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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.

CRM Idol 2012: The Second Season is Here! Cue the Music.

Okay, I'm done teasing.  Without further ado, welcome to CRM Idol 2012.   The submission period opens today.  We are pumped and we are ready to roll this year. Without saying this to hype it (mostly), we think that this, our second season, will be more exciting and bigger than last year - and have more impact.

Face it, last year, we did it by the seat of its pants, improvising as we went, changing the rules - well, tweaking them when they needed to be tweaked. For example, realizing that we need a semi-finalist round which wasn't in the original plan or the original announcement.  But we are WAY past that stage now. We have a great strategy, the program is solid, the participation on the judges' side is up from 45 to 75 this year with more and more influencers joining the effort.

So what's different?  The submission process has dramatically altered. We realized last year with the overwhelming response we got that we had as many people on the waiting list as we had participating. We thought it probably wasn't exactly fair, though it was necessary, that about 60 companies didn't get a chance even though they were able to submit in a timely way but not the fastest.

So this year, we've eliminated "first come first serve." The submission period starts today and closes at 6pm Pacific Time on May 25.  There are no exceptions after that date. Rather than first come first serve, the Brain Trust - the original primary judges will select the contestants - 40 from the Americas; 20 from EMEA, and new to CRM Idol 2012, 20 from Asia/Australia.

The trick is that this year an email declaration won't do. There is a submission form that you can get and must get at the CRM Idol website.  You'll note not only are the same stuff as last year there but also a few new items. EVERY single thing, including financial information, must be disclosed.  The financials will be kept confidential; we are not asking for documentation, we just need a true number from you so we can assess eligibility.  If you're reluctant to do that, please don't apply.   See below for the application procedure.  I don't want to bore you with more details here.

This is exciting and there is some actual measurable benefit for you, if you are an emerging technology company less than 7 years old and with under $12 million in revenue (requirements are up at the CRM Idol website).  For example, on the most dramatic side, 3 CRM Idol contestants were acquired. In the case of one, we were explicitly told that their position in CRM Idol was a part of the valuation.  We have been told by countless other contestants that their experience with CRM Idol, which puts them in front of the most experienced and influential people in the CRM and related industries changed the nature of how they do business today.   Heady stuff for us at least.  And valuable for you.

Don't forget we have the mentoring program that comes along with it.  The extended judges are assigned a contestant company and work with them to prepare the briefing/demo (changes there too. See the site) that they need to impress us primary judges as to why you are the without a doubt the worlds greatest company.

Plus the prizes -ranging from free consulting, to free lead gen webinars to free software/services to pitches to VC firms, with more added every day, - are worth it by themselves, even if you don't interact much with the species.

So suit up, companies. Here's what you gotta do.

1. Go to the CRM Idol website starting right now.
2. Read over the rules on the site.
3. Register on the site.
4. Follow the instructions that are provided after you register
5. You will be sent the candidacy form.
6. Fill it out COMPLETELY. Refusal to answer any question are immediate disqualification. If we see something left out, we'll ask you to fill it out.
7. When you have completed the form, send it to [email protected] ONLY.  If you send me or any judge the form or to any other CRM Idol address, it will be discarded. Seriously. If you have any technical difficulties accessing the address (e.g. bounced email) you can contact me and let me know of the problem at [email protected].  Don't send me your submission.  Just let me that you're having a problem.
8. May 25, 2012 at 6:00pm Pacific Time U.S. is the final deadline for submission. No late submissions will be accepted.
9. Watch the site and the twitter hashtag #crmidol, Twitter ID @crmidol and the Facebook page for updates.
10. On June 1, here and in the other media venues and of course on the site, we'll announce the contestants.

This is going to be a blast! Okay, so we're not Steven Tyler, Randi Jackson and of course, the inimitable J.Lo.  So what? We are who we are.

And we are ready for you.

Are you ready for CRM Idol 2012?

CRM 2012 Forecast–The Era of Customer Engagement Begins– Part II

To understand why I’m saying this, please go to Part I on my ZDNet blog here.

Gamification becomes Serious Business

No matter how old you are, human beings never lose their desire to play. Play makes us happy. Each of us, and I challenge you to deny this, wants to have a happy life. We do what we have to in life to improve our chances to have one. One of those things is to have as many happy moments as we can accumulate throughout our lives. Even if we aren’t all that universally happy (not projecting here), each of us has had times where we were that we can point to.

Gamification, while often over hyped and misunderstood, is a concept that has increasingly important business value. It doesn’t mean playing games; it isn’t game theory; it isn’t a form of hunting meat. My favorite definition comes from Constellation Research Group CEO (and key influencer) (and great friend) Ray Wang from his recent research paper, “Demystifying Enterprise Gamification for Business:Behind the Hype of Influencing Behaviors and Effecting Business Outcomes:”

“Gamification describes a series of design principles, processes and systems used to influence, engage and motivate individuals, groups and communities to drive behaviors and effect desired outcomes.”

To see it in action, even in an unexpected place, take a look at how SAP has gamified Accounts Payable. As odd as that may sound, they’ve done a genuinely good job. Here is a post on it with screenshots at Enterprise Gamification.

These aren’t edge cases for a small niche. Gartner Group in April 2011 thinks that by 2014, 70% of all businesses in the Global 2000 will have “gamified apps.” Research firm, M2 says that by 2016, the gamification market, currently sized at $100,000,000 will reach $2.8 billion, with 200% growth in 2012.

In other words this is starting to get big.

The vendors are in the game too. Those who have enterprise ready gamification platforms out there include Bunchball, Badgeville, and of course, Gamify, all in all about a bakers dozen.

We’re already seeing sophisticated gamification frameworks being set up. Innovative small companies like the award-winning UK virtual mobile network operator GiffGaff used gamification to recruit their initial customer community prior to their beta launch by providing DIY tools to create videos – the best of which got a £5000 prize.

For a more complete discussion on gamification worth reading, please make sure that you read the posts by thought leader and Lithium Chief Scientist, Dr. Michael Wu. They are well worth it.

Ray Wong, Gartner, M2, all say gamification in a big way starting this year over the next few. I say, amen, brothers and sisters.

Insight Solutions will emerge as a technology category of its own

One thing that we can’t ignore (okay, that I can’t ignore) is that if customer engagement is to work, then insights into how customers want it to work are becoming increasingly necessary.

But again, we’re dealing with scale and we’re dealing with a dynamic social web with constant conversations that are liquid and changing continually. They are being carried out in multiple channels – channels that number all in all, in the thousands, both public and private.

The current generation of social media monitoring tools with a few exceptions – Radian6 and Attensity come immediately to mind – are somewhat passive tools that scour the web, find the conversations and organize unstructured data in the form of a report that provides the users with what is being said, usually in a positive, negative or neutral vein. The better tools provide strong analytic capabilities that give some insight into how customer segments are thinking or how “nodes” are responding. That would be Attensity, for example. Or they provide highly focused, highly specific, well thought out intelligence such as the sales intelligence focus of InsideView. Radian6 takes this to a whole new level with their Insights Platform which takes Radian6’s vast data mining and information organizing capabilities and integrate other technology tools that combined with Radian6 provide deep insight into individual customers, if that’s where you want to go. With the future capacity to tie this to salesforce.com or database.com or data.com transactional data, and contact information, we are beginning to see how an insight solution would work. It’s obvious limitation is that it will be tied to salesforce.com only customer data. But that aside, we are talking about something that at least foreshadows what are a future class of applications. Bryan Jennewein, the product manager for the Insights platform calls the results “social insight”, which is not an inappropriate term, in this case.

But Radian6 hardly plays in its own sandbox here. There are a number of emerging players in this space which I’m calling “insight solutions” who have been misplaced in or evolved from other market categories. Currently, the runaway number #1 of these for me is Coveo, which came from the Enterprise Search space. Following them is Allegiance, emerging from the Enterprise Feedback Management world and Lattice Engines, which inhabits the sales intelligence world uncomfortably. Another newcomer that has flown under the radar is WiseWindow, a "mass opinion business intelligence" (MOBI) provider, who specializes in vertical insights among other things and come from the BI world All four have the technology to provide insights. Each takes an entirely different approach to attaining the knowledge that can support insight, but each minimally provides dynamic data mining, collaboration and analytics. All four either can or do integrate with CRM, by the way.

This is not to say that more “traditional” analytics such as text and sentiment analysis, business intelligence, etc are going to be replaced or suffering. In 2012, they will be even more important than they are now.

Several vendors are either upping the ante or providing new ways of looking at the data – all in the name of recognition of the importance of insight – into customers primarily, but also employees, opportunities, processes, etc.

For example, Clarabridge is both upping the ante and providing a new approach to analytics by taking sentiment analysis to a whole other level beyond the traditional five-point expression (very positive, positive, neutral, negative, very negative) and ratcheting it up to eleven points using semantic analysis so that there is context to the sentiment, besides. Recently, SAP, despite the fact that they own the best analytics firm known to man – Business Objects, recently announced a partnership with social analytics provider Netbase to become a VAR that would sell “SAP Social Analytics by Netbase” to their customers. They realized like others before them, insight is 2012 table stakes and social data is the tableware.

Analytics as a whole is becoming fundamental to all business strategy. 2012 brings more of that than ever and the rise of a new category customer-focused solution that provides a combination the surfacing of dynamic information and the analysis of that behavior as dynamically as it is surfaced.

An optimal customer experience becomes the core of what CRM can provide. Finally.

In 2011, we saw a significant shift away from the pure left-brained messaging of CRM toward a much stronger focus on customer interactions, engagement and behaviors. Traditional CRM vendors for reasons that are both good and bad began to rebrand their messaging around the idea of technologies that can support an enhanced customer experience. The good reason is that they needed to do that and they did. The bad reason is that they did it as a reaction to historic CRM bad press a lot of times, rather than just recognizing that the context had shifted and we were entering a period that demanded that customer experience and engagement got attention. Right results, sometimes wrong reasons.

Vendors like Sword-Ciboodle have taken it further and begun to present their product portfolios not as a menu of features and functions but around solution sets that help you do your jobs better. The name for it is jobs-based thinking. The academic framework for that is Service Design Logic, something that is gaining increasing credence in the business world. If you look at the Sword-Ciboodle site, you’ll see that it’s got a roles-based focus. The reason for this is that there is a recognition that we are dealing with behaviors – both customers and employees, not just products.

But the interest in providing the “right” customer experience high. Witness these numbers that come from the “2011 State of Customer Experience Management” put together by ubër-expert Bruce Temkin, the leading customer experience influencer and best of the lot in my book. These numbers are indicative of both where things are (not new but embedded) and where they can go (toward maturity). Temkin found that:

• Nearly 60% of the companies surveyed have a senior executive in charge of customer experience
• There are 30% of the companies that have 20+ employees who are delegated to the customer experience
• There have been positive results (measureable ones, people!) from Voice of the Customer programs in 84% of the companies using them
• The percentage of companies that received a moderate or better competency rating rose from 22% on 2010 to 30% in 2011.

That’s the good news.

The signs that this is still immature?

· “Only 3% of companies reached the highest level of customer experience maturity, which (Temkin calls) a Customer-Centric Organization

· Only 17% of respondents believe that their executives regularly support decisions to trade off short-term financial results for longer-term customer loyalty.” (source: Temkin, 2011 State of Customer Experience Management)

That means that there is a lot of room to grow and in 2012, I expect that we’ll see a continuation of these efforts to improve and get measurable benefit, though nothing dramatic.

The only real “trend” that will likely stand out when it comes to customer experience in 2012 is that I think vendor messaging will be increasingly focused around it. That’s not really much of a trend, if you think about it. You feel me?

Social marketing becomes an integral part of an explosive marketing automation sector

Social marketing and the broader, customer-facing interactive marketing are becoming ubiquitous as customer engagement becomes the increasing focus of companies thoughts.

Chief Marketer in their 2011 Social Marketing survey found that 73% of the respondent companies were incorporating some kind of “social messaging” into their marketing campaigns and in 2012 an additional 10% (meaning around 83%) would be doing the same. What’s interesting is the primary reason that the respondents were doing so. Fully 85% of them felt it was a way to “reach customers at multiple touchpoints.” That’s 25% more than the next reason, which is that customers are spending more time on social networks. In other words, there is a recognition that social channels are now part of the mainstream and that they are additions to the channels that we’ve reached customers on traditionally. To get a feel for how big a deal this really is, in August 2011, Forrester Group came out with their “U.S. Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011-2016” and saw the market spend up from $34 billion in 2011 to nearly $42 billion in 2012 and $77 billion by 2016. The bulk of the spend will be in the more traditional channels of interactive marketing – e.g. display ads and search marketing with emerging marketing such as mobile and social increasing about 250% in that time.

This is not surprising and if you look at it, the technologies available are once again more primitive than the efforts expended by the practitioner marketing departments.

The vendors are beginning to recognize the value of social marketing and are trying mightily to catch up and either incorporate it into their existing marketing automation or revenue performance management (sigh) applications and services. There are only a few genuinely useful pure social marketing or niche related apps out there at the moment, notably CRM Idol 2011 finalist Crowd Factory. One example of a niche related vendor would be the FuzeDigital reputation engine.

However the larger marketing automation/revenue performance vendors are taking note too. We are seeing social features being incorporated into more traditional applications from Marketo, Eloqua and Silverpop for example. Analytics giant SAS, rather than incorporating too much social into their marketing automation application, built and social media analytics application to take the pulse of the brand conversations going on out there. Companies like Infor, who provide customer interaction engines like Epiphany are using them to engage their prospects.

2012 will bring us continued explosive growth in marketing, especially social marketing because we have reached ubiquity when it comes to utilizing social channels as part of campaign planning. The more engagement is on the table, the more that marketing – with social marketing functionality as a prerequisite for a contemporary marketing suite – will grow dramatically. Forrester has it partially right with the increase of some 20% year over year in interactive marketing expenditures.

Think I’m wrong? Prove it. Launch a campaign on Twitter to do that. Ha!

Short Bursts: Other Trends

These aren’t meant to be full blown prognostications – just short takes on interesting trends that I’ve noticed that I want to make you aware of. There is too much in the sections above for me to draw these out but I didn’t think I should ignore them even if I don't spend a lot of digital ink making the case.

1. Mobile CRM - As in 2011, the creative development of mobile CRM will be driven by the tablet market and by the ability to analyze large amounts of data quickly that will show up on the tablets. The iPad will still be the dominant driver of mobile CRM application development. But we will see more activity around mobile payment than we will around anything else as Near Field Communication (NFC) is deployed on devices to a much greater extent than 2011 and Google Wallet grabs share of….mind as more and more businesses adopt.
2. Small Business SCRM – The success of Hubspot in 2011 and the emergence of a myriad of other technology platforms and companies who are small business focused (see CRM Idol again for many of the technology companies who concentrate on small business) is an indicator of the interest that small business has when it comes to doing business using social channels. I’m going to leave the details to Brent Leary in a forthcoming post here on the small business CRM market in 2012.
3. Big Data Becomes Really Big Data - The issue of how to data the massive increase in data and especially desirable data becomes possible the highlight of 2012. This is being fueled by the substantial increases in unstructured data on the social web, in the use of video, images, audio files and other rich data and by the growing ubiquity of the cloud all leading to what IDC feels is going to jump to more than 2.7 zettabytes (that would be 1021) in 2012, which is 48% higher rate of growth than 2011 – and 90% of it will be unstructured (Source: IDC Predictions for 2012: Competing for 2020). Managing this data will drive not only the storage and infrastructure markets, but will make even more “traditional” areas like Master Data Management (MDM) something that businesses will be investing in. This is a massive opportunity and a massive issue.
4. Acquisitions – The shrinkage of the market via acquisitions and it’s strengthening via strategic partnerships that support Social CRM and social business ecosystems will continue as they did in 2011. IN 2011 we saw, among others, salesforce.com acquiring DimDim, Radian6, Assistly, Model Metrics and Rypple; Oracle acquiring Inquira, Endeca and RightNow; SAP acquiring SuccessFactors and Microsoft acquiring Skype. We also saw a key strategic partnership between IBM and SugarCRM which was crucial to both companies. There will be more of the same in 2012 with interesting acquisition targets (at least interesting to me, not because I heard anything. Just to be clear) will be Marketo, InsideView, Coveo, SugarCRM and a handful of others including several of the CRM Idol contestants. Though, as always I’m sure I’ll be surprised and completely wrong. But acquisitions and partnerships will be the stars of 2012, whether I’m surprised or wrong or not.
5. The Cloud – 2012 continues the bandwagon though the hype will slow. This year not only did we see Amazon continue to be the cloud to beat, but companies like Oracle announce their “public cloud” and SAP went deep into the cloud as they announced at the recent SAP Business Influencers Conference not only buying SuccessFactors shortly after they announced that they wanted to significantly compete in the cloud but also announcing that from here on they are going to architect what they produce as cloud and will adapt it to on premises, rather than the other way around – a 180° turn in philosophy and development strategy. We also saw the cloud become the delivery system of choice, if you take it from the rate of adoption, not the amount of deployments out there in the on premises v. the cloud competition. Since this is short, let me recommend the always fantastic, quiet thought leader, Louis Columbus’ great aggregation post on cloud adoption. Read that to get the picture. On premises still is the dominant installation for CRM and other business technology, with hybrid deployments a popular option – and one offered by companies who have historically been invested in on premises software. In fact, all the leaders but salesforce.com offer it as part of their portfolio. More of this in 2012 as the unstoppable cloud juggernaut continues to gain delivery mechanism share.
6. Innovation/Co-Creation – This will continue to be in the purview of the most progressive companies – the leading edge of thinking and practice in business. But only at the lowest levels – feedback etc. will it be pre-eminent. The true practitioners of co-creation are just beginning to make their appearance on the global stage. I expect we’ll see most of this in the Fortune 3500 companies. I’ll be writing more on this and you’ll be seeing guest posts on this subject in 2012.
7. Knowledge Management – while there will be no slacking off of the existing models for knowledge management – accessible knowledgebases being the core of that – there will be considerably more focus on dynamic knowledge with as close to real time response as possible and the use of knowledge for insight (via analysis). The technologies to meet the requirements for the latter are just beginning to appear in the market. Knowledge grabbed from customer user forums and other external "unstructured":
8. Applications Marketplaces – Application marketplaces are becoming increasingly prevalent as more and more companies begin to view things from the standpoint of providing their customers with customized/configurable ecosystems. So now, in addition to the technology company marketplaces we know and…whatever emotion you want goes here….we are seeing even government agencies like the U.S. General Services Administration or the U.S. Army providing these application marketplaces to their constituents – in the former case, the other U.S. federal agencies and the latter case, varying Army commands. There is no reason to think that this is going to slack in 2012. In fact, look for it to accelerate.

The One By Itself

This is the most important prognostication for 2012. Period.

The Yankees Win the World Series – Locked and loaded. Our starting pitching straightens itself out, Teixeira gets his batting average back to a normal .290 or so; A-Rod revives his career enough to be a difference maker; Jeter just continues from his 2011 second half and Rivera of course is Rivera. Thus, The Yankees Win. The Yankeeeeeees Wiiiiiiiiin! Yay!

Finally

Look. This may be the most uncomfortable "forecast" I've ever made. It wasn't easy. I'm evolving a perspective I've had for almost 10 years and it has implications that are important, though not that dramatic, for how the industry will be developing and the strategies that need to be considered - if I'm right.

And that makes me uncomfortable. But I've learned a few things in my 62 years that I think have done me well over the years - some of it due to adversity that makes my skin very thick. Let's just say criticism doesn't exactly phase me.

First, I've learned that you are always learning.  That means that what I am writing here while I think its useful is only the beginning of something that I hope will have some impact but that will be constantly evolving even as it does due to collegial inputs from smarter people than me and those who are testing out what I'm hypothesizing here and finding how to tweak it or to show me that I'm wrong.

But if there is one thing I've learned that probably will never change, there is a way to think about all this. You make as good a case as your observations allow and then get on with your life and see how the next phase plays out. Which is what I'm now doing for 2012.

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.

CRM Idol 2011 Update #2: We're Crankin' Now!

In case you need the full monty as CRM 2011 keeps rollin': here are the two links to the oh so passé past.

• The original rules and contest ideas, judges and prizes.
• Update #1

Now here are the latest updates:

Additions to the Judges

1. Lets give a big round of applause to Larry Ritter,  Senior Vice President & General Manager of CRM for Sage Software who joins our Extended Judges Vendor Panel . Larry is a long time industry veteran who not only knows software but knows small business too. A huge addition for the panel
2. Now, put your hands together for Chris Carfi, Vice President of Antseyeview and the man who just may have coined the term "social customer" with his incredibly popular blog. Chris is one of the first social influencers and one who knew the CRM market from the get go. He is also incredibly popular.  He joins the Extended Judges Influencer Panel.
3. We've got one more to clap those hands for and that would be Brian Vellmure, Founder and Principal of Initium, LLC. Brian is one of those Social CRM influencers who appeared about 2 years ago and just keeps getting more and more prominent. He joins the Extended Judges Influencer Panel too.
4. Also, give it up for Thomas Vander Wal, Principal at InfoCloud Solutions who joins the Extended Judges Influencers Panel. Thomas is a web legend who pretty much created social tagging and folksonomies and is the man who is defining the social "lens" that we look at companies, products and social interactions through.
5. Finally, last but not least, raise a glass to Kristian af Sandberg, Product Manager, Redpill Linpro, one of Scandinavia's foremost strategic implementation firms. Kristian is an EMEA leader who becomes part of the Extended Judges Vendor Panel.

The Mentor Program

We are adding another facet to the mentorship program. Where originally mentors were available to only the seven finalists on how to construct the content for their video, we are going to be able to expand that program to the 60 contestants on how to handle their demos etc with the primary judges. These mentors will be drawn from the Extended Judges panel and will be VOLUNTARY when it comes to which judges. Watch for a list to be published on the website at some time after the site launches.  The contact information will be made available PRIVATELY to the contestants for their knowledge only and the dates that the mentors will be available also will be privately provided. This is an exciting addition because it will provide invaluable advice on how to do things that will benefit the young businesses that are in this competition. Participation is strictly voluntary on both sides.

The Latest Calendar - May  5, 4:30PM ET, 10:30PM GMT

CRM Idol 2011 is closed. All the slots are taken but we've put together a waiting list. 

For all of the companies that have made it, please remember:

1. its provisional - dependent on your three references checking out. Once they do, we will send out notifications to everyone that will let you know the time and date of your actual slot.
2. I'm traveling and the other key judges are busy and we are all human beings so we might be a little slow in responding.
3. The waiting list is those Americas companies that submitted after closing of the competition. The order is based on the time stamped proper submission of the email. Any email that had something wrong with the submission has been asked to resubmit with the corrections. The resubmittal will be their actual time and date, not the original submission. Hey, it might sound sorta anal, but we haven't been asking much so reading the rules and making our lives a little easier isn't unwarranted, is it?

The Americas Calendar - FINAL (see #1 above though)

The Americas (all times are Eastern Time)

Date
	August 15 3pm – PhaseWare 4pm – Performance Solutions 5pm – Solucciones 6pm – Jaguar TPM	August 16 3pm – Relenta CRM 4pm – LuxorCRM 5pm – thedatabank 6pm –Connected	August 17 3pm –Assistly 4pm – SplendidCRM 5pm – RO/Innovation 6pm - GreenRope	August 18 3pm – Cosential 4pm – Media Funnel 5pm – Tasker.ly 6pm – Aplicor	August 19 3pm -FreeCRM 4pm – Interactions Corp 5pm – Antharia LLC 6pm – Relayware
	August 22 3pm – Lookout Software, Inc. 4pm – InvisibleCRM 5pm – Negoxia 6pm - CiviCRM	August 23 3pm –Vigilius LLC 4pm – Hyperoffice 5pm – SalesNexus LLC 6pm – Salestrakr	August 24 3pm – Brick St. Software 4pm – Stone Cobra 5pm – VIPorbit 6pm – Nimble	August 25 3pm – Front Row CRM 4pm – GetSatisfaction 5pm – ContactMe 6pm – FuzeDigital	August 26 3pm - bigWebApps 4pm – Loopfuse 5pm – Vertical Solutions, Inc. 6pm – Dovetail Software

EMEA - FINAL as of May 5, 10:30PM GMT

EMEA (all times are GMT)

Date
	September 5 3pm - Swivelscript 4pm – InTouch 5pm - Efficy NV 6pm - Jibe Company	September 6 3pm - Loyalty Factory 4pm – B-Kin 5pm – Atollon 6pm - Dimelo	September 7 3pm - Pipedrive 4pm – Akordis 5pm - Workbooks.com 6pm - BPMonline CRM	September 8 3pm – Iko System 4pm – Zestia Ltd 5pm - Really Simple Systems 6pm - Arten Science Ltd.	September 9 3pm –The SelfService Co. 4pm – Digita Srl 5pm –ABCrm 6pm - webCRM

Thus….Available Times as of May 5 at 1:30am ET, 7:30am GMT.

Americas (all ET)

• CLOSED

EMEA (all GMT)

• CLOSED

That's it. CRM Idol 2011 now has all its candidates for this year.  This is exciting. There is still room for those who don't mind being on a waiting list. Feel free to submit.In Other News

We are cranking on several other fronts that are in progress as this is written. Among them:

1. We are working on a CRM Idol 2011 website that will feature a Joomla! based content management system at the backend. This will become the source for all updates and queries when its ready. Watch for it in the near to mid future.
2. We are also working on a Facebook page for all you fans and friends out there.
3. We are working on a YouTube channel, which as of now, is going to be the system of record for the videos though because we are at 10 minutes as a video, we reserve the right to move this channel elsewhere should YouTube rules interfere.
4. We are working on the 1 hour session guidelines for all the entries so that you won't feel lost and we will see what we can do to set up a system of mentors that will be available during certains as yet ascertained period for advice for the one hours. That will be in July sometime I would reckon for the Americas and August for EMEA.
5. Finally, we are continuing to provide more possible prizes and will be refining the rules for prizes etc as we go on.  Stay tuned for more announcements.

 

Finally…CRM Idol 2011: The Open Season Is Here! Welcome to…Wherever We Are

PG Note: The post you see below represents the “official” launch of CRM Idol 2011 and is one that all eight primary judges endorse. For me personally, this is my “angelic” side – the side of me that wants to support an industry that has been good to me. On my more edgy side, some of the reason that this was hatched was because of PR agents who basically don’t do their homework and pitch me all day long without an inkling about me as an actual human. They think I’m an influential CRM cyborg. Dealing with that from the other side, Brent Leary and I will be launching a music video in a few months from Playaz Productions. Heh. Heh.

But the side of me that’s grateful to an industry and friends and those companies that actually have honored me by listening to me blather all these years, is enthralled by the idea that we may be able to give back to all of you through CRM Idol. So, thank you for everything over the years and welcome to CRM Idol 2011: the Open Season!!)

 

 

Okay, everyone this is the big one. CRM Idol 2011: The Open Season is here and we’re ready to take your companies and find out which one of you in the Americas and which one of you in EMEA is not the next CRM Idol but the FIRST CRM Idol.

The Idea

Most of what we’re trying to do was outlined in the pre-announcement announcement of CRM Idol last week. But it bears some repeating:

Small companies – at least in the CRM software related world – and that means social software world, in this case, too – abound. There are thousands of companies out there that are possibly innovative, possibly commercially viable in a big way, possibly the next big thing. But, as we said, there are thousands of them. And, no matter how great your product is, if no one knows about it, well, then, oops. Not a good thing.

These small companies are all making efforts to get into the ecosystem that could benefit them – one which includes investors, influencers, technology/strategic partners, media connections, etc. While getting support from this powerful ecosystem is by no means a guarantee of success, it can be enormously helpful in getting well down the road there. But, those small companies are often thwarted in that effort by either really bad PR people, or just the incredible amount of companies out there trying to reach into the ecosystem who are pummeling the small amount of influencers, etc. every week with requests to demo or talk.

Now, to be fair to the influencers, they are human beings with lives that aren’t built around supporting this one company that really thinks they are it. All they know is that each of them is getting between 20-50 requests a week to take a demo or conversation with someone who owns or represents a company they’ve never heard of and never talked to yet. In addition to those that they know. Often enough, they are pitched by a public relations person who is either inexperienced or not really good at their job who makes no effort to find anything out about the person that they are pitching to. So the influencer, journalist, venture capitalist gets a generic curve thrown at them that doesn’t even break over the plate – guaranteeing that the email is going to be discarded as a matter of course before the first paragraph is even read. Or it could be that on a particular day the influencer got 10 pitches and had a headache and didn’t want to see any of them.

As unfair as generic pitches and high volumes of noise are to the influencers in the highly desirable ecosystem we are chatting about here, it is a problem because what are probably a lot of good companies are never given a chance to move ahead because of the difficulties inherent in the process and the vagaries of bad luck on any given day.

Which is why CRM Idol 2011: The Open Season exists.

The concept is simple, small companies out there. If you meet the submission criteria outlined below, you will be given the opportunity, first come first serve, to secure a time slot on a specific day that will put you in front of some of the most influential people in the CRM/SCRM world. They will spend an hour with you in a demo to hear about your technology product – software only – and they will write a jointly signed review of what they saw of you – that will be published in multiple venues as soon as its written. It can be a good review, a bad one, a mix or indifferent. There’s risk on your part to be taken here. But it is something that you need to be aware of. The reviews will go up as soon as the 5 judge sign off on the final content. They won’t be exhaustive reviews but they will be opinionated and fair.

Forty companies from the Americas and twenty companies from EMEA (that means ONLY Europe, the Middle East and Africa) will get a shot at this – again first come first serve (more later on what that means). Of the 40 in the Americas, 4 finalists will be chosen. (NOTE: There will be an APAC edition hopefully late in the year or if not, early 2012, depending on the success of these two events. Sorry, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, et.al. Logistics made it impossible at this juncture.) Out of the 20 in EMEA, 3 finalists will be chosen. Each of the finalists will be REQUIRED to do a ten minute video about their company and the product. Not a repeat of the demo but a video. Note I used the word REQUIRED here. Let me put it this way. If you make the finals and don’t do the video, we will publicly skewer your company. Know why? Because our judges are giving up what little free time they actually have in a summer to do this and it will take us 4 hours a day for 3 business weeks to do it. So if you can’t or won’t put in the effort to do the video, don’t bother to apply. Seriously. We’re trying to help out here and we want you guys all to succeed but it’s a two way street.

Okay, that rant out of the way. Once the finalists are chosen and the videos done, they will be posted online in multiple media outlets. They will be voted on in two ways:

1. Popular vote – see, crowdsourcing is important. All the votes for the one winner from the Americas and the one winner from EMEA will be tallied from the public sites – in aggregate. That’s 50% of the vote.
2. Extended Judges Panels – as you can see below, we may have assembled the greatest panels of judges – both leading vendors and influencers ever assembled in the history of CRM – not to be hyperbolic or anything. Each judge will select a specific winner in each of the Americas and EMEA from the 7 finalists. That’s the other 50% of the vote. The original judges will be voting as panel members.

The winners in each will get a major array of prizes, some of which are below, and be declared “CRM Idol 2011 Winner.”

Not too shabby is it? Vast amounts of media attention even if you don’t make the finals. If you make the finals at all, some prizes to you. The winners get everything that the ecosystem can offer but guaranteed success. But they do get all the accoutrements they need to support their increased likelihood of it.

That way, you small companies out there who have been victimized by bad approaches or just circumstance have the opportunity to bypass all of that and make something happen. It’s up to you to take the reins in hand but once you do, you have at least a serious chance at making yourself successful.

The Criteria

This competition is for small companies in the CRMish/SocialCRMish world. – see the categories below for some guidelines though please feel free to make the case if you don’t see yourself in the guidelines.

1. You have to have software that is commercially available by the time of the demo – that would be in August – again see below. No betas, alphas, release candidates allowed. If we find that you’re not commercially available, and you have a time slot, you’re out and someone else will fill the slot. So please be sure that you can verify the claim if you want to participate.
2. You have to have 3 referenceable customers that, if we care to, we can contact and ask about you.
3. You have to have revenue under $12 million U.S. your last fiscal year. As far as disclosure goes, you have the choice of making the claim that you do – though that will have to be stated in your submission and we’ll trust you or you can disclose your revenue in the submission with the knowledge that only the permanent judges will know what it is. If you make the claim, please be prepared to back it up if we ask. Your call on how.
4. You have to be willing to make a ten minute video if you get to the finals. More on that later.
5. You have to fit a category – though there is some leeway there.

The Categories

The categories that we’ve identified to start are:

1. Traditional CRM Suites
2. Social CRM
3. Sales - Sales Force Automation, Sales Optimization, Sales Effectiveness
4. Marketing – Marketing Automation, Revenue Performance Management, Social Marketing, Email Marketing, Enterprise Marketing Management, Database Marketing
5. Customer Service – all permutations
6. Mobile CRM
7. Customer Experience Management
8. Social Media Monitoring – requires the possibility of integrating with a CRM technology
9. Customer Analytics – including text/sentiment analytics; voice based analytics; social media analytics, influencer scoring, etc.
10. Enterprise Feedback Management
11. Innovation Management
12. Community Platforms
13. Enterprise 2.0 – collaboration, activity streams etc.
14. Social Business
15. Knowledge Management – this one requires the possibility of integrating with CRM systems
16. Vendor Relationship Management
17. Partner Relationship Management

Once again, if you don’t see yourself in this list, don’t worry.  Just make the case as to why you have some customer-facing possibilities and the likelihood is that we’ll be cool with it. We’re trying to make this easier for you, not hard.

The Rules

They are numbered to be entirely clear.

Submissions

1. There will be 40 slots made available in the Americas and 20 in EMEA.
2. The submission will be by email ONLY to: [email protected]. (See below to see this again and what to do if there are problems). Any other attempt at submission will be rejected out of hand with the problem exception mentioned below.
3. The submissions will occur starting today – Monday, April 25 and will continue until Friday May 13 or until all slots are filled, whichever is first (watch #crmidol on twitter for updates on that as it occurs). On May 13, should any slots be left, the remaining specific dates and times will be made publicly available and another final round of submissions for those remaining slots will occur from May 13 through May 20. After that the submissions will be closed.
4. Each submission will include the following:
   1. Your company contact and named person contact information Two date and time specific slot requests. ONLY two. If your slots are not available, you’re out of luck until May 14 – and then you can resubmit to any time slots that are publicly announced as still available. Though there is no guarantee that there will be any available slots at that time. (see below for examples of how to submit the dates/times)
   2. The category you feel you fit into - or if you don’t but think that you qualify – why.
   3. A description of what the product is/the company is. Be persuasive here that you meet the criteria, not that you have a great product. This is merely a qualifying discussion. URLs cannot be used as substitutes for this description. The submission needs to be all inclusive. However, they can be used as supporting documentation.
   4. The names of the three (3) referenceable customers – the company, the contact and the way to communicate with them – minimum of email and phone, please.
   5. A statement that says that you meet the revenue requirement along the lines of “our company states truthfully that our revenues in our last fiscal year 2010 were under $12 million U.S”. OR you can state the actual number with the knowledge that the primary judges in each of the Americas and EMEA will treat it as under non-disclosure. But please be aware those designated primary judges below will see the actual figures if you choose to reveal them.
   6. A statement that says, “if (you) make the finals, you are committed to making a 10 minute video for submission and public viewing as part of the conditions for entry.” Word it anyway you prefer but make the commitment clear.
5. If you are accepted, you’ll be notified privately but it will be posted that you’ve been accepted on the Twitter #crmidol stream. The time will only be sent to you privately. Just your acceptance will be posted. Please allow some time between your submission and the posting of it to the hashtag and your private notification, since we all still have to work for a living.
6. If you don’t include everything specified in the rules for submission, it means automatic disqualification and you cannot resubmit.

The Demo

The demo has few rules. Just be prepared to a. explain your company; b. show your product – live please c. answer questions from the influencers/experts.  Not much more than that. I’m sure many of you are experienced at this already so wed don’t have to tell you this, but just in case… A site for the demos with login etc. will be announced to the timeslot owners in early August.

The Video

The standards for the video will be mentioned to the finalists once they are named. To rest any unease, you won’t be required to spend lots of money to get it done. How much you spend and on what will be up to you as will the content and how you present it. We’ll issue guidelines when the time gets near, including how the video is going to be distributed for posting and voting.

The Judges

Here are the lists of all the judges. As you can see, we have what is likely to be the heaviest hitting list in the history of anything done in CRM when it comes to awards or competitions. Click on their names to get to their LinkedIn bios. They are in alphabetical order.

Primary Judges

The Americas

These five judges will handle the 40 entries for the Americas which consists of the United States, Canada, South and Central America.  They will all be involved in the one hour reviews each of the days over the two weeks and will jointly sign off on each review which will be posted to multiple media sites. They will also solely choose the four finalists for the Americas.

1. Paul Greenberg – Managing Principal, The 56 Group, LLC
2. Jesus Hoyos – Managing Partner, JesusHoyos.com, LLC
3. Esteban Kolsky – Principal and Founder, Thinkjar LLC
4. Brent Leary – Managing Partner, CRM Essentials
5. Denis Pombriant – CEO, Beagle Research Group

EMEA

These four judges will handle the 20 entries from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia etc.  They will all be involved in the each of the 1 hour demos/discussions from Sept 5 through 9 and will write and jointly sign off on each review which will be posted to multiple media sites. They will also solely choose the three finalists for EMEA.

1. Laurence Buchanan – Vice President, CRM & Social CRM, EMEA, Capgemini
2. Silvana Buljan – Founder & Managing Director, Buljan & Partners
3. Paul Greenberg – see above
4. Mark Tamis – Social Business Strategist, NET-7

Mentors

This is an exciting part of CRM Idol 2011. Each of these fine human beings has volunteered a day of their time – two during the finals and one with the winners – to provide the benefit of their experience to the contestants.  What they will do is noted by their name. This is an awesome idea that Anthony Lye actually cooked up. Each of these mentors has decades of experience in the software and venture capital world and is considered a leader in the CRM space. So if you make it to the finals, you have the benefit of their knowledge and their valuable time.  Amazing.

1. Anthony Lye – Anthony will provide one day for the Americas finalists and one day for the EMEA finalists for consultation on how to best do the content for the contending videos and whatever other pertinent advice the finalists need. Anthony has had years of experience as a senior management person for enterprise CRM and a thought leader.
2. Joe Hughes – Joe will provide one day for the Americas finalists and one day for the EMEA finalists for consultation on how to best do the content for the contending videos and whatever other pertinent advice the finalists need. Joe has been a leader in the CRM space for as long as we can remember and one of the more foresighted when it comes to the value of Social CRM
3. Larry Augustin – This is a prize for the winner of EMEA and the winner of the Americas. Larry who has years of experience as an executive in the software space and has been a successful venture capitalist will work with the winner to prepare them for dealing with possible investors including doing a VC matching with the winners.

There will most likely be other mentors announced as the competition gets closer to the demo dates.  We might try to make some mentors available to prepare you if you need them for the one hour demos but that’s still up in the air. We’ll keep you posted.

Extended Judges Panels

The Influencer Panel

1. William Band – Vice President & Principal Analyst, CRM, Forrester Research
2. Jim Berkowitz – CEO, CRM Mastery
3. Bruce Culbert – Chief Service Officer, The Pedowitz Group
4. Zoli Erdos - Publisher/Editor, CloudAve and Enterprise Irregulars
5. Mike Fauscette – Group Vice President, Software Business Solutions, IDC
6. Josh Greenbaum – Principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting
7. Dr. Graham Hill – Partner, Optima Partners
8. Dennis Howlett - Buyer Advocate
9. Ian Jacobs – Senior Analyst, Customer Interaction, Ovum/Datamonitor
10. Michael Krigsman – CEO, Asuret
11. Marshall Lager – Managing Principal, Third Idea Consulting
12. Kate Leggett – Senior Analyst, CRM, Forrester Research
13. Maribel Lopez – Principal Analyst and VP, Constellation Research  Founder Lopez Research LLC
14. Jeremiah Owyang -Managing Partner, Altimeter Group
15. Sameer Patel – Managing Partner, Sovos Group
16. Scott Rogers – Customer Evangelist
17. Robert Scoble – Managing Director, Rackspace Hosting
18. Brian Solis – Principal, Altimeter Group
19. Dilip Soman – Professor of Marketing, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
20. Ray Wang – CEO, Constellation Research
21. Mary Wardley – Vice President, CRM Applications, IDC

The Vendor Panel

1. Larry Augustin – CEO, SugarCRM
2. Anthony Lye – Senior Vice President & GM, CRM, Oracle
3. Phil Fernandez – CEO, Marketo
4. John Hernandez – General Manager, Customer Care Business, Cisco
5. Jonathan Hornby – Director, Worldwide Marketing, SAS
6. Joseph Hughes - Senior Executive, CRM Service, Support and Social System Integration Lead, Accenture
7. Charlie Isaacs, VP, eServices and Social Media Strategy Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise
8. Vinay Iyer – Vice President, Marketing CRM, SAP
9. Katy Keim - CMO, Lithium
10. Marcel Lebrun,- CEO, Radian6
11. Mitch Lieberman, Vice President, Marketing, Sword-Ciboodle
12. Chris Morace- Senior Vice President, Business Development, Jive
13. Zach Nelson – CEO, NetSuite
14. Bill Patterson- Director, CRM Product Management, Microsoft
15. Dileep Srinivasan - AVP - CRM & Social CRM, Digital Marketing & MDM, Cognizant
16. John Taschek –Vice President, Market Strategy, Salesforce

The Journalist Panel

1. Elsa Basile – Director, Callcenternews (Argentina)
2. Barney Beal – Managing Editor, SearchCRM,
3. Anita Campbell – Publisher, SmallBizTrends.com
4. Robin Carey – CEO, Social Media Today
5. Neil Davey – Group Editor, Sift Media
6. David Myron – Editorial Director, CRM Magazine, Speech Technology Magazine
7. Valdir Ugalde – Board, Member, mundocontact (Mexico)
8. Anne Van Den Berg – Senior Editor, CustomerTalk (Netherlands)

 

Media Partners

You’ll note that we have 8 journalists on a panel of judges. Well, each of them represents a media partner that will be broadcasting the competition and posting the videos for voting in the finals for the popular vote.  They are an awesome array of the most influential media sites in social media, CRM, and small business as well as local influencers in CRM in Latin America and Europe.  They will be significant in the lives of the contestants, the finalists, and the winners giving each what may be an unprecedented breadth and depth of coverage. Their coverage will be supplemented by posts to the blogs and other sites that are owned by many of the judges so there will be significant reach for all 60 of the initial contenders.  Each of these partners will be getting exclusives from the judges and hopefully some of the companies too so that we can add a quality of coverage that would enhance the value to the SMBs participating. in all areas – CRM, social and small business directly.

We expect to add more media partners as we continue on throughout the competition.

The current partners and links to their sites (in alphabetical order, like every list here):

1. Call Center News (Argentina)
2. CRM Magazine/DestinationCRM
3. CustomerTalk (Netherlands)
4. Mundocontact (Mexico)
5. MyCustomer.com/Sift Media
6. SearchCRM
7. Social Media Today
8. SmallBizTrends.com

 

The Prizes…So Far

These are the prizes as of launch today. There are several others in the works that will be announced as the contest rolls out.

All Finalists

All 7 finalists will get to choose one day of consulting from the list of Influencer consultants below. The order of choice will be based on the popular vote on the video which will be kept confidential but used for the choosing. There will be more consultants added to the list as contest moves forward.

The Americas and EMEA Winners

Each winner will get to choose four prizes from the list.  Note – in the case where multiple prizes are being offered by a single vendor – the vendor counts as a single prize with all the items as part of that.

1. Accenture
   1. A full day workshop with CRM leaders in Accenture for possible partnership and/or possible investment.
2. Capgemini (for EMEA winners only)
   1. A half day workshop with Patrick James, Global VP CRM and Laurence Buchanan to explore joint go to market opportunities and help you refine and test your value proposition.
3. Social Media Today
   1. A blog post featuring the winner of the contest to run on both The Customer Collective and Social Media Today
   2. A single blast to the Social Media Today opt-in list (approximately 50,000 names) which will conform to their minimum standards (valued at $10,500)
4. Microsoft
1. 12 mos. of CRM Online Free for developing extensions to CRM
2. 12 mos. of Windows Azure Free for developing web-based portals and BI solutions
3. Access to the Office 365 Beta for building collaborative applications and services
4. Guaranteed access to exclusive Business and Technical On-Ramp program funded by Microsoft to accelerate entry
   and access to the Microsoft ecosystem
5. SugarCRM
   1. Free 10 user subscription to SugarCRM Professional or Enterprise
   2. Membership in the Sugar Exchange and free consulting on product integration with SugarCRM
   3. CEO Larry Augustin, a successful venture capitalist in his own right, does a mentoring & VC matchmaking session with the winners
6. Brian Solis
   1. One hour internal webinar on how to use SCRM and social media to your advantage
7. Paul Greenberg
   1. One hour pro bono external webinar on a subject TBD for lead gen, mindshare, etc.
8. Ray Wang
   1. One hour pro bono external webinar on a subject TBD for lead gen, mindshare, etc.
9. Sameer Patel
   1. One hour pro bono external webinar on a subject TBD for lead gen, mindshare, etc.
10. Influencer Consulting– free strategic consulting for 1 day or 8 hours from a variety of judges (in person travel expenses to be covered by winners)
    1. Esteban Kolsky (in person only)
    2. Paul Greenberg (on phone or in person)
    3. Denis Pombriant (on phone or in person)
    4. Mark Tamis (on phone or in person)
    5. Jesus Hoyos (on phone or in person)
    6. Brent Leary (on phone or in person)

 

The Times, Dates, Hashtag and Email

Okay here’s the hardcore stuff:

1. The hashtag is #crmidol
2. The email for submission is [email protected]
   1. If you have a problem submitting to that email send your submission and a report of the specific problem to [email protected]

 

Dates and Times Table for the Americas and EMEA

We’ve put together an easy little table with all the relevant dates and times that you’ll need as you progress through the competition.

 

Dates/Times	Americas	EMEA
Submission Dates	August 15-19; August 22-26	September 5-9
Submission Times	3pm ET; 4pm ET; 5pm ET; 6pm ET	3pm GMT; 4pm GMT; 5pm GMT; 6pm GMT
Finalist Video Submission Date	September 30	October 14
Winner Announcement	October 17	October 31

 

 

 

 

A Note or Two

A little bit of unfinished stuff that will sort itself out as time goes forward.

• There will likely be a CRM Idol site (Joomla based) coming in the next month or so that will be an aggregate site for all the media outlets and streams.  However, this remains a work in progress that’s still under discussion.
• There will be more mentors and prizes added and possibly a judge or two.
• For now ongoing news will be found at the twitter hashtag #crimidol.

In Closing

That’s about it. Now its time to bring it. First come, first serve. See you, maybe as the 1st ever CRM Idol, in Vegas, Hollywood. London or on the Social Web. Somewhere anyway.

 

CRM IDOL 2011 IS NOW OFFICIALLY UNDERWAY

CRM Idol 2011: The Open Season, Begins! Small Companies Let Us Know

Okay, everyone. Sit down and listen close....C'mon. Sit already. God, this is like herding cats. Shhhhhhh. I have a big announcement...or should I say WE have a big announcement. You'll understand what I mean in a minute if you just sit down and shut up.

Starting now, we are opening the doors for the first annual CRM Idol: The Open Season. YES! CRM Idol the Open Season launches today and it is something that will be here every year from here on. Something that....well let me tell you the story.

Why the Hell?

Because there are so many companies coming into the "CRMish" market, the market for customer facing programs and activities, there is little chance for smaller players to get much visibility among thought leaders, analysts, journalists, venture capitalists and even the general public. One company seems like another and they are all vying for attention. They either do their own public relations or hire public relations firms that are often, lets just say, until Brent Leary and my next public skewering of them, deficient in their public relations skills, sending ill considered emails that indicate no research done - and thus, the influencer, analyst, journalist, doesn't give it the time of day.

Know why not? Because each of us gets some 30-50 of these emails per week and because we want to have a life, we can't read or even respond to all of them. Consequently, it takes something special to get through to an individual who may be able to help the small company. The irony is that this small company may have a great product, but no one will ever know, because of the bad PR work or simply the overwhelming amount of possible competitors vying for attention.

There is another thing that makes it tough on all of these companies too. Many of them, rather than try to be smarter, get whiny. For example, when I issued my CRM Watchlist 2011 and placed SugarCRM on it, one SugarCRM competitor wrote this incredibly waah waah comment on the blog post that said something to the effect "why is it that when SugarCRM changes a palette color, they get coverage, but we add a workflow and business rules engine and no one covers us." This is a paraphrase. I can't do justice to the childish, petulant nature of the commment, but incidences like these turn off the switch when it comes to coverage too.

So all in all, partially due to the inability to provide something attention capturing, partially due to the complaining, but mostly due to the high volume of requests for demos and briefs which limit the influencers in making a choice, the small companies are not able to get the traction or visibility that they need to solidify their market position and make themselves known.

Until now.

What's going to be different? CRM Idol The Open Season.

The thinking behind what you are going to hear in just a few is simple. These small companies should have a chance. It isn't their fault that there are a million other companies out there trying to reach the same 100 plus people they are. It isn't their fault that the ability to penetrate the influencer's nearly impenetrable walls due to email/etc. volume, is beyond the skills of a goodly percentage of public relations professionals. And it isn't their fault that some of their colleagues/competitors are sucking their own thumbs.

Thus CRM Idol: The Open Season 2011 is born

What in Hell is It?

This is a competition that is easy to enter but difficult to win. But as long as you enter, you'll get something out of it. Its time to let the small companies who are out there, fighting for that visibility every day, have a chance at some of it, with some of the top thought leaders/influencers in the industry. It's also time for the thought leaders to be more available and do something to support those small companies out there. So here's the game plan. First, the format. Then the rules.

The Format

There will be two versions of this competition/show. One based in the Americas - which will encompass the United States Canada, Central and South America - and one based in EMEA - which will encompass Europe, Australia and Asia for now.

The Americas Version

FFrom August 15 through August 19 (Monday thru Friday) and then again, August 22 through August 26 (Monday through Friday), (thanks LuxorCRM for finding my date booboo), each day, from the hours of Noon to 2pm ET (thus, 9am to 11am PT) and then again 4pm to 6pm ET (1pm to 3pm PT), a panel of three judges will hear, each day, 4 companies who will provide 1 hour demos of their products. That will mean 40 slots in total - all in the month of August. The only criteria for getting the slot (the criteria for entry will be seen below) is that you ask for it first in a period that starts April 18.

After each demo is over, the judges will score/analyze the company and its product(s) and, this is the kicker, will jointly publish in all their venues and in media sponsor venues, a review of the company -giving each of the 40 companies the widest possible exposure. But be on your game. Because I'm not saying the judges will publish a good review. It will be fair, it will be honest, but it could be great or bad or in between. That's up to you as a company.

When all forty demos are done and each of the articles/posts have been published, there will be four winners announced. The winners are obligated (yes, obligated. Don't join the competition if you are unwilling to do this) to put together a 10 minute video that highlights what their company does and how their products work - it can be clever, funny, somber, boring or whatever, but it has to highlight what the company is like and how the product works. This video will go up on multiple venues (including a YouTube channel for this) and there will be an expanded set of judges. The 4 winners will be judged by the public - and a much expanded panel of influencers (between 10 and 15). The publics vote will count for 50 percent and the expanded panel of judges will count for 50 percent. Out of those four finalists will come one winner who will be the CRM Idol 2011. Not only will this be published widely in all venues, but the winner will get a choice of several prizes which will be announced at the time that the four finalists are announced. They could range from a significant speaking slot at a conference to a meeting with a venture capitalist/angel who might be willing to fund the company to a meeting with a key potential vendor partner. More to come on that later. The combination of the prize with the publicity and the exposure to a significant group of thought leaders all with an easy entry point if you meet the criteria should be worth any small CRMish company's time. Take a chance.

EMEA Version

This is pretty much the same rules (three judges, final video, etc.) but there are a couple of differences. First, it will be only 20 slots. Second, the dates for this as of now are TBD. But watch these venues over the next week or two.

The Entry Criteria

Because many of us are giving up a good chunk of the little free time we have in the summer to do this, this is going to be a hardnosed set of criteria - and woe to you if you take up a slot and don't qualify - seriously. I don't want to get self-righteous, but none of the judges have much time to do non-work related things in a given year and we're giving up two weeks of that to do this, so please do me a favor, only bother if you meet ALL the criteria.

Here they are:

1. The products you show must be commercially available when you show them. No betas. No alphas. No incompletes.
2. You must have 4 referenceable customers. We will most likely send them notes or call them to check, so again, please make sure that they know they are referenceable customers who may get contacted by us.
3. If you are a finalist, you must do the 10 minute video describing your product. Its your call how you do it. It has to be able to be posted on YouTube though. This isn't optional for a finalist. This is a mandatory rule. Otherwise, we can't pick a winner.
4. You must be in an area related to CRM somehow. This could be marketing, sales, customer service, enterprise feedback management, social software, analytics, knowledge management, community platforms, social media monitoring, etc. Customer facing or something that captures customer data. There's a wide range. However, the judges have the final say as to whether or not they think you meet the criteria.
5. Finally, your revenues need to be $12 million U.S. or under.

How to Enter

On April 18, we all will announce through multiple venues the opening of the slots. That means that anyone who meets the criteria who wants to compete should send an email to the email address that will be announced the date we open. In that, please send company name, information about the company and products, the names of the 4 referenceable customers and a contact at your company. Additionally, identify two slot times. If one is taken by the time you send it, then you will get the backup slot. If both are taken, then you're out of luck unless there are slots still available at the end of the slot availability period (roughly 10 days). It is first come first serve then for those who missed - meaning the judges will look at when the emails were sent and if you're early enough, you'll be offered remaining available time slots. If you don't want any of them, then you're out of luck.

The Judges

Finally, the esteemed panels of judges for each event. (click on their hyperlinks for their bios)

In the Americas

• Paul Greenberg
• Brent Leary
• Esteban Kolsky
• UPDATE: We've added, CRM LATAM thought leader Jesus Hoyos to the judges panel in the Americas. YAY! Click on his name for his bio.

In EMEA

• Paul Greenberg
• Laurence Buchanan
• Mark Tamis

Even More Judges....

As I mentioned before there will be an expanded panel of judges for the finals. But I was dissembling a bit. There will actually be two expanded panels of judges for the finals. First, a panel that will consist of roughly 10-15 key influencers which also may (this is still under final discussion) include a venture capitalist or two; and second, a panel that will consist of a like amount of appropriate larger and well established technology vendors and large systems integrators/consulting firms. In other words, those companies that the small companies would love to get in front of anyway. Sitting on these panels, especially the latter, are potential partners and investors.

These will be responsible for 50 percent of the decision on the winner of the competition.

But it doesn't stop there. Wide exposure is going to be the minimum benefit (unless something bad is written, then its not much of a benefit) and so we are bringing in media partners who will non-exclusively carry the entire competition from beginning to end and will be sites from which the popular vote is tallied.

The first media property in is MyCustomer.com, a wildly successful CRM related online digital media outlet in both Europe and the U.S. with, all in all hundreds of thousands of readers.

The 3 full panels - influencers, vendors/consulting and the sponsoring media properties will be announced on April 18 when the "first come first serve" slots open up. The final prizes which will involve, among other things, companies and individuals who are willing to give the winner a crack at getting invested in, will be announced in the midsummer before the Open Season....well, opens on August 14.

That about does it. I'm all written out. So be prepared for this. This could be a big deal. Hopefully this will be both the break that some of you are waiting for and also will show us some of the companies that we should have been watching but weren't. We can close the historic gap and have a great time along the way. Watch for the "sound of the opening bell" coming soon. Remember, first come first served.

Thinking it Through Some More: More on What Else? Social CRM

Bob Thompson raised a very important question in Jeremiah Owyang's Social CRM Pioneer group (public), which I suggest anyone who reads this post, should join. "Can You 'Do' Social CRM without Social Media/Networks?" It is a serious addition to the continued discussion that is going on enmasse throughout the social sphere about what Social CRM is. Bob's question in combination with other extraordinary conversations such as this one on Frederique Garzon's blog last week, and ones ongoing among the varying denizens of the Accidental Social CRM group, along with several other discussions, which I have to admit irritated the crap out of me due to their entirely self-serving, uncooperative nature, crystallized some of my thinking over the last few weeks and makes me want to saunter forth for a moment to lay out some things that I thought I would like to clarify - some of which I've either written about in CRM at the Speed of Light's 4th edition, or via my blogs, other pieces new or at least resituated from where I thought about it previously. So, if you're game, I'm game.

The Customer Ecosystem

I'm trying to figure out a way to make this seem emphatic without capitalizing all the letters. Lets see....Okay I think this might work. The business ecosystem is controlled by the customer. Period. That means its NOT controlled by the company and its NOT jointly controlled. The controller of this ecosystem is going to be whatever group drives demand and, currently that is I think, indisputably, the customer (if it isn't that - meaning you want to dispute it - prove it to me. Take my word for it - it would be tough.). While we call the the customer-boss the social customer, that doesn't mean that all customers are consciously social. Those who are social demand much more of the companies that they deal with including some way to communicate with that company transparently. That goes along with an expectation that the company is going to take action on the communications in some way too. Here is a somewhat simple, sorta catchy slide that outlines what the social customer is.

We've seen the actions taken by companies in response to the social customer literally countless times for good and bad with bad being the recent Nestle's brouhaha and good being Procter and Gamble's ongoing work with VocalPoint, Connect & Develop and use social marketing (as in the Sparklebody spray example). Nestle is a great example of how savvy organizations can take advantage of the customer's control of the conversation. The incident which is well documented here began when the company decided, that Nestle's customers who were supporting Greenpeace's campaign protesting Nestle's use of palm oil for their Kit Kat candy bars, bought from an Indonesian company who were apparently involved in the decimation of the rain forest. If Nestles had been smart and had responded the way they could have, which was to issue a public statement "we stopped buying from them" - which they did. it would have all been over. Instead they violated social customer rule #1 - if you don't like it, don't delete it unless its truly offensive. Instead, they decided to delete all posts from the Nestles Facebook page that altered the Kit Kat logo to make it look like "Killers'. They compounded the action with a really snotty employee who responded to the complaints about deleting the messages with incredibly buttheaded sarcasm - and continued it for quite awhile. Naturally, the customers took hold of this, drove up the Facebook page fan membership to 96,000 mostly detractors and rammed the employee's snotnosed comments up his - nose. Even though Nestles had actually dealt with the problem by stopping their purchase, it didn't matter because they had attacked the social customers who came to one another's defense. Nestles created a firestorm they didn't have to. To see what Nestles might have done in this circumstance, read the Altimeter Group's Jeremiah Owyang on the approach that Nestles (and others) could take. The fundamental point is that the customer's command of the ecosystem is firm. Their are other countless examples of this - enough to make the case definitive. How the social customer communicates in this new environment is changing too. Nielsen's Online Research's “Global Faces on Networked Places” survey found in March 2009, for the first time ever, when it comes to those using the Internet, more of them are communicating via communities (66.8%) than via email (65.1%). You can extrapolate from here (I do). The social customer communicates in a world of one to many via multiple channels as frequently if not more frequently than even one to one communications, strengthening his or her ability to impact more than one person at a time. Let me clarify something else again. Not everyone in the world is a sophisticated social customer. In fact, I would venture to say that most of the people in the world aren't that sophisticated nor do they communicate much beyond the phone at this point. But even those who aren't "social customers", are affected by how they communicate via phone. There are 3.3 billion cell phones in the world and they are available inexpensively and even free to the poorest person in the poorest town. That means that communications via a phone - whether strictly as a voice-to-voice device or via other services like text messaging, is now untethered and allows for real time or near real time response, possibly in multiple ways. That means that even these non-savvy customers are being impacted by the communications revolution that's occurred and that has given the customer the ecosystem control. If you want more detail on the customer ecosystem, I'd humbly (though being a New Yorker, I'm not THAT humble) suggest you purchase and read my book. Or go to the McGraw Hill professional site and get the five free not-in-the-print-edition-and-no-need-to-register chapters here What this means for your business is significant. It means that you need to cede control to the customer's ownership of this conversation. In the past, where, even if you were at a customer-centric company, your company controlled how they communicated and responded to customers. That meant the marketing and messaging, the way and time in which you responded to customer service complaints and queries, the products and services that you provided, were all pretty much based on your company's operational objectives and business methods. What this cession of control means is that you recognize that, unlike the past, the channels of communications are now owned by the customer - and there are many that they can use to communicate that are outside your firewall. It also means that they have a series of demands that now have to be met or they can quite easily - much easier than ever before - take their business elsewhere - and get the same products or services they were looking for from a competitor of yours. It also means that they control how, when and what messages they want to hear from you - and when they do respond or proactively communicate with you they can do it in a way that your company can't control - because the effective communications channels are public. If they decide to communicate with you, they expect certain kinds of channels should be available to them - and if you don't provide them - they will communicate publicly instead. Of course, as I've repeatedly said, even with the customers' control of the conversation, your business still has control over its own internal operations. But how they need to be used in customer facing activities is what you've lost control of. For example, processes that the customer doesn't like, even if you do, will lose you their business if you don't change or replace them. Nonetheless, as a business you still have to set business goals, develop KPIs and other metrics that benefit your expected business result. You need to establish the processes that will make your business run effectively. But in this new world, you have to consider the effect that the customer has on the process and the effect that the process has on the customer. Sound strategy tells you that business process management is no longer agnostic. Its not coincidental that those vendors who had been strong BPM providers such as Sword-Ciboodle and Pegasystems are staking their claim in CRM now. They understand the trend and rather than resist it and hope that things are what they were, they are acceding the change and making the appropriate strategic adjustments to their products, services, etc. Make no mistake about it. If your business doesn't understand this, for example, they won't provide the level of transparency that the customer is now demanding to make an intelligent decision on how he wants to interact with your business. But if you do this, there are multiple opportunities to actually take what could be a vast problem and turn it into a vast advantage, actually giving you the opportunity to recruit advocates. Okay, treat this as the context.

The Strategy and Model Suggested by the Customer Ecosystem

I think there's one more thing before we get into Bob's question. I'd like to reseat the ongoing bigger discussion a little bit. A few points:

1. Social CRM is an extension of CRM, not a replacement so some of the tenets of traditional CRM remain as important as ever.
2. The true difference between CRM and Social CRM is the customer strategy associated with it, not the use of technology. Traditional CRM was a customer management strategy that was aimed at providing the programs to a business so that they could be more effective with their customers in providing them with the products and services that they needed. Social CRM is a customer strategy that aims at engaging the customer with the company in ways that allow each to make an intelligent decision on how they can interact with each other. This allows them to both transparently cooperate - and meet each other's needs. Make no mistake about it though - even though the benefits will be mutual, to make this work, the business organization has to be realistic and acknowledge that the customer is now in the driver's seat.
3. That also means that the new business model is different too. The traditional model associated with CRM was based around providing better products and services to the customer - and also good customer service. It was a sales driven model to some degree - thus the first mover in CRM technology was salesforce automation. It was also transaction-focused, driven by purchases. The new model is interaction-driven (though transactions still matter, obviously) and with that, the most interaction-directed pillar, customer service, is emerging not only as the primary of the three pillars of CRM, but as a wrapper around all interactions in business.
4. This new model is no longer based on just the constant improvement of products and services. At this stage businesses need to be aggregators of products, services, tools and consumable experiences - so that the customer has what they need to sculpt their own involvement with the company that they've chosen to be involved with.
5. In the longer term, the model will be (hopefully) a company that's sufficiently transparent, institutionally structured and culturally ready to collaborate and innovate directly with the customers. Obviously, this isn't the way that most customers will interact with all the companies that they have some interaction with. Many times we buy for immediate need and for convenience - and that mostly doesn't require deep or rich customer/company relationships. But it is the way that companies need to structure themselves, allowing for the fact that while social customers of the level I'm speaking of don't exist in the billions, those that do exist (could be hundreds of millions - given the ubiquity of internet connectivity, the near ubiquity of broadband connectivity and the findings that 74% of all adults on the web are active in some social network or another) have influence far beyond their individual purchases and there will only be more and more of them as time passes and tools to communicate cheapen - even as features get more sophisticated.
6. One thing that CRM and SCRM have completely in common is that no matter how you view these things, or define them, or implement them, they are based on the customer experience with the company and the perception of the experience by the customer. As I always say, "you don't have to have luxury, you only have to feel luxurious."

Okay, now on to Bob's most important question.

Can You "Do" Social CRM without Social Media/Networks

Emphatically yes. The same way that you could always do CRM without the use of a CRM technology system. Nothing has changed when it comes to whether technology needs to be used. Social CRM is a reflection and acknowledgement of the changes in customer behavior and the resulting demands on business institutions. It means that the company needs to figure out what the customer is demanding and how to utilize the new formats and channels that the customer is communicating in already. That's what makes it social, not social media. First a quick look at what at least I think when we're talking about when we talk about social media and what Bob T. makes clear in his question. There is a distinction between social media and social networks. Social media are tools (blogging, podcasting, client communications tool, etc) - and, as a matter of fact are different than social channels such as Facebook and Twitter. For example, Twitter is a communications channel while HootSuite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic etc. are tools that facilitate communication via Twitter outside Twitter's native client tool for communications via Twitter. I'm going to leave it at that. Social media doesn't have to be included in programs for customer engagement. That said, there is no reason to constantly disparage the use of technology or denigrate its importance to a Social CRM (or traditional CRM) program. In fact, for the first time in a long time, consumer technologies like cellphones/smartphones and various web tools are partially driving the changes to the customer's behavior because they are cheaply and easily available and eminently learnable, which makes these new modes of communication simpler than ever. Unlike in traditional CRM, where technology was strictly an enabler, not a driver, in SCRM, some technologies have been drivers of the transformation in the customer and are now becoming in part drivers of business change. I don't want to overemphasize this, but I do want to note it because its something that I personally wouldn't have supported several years ago. I do think that consumer technologies and social channels are impacting business in ways unheard of years ago. Look at the iPhone or Facebook or the growth of the social media monitoring space in a short couple of years. The use of a Facebook page (channel) or sentiment analysis tools to monitor brand activity outside the firewall can only be part of a strategy that's based on the programmatic requirements that a company has when it comes to gaining the kind of insight into the customer to provide them with the aggregate component I mention above. But if you can provide an extraordinary customer experience without them, then don't use them.

Doing It Without (Oh, Be-HAVE)

Several years ago, I met the CIO of a Latin American branch of a huge multinational corporation who told me that their competition was huge when it came to nabbing distributors for their products. Because most of their distributors were in small villages, there was no internet connectivity at all. So the only way they could communicate with most of their distributors who were mom-and-pop sized was via the phone or in person - and they sometimes didn't have phones. The only thing the the star distributors (small retailers) got as a reward was great signage. What could they do? Social CRM tools or CRM tools didn't do a thing in this situation. So here was the game plan I suggested.

1. Provide vacations and prizes for the best distributors that gave them something for their families, not just signage for the business
Produce a newsletter of some frequency that went out on the trucks that dropped the products (I said "treat the drivers as your internet") to the retailers. Make sure that the contests and stories about the winners in addition to useful tips and business news appeared in the newsletter.
2. Hire all the drivers locally, since they would then know the retailers in the surrounding area and it would strengthen the relationship.

You get the picture right? No internet, no social media, no SCRM technology, but a customer engagement strategy designed to give this company a real advantage due to the social bonds between retailers and the drivers and using the preferred communications channels of those customers. Here is another example that I've used many times. The Green Bay Packers - has been wildly and widely engaged with its direct customers - the town of Green Bay and many others outside there for more years than there has been a CRM, much less an SCRM. They have a social media presence which as you can see is minimally indifferent and apparently ineffective. But what they do have is a program for community engagement, which is a hallmark of SCRM. Their purpose is to turn those community members into advocates and nothing less than that - again, a hallmark of SCRM strategy. They've succeeded with a measurable ROI and no particular CRM or SCRM or social media tools making much of a difference to that strategy. The program is an engagement and advocacy program whether there are tools or not, and here, for the most part, there are not.

A Case Study In Social CRM Without Technology: The Green Bay Packers

View more presentations from Paul Greenberg.

That said, there's no reason to either laud the non-use of technology or the intensive use of it. One of the values that CRM technology has always had and this has carried over to SCRM related technologies - is that if they are used well, they make the implementation of the strategy easier than it otherwise would be and interestingly less costly. Or at least more effective. For example, imagine if there were internet connectivity in the example of the multinational in Mexico. If the retailers had been reasonably skilled at communicating via these channels with the tools, there would be a lot easier path to both communicating with them and understanding them better (think data captuer and analysis). Again, to answer this as best as I can, SCRM doesn't need social media nor does (did) CRM need systems to implement a program based on a particular customer strategy. Depending on the company, customer base, etc. what it takes to implement an effective program varies from company to company. Nothing changed there at all. Hopefully this helps. It helps me clarify my thinking, I have to say. Please do me a favor. The reason I didn't make this a comment in the Social CRM Pioneer group is because of its length and because there are other conversations going on about this beyond there. But rather than comment here, please do me a favor, click on this link here and put any comments you might have on what I say in the Social CRM Pioneer Group. I think that that would be appropriate and a good way to further the discussion. See ya later. I'm starting work on the CRM 2010 Watchlist "3 months revisit companies" and will be making a few other comments and additions to that list. Watch for the first post on the updates 2010 CRM Watchlist over the next few days. If you're interested, here's a link to a PDF of the entire Watchlist including Brent Learys SMB contributions that ZDNet has so kindly provided. (Registration necessary for download) Also, i'm going to be traveling a lot. You can find my calendar at Tripit, though you'll have to register and become part of my network to see it. If you want to meet up in one or two of these locations, let me know and if its at all doable, I would be honored to.

SAP Business Influencers Summit - Technology Strategy Dr. Vishal Sikka (SAP Labs)

Dr. Sikka begins by talking about what SAP is calling "Timeless software"

First up, In Memory Computing

THe idea is to incorporate column stores in main memory with use of multi-core processors provide up to 1000 times performance gain. The business value of doing analytics with in memory computing is apparently phenomenal. One billion rows of data are analyzed in a sub second. The applications become simpler and faster. Real just in time calculations can be done. The TCO associated with the layers and intermediate stores literally "goes away." Can "add columns on the fly" and add "more blades on the fly." From data to hardware, extensibility becomes possible. Inventory mgmt. Shows a blade with a terabyte of main memory. All transactional data of most large customers can be stored on it. Data by columns in main memory allows us to deliver brand new applications, not just analytics. Another commercial for "real real time computing." Lauding sales info that was available "befor the customer left the store." Data delivered in less than 2 seconds. Data is compressed in mory. Can do the calculations on an iPhone, in office, "on the beach." Snapshot of biz as it exists "this second." Commercial over. Now going to show us a demo of In-Memory Computing. "Timeless Software" as "software that takes no time." Showing Business Objects Explorer. Very fast. (PG: Seen it before. Almost instant). Have an interesting UI. Can do the same using Excel interface and it goes as fast as it did when shown on its native interface. Sub-second response for 275 million records. Showed its use with Microsoft "haptic" technology (PG: A.k.a Microsoft Surface). Now

Cloud Computing

Low cost infrastructure, scaling and operations via cloud computing (using Google's approach). See the in-memory based cloud apps (PG: Stringing their new initiatives together) Dispensing "the myths" of cloud computing.

1. Everything won't be running on the cloud
2. SAP does run in the cloud. Says that the Apple Store (ITunes) running in the cloud on top of an SAP system. The way its being positioned is that "SAP powers many Internet-scale, mission-critical cloud services." (PG: Are they integrated with someone else's cloud capacity or providing it themselves? Not clear)

Now saying that Business By Design runs in the cloud and is running in-memory. (PG: I'd say BBD is running "in theory.") Saying that the Cloud applications are being built with Design Thinking. Showing an app for a contractor management system that is being hosted on Amazon (PG: FINALLY know who is hosting SAP cloud). Showing the app on the iPhone. (PG: Seen several apps from demos on stage to more private demo - all iPhone apps NO Blackberry apps. That's interesting given the SAP/RIM alliance that was so important at the 2008 Sapphire. IPhone seems to be gaining ground everywhere at RIM's expense - even at SAP. That's actually significant). With contract management - contract management running in the cloud is the consumable part but the integrity of the backend SAP system is maintained. THe SAP Contractor Portal also integrates with Google WAVE and other collaboration capabilities. Vishal says "ease of consumption has to be across the board" Now talking about Pervasive Connectivity and mobility. 4.1 billion mobilephones, 35 million iPhones, 5 Google Android-specific phones; new Blackberries; Facebook has 350 million users - 50 million in 2 mos.; SAP Community has 2 million. SAP thinks there is an enormous opportunity for clustered collaboration. Fidelity of the information is guaranteed by back end connectivity. The idea is to connect "the physical world with the system of record" This could be smart devices - e.g. smart meters etc. (PG: Best Example is Coca Cola Freestyle vending machine that records user choice and wirelessly sends the information to an SAP system back at Atlanta HQ. Wonder why SAP doesn't talk about that?). Discussing interoperable components: Looking at ambient-real time systems - "CESTBon" is the name of the system. CESTBon can look at an Outlook email and recognize relevant content associated with a system. So if "purchase request with a number" is in the email, it actually can link it automatically to the system's knowledge of the quote and bring up the data live in real time without having to go into the system. They've added a Supplier Rating that is based on social knowledge coupled with sentiment analysis that gives a rating. (PG: Now THAT is pretty cool. Social SRM?) That's it for this (AND my power is running low)

Enterprise 2.0: An Idea Whose Time and Annual Conference Have Come: Guest Post from Steve Wylie

I'm heading over to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston on June 22. If you're interested in the social customer and how businesses should respond to them - and how workplace performance can be improved - this is the one conference you shouldn't miss all year. I mean that. Go. I'll hook up with you if you're there. Contact me via Twitter to set up some time. I'd love to make contact with you guys. Also, there are going to be a number of industry luminaries there like Ross Mayfield and Thomas Vander Wal and Mark Woolen from Oracle. Susan Scrupski of the Enterprise Irregulars and well, you name it, they're there. I'm going to be doing a panel sponsored by Radian6 on Social CRM with Brent Leary, Michael Thomas and Frank Eliason (the Comcast rocker) on the 24th from 5pm to 8pm. I'll publish the details soon.

To get across the fact that I really think you should bite bullets of time and money and come to this thing, I asked Steve Wylie, the GM and Conference Director for this knockout of a conference and all around good guy, to write a guest post because I don't think I'm persuasive enough and this guy has those needed mesmerizing powers to get you there - using rational thought as his hypnotic tool of choice. He is also the editor of the Enterprise 2.0 Blog, which means he can write a pretty mean posting to begin with. He'll give you an idea of why an Enterprise 2.0 event is even more cogent than ever.

SF-based Steve is an events industry veteran, having handled some of the biggest conferences around including the Interop mega-events in Las Vegas and New York. He is an IT industry veteran too, as the former program director for InteropNet, which ran a multi-vendor test lab geared to evaluate, improve and showcase early implementations of open-standard IT infrastructure technology.

I'm always amazed at what it takes to run an event. I think event planning is a magnificent and difficult venture. But Enterprise 2.0 is not just an event, but one with actual content - and plenty of networking. Oh, if you want to hang around with the rock stars of the social web, they hang there too. Here's where you can get more info on the conference.

I'd truly take advantage of this and make the effort to get there.

Take it away, Steve

The Next Phase of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

Paul kindly invited me to share my thoughts on the Enterprise 2.0 market and provide some highlights for the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. As the conference chair, I've got a fairly unique perspective on the state of Enterprise 2.0 and some ideas on where we're headed. We're roughly three years along since Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee first described this new category of enterprise software and organizational strategy that he dubbed "Enterprise 2.0". Someone recently asked me what's changed in the Enterprise 2.0 market from that point to present day.

For starters, we really didn't have much of "a market" to speak of three years ago. At that first Enterprise 2.0 Conference we described a new vision for business applications that included some truly ground-breaking concepts. Attendees were largely business users and managers, frustrated with the disparity between fast-paced, consumer technology innovation and the dated applications being supported by corporate IT. At that first conference we were embarking on a radical journey to turn these business applications and the corporate culture around them upside down. We were ready to take on the world.

Fast forward three years and those early aspirations are now grounded in reality. Momentum is building for what is now truly an Enterprise 2.0 "market" and we're seeing many early signs of success. But while we've made tremendous progress in three years, Enterprise 2.0 concepts and applications are still striving to reach more wide-spread, enterprise-scale adoption. There is an abundance of use cases around small or department-level successes but far fewer examples of large-scale deployments - examples of Enterprise 2.0 concepts and applications that form part of an organization-wide fabric for productivity and communication. Why is that?

While we could argue that this is a very new market and that businesses take time to change, I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be challenged by large-scale adoption until corporate IT is fully on board. Early adoption has been largely driven by business users and department-level managers. They had a problem to solve and were fed up waiting for IT to provide the solutions they needed. They took matters into their own hands by finding workable, web-based solutions and even celebrated this new found freedom from IT. With a few exceptions, IT took a reactive posture to Enterprise 2.0 and viewed it as a threat to be managed, secured and even blocked in some cases.

Three years later and I see that posture changing for many IT leaders. We're entering a new era where forward-looking IT leaders embrace Enterprise 2.0 as a strategic advantage and as part of a cohesive, company-wide system. This change is an important ingredient to the next phase of Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

So what should you expect from this year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference? Expect to network with nearly 1500 people from over 40 countries. Expect our most comprehensive program to date with deep coverage of new topics like Social Media and Cloud Computing. Expect even more innovation from industry veterans and start-up vendors preparing for the next big thing. And expect to hear some really compelling case studies and speakers from organizations like the Obama Campaign, the US Army, Booz Allen Hamilton, Volvo and Jet Blue, all ready to share their experiences on how Enterprise 2.0 is transforming business - changing the world.

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