially in Europe and increasingly in the U.S. 

Influencers Who Influence Influencers

This is arguably the most interesting and the least known of all of the kinds of influencers out there. These are the people who the more public influencers will often sit at the feet of. They are people who typically only write occasionally but they are never invisible. They are highly experienced and trusted by the people that group of people who I’m describing in all the other areas. I would be in touch with these folks if I were you. Seriously.

Our representatives:

Bruce Culbert – I need to come clean here. Bruce is one of my best friends and a business partner of mine in BPT Partners. I only say this so you can’t throw it at me – it actually has no bearing on why I am explaining who an influencer who influences influencers is.  Bruce is the man who created e-business at IBM, ran Bearing Points global supply chain and CRM practices simultaneously and then ran professional services at salesforce.com for awhile. He is someone that we all know and all listen to because of his experience and his good heart – thus the wisdom dispensed and mentoring he does is truly valuable. He is the epitome of the kind of person I mean. You won’t find a lot of writing from him, though there is some, but you will find universal respect.

Louis Columbus – Louis is perhaps the most prolific writer of this lot – and a really good one. He works for Cincom Systems, so you could squeeze him into the vendor influencer category too, and that exposes the artifice involved in squeezing people into categories.  Louis is constantly developing themes on the customer experience and the technology side of the equation.  But where is truly influential is in the relationships he has with the influencers he knows.  He is one of those people that influencers simply trust – so his considered opinion matters.  That is powerful stuff. Which he always delivers with a grin.

Michael Thomas – Michael works for Microsoft. Michael is the president of the CRM Association. Michael truly gets Social CRM. Michael is really smart. Michael is a genuinely good human being with kind words for everyone. Michael is someone that we all are willing to pay heed to when he speaks.  Nuff said.

Others: Ryan Zuk, CRM Analyst Relations, Sage Software; Derek Grant, Senior Vice President, Business Development, Pardot  - there is a particular story to tell about why these two are here. Let’s just say, we’d have little or nothing to do with their companies if it weren’t for them – making them an interesting kind of influence the influence, but one that a. belongs in this category; and b. shows you how complicated this whole thing can get.  If you want to know more details on this, ping me on Twitter @pgreenbe or email me at mailto:[email protected].

Organized institutions

Finally, for the purposes of this post anyway, there is one other thing to consider – the influencers “secret societies.” They aren’t really that but I love the intrigue implied in the idea.  But they are organized communities of influencers who speak often on Google Groups or the Skype IM channels and they consistent of either people from multiple backgrounds, institutions and venues or a single venue who communicate as a community on the backchannel.   But they reflect two fundamentals that are important to know when it comes to the “secrets” of influencers. 

1. They are incredibly knowledgeable people. Perhaps some of the most experienced, powerful and brilliant minds in the industry.  Customers, other influencers, vendors, investors all confer with and listen to them.
2. They (we) gossip.  That sounds hilariously funny because it can be the same kind of snarky gossip that you would hear on TMZ, as well as the more topical and intellectual kind, but it isn’t actually funny at all. Its important that you get this one.. These groups are social networks that are made of people who enjoy their participation in them because they are trusted sources. Meaning if you do something as, lets say, a vendor, either good or bad, it will be known to more than just you because whoever you “did” it to, will speak about it among their friends – just like you would.  The reality is - an injury to one is an injury to all at least an injury broadcast to all – and it will be broadcast As a disclaimer, if it’s under non-disclosure either formally or informally (meaning someone asked them not to say anything), nothing will be said – these are the most honorable professionals I’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with and who you will ever meet. But anything that’s not under either formal or informal NDA is in the category of “possible fair game” and it often will be socialized. So be smart and understand who and what you’re dealing with and you can’t go wrong.  If you just understand what you’re dealing with, you can go wrong.

Enterprise Irregulars – this is the “Skull and Bones” of enterprise software – probably the most influential organization in this world of influencers.  A mix of independent analysts, a few vendor representatives and an eclectic few others, it is an unmatched aggregation of highly experienced industry veterans. They communicate in a back channel regularly, they have a website that aggregates their various writings and kind of gives you an idea of who some of the members are (hint: look at the blog roll).  The total years of experience in this group probably would if strung serially start at the Cretaceous.  It is an intelligent, formidable body and deep in its knowledge of the industry it stems from. 

Accidental Social CRM Community – Also self-labeled the A.C., this is a group of quasi-organized, somewhat younger influencers in the Social CRM world.  A multi-continental group, the group is comprised of many of the leading  Social CRM thinkers.  They are a mix of independents and there are fair amounts that are from the larger consulting/systems integrator firms.  No vendors in this group.  They are not as well established as the Enterprise Irregulars but the quality of discussion, while different, is every bit as good as the EIs.  There is some overlap between members of both groups. This is an organization to be mindful of if influencer/analyst relations are your game.

It should be noted that a number of the existing analyst institutions have back channels that have been formally created for their own analysts, advisory board members etc. to have discussions and collaborate. The tools used are typically Skype, Google Groups, Yammer on occasion and rarely an internal community or wiki-like collaboration space. 

My reason for mentioning this isn’t only to identify a couple of the groups that exist out there but to reinforce the point that we all talk.  A lot.  And in ways that are classically social – meaning networks of people communicating 1 to many and many to many.  A lot. All the time.  24X7.

My reason to “type” influencers isn’t to put any one in a box. The irony of all of this is that, regardless of the institutional dynamics that might be inherent among the social networks involved in this, it still means you are dealing with human beings who have different skills sets, different contexts that they operate in, different approaches, different agendas and different experience. Each of them and several of them may be suited for what you have to do.  The types I mention here are loosely fitting and there are always exceptions and some who don’t really fit the mold.

The other thing to understand, which I will get into in a future post, is that there is an actual CRM/Social CRM community that consists of vendors, influencers, customers, that know each other, see each other a lot and are quite friendly, despite some internecine battles here and there.  They are not formally anything but they fit the criteria of a neighborhood pretty well. I’ll get into more details about what the dynamics of this are in a future post. Though don’t expect a tell all. This isn’t a gossip piece. This is a “how to deal with influencers” piece that I’m writing as much for self-interest as for yours. 

Key Takeaways

So what’s the key lesson here?

1. Do your homework: understand who they are, not just what they are.  That means learn something about them as actual human beings, not just influencers. More in that post that will also cover the community.
2. The individual influencer is the one that matters, not the firm they represent.
3. But you can’t ignore the institutional dynamics.
4. Choose their abilities according to your needs.  Not their organization or their reputation.
5. Remember, influencers, like all other human beings of any “type”, talk. So realize that you may not just be talking to one person, even if you are. This is to your advantage or disadvantage, because, like anything else, it depends on what you say.

Okay, next up sometime….whenever, Chapter 2. Hope this is a useful start to you.

The Voters Speak! CRM Idol 2011 Announces Winners & Who Voted

Alright, I'm not going to keep you in any kind of suspense.  I'm going to let you know from the get go who won. Though please go to the CRM Idol website for more coverage of the winners.

The Winners

In the Americas - Get Satisfaction!

In EMEA -BPMonline!

The Americas contest was particularly hard fought with Get Satisfaction edging out two of the three other contestants. Edging out was the operant phrase. It was a tough race and there were differences of opinion between the judges and the popular vote.

If you remember, back in April, I made the statement that this is an "easy contest to enter, but hard to win." Exactly what this proved to be. The process was long, though not grueling. There was a lot of interactions, mentoring programs, a lot of questions that had to be answered. We had to learn some things on the fly - like incorporating a semi-final round before the finals. It turned out to be absolutely necessary and important to have so we could learn more about the companies that were (and weren't) ultimately chosen for the finals.

Congratulations to both Get Satisfaction and BPMonline. Well played, teams, well played.

The Judges

The Primary Judges - me, Brent Leary, Esteban Kolsky, Denis Pombriant, Jesus Hoyos, Silvana Buljan, Mark Tamis and Laurence Buchanan functioned as the brain trust throughout this process and were responsible for making whatever changes were made to the process and deciding on things that had to be decided on - even beyond the voting - when it came to companies who did good things and bad things.  All are back on board for next year which is totally exciting.

Breaking Down the Vote

Ha! You thought you were going to get a breakdown of the vote totals for the finalists.  Not going to happen.  Too bad.  That would be prurient. Instead, let me tell you a few other things that would be prudent, not prurient.

The voting for CRM Idol exceeded our expectation with several thousand votes coming in.  I'll tell you a little about who voted and what it indicated. We had a series of additional (optional) questions that roughly 22% of the voters answered which gave us a flavor of who was voting and how they understood and implemented CRM. The results were interesting for sure.  Here's a few stats:

The voting was geographically pretty well divided with:

• The Americas - 44.0%
• EMEA - 38.4%
• Other - 17.6%

It was mostly users and manager/execs who voted with 29.9% and 27.9% respectively.

In the question that was "My Company uses the following CRM(ish) modules (choose all that apply) the results were a bit eye opening really - a little surprising. The top 5:

• Contact Management - 50.5%
• Sales Force Automation - 49.0%
• Help Desk - 41.9%
• Social CRM - 37.1%
• Marketing Automation - 36.2%

What is surprising here is that the #1 CRM application is contact management - which indicates a small business presence typically or a confusion between contact management and sales force automation which is something that has existed for years. (e.g. some people use salesforce.com for contact management. But others use ACT! for sales force automation).  Most surprising, to me at least, is that #4 is social CRM as distinguished from social media monitoring which was #9 on the list. Meaning there was an understanding that there is a difference. Also that so many companies feel that they are deploying it. That fascinates me because if it is any indicator at all, there is considerably more usage of SCRM technology than I had imagined. That's something that I'm going to dig into early in 2012 to find out about the actual usage of Social CRM technologies in business - and what people think that Social CRM is.

What people felt that they really liked about CRM Idol was overwhelming one of the actual reasons we created the competition.  Over 63% felt it was "learning about other companies" - by far the biggest reason. That means as far as what we wanted to do for these small companies vis a vis the general public - we did (pat, pat, pat on the back for us.)

What did the voters want to see more? That was pretty close.  Top choices - greater focus on CRM categories - a conclusion that we are taking to heart - and one that we've been talking about a lot as far as modifications for next year. The second most - more commentary from the judges. That one I'm not so sure of. If they mean more commentary from more judges - maybe.  If they mean more commentary from the primary judges - well, some things you just don't get in life. We were pretty stretched to have to review nearly 60 companies within 7 business days (or so) of their reviews and we did it. But it wasn't easy. More commentary from the 8 primary judges is highly unlikely, even if was a popular suggestion. I'm just sayin'.

Finally, we asked what would you like to see more of or less of for CRM Idol 2012? Interesting result. The biggest answer overwhelmingly was "None of the above (48.8%). Since "Other" with room to specify was also a category, and was the least answered, we have to assume that people who voted for none of the above were happy with what we provided and the way that we did it. That's a reasonable assumption, right? You would think so.

#2 on that, though, was CRM categories (though in a bit of a flaw in the questioning on our part, we don't know if less or more is what they meant). However that dovetails with the answer to "Next year I'd like to see" greater focus on CRM categories as the #1 thing. So we hear it LOUD and clear.

Coming Up

There's a lot to be done in the period between contests and I'm sure that next year, the preparation will be starting a lot earlier than it did this year. We learned a lot along the way and will be taking our lessons from the streets - though not mean streets, nice streets - and the feedback we get. We'll be making changes accordingly.

In the interim, we are going to encourage all companies that have been participants to keep participating. First, because we have a community now of the competition organizers who are influencers in the industry and subject matter experts par excellence and companies that are now emergent, whether they won or not. Plus the prospects for the 2012 competition will be invited in to join the community in advance of next year so they have a shot a some visibility and great interaction with the influencers and this first graduated class of CRM Idol participants. Our slogan/mantra has been "once a participant always a member" and we will take that seriously.  To that end, the inestimable Kelly Craft has volunteered to be our Community Manager and we all gratefully took her up on her generous offer. The woman has mad skills, passion, enthusiasm, and serious chops when it comes to all this.

I can assure you of one thing. Next year we are going to take paid sponsors for the contest so we can hire someone to handle some of the logistics which was massive. I spent 2-3 hours a day for 7 days a week from late April thru now - with some hiatuses - doing this and it was more work than I ever anticipated. Plus financed the bulk of it out of my pocket. Though I have to say that Brent Leary generously paid for some of the costs and DRI, the Portuguese open source solution company did the website for nothing, saving thousands for us and doing a brilliant job.

I'm not complaining. I chose to do it that way. But honestly, I'm going to need help for the logistics and sponsors will be important to helping finance that.

So, I'll keep you posted of course on the things upcoming and I'm sure I'll be trying to wangle some participation time out of you to help out next year so that we can keep highlighting these companies and their great potential.

Stay tuned here.  Thank you to the primary judges, our media partners, our extended judges panel, our voters and of course, those that spent the time and effort to participant in CRM Idol 2011.  It has been awesome - and will continue to be.

2011 CRM Forecast - What's Up Wit' Dat - Part II

I'm presuming that you've already read Part I of this 2011 CRM Forecast, oui? If not, scoot on over to ZDNet and do that before you read here. This is a continuation of Part I, not a repeat of it. I would HIGHLY suggest that you do this in order. :-) 6) Knowledge management replaces enterprise content management as a core requirement for large businesses - This might sound self-evident but it isn't. One of the most important conceptual transformations going in business is around the idea of Service Dominant Logic (SDL) which to put into its most simplified form would be - "rather than speak of the features and functions of technology that you need, try to think about the jobs that you need to get done. Then go from there." This dovetails directly with the idea that in order to understand the value of SCRM or CRM or any strategy or technology or process, you have to proceed from the standpoint of the self-interest of those involved as potential buyers or users. So what you are attempting to create is a commonwealth of self-interest. What are those things that can be done that will make the jobs of the persons involved easier when it comes to engaging customers? Knowledge management, unlike enterprise content management, isn't only the collection, storage and organization of documents but is the accessibility of information that answers questions. What it also involves is the delivery of that information and the timeliness of that information. That means it can be via FAQ, web self service knowledgebases that are accessible by both employees and customers; it can involve the delivery of dynamic knowledge based on ongoing wikis and threaded forums; it most certainly involves a highly effective search mechanism. This year we are starting to see the integration of knowledge management with CRM - especially around customer care through companies like eGain, Coveo, and perhaps most visibly, Inquira. In fact, while none of them made the Watchlist candidates (Inquira just barely missed) that's mostly due to this being a new and important technology integration and one that I didn't monitor as much as I should have - which I will rectify in 2011. But as more and more information becomes available, as more and more customers are providing answers to other customers questions through communities, social networks and threaded forums; as more and more customers are requiring increasing information from companies to make buying decisions and as more and more customer service reps are expected to respond with answers instantly, knowledge management becomes increasingly important. In 2011, KM will bubble to the top as a noticeably critical factor in both running effective customer service operations and in answering customers' questions. No longer will just content management (go here to download this document or look at this FAQ) be enough. KM in 2011 will rise to the top as a critical component of Social CRM and in the ensuing years be redefined and then adopted by the larger enterprises around the idea of "answering questions" not just "storing content." (9)Customer experience reasserts itself loudly as the core of CRM and SCRM - This one is kind of a no-brainer in a way. The core of traditional CRM even though it was always operationally focused was still the improvement of the customer experience and it was recognized that this was in fact the foundation for the success of how customers related to your company. But over the past few years, as CRM became more and more technology and process driven (rather than enabled) the core message disappeared into a dusty archive. Then along comes the distinctly right-brained focus of Social CRM. Then a flood of companies focused on collaboration, social software, community platforms and even those calling themselves customer experience management (CEM) vendors and strategies poured over the market. Traditional CRM vendors decided that they had to add social functionality to their traditional offerings adding another dimension. The market was confused about what to call itself, the vendors confused about how to message. But that forced the customer-driven intelligentsia - e.g. thought leaders, journalists, and analysts to rethink the value locus for companies at the point of interaction with the customer. There were two things that seemed to be generally agreed upon. First, there really is a social customer who is distinct from the customer of seven years ago. Second, and most germane to this forecast, is that the customer experience is the locus that we've all been missing and should be what companies focus on - whether the vendor thinks its providing or the practitioner thinks its implementing CRM, CEM, SCRM, a community (platform), listening, acting, social software, SMM, what have you. As a result, there is an increased focus on the customer experience on the practitioner side with programs primarily being evolved through loyalty/advocacy programs (see KLM's Club China, Marriott Hotels Rewards program, eBay's mobile efforts, etc.) or the messaging of vendors, which is dramatically shifting around to a focus on customer experience. You need proof? Check out the messaging of SAP, Oracle, Jive, etc. and you'll see a decisive shift in that direction. In 2011, not only will the focus of companies move in the direction of improved customer experiences through provision of products, services, tools, and consumable experiences, but the vendors messaging will both continue to align toward that end and the products that they provide will reflect that message. NOTE: Vendors, beware. Just because this will be happening at an accelerated pace, that doesn't mean that there will be a CEM market in 2011. CEM is not a market. It's a strategy that integrates with operational CRM strategies (I really don't care which one you think is dominant). Don't try to revive a market that was never really there by that name. Your messaging is around the customer experience, not a CEM market, right? (6) Co-creation and customer driven product innovation becomes more than just an advanced idea. Gains significant ground in the B2B space as a core necessity - Ideation isn't just a fad. Sure, in the past 2, 3 years, it was left to a few visionary thinkers like Steven Vargo, Robert Lusch, Graham Hill, Wim Rampen (I'd love to be included here but really, I'm just sipping at their fountains) and a few forward thinking companies like Procter and Gamble, Samsung and SAP. But the reality is that, as 2011 and beyond march ahead, customer driven product innovation is becoming something that companies are beginning to see true value in - with exactly the mutual benefits that we devoutly wish that SCRM would provide. In that same IBM Institute for Business Value mentioned above, they found that 78% of the customers would involve themselves in product innovation with the aforementioned companies. While I'm not sure how they derived this figure, the key is to see the picture being painted here - customers are more interested than ever - especially in the B2B space if you still believe that sort of thing - in participating with the company in the things that matter to them - the creation of the products that they buy. (8) Microsoft Azure emerges as a true cloud provider at the level of Amazon as cloud computing considers its rise to becoming a primary technology infrastructure - This may be my only vendor-specific forecast for 2010 because I think despite the hype of "we are cloud providers" that comes from an incredibly large number of the other technology vendors, Microsoft is the ONLY one poised to be true provider with the scope of Amazon, through their extraordinary Azure platform - a 9 billion dollar investment so far. I think they have the technology, the infrastructure, the platform and the storage capacity. They are willing to host someone other than themselves on their cloud infrastructure too - unlike the other claimants to the throne. Microsoft's sin if you will is that they are terrible at marketing Azure, which is a pity because as y'all know, its not good if no one knows about it. (5) Application marketplaces will become commonplace as companies look to platform providers to fill ecosystem needs, not just CRM - I think that we're already seeing a quantitative leap in the number of apps marketplaces out there. As we all know, salesforce.com was the first to do this with AppExchange, the first truly successful business applications marketplace that gave partners a chance to show off their wares - some of which have been quite good. ITunes of course, was the first great consumer marketplace to add applications with the launch of the iPhone. There have been multiple others since ranging from RIM having a Blackberry marketplace to Jive Software launching a marketplace in 2010 for their partners to provide the apps, add-ons, plug-ins to make Jive, not just a community platform but a community ecosystem. Of course, Google and Android are also in the mix as always. This is a trend that has nowhere to go but up in 2011. What could be wrong with easily consumable applications that support the ecosystem needs of the companies that are wedded to a particular vendor's platform? Expect to see a proliferation of these applications marketplaces in 2011. NOTE: Vendors, one cautionary note. I saw salesforce.com go through a period a few years ago when they were starting to ignore the difference between strategic partnerships and building an app on the AppExchange. Thankfully, they righted that ship reasonably quickly but not before I witnessed two instances of exactly that kind of thinking. Learn from that. An appexchange is no substitute for a strategic partner. Might sound self-evident, but if a company as smart as salesforce.com did it, what makes you any smarter - other than learning the lesson. (10,000,000) Yankees rebound and win the 2011 World Series - This one is, of course, the one that I am more likely to be right about than any other. 27 World Series, 49 pennants. That is substantiation enough. Forecasts I'd Like to Make But I Can't Defend There are a few things I'm just going to say. The problem is that these are just things that either come straight from the gut or are likely wishful thinking. I can't defend them - unlike anything else I have above. Those are defensible and I'll fight you to the death on them - My Forecasts, Right or Wrong as Patrick Henry, esteemed American patriot said during the War for Independence in 1776. Or was that My Country Right or Wrong? Whatever.

In any case, here are the unsubstantiated claims - the only ID will be a note that says, gut or wishful thinking.
1. Partner Relationship Management (PRM) finally ignites and takes off as a market. There are good products out there now (e.g. Relayware, Oracle Siebel PRM) but the market broke my heart twice now and I don't want it to happen again. (wishful thinking)
2. A few major practitioner companies come out with full-blown Social CRM strategies that they actually call "Social CRM." (gut)
3. Salesforce.com adds customer facing capabilities to Chatter making it a genuinely interactive community platform - Actually I heard Marc Benioff say they would have this in a year at a briefing in September but I'll have to see it to believe it. I think it's a matter of time. (gut)
4. Yankees get Cliff Lee (gut).

Finally, What I Didn't Forecast

You'll note that I didn't say anything about the cloud this time, since I think that's become entirely self-evident and a forecast on the cloud getting "bigger" isn't going to be a particular useful one from me. Gartner actually says that 75% of all SaaS deployments can be considered "a cloud service" now, according to Gartner star analyst Sharon Mertz (take my word, if she says, you can believe it).That's an interesting figure because that means that 25% can't be AND that, as I love to keep reminding anyone who isn't sick of me, there is a distinction between on demand and the cloud. In any case, according to my checklist, we can stick a forecast into it, its done. Next up, The Watchlists. Those are going to be more fun than ever before. I'm at Dreamforce so watch for my live tweets under the #df10 hashtag. Then a post, THEN the Watchlists. Bye. See you at the tail end of next year with my look back at how stupid I was this year. Not. Maybe not.

Following On More Than Friday: The Experts Worth Checking Out

Note: I'm actually on a vacation, just finishing an incredible cruise through the Mediterranean and now on Day 2 of a 3 day stay in Barcelona. All in all a dream vacation to tell you the truth. Best ever. But I HAD to finish this post. An addiction. If I left you out and I actually do follow you as an expert, I apologize and will update this list in the near future. Forgive me. I'm loving this trip to much to worry about the rest of it all. Also, please let me know who teaches you. Not just who you read but who teaches you something of value - and moves you forward. Either ZDNet or PGreenblog which will have this post will be great for the comments. Please.

There’s was this list going around a few weeks ago that seemed to be saying that somehow those on it were "the" SCRM Top 50 "experts." After seeing yet another list of another group of experts or influencers in CRM, I realized I'm having a problem with all of these lists. The problem isn't who's on the list, though about 20% of the people on it, I've never heard of - which is highly unlikely if they are influential. The bigger problem I have with lists like this is in this case is that a list like this is now calling the chosen ones on it, "experts." This particular list is saying that the top 50 SCRM experts are sorted by a combination of some sort of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn followers, friends and other connections. Hopefully, the use of the word "experts" here was a poor unconscious choice of words, because I'm hard pressed to understand how these criteria are linked to expertise.

Look, I have a really hard time seeing a combination of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn compadres as a measure of influence,much less expertise. How this T+F+L combo scrubbed with an algorithm or two qualifies someone as an expert, I'll never know. (hat tip to Groucho Marx). I just get the feeling that even beyond this list (no offense intended, list producers), we are reducing the value of expertise to something that means "someone will listen to you beyond your mom and/or dad." All it seems to need in the world of Social CRM is a comment in an #scrm hashtag or some SCRM related keyword in combination with retweets, Facebook wall posts and god-know-what on LinkedIn to be anointed the god of an industry. Now to the authors credit, they said in their post to not take the numerical order of the list seriously. Which I didn't.

Whatever.

It’s just not the way I roll. Or most of the people I know either.

Please forgive me if I sound somewhat grouchy, but I’m seeing lists like this everywhere that are based on some quantitative calculation that are then being acclaimed as definitive. Reality is that they aren’t definitive and they actually provide little value and more confusion than not.

Here’s my take on all of this. The value of an expert is that they are able to teach someone something in a way that the person learning can understand. In other words, not only do they have depth in a discipline or domain of some sort, but they also think about who their audience actually is and what they do and how they live and, most of all, how they think. The reality is that each person, regardless of their proximity to a particular demographic, thinks differently than the next person. They think in different metaphors. The expert – at least the experts that I think deserve that designation are those that think about that audience. They aren’t just people who spout stuff about a subject or who build up a big Twitter following or who have lots of Facebook friends. They are people who have an expertise that they can impart in the metaphors of their audience so that their audience really understands what they are trying to say. These are people who think about doing that too.

The people that I’m going to recommend here are those I look to for learning. They are the ones who actually teach me something. They don’t just rehash others stuff, they don’t spend their lives arguing their picayune niggling gripes about "definitions"; they aren’t in business to maneuver themselves into leadership positions. They don't backstab or spit at others due their own inadequacies. They've become experts because they've earned the recognition, not because they are trying to get it.

These experts have ideas that create the seeds of new concepts, or they provide unique frameworks in how they look at a subject, or they are able to advance a discussion in a way that didn’t seem possible twenty minutes before I read the article/post etc. They are thinkers who love ideas and love executing on the ideas. I look to different ones for different things. There are many others who I read that I enjoy but they aren’t the ones that consistently move me to another place in how I’m thinking about something. The ones that I’m highlighting are those that do make me think differently more often than not. I'm going to specify what each does - for me, at least. Others who aren’t on the list, please don’t take offense. Its quite possible I simply forgot to include you - and for that I blame a senior moment or two. Or I enjoy reading what you're saying and on occasion you too move me to new concepts and ways of thinking. But the ones here are the ones who consistently move me to change how I think and change what I think about, and they are my gods and goddesses.

I've listed them by category – The links to their name are to their blogs. Or barring that, to their twitter handle. They are in no particular order at all. All of these are regular or semi-regular bloggers or writers. These are not book authors who don't blog much. That means you won't see Joe Pine II or Lior Arussy here since they don't blog enough - even though they are expert when it comes to customer experience. Folks like them will get a separate post when I lay out the books that affected my life and impacted what I think in business. They also are not those who own the social sites or the aggregators, so you won't see Robin Carey or Bob Thompson here, both of whom are true influencers. Also, for those here, there are overlaps with some of these guys being experts in multiple categories but I’m only putting a person in one category. There is room for only so much knowledge between my ears before it fries my brain.

Social CRM

1. Ray Wang
- Ray is not only one of the most astute enterprise analysts I've ever met but he has a solid grasp of Social CRM and how to apply it in the real world which is something that is painfully needed in business now. He also has a heart of gold and a great head for business. He was voted the equivalent of the Analyst MVP two years running for good reason. He is one of the few must-always-read-even-if-you're-in-a-hurry pundits around.
2. Esteban Kolsky
- This man will frame you. Well, okay, so I'm taking some dramatic license here. He is a master at developing the kind of insights businesses need when it comes to SCRM and then creating frameworks that actually make some sense for businesses to apply. He does this on a solid intellectual foundation and a practical history as a former Gartner analyst. Plus he is really very funny.
3. Brent Leary
- He is the master at the application of SCRM to small business. Very few people can even understand how to apply CRM much less SCRM to small biz. Brent does both and straddles both worlds - CRM and small business as an influential. He can be found on the American Express Open Forum, BET, hanging out with Anita Campbell and of course among the glitterati of the CRM world too. Watch his real world examples of small business success carefully. Plus watch our show The CRM Playaz. Wicked.
4. Jeremiah Owyang
- A year and a half ago, Jeremiah was a social media rock star, now he's put the enterprise into his bucket and he's not only learned it but he's actually begun to master it. His insights into companies he's in touch with are not only priceless but actually usable when making technology decisions. I keep learning.
5. Denis Pombriant
- What can I say about Denis Pombriant. For all things SaaS, all things macroeconomic and all things SCRM, he's da man. He is the one who realized that salesforce.com was not only an upcoming company but would be something of a force of nature in the CRM and enterprise world. He called them a "disruptive innovation" when no one else did. Now he's talking about sustainable CRM companies - take heed.
6. Prem Kumar
- this guy is actually the chief SCRM evangelist at Cognizant - a company that is actually beginning to get it and Prem is a guy who totally gets it. He has a keen sense of the technology and a fine sense of the strategy.
7. Mitch Lieberman
- a former VP of SugarCRM, Mitch earned his way up to thought leader even when attached to a vendor. He is an astute analyst who sees SCRM with a depth of perception that most don't. What Mitch does uniquely is take an idea out there and then drive into it so deeply that you can see all the implications and questions that are contained in the idea. Plus he can do it with a sense of irony.
8. Martin Schneider
- Martin has achieved that rare consideration. He is a current vendor employee (senior director in fact) that actually transcends his company's particular interests. Not terribly surprising in his case, since Martin was a leading analyst in CRM prior to his sojourn at SugarCRM. (they seem to spawn these types at Sugar don't they?). He understands Social CRM strategy and writes short cogent pieces on what to be looking at when thinking "strategy." Not many do that - or write as well as Martin. Or can play in a rock band as well as Martin. He was even a pro at that!.
9. Mike Fauscette
- I've known Mike for 12 years (he co-authored my very first book with me on PeopleSoft in 1998) and he never ceases to amaze me. Currently the head of IDC's enterprise applications practice, he has perhaps the best grasp of social business in the industry and a laissez faire attitude that I love. He genuinely sees how business needs to run when it comes to CRM and SCRM because he was a practitioner himself and also worked for vendors. His experience is perhaps unparalleled among SCRM thought leaders. And that counts for a lot. Besides, the dude can really write.
10. Brian Vellmure
- Brian is a big idea kind of guy. Look to him when you want to know the difference between, say, traditional CRM and social CRM or understand a concept like. He makes it easy to understand and makes me think "why didn't I think of that?" constantly.
11. Michael Maoz
- Michael is the 800 pound gorilla of the 800 pound gorillas. He is the most utilized Gartner analyst, bar none, I hear tell, and there's a reason for that. He is foresighted - having figured on this social thing for the last 5-6 years. He is ruthlessly honest, not really worrying about anything but doing the best thing and the most honest thing for his clients. And he has a unique take on the social CRM world - one that's actually realistic, rather than some of the fantasies that are floating around. He is one of the few analysts who has truly gotten Social CRM and remained connected to an analyst firm. Michael is one of the Gartner analysts responsible for the new Social CRM Magic Quadrant that they are releasing, I think, at the Gartner 360 CRM Summit, that I'm speaking at multiple times - once with the subject of this particular paragraph. Coolio.
12. Mark Tamis
- Mark is a smart dude. He drills down deeply into concepts ranging from how strategies work (and differ in customer-driven enterprises to the depths of transparency and authenticity. He doesn't write enough but he writes really really well. Moves the needle.
13. Chris Carfi
- Funny, just as I'm writing this, Chris Carfi joined Edelman Digital as a leader of a group there that will handle Adobe and make sure they stay in the social age. There might be no one better suited than that. Chris is arguably the guy who coined the term "social customer" having developed his blog "The Social Customer" some 6 or 7 years ago; long before anyone else was even thinking of what that social customer might be. He is one of the few who started out in the social and CRM worlds simultaneously and managed to magically and accurately stitch the info. A long time compadre of mine who I think has miles to go before he sleeps in the words of the immortal Robert Browning.

CRM

1. Bill Band
- Bill Band, who has had years and years of industry experience is not an expert on Social CRM though he fully understands it. But when you're looking at traditional CRM and its practicalities and how those practicalities are evolving; well, there aren't many who can give you the step by step than Bill does. Forrester is lucky to have him frankly. I only wish he blogged more than he does.
2. Jim Berkowitz
- Jim is the "tool guy" for CRM. Want to get a unique take on vendor capabilities when it comes to enterprise software? JB is your man and reading him is the plan, Stan. (that so dates me.). Jim spends incredible amounts of time understanding how features and functions can be valued when it comes to enterprise software and the businesses that are going to apply it. If you're trying to understand the selection process, he's your man. If you want to know what tools to use, he's your man.
3. Mike Boysen
- Mike Boysen is an iconoclast. A kind of retro-iconoclast who places a great deal of emphasis on what works and what doesn't when it comes to CRM. While he's not convinced that SCRM is going to be the harvest of bountiful plenty that most of us think, he is convinced that it has it's place in the world of traditional CRM where he is an expert - and an expert with a wry sense of humor. A very wry sense of humor. Land on earth is the location for Mike and how he moves the discussion on CRM forward.
4. Don Peppers & Martha Rogers
- I'm only putting them under this category because they are key business strategists who have shaped the industry for decades and continue to make their mark - and I'm not sure where else to put them. They have been a team forever and they have a quality company that comes from quality thinking - and a quality staff. Not only have they been the creators of 1 to 1 relationship marketing - the forerunner of personalized insight and interaction, but they also sparked the industry discussion with their notion of Return on Customer (ROC) - which transcends ROI. Whether you agree with them or not on this (I do with modifications), they moved the needle and continue to do so with their 1to1 publications.

The Enterprise

1. Josh Greenbaum
- Josh is tough. Really tough. I've heard him at vendor conferences asking what are perhaps the toughest questions that vendors will get at any time during the conference. But the answers are translated by Josh in ways that provide what is one of the most coherent voices in the industry when it comes to interpreting the complexity of large enterprise software vendors and the practitioners implementations of the large "stuff."
2. Michael Krigsman
- Michael has a unique role in the world of experts and influencers. He documents failure so that success can be learned. What he's able to do, which no one else can, is identify problems that have damaged other companies and then provide a foundation for not committing the same mistakes twice. He is thorough, thoughtful and has the good of the industry and interested parties in and around it at heart. He is a must follow who helps the industry.
3. Vinnie Mirchandani
- Vinnie is best known for his blog "Deal Architect" (see name link) which covers all things topical and enterprise; but he is best represented by his other blog - New Florence, New Renaissance and his new John Wiley published book out at the end of this month - The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations - which takes a look at innovation and transformation in the business world from the perspective of a renaissance of new ideas. If he weren't a Tampa Bay Rays fan, he'd be perfect.
4. Dennis Howlett
- Dennis is a man of ascerbic wit, passionate belief and devastatingly accurate insight into the enterprise - and he has NO problem saying what he thinks often with a very sharp tongue. He scares companies but actually makes his readers (among them me) think. He is a powerful influencer who understands the enterprise software industry better than most - especially the financial/ERP end of it - and has the chops to prove it.

Co-Creation/Innovation

1. Graham Hill
- Graham is always one step ahead - he is an innovative and brilliant thinker, a no holds barred fighter for new business ideas and someone who makes you think, not about social business 101 but about social business 202. Thing is, he isn't just academic either. He has years and years of experience of doing this for companies. Years. Light years. Check out his Social Business Manifesto from last November, his very last Cust0merThink post. A critical post.
2. Wim Rampen
- Eighteen months ago, I didn't know Wim. Now I do. I'm glad i do, because he is also a key thinker in the co-creation/innovation, social business 202 world. Guy has a brain that must run hot because he is always applying the lessons of co-creation to real life. Not easy to do, given the infrequency of success that the combination has. But he is an optimistic guy who is a forward thinker that simply should be read.

Enterprise 2.0

1. Sameer Patel
- Sameer is an enterprise software industry veteran, who is not only one of the best writers on collaboration out there but also a keen observer of what's going on when it comes to trends. He is someone who gets down to the core of an issue or digs out a strength where others may just gloss over it. He is one of the clearest voices and strongest influences in the Enterprise 2.0 space.
2. Dion Hinchcliffe
- Dion is a superstar. Joining the Dachis Group in April hasn't changed a thing when it comes to his incredibly comprehensive, cogent blog posts - often for ZDNet (see blog link at name). He is someone who blogs less often but when he does, his blog postings are blockbusters. They establish frameworks, interconnections (e.g. between Enterprise 2.0 and SCRM), maturity models, technology models, you name it. What is astounding is how clearly he does it. He is a serious must read in this space. Deep, deep knowledge. Plus an aggregator of resources of the first order.
3. Oliver Marks
- Oliver, who is partnered with Sameer Patel in the E20 space is also someone who you need to read. He is an astute thinker who covers issues in the collaboration space as often as he covers techniques and approaches. Someone who gets down to the core and is scrupulously honest in his assessments with no agenda but reality.
4. Andrew McAfee
- While I'm always called the Godfather of CRM, Andrew McAfee is the father of the Enterprise 2.0 - and has been since his 2006 publication in the Sloan Management Review of Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration. Honestly, aside from his deep commitment to the Boston Red Sox, the man has nothing wrong with him. He is the guy who created the SLATE model of E20 (see the article) and made the idea of using social tools internally at a company, not just interesting, but de rigueur. Someone that you must pay attention to because what he says in his writings and books is just right and provocative. Just get a load of his latest blog posting on the iPad, which is awesome, ascerbic, funny and pointedly right. He sits on the curve in a way that makes the curve move ahead of itself. If you catch my drift. But that Red Sox thing.....

Journalists

This category bears explanation. These are the journalists, some who blog, some who write regularly for publications - all of whom have a leadership position in the CRM and SCRM world one way or the other. Each of them is a terrific writer as well as an original thinker. Each of them, to one degree or another, falls into that hazy space between journalist and analyst, meaning they are journalists with a well formulated opinion. Their advantage over analysts is that they write better. You should follow them. You have to. You NEED to. You want to. When I snap my fingers, you will. AND you will feel refreshed, as if you came out of a deep and satisfying sleep.

Oh yeah, since they aren't all bloggers regularly, I'm going to point you to their articles if need be in the link of their name.

1. Josh Weinberger
- Josh is flat out brillant, insightful, always on top of the CRM/SCRM industry and actually practically conversant with all the tools of the trade, ranging from the software that runs businesses to the B2C stuff we are now discovering might have business value such as Foursquare. Read anything you can of his. Just do it.
2. Chris Bucholtz
- Chris Bucholz makes the industry a bit stronger for his range of knowledge, his writing skills and his sense of humor. He is actually the former editor of InsideCRM now the editor and chief writer for Aplicor's Forecasting Cloud - a compendium of daily writings in CRM, ScRM and even some ERP as of late. But don't let his cogent thinking get buried in all the other writing. Even if he wrote alone it would be worth it.
3. Ginger Conlon
- Ginger is someone who tries to keep her profile low (she is currently editorial director of 1to1 Publications) but can't because she is so good at thinking about things. I asked her to contribute to CRM at the Speed of Light's 4th edition, because I think so highly of her. She is a veteran of the industry, though not very old, with a background as editor-in-chief of CRM Magazine in her past. AND she gets all the social stuff. All of it.
4. Marshall Lager
- Marshall is something unique in the CRM industry. A great writer, with a rapier wit who has made the transition from pure journalist to analyst/consultant without losing an iota of his writing skills - making him well qualified to get across the ideas that he has to.
5. David Sims
- This guy might well be the most literate journalist with an opinion in the enterprise software world - and possibly the funniest. Thing about David, who has been writing for years - for TMC as a columnist and blogger, CustomerThink, etc. is that he has strong opinions and is an original thinker, but he does it with a literary humor that both enhances and masks the insight. He is SO worth reading. I've been a devoted fan (and friend) for years of this man. You should be (both) too.
6. David Myron
- David is a tone setter. As jefé of CRM Magazine, and one or two other Infotoday properties, he is not only doing what superb editors-in-chief do (don't forget I have a degree and an editorial work history in journalism, so I know what it takes to be an editor-in-chief), juggling all the time, but his editorial content sets not only the magazine's pace, but often sets the industry's pace. Be aware, be very aware of what David says.

Analytics, Measurement

1. Michael Wu
- Michael is the Principal Scientist of Analytics (for real) for Lithium and its rare I read someone who understands analytics better and more...analytically than Michael. For example, he actually is looking at what makes for identification of a true influencer - rather than the gross oversimplification that's going on now with T+F+L = Superman as the going industry standard. He shows me something new in the world of analytics, without any overt Lithiumesque interest in the writings. Most recently he is distinguishing between communities and social networks in a two part post. Part 1 and Part 2. Gotta read this dude.
2. Jim Sterne
- Not only is Jim Sterne one of the granddaddies (metaphorical, peeps, metaphorical) of Web analytics - and the president of the Web Analytics Association, but he is now a pioneer in social media analytics, the current author of a successful book in the field called "Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment" and is a constant presence in the refining of these newly developed metrics.
3. Dr. V. Kumar
- Even though he's really more of an author than a blogger - in fact, I don't think he has a blog, I'm going to break my protocol and include him here because he had such a seminal influence on my thinking when it came to the measurement of advocacy. I always knew that Net Promoter Score, while a good start, was hardly sufficient for measuring the social customer's power in and value to business. When he extended Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to include Customer Referral Value (CRV) among other measures and asked four questions with number 1 being NPS - would you recommend this company to someone you know - I thought - 'ohhh-kay". But it was question 2 that was both an epiphany and a "duh" moment - "Did you recommend this company to someone you know?" that I knew that I loved this man. He is a distinguished marketing professor at Georgia State University, the executive director of the GSU Center for Brand Experience Excellence and a must read. His book is "Managing CUstomers for Profit" and its a great start to a new version of measure for social business.

Social Media

1. Brian Solis
- Hard not to think of Brian. He's a vibrant, visible presence and what I've always called one of the "Big 3" of social...whatever. (The other two are the aforementioned Jeremiah Owyang and Chris Brogan). He's easily one of most influential and most respected guys in the world of social media and is spending serious time putting thinking about Social CRM and what he sees as a successor to it, SRM. While I can't say I can fully buy into the SRM side of it, I do fully buy into Brian. Also, he is so active in social media that people forget that he is a highly successful PR guy and his blog PR 2.0 is actually fascinating. Plus he has a new book out called Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web which is a social marketing book more than a social media one. And really, really good.
2. Paul Gillin
- I've known Paul since he was the Executive Editor of SearchCRM about 7 or 8 years now. Not only is he an expert in CRM, but he is also an expert in social media from a standpoint that few others are. First, he has a B2B knowledge that is unparalleled in social media. Second, his expertise is eminently practical. Meaning he is not theorizing on definitions of things, he is telling you how to do something. Want to blog? Here's how, here is the supporting arguments on its behalf to your left brained boss, your right brained boss and your colleagues. Here are what you can and can't do...you get the picture. He has two books out now, The New Influencers: A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media and Secrets of Social Media Marketing: How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business! and a third coming in January 2011 on social marketing.He is also the only columnist I read religiously in B2B Magazine - even with my secular behavior.

Sales

1. Anneke Seley
-Anneke wrote a book on Sales 2.0 and she blogs on sales 2.0 and she knows sales 2.0 better than you do. She is a long time industry veteran with insight and is a delightful person. You'd think the latter is enough to make you want to make you read her blog but, honestly, her insights are the real reason.

Customer Service

1. Natalie Petouhoff
- I've known Dr. Nat for years. Many years. Though she's a lot younger than me. She is formidable. Tres formidable. While she is currently heading up all social media efforts at Weber Shandwick (good move, WS), she is still one of the foremost experts in "social" customer service that you will find in the world. She has a solid research background and methodology, an intuitive sense of what's right when it comes to treating customers well that overlays that, and is just a good person who is able to turn that goodness into something substantial and interesting. I'm not sure where her new position will take her, but I'll follow.

Marketing

I can't say that I really can find anyone that rocks my boat here though there are many that I read ardently. I think this is a transformational period and there's a lot of both good stuff and noise out there but I can't clearly distinguish one from the other yet, so I'm going to leave this category alone. Though some of my social media experts are also marketing guys - so just reiterate them.

Public Sector/Politics

1. Andrew Rasiej
- This guy is amazing. He not only runs PDF - the Personal Democracy Forum - one of the most influential progressive institutions in the country - with an activist bent - but also is one of the jefés of TechPresident, which could be the most significant political blog in the country. He's also a true New Yorker - acerbic and honest and an ardent Yankees fan. A perfect person.
2. Alan Weber
- This guy, now at Altimeter Group with Ray Wang, Charlene Li, Jeremiah Owyang and a host of other superstars, has serious chops when it comes to the comings and goings of the public sector and the future of government as it links to the new technology paradigms. I have to say that I almost envy his depth of knowledge, ability to extract information from sources and his analytical skills. Public sector ain't easy to decipher yet, somehow he does it.
3. Alan Rosenblatt
- Alan is the Associate Director for Internet Advocacy at the Center for American Progress - the most powerful progressive think tank in Washington DC (I sit on their New Media Board of Advisors). Alan is also a tireless champion for constituency engagement utilizing the new social tools to empower citizens. He blogs for multiple sites including TechPresident, the CAP blogs and the Huffington Post. The man has mad advocacy knowledge and skills and if advocacy is something you think is important, whether in politics or business, then Alan is your man. Just read him, and if you meet him, offer him a single malt and you'll get the conversation you're looking for.

Mobile

1. Sheryl Kingstone - Sheryl works for Yankee Group. She is the Yankee Group star (no disrespect to any other Yankee Group analysts when I say this). She is the analyst most responsible for "the Anytime Anywhere Enterprise" that Yankee espouses - which of course includes a mobile component. Sheryl has been one of my ongoing beacons for mobile trends for as long as I can remember -which of course means since she was about 6 years old. I trust her thinking and judgment.
2. Michael Gartenberg
- Michael has been a bastion of mobile insight forever and a little longer. He is now at Altimeter, was at Forrester and was always someone that people just listened to. Among them me. For me, in the mobile world, he (and Sheryl) are it. 'Nuff said.

Others

These are those who either defy classification or who's category doesn't include that many but are exceptional thinkers who are actually ahead of the curve.

1. Doc Searls
- Doc is in his own category - and that would be Vendor Relationship Management (VRM). In principle, VRM is an important addition to the scholarship of social business. It helps define the customer's individual behavior when it comes to all businesses that he/she interacts with - in reality or potentially. It dovetails from my standpoint with what I call the personal value chain of an individual customer. Doc, one of the authors of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, drives VRM like no one else. Whether or not it becomes the "movement" (the labor movement for customers) it should be, remains to be seen. But what doesn't remain to be seen is Doc Searl's importance in the social business landscape.
2. Thomas Vander Wal
- What can I say about Thomas Vander Wal? He is the father of folksonomy and social tagging. He is the person who developed the social stack that I use for my discussion of social characteristics in enterprise software (that is software mimicking human behavior). He is constantly evolving new ideas on how to humanize the software and business processes that are supporting 21st century business so that business is able to gain greater insight into their customer base. YO'd be wise to read him because if you do, you'll be ahead of the curve - one that your business needs to be ahead of.
3. Lisa Stone
I love this woman (you know what I mean). She is a co-founder of Blogher, recently named one of 2010's 100 most creative people in America by Fast Company and one of the most generally astute bloggers anywhere. I am a fan who simply loves what she does. Its also nice that she's the significant other my my dear friend and influencer mentioned above Chris Carfi, making me thrilled to know them individually and as a couple.

Vendors Who Have Blogs that Transcend Pitches

I'm not going to go into a breakdown of each of these except to say that please check them out. Each of them has a unique perspective that's interesting and transcends their merely mortal business interests, though clearly doesn't ignore them. In the case of SAP, they have so many blogs that I've chosen the properties of SMT that they are the chief sponsors for and have some of their staff writing for. Also, interestingly enough, I'm noticing that the blogs that I do follow in marketing are mostly vendor blogs. Not sure what to make of that except that the marketing industry is still working it all out.

Okay. All in all, I've got the links for you. Click and read. Follow the yellow brick road.

1. Lithium
2. Attensity
3. SAP
4. Infusionsoft
5. Eloqua
6. Radian6 - in this case, look at the bottom of the page for their extensive list of blogs and podcasts
7. SugarCRM
8. Aplicor

Thank You – Beyond Anything CRM

Every now and then, something strikes me rather deeply - deeply enough to emit an outright gasp of an unshaped, almost unrecognizable emotion. Some times it's flash of insight into a problem or idea I've been wrestling with for a long time. Sometimes it's a welling up of a feeling that leans in the direction of tears but because it's not clear whether they're tears of joy, sadness, or something far more profound but indiscernible, it's-not-quite-that either. The latter whatever it is can be triggered by anything from a movie to a real act of human kindness to a simple human gesture or look that I notice when watching someone else.

I don't exactly know why these moments trigger these ethereally shaped emotions but they do.

I had one while sitting on the plane from San Francisco back home to Manassas VA about 10 days ago. I imagine I can equate it somehow to SCRM or CRM or something but I think it would be an artificial construct.  I think as you'll see if you care to read this that it has everything to do with human relationships - at least my human relationships. But please bear with me and understand that if you want to take this any further it's gonna be kind of rough-edged because I have to grapple with explaining something that was momentary, fragmentary and yet is compelling me to want to publicly say it.

What happened was this. I was thinking about my trip which was highly unusual because I interacted or maybe intersected is a better word 4 vendors in 4 days and with 3 of them in 1 day. Invited to those events were a significant number of analysts and journalists, sometimes with one vendor for the first time - but the zillionth for the second vendor. In some cases, the vendors invited different people, but there was a large overlap that was apparent. I would say that 40% of the journalists and analysts were people I saw in that two days at all three events or at least two of the three.

My role varied from event to event. For SAS's Social Media Analytics launch, I was "Press" and there via the PR folks; at the SugarCRM SugarCon conference, I was a keynote speaker; at the NetSuite event I was an analyst. Once again a chameleon - fitting an appropriate budget line.

(Update: Since this was written a bit over a week ago – I’ve been in Seattle again and then to Microsoft Convergence 2010 in Atlanta)

But the experiences at these three events in two cities - Seattle and San Francisco - in a way had a certain oddly sublime quality to them. Not because they were great events - even though each of them was in its own way. But because I realized that these folks that I was interacting with were not just occasional colleagues who I saw here and there, but in many cases, friends - meaning people I enjoyed the company of and would have the backs of no matter what in life they chose to do moving forward. And it just smacked me that this was more important than whatever else I could extrapolate from the events. I hadn't planned on thinking about it that way. Whack. 

Some of this had to do with my last December 60th birthday which I was hoping to pass off as not all that significant but its made me think far more than I ever thought I would about how I conduct my life – at all levels. 

Anyway…..

The environment at these things is always very nice and because we're considered influencers we're treated well. Good dinners, private meetings with senior management, access to stuff, a nice pen once in awhile. But it struck me for some reason harder than ever before that these weren't just analysts, or journalists, or vendor reps. They were people that I actually cared about, people who, over the years, I had forged serious friendships.  For example, I've known Angela Lipscomb at SAS, their star PR person, for 8 years - and my relationship to her is not business per se - though there is always something of that - but absolutely personal and something I’m glad for. I saw Denis Pombriant at all three events - SAS, SugarCon and NetSuite and was just simply incredibly glad to see him - not just to bounce biz stuff off of him, but to find out how his wife and kids are - to see what he's up to – to be available to trade Marx Brothers routines. Or at SugarCon, Martin Schneider who I've known for 5 years. Following my keynote there,  Martin escorted me off the stage almost like a bodyguard so I could get upstairs to do a webinar for Pivotal without stopping and chatting. I thought it was kind of funny at first and then realized - hey, I'd actually trust him to have my back if it came down to something more significant- because I knew I could trust him.

I had dinner the night before I spoke at SugarCon with Mei Li, the SVP of Corporate Communications at NetSuite - just her and me. Why? Because I was one of maybe a dozen or so at her wedding and she is one of my closest friends - and a dear friend of my wife's too. This wasn't for me getting a contract with NetSuite. I don't care about those things. This was two friends catching up on what we don't care to speak to others about.

But it goes on and on.  I think that Brent Leary is not just my partner-in-Playaz but someone that I'm truly glad to know and will be happy to know for the rest of my life. Mike Fauscette, who runs IDC's enterprise business is someone I've known extremely well for 13 years and am simply glad I do - and will.

I have a batch of friends that I've gotten to know much more in the last year or so who I saw at these events - among them Ray Wang, who I consider perhaps the smartest enterprise analyst in the business - but that's not why I like him. I like him because he's got a great sense of humor and most importantly, a big heart. The guy actually gives a damn about other people. Esteban Kolsky, who is among the brightest people I know, also with a great sense of humor and I don't know who in the universe could possibly dislike him - he doesn't have a mean bone in his body. Plus he has a take on things that others just simply don't. Iconoclastic with a good nature.

But its more than that. I see people at the conferences that I barely talk to but I know enough to give me some comfort that they are there. Brenna, who was John Roberts executive assistant and now Larry Agustin's at SugarCRM - this year I didn't even speak with her but have in all my past engagements at SugarCON - but I was comforted by the fact that this always very nice person was in the front row - meaning still there - again - listening to me speak another year. Are we close? No. Am I glad I know her. Absolutely.

On the opposite side of that same spectrum, there are those I knew “before…” Particularly my dear friend Nikhil Hasija, a key thinker on SCRM at Microsoft who I just did a joint presentation session with at Convergence yesterday.  Nikhil and I go back to 1997 when he was the star of a Lotus Notes practice that I was running. He is brilliant and I love him and his family to pieces.  Yet, here we are on a stage at Microsoft jointly presenting on SCRM.  Do you realize how lucky that makes me?  I get to do stuff with my friends – in fact, the way it’s working is that I get to make a living doing stuff with my friends. That is beyond even MasterCard priceless. 

It keeps going. There are the senior management of the vendors that I deal with. They’re busy folks. I don’t spend a lot of time talking to them. But, for example, I really like hanging out with Zach Nelson, NetSuite’s CEO.  He’s a cool guy and easy to like. Plus is very good at what he does. 

Keep in mind, I'm barely scratching the surface. Not only doesn't this little paean include those who weren't at the events but not even all of those who were. It doesn't include the friends that I have on Facebook - or at least those I've gotten to truly know. It doesn't include the AC - the Accidental Social CRM backchannel – which has about 20 people who I just think are awesome. It doesn't include Bruce Culbert, who is a member of my family as far as I'm concerned and has been a key CRM influencer for many years. It doesn't include my practitioner client friends - guys like Scott Rogers who I've known for 9 years and is a truly fine human being or....oh, jeez, I could go on and on frankly and wouldn't complete the list even at 1000 names. It doesn’t include the folks who were at vendors I used to deal with a lot and now are at the vendors I don’t deal with much – but they remain my friends – like Jeff Pulver who was VP of Global Marketing at Siebel and now is VP of Biz Development at Workday.   He’s truly my bud. Or John Taschek at salesforce.com who I read from afar for years and then got to know and am grateful I do.

Enough names though because I could easily keep going.

I realize that I'm treated exceptionally well wherever I go – well beyond the norm – for reasons that I wish I could explain but I can't. I'm not saying that to show some level of false humility - I really don't know why people do. But what I do know is that this year, once I passed that 60th birthday, I've had a number of these somewhat fragmentary but seemingly organized emotional wellings and a series of revelations that solidified my thinking about who I am, where I sit in this vast universe and what matters to me. All of these revelations and less identifiable emotional upheavals - especially this one - have been related to the personal relationships I've established in my life – wherever in my life. They've made me incredibly grateful to all these people mentioned here and countless others I didn't name. To all of them and to all of you who have read my stuff, who have sent and continue to send me these wonderful notes thanking me for what I do – you who validate me every day - thank you so much for all of that - and all of this. I don't know what I did to gain your trust and support but I promise you one thing - you have mine - always. I'll do everything I can to be available in any way I can to help. Please remember that - even if I have a bad day, I'll have your backs.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. You've helped make my life, not just my day.

Blocking and Tackling: Not Football, CRM

The discussion on "social" is painting much of the business landscape, not with a brush but with a bucket thrown at the canvas. It has become so ubiquitous, so omnipresent and omniscient, that even the New York Times, in their long running column "On Words", had an enthused discussion on the word's very presence in the literary landscape (I have to say, I found out from a tweet that mentioned that I was in the article, much to my delight - since my interests are literary - though it called me a "customer relations management expert." Close enough, especially when I got equated with being one of the cognoscenti). But, even though it is the hottest of hottest conversations in any enterprise/business town, what has been noticeable also, has been what hasn't been spoken much of, besides giving it the appropriate lip service, not because of anything malevolent, but because of the excitement of Social CRM - and social media. Its what makes the two distinctive (among other things) that in fact is being somewhat ignored. That would be the basic blocking and tackling of traditional CRM that is still part and parcel of any actual strategy - and any implementation. The operational"stuff." Even with all the incredible roaring, growling, yelling, about social and even with the party-level polite conversation going on showing thought balloons (or tag clouds) with "social media", "Social CRM", "cloud computing", "Tweet (oh wait, that's a Scarlet Tanager that flew in the window)", "conversation", "mobile CRM", "Facebook CRM", "customer engagement" and any other sexy cool term with meaning, one thing we can't forget. That's would be that CRM - be it our contemporary Social form a.k.a. SCRM or even the traditional CRM which is still an instrumental part of many businesses - has some basic operational requirements and planning that has to go into the development of an overall program for customers that a business can use successfully to accomplish its particular aims regardless of the changed circumstances of the modern customer controlled ecosystem. What we are dealing with when it comes to SCRM is, simply, what kind of particular program does an individual business require to reach out to their customers and provide them with what they need to get what the business values in return?

A Program

The best way to think about SCRM/CRM for simplicity's sake is that it its a customer centered program. The program's focus/direction needs to change from time to time because of the business exigencies of a particular era. For example, five years ago I would have said it was a program for customer management, now I say customer engagement. Which is more than a po-tay-to, po-tah-to distinction. It has serious implications for how businesses need to conduct themselves. But the basic requirements for the program's construction remain the same. It needs these following components if CRM in any form is going to be executed successfully.

These are the basic building blocks of what comprise a CRM strategy and program. They were needed in traditional CRM and they continue to be needed in Social CRM plans. While the emphasis and approach to the components vary from era to era, and while there are some additions to the list, all of them still need to be thought through, decided on, budgeted, organized into something and then followed through and then tweaked, tweaked and maybe even rebuilt, to make the changes in how the business thinks and runs, not just thinks. If all of that is done, the customers' requirements for continuing to do business with your company can be met. When it comes to some of the things (note I said "some") that distinguish Social CRM from its older sibling, such as social media (as tools) and social networks (as channels/locations) they have to be factored in, but not at the expense of the other pieces. In a perfect world, all of them need to be incorporated into the planning. In that perfect world, technology is a part of the program, but not the program.

A Clarification on Technology

Before I continue on, I need to clarify something. In my response to Bob Thompson's superb discussion on the Altimeter Group's Social CRM Pioneers Google Group, "Does Social CRM Need Social Media", I said emphatically no. That doesn't mean I'm opposing technology, nor do I think in a business, a Social CRM program can scale without it. But also remember at this point, when I say technology is needed to scale, then I'm also saying that social media is not the only technology involved in a Social CRM implementation. It just happens to be the one currently oozing sex. However, the traditional operational and transactional technologies such as a customer record - preferably with a single view, or a business rules engine, a workflow creation tool, a set of automated processes, communications channels etc. will continue to be as or more important than ever before. You still need to record transactions, you still will be wise to know what your customer is thinking and to use analytics help you ascertain that. You will still need to be able to track what your employees are doing with their customers, not just what the customers are doing. No way should you simply assume that you can substitute a customer's social interactions for recording a customer's transactions. You shouldn't underestimate the importance of having and knowing a transaction history. Knowing an interaction history simply gives a business the means for richer customer insight when used in conjunction with customer transactional behaviors. In fact, interestingly some of the more recent efforts by vendors like Oracle and SAP base their social knowledge of the customer on existing transaction records - not social interactions. The start to some pretty sophisticated customer insights and some really sexy customer-usable tools, starts with the historic transaction record. In fact if you look at what kind of IT framework you're going to need for Social CRM, you'll note some comfortably familiar faces mostly grouped on the left and underneath along with the scarily unfamiliar. Here's that.

What's sitting all the way on the left is what we think of as traditional CRM. They are on this tools map a necessary part of a larger framework of foundational architectures, web services, applications, services, and ways to deliver these services. The technology here is what's needed to run this thing at the enterprise level. This "thing" is CRM - be it traditional or social. Again, basic blocking and tackling stuff.

Let's Get Real

While what I'm saying may seem rudimentary to you - meaning you know this - and I apologize to you if it is. Unfortunately, the discussion on how to handle the basics has gotten somewhat lost in the social conversation. Businesses are primarily concerned with one thing - running their business and succeeding. If customer engagement is the key strategic parameter for success, they clearly would be smart to focus that way. To do that, they need to change how they run their business and figure out the impact that this change in strategy is going to have on all the things in the slide above. Then they need to run a program. Remember, their purpose is to be successful and meet their goals. Their purpose isn't to engage their customers. Their strategy is to engage their customers. The businesses have operational requirements that will exist even when the customer controls the conversation as they do now. That doesn't mean the business gives up running - it means it changes how it runs. But it still runs and the traditional CRM capabilities support that running of the business as well now as it did a year or three ago. But there is now more that needs to be done. That's where a Social CRM program comes in. The debates all recently have centered around what CRM used to center on. Is Social CRM a strategy or a technology? In some part the locus of the debate is due to my contributions to all this discussion among many others. For this somewhat of an incomplete discussion, I apologize for my role in propagating it. Above all, Social CRM is a program for customer engagement that encompasses a strategy, technology, system, processes, etc - just as CRM was. I'll probably tweak my definition in a post shortly to reflect that. At this point, Social CRM is a just a bit more than a construct that has some truly important but nascent practices that are associated with it that differentiate it from CRM. These are critical differentiators as you can see if you compare historic use cases against the best first take on the use cases that were done by Ray Wang and Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group last month. But they are not differentiators that don't incorporate traditional CRM somewhere in the mix. Social CRM is never purely social. All I'm saying here is that in the hot, steamy, hyper-charged sexy world of social everything that has revitalized the discussion around CRM - we can't forget what is basic and fundamental for businesses. They have to run, they have objectives that are not the same as the customer's when it comes to how they interact and they need to change with the times. The times require the them to consider Social CRM rather than just traditional CRM. Whether or not they decide to go with it won't change the basics of what they need to do to run, but it will change how they run. Maybe add some components to the basics. But the basics remain. And that is that.

A LOADED Comment - The Impact of Culture and Technology on Each Other in the Realm of Social Business

Mitch Lieberman, a VP at SugarCRM is a living proof of concept - vendors can contribute serious thinking to the ongoing discussion around how to create and apply business strategies to customers. Despite the cynical thinking of many out there. He recently did a presentation using the Prezi online cool tool (for some things) to describe his thinking on how Social CRM is perhaps the most significant pathway to the accomplishment of Social Business. Its well worth checking out and, thinking about. But, that's not what I want to address. There was a comment by someone with the handle munishgand on Mitch's post which reminded me of something that I not only have been mulling over for a long time but meaning to write about. Munish and Mitch inspired me to pen this thing. Here's the part of Munish's comment that I want address:

"To me, the picture “Old Organization + New Technology = Expensive Old Organization” (http://grab.by/grabs/f614c734bb56ed20df7f93b81fc5f74e.png) says it all. There is a big shift in culture required for a social business to thrive in the new environment. Else, why pave the cow paths? What I am wondering is the following. Changes in culture are notoriously difficult to accomplish. Should a company stop trying to get the tools in if it cannot make the cultural shift? Sometimes, an exposure to the technology provokes the cultural shifts needed."

Thanks for that, Munish. Its a good insight and, when it comes to the relationship of Social CRM and the more traditional forms of CRM, a very important question - because there is a distinct difference between how technology needs to be treated a.k.a. thought about in Social CRM then it was in traditional CRM.

Sometimes Mantras are Made to Be Interrupted

Probably the most irritating though significant discussion that's gone on in CRM since day one was "is CRM a technology or a strategy?" or its corollary "is CRM a technology or a strategy - first?" Those in the same camp as me have argued that CRM is a strategy and program that uses technology as an enabler. My original definition of CRM from CRM Magazine 2003 reflects that thinking.

"CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a system and a technology, designed to improve human interactions in a business environment."

What this reflects is that CRM has always been the program for development and execution of customer strategy - what are the things that you actually do to see that customers relationships to companies are always meeting the expectations (if not exceeding the expectations) of those customers. Traditional CRM was more about managing the relationships - which practically translated meant providing more automated processes and interpreting more data so that the company both understood the customer in a way that was useful to them - and at the same time, the customers received at least the minimum of what they needed to handle their relationship to the company. Accomplishing this would be a traditional CRM success, but traditional CRM was embedded in a business ecosystem that was still owned by the company. From almost the first day of CRM (which is mythic at this point), there was a fight to overcome the popular perception - among the practitioner companies that CRM was a technology that you bought. Despite the best efforts of the "CRM is a strategy first" camp, the technology persists as the "prime mover" of CRM to this day. That meant that when you were developing a CRM strategy you were implementing a CRM system not developing a CRM program. I was among the folks that pushed the idea that CRM was a strategy and program first and technology choice was the last facet of developing that program - as an enabler - not the primary focus nor the driver of a CRM strategy at a company. Regardless of what I or anyone else thought, the popular view of CRM was and still is that it is a technology and system first. That has been adopted at many many organizations as just that. The practical implications for this particular approach have been almost staggering in consequence. As a result of the technology system, not program outlook, hundreds or even thousands of organizations implemented CRM systems from multiple vendors without a clear vision of what they wanted to do at the company when it came to their customers or what it meant to have a customer-centric culture. The implementation was the thing. The sequence was:

"We want to be customer centric. Let's go out and buy a CRM system and put it in. We want the CRM system to have this feature A, and do this function B and we in the future could use this feature/function C. That will make us customer-centric."

Keep in mind, we're not talking about stupid companies with no plan. But their plan was geared toward what they wanted from the technology, given what they thought they needed to do with their customers. It wasn't what they wanted from their company given what they needed to do with their company. It was a system, not a program. While that's better than thinking that they don't have to be customer-centric, its still a real problem, because of two things:

1. it doesn't take into account the impact of being customer centric on the culture of a company - especially given that the likelihood of the company having been customer-centric is about zero so there is no cultural precedence for that customer-centric perspective or program;
2. the technology's success or failure became the foundation of the company's success or failure in CRM rather than merely an aspect of it.

The result of this was that even when the technology was technically proficient, the ultimate customer-centric perspective that the company needed to embrace wasn't. Does this mean that traditional CRM was a failure? Hardly. But what determined success was delimited by the capabilities of the software. It also meant that while the culture wasn't impacted by the software, the software was impacted by the culture - meaning that the existing culture wasn't changed and thus made adoption of the software far more difficult, because, no matter what the theory - software as a driver or an enabler - it still was, in practical terms, an enabler only, which meant, as CRM software, it was supporting an idea or outlook that wasn't part of the company's actual outlook. A square peg in a round hole. The early numbers surrounding the software adoption supported this. The primary reason for lack of adoption was the lack of involvement of the user from the beginning of the process (47% of respondents in an IDC survey on CRM user adoption in 2003). Why the lack of involvement? Because the cultures of the companies hadn't changed to understand that the user, and the customer drove the requirements, not the other way around. This also led to the higher failure rates of the earlier days - because the expectations of the results around CRM were driven by the software, not by a CRM program that used the software as a tool.

Ommmm. Ommmmm. Owwww. The Mantra Is Broken

But then along comes the social customer in 2003-2004. What does this social customer do that his more traditional brethren didn't? He communicates outside the corporate firewall with those he or she trusts the most - his or her peers. He uses what to communicate? Tools that AREN'T traditional CRM tools but are easily available social software, hardware and channels. That would be cell phones and now smartphones. That would be social networks (66.8%) even more than email(65.1%) (see Nielsen's Global Marketing Insight survey of March 2009). That would be Skype, (521 million), Facebook (400 million), Twitter (100 million), and hundreds of other channels not behind the corporate firewall. From 2004 on, people seized control of how they communicated 24/7. What devices they used, what tools they used, what channels they used, when they communicated, what they expected as a result of that communication, what kind of response they got, all shifted into the hands of the individual. In the world of business, communications about a company no longer needed some company venue to occur. For a communication or array of communications to affect a company, it didn't have to occur with the company's acquiescence. Even more telling, it could occur without the company's knowledge. This meant that the company no longer controlled its own destiny in regard to its customers, though it, of course, continued to control its own operations. (the fact that the company still needs to run itself is one of the things at the core of the difference between Social CRM and almost anything else with the word "social" in it) The conversation passed into the hands of the customers - meaning they could damage, grow. or affect somewhere in between, a company without the company having much to say about it. So what did this do to CRM?

Traditional CRM To Social: The Transition of Technology

The customer's ability to communicate outside the firewall and still affect the company, was of course noticed early on. From Dell Hell in 2005 to the recent Nestle's fiasco which took a minor incident of a snot-nosed customer service rep's arrogance and ended up with Greenpeace driven major viral damage due to Nestle's alleged use of Palm Oil from XXXXX, proves the point in spades. There was(and continues to be) a material effect on the fortunes of companies when the customer commands the storyline. CRM thinkers and doers began to realize that they had to open up channels from the corporation to the customer in order to minimally contain or capture the conversation going on outside their realm and optimally to interact (listen and act) with their customer in a way that supported the benefit of both. What did this take? The technology to do so. But that wasn't the only trend. In parallel with the growth of this social customer, Gen Y was entering the workforce and bringing the tools that they wanted to use to that workplace despite the rules of the enterprise that they worked for (52% of them were happy to ignore the corporate regulations to do so). Additionally, technology was becoming not just a utilitarian choice that one made, but a lifestyle choice and this too was penetrating the workplace. It was no coincidence that RIM released the Pearl in 2006, thus ending the era of high functioning but butt-ugly mobile devices. Thus, much of the technology that the CRM-morphing-to-Social-CRM thinkers/doers were considering in their efforts to open channels were the same consumer-driven technologies that their newly younger workforce were using. Also, it was the same technologies and channels that they (the decision makers among others) were using outside the workplace. Its no coincidence that Marc Benioff and salesforce.com actively trumpet their reliance on and adaptation of Facebook and Twitter for not only their new Chatter "cloud" (their term, most definitely not mine), but also for its impact on Service Cloud 2 and Sales Cloud 2. This isn't just marketing (though that certainly is a part of it); its actually the case. What makes this significant is that the penetration of consumer thinking and the use of consumer technologies in the enterprise has been in part a driver of the cultural change that the most advanced companies are embracing and the less advanced companies are reluctantly acknowledging. Yes, a driver, not just an enabler. This is something I NEVER thought that I'd be saying, but hey, what good are we if we can't change?

How Does The Technology Drive It?

The mere fact that the technology is being brought into the workplace and used despite the rules attacks the company's culture. The carriers (Gen Y workers, many of the Gen Xers and a few savvy baby boomers - the catchall term is often "Gen C.") are also showing the value of the technology. - Thus, breaking the rules either forces the company to get rid of what is a productive workforce doing something demonstrably valuable or it adapts to the new circumstances - which forces the company to change its own behaviors, institute a new set of rules and at the same time empower a whole new layer of the workforce. For example, wikis in companies have often had the same effect. The most famous Enterprise 2.0 wiki case study, DkW, (thank you Andrew McAfee) showed how the introduction of the technology and the organic growth of its user base to 1200 dramatically altered the company's culture - making it collaborative and open where it hadn't been and with measurable productivity increases. The technology itself, the wiki, had been introduced to solve a practical knowledge-driven problem. The culture was transformed. This is becoming a more widespread phenomenon. After all, remember, what you use at home, if you're using it at work, is simply you using technology to function the way you are comfortable functioning as a human being. Not a customer, not an employee; a human being. How it gets realized is determined by what kind of interactions you have with specific kinds of institutions - social, economic, or business for example. But its more than just what I've said so far. Keep in mind, one of the key pieces in a Social CRM program is that the company provide channels for the customer to communicate in an easily usable/navigable bidirectional fashion. That means that the tools the customers use and that the company provides are either familiar to the customer and the company employees or become familiar easily. That's why you see the adoption of Twitter and Facebook as initial service (and marketing) channels for companies when it comes to that company-customer engagement. The company is recognizing that those customers are using the tools that they enjoy using and the company is then going to those customers with those tools so that the communication occur in a way that's familiar to both. Its no coincidence that Frank Eliason has been the reason for the success of Comcast on Twitter. He understood the tool/channel and its impact on both employees and customers. But Comcast is also an example of what happens when the cultural change isn't successful in this environment. Each year Bruce Temkin, Forrester's customer experience guru, puts out his customer service experience index on how big companies are doing. For example, companies like USAA get it - they are in the top 5. But Comcast is 126 of 133 in 2010. Know why? Because they think that what Frank is doing is great PR. Not a paradigm for how to treat customers. Great PR. They'd be 133/133 without Frank. What this says is that the technology as a driver isn't always successful. By itself, it probably never is successful. But in the world of Social CRM, because of the penetration of consumer technology and the importance of the tools in the transformation of communication, they are no longer, as they were in traditional CRM, just enablers; they now can both drive and enable.

What are the Practical Implications?

Actually, there are some very specific practical implications when it comes to the programmatic part of Social CRM. In the past, I would recommend almost universally and uniformly, that technology selection be the final stage of CRM programmatic efforts. Wait until you had a solid strategy, understood every process, had determined what you had to do and not, developed a program, and sufficiently transformed your culture, before you made your technology selection. Not that anyone listened to me that much. Though often enough, I guess, they did. Now, I think that parts of the technology selection can be made without a full blown "everything." For example, if you're developing a customer service strategy and it involves the development of a multimillion dollar contact center, you still can implement an alternate service channel using Twitter or perhaps Get Satisfaction, while the effort to build a contemporary contact center continues. What still has to be clear is that as the alternate channels are implemented by a company and used by customers, they will impact your culture and thus have an effect on the outcome of the development of the contact center (in this example). For example, where in your original contact center strategy, your agents were traditional help desk agents, perhaps due to the success of your alternate service channel, you expand the role of some of the agents to community facilitators who participate in some way in your alternate channel. In any case, while just one example, you get the picture. The impact of the use of technology for dealing with the social customer could (not necessarily will) change the culture of your company - unlike the older traditional CRM systems which, if the culture hadn't changed, were simply not used. Life in a company is a lot different now - or should be - and Social CRM has to reflect that. I just figured I'd try and shake out some more dust in at least my own thinking - and I hope yours. Let me know what you think. While I'm fully aware (and I hope you know this) that there are far more factors than technology driving change in a company's culture, the very fact its one of them - whether the most powerful or not (its not) - is a change unto itself between CRM and its baby kinder Social CRM.

Organic Social Networks, The Yankees & ...Wha? (UPDATE: WE WON OUR 27TH WORLD SERIES!)

Needless to say, being a Yankees fan of the entirely driven and committed sort, I'm biting every nail on my hands off and frankly, if I could reach my feet, would go at those nails too (Ugh.). I do that every time that the Yankees are in the playoffs or World Series particularly, though, I have to admit, I do it to a lesser degree, but to a degree during the 162 game regular season too. Meaning, from April through hopefully early November, I don't need nail clippers.

But this year is very, very different. Aside from being in the World Series for the first time since 2003, which makes it different, Twitter, Facebook, text messaging, push technologies and an iPhone make it different.

I no longer watch the game by myself though I'm the only person in the room (my wife, also a Yankees fan, is up in Newfoundland at the moment with her mom who's recovering from surgery). I'm not even just watching the game with friends of mine who are Yankees fans on Facebook such as fellow Yankees fan David Sims, who is without a doubt one of the all time great writers and columnists in CRM and other IT matters - and one of the funniest. I'm also watching the game with several thousand people who are actively conversing from the stands at Yankee stadium or watching it on TV themselves - all members of either subgroups within social networks communicating via channels or members of organic communities - outcome based communities that have come together for the World Series and the World Series only and who will, for the most part, disappear after the Series ends.

But note something, I said will disappear for the most part, not entirely, which we'll get to

If this were 2003...

If this were 2003, I think probably by now I'd be hating Josh Beckett (wait I still don't like Josh Beckett) for beating us and Jesus Hoyos, a CRM thought leader in Latin America, would be the happiest man on the earth because the Marlins had beaten the Yankees - though to his credit, he'd be happy if the Marlins had beaten anyone at all in the World Series because he's not a Yankees hater, he's a Marlins fan. But how would he be letting me know (if we knew each other - which then, we didn't)? An email maybe - a phone call? And only after the result itself was in and done. To communicate in some real time fashion with even one person was either cumbersome or expensive even then. Or at least more cumbersome and expensive.

But This is 2009....

While the Series isn't quite over when I'm writing this (prior to game 6), here's the picture so far and now.

The kicker is that I'm in Bogota Colombia, as one of the keynotes at CRM conference here, but no worries, broadband is solid and I have a subscription to MLB television on MLB.com which gives me streaming video live for the game. Or, I can watch it - yes watch it - using the MLB iPhone application streaming via Wi-fi that's readily available.Or if for some feverish reason, I'm sick of Tim McCarver and Joe Buck (which is a frequent occurrence) I can listen the audio/radio feed from NY with John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman - our homie broadcasters.

In the meantime, David Sims is getting ready to watch it from New Zealand somehow - TV or streaming maybe. The key Yankees bloggers for the press like Mark Feinsand are already starting to set their tweets out to the Yankees fan faithful to get prepared for the game. The conversations are already beginning on #yankees on Twitter and in the "enemy camp" at #phillies on Twitter.

When the game begins, I'm watching somehow or listening and in the meantime, between communities and sub-communities on Twitter and my Facebook buds, we're rarin' to go. So the night is a viewing experience and a conversation stream that organically evolved that includes my CRM colleagues, my cousins, a good friend who roots for the Phillies and other friends I have who happen to root for the Yankees or the Phillies who I had lost touch with but am now hooked up with primarily on Facebook. Plus there are the myriads of unknown folks gathered either physically at the park or watching on the tube or the web who are connected in total through twitter via their mobile device.

The conversation stream is real time and its intense and responsive to the game itself.

What's remarkable is what organically happened from the beginning of the playoffs. People who I've befriended over the last couple of years and vice versa, or who are mutual followers began yakking about something they are passionate about using not email but social networks and communities to correspond. Which dovetails with the Nielsen data from their Global Network Survey in March 2009. Their finding was that more Internet users correspond via social networks (66.8%) than via email (65.1%). WOW.

The Social Side

But think about this. I'm working on a personal social graph that is outcome based - i.e. built around an event - the World Series - that incorporates my family, sub-communities of CRM influencers; large communities of yankees fans who I only will know for the games - and phillies fans - and fans who are converging because of the World Series only - regardless of who they root for #WorldSeries - using social channels like Twitter and social networks like Facebook. What makes this even more fascinating is due to Facebook Connect, my tweets are carried to Facebook allowing my friends on Facebook who don't tweet much to comment and converse on the content of my tweets.

And this is all organic.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post on outcome based social networks (OSN) which was an excerpt from the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light. What was most prominent about it was that the OSN was pretty much archived when done. That's likely, hopefully after tonight. But in the course of this amazing playoffs, two things happened. I made some new friends and found a bunch of new people on Twitter who follow me and/or who I follow. I saw how quickly that even existing social networks and communities can morph themselves into new forms with new rich results and conversation - which tells you how important it is to not just understand the business value of the communications revolution that we've seen in the last five years or so, but the social value that's been added when it comes to being able to converse with "people like you" in real time in a few seconds after you decide you want to. Extract what business value and thinking you want from this observation. I've got to get ready with my laptop and iPhone, for the game, sitting at my hotel in Bogota.

Though I wish I could be at Yankee Stadium tonight