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March Madness - Non-NCAA: Copious CRM Tidbits - News, Personal, References, Coolness

March has been one of the more incredible months for sheer action when it came to the world of CRM. First, every CRM-related company, large, small or medium had some announcements that were actually significant; then the social gang decided to get in on the CRM action, declaring Twitter "Social CRM" and some of the CRM oldies but goodies decided to get in on the social "thang" trying to find ways of figuring out how good ol' operational CRM fit in - or didn't. I was busy as....hell throughout the month rockin' through 5 cities (counting NY twice) and doing 5 speaking engagements - and moving my miles for 2009 up to nearly 30,000 already. I even went to Chicago and did two....webinars. Plus I have a really great business-personal announcement too. Which those of you who use Twitter - a.k.a. Social CRM-NOT, or Facebook will already know. AND some really good stuff got published that I'm going to point you to.

So, we action, drama, intimacy and love here, people. Let's get this party started.

Get This Party Started

Okay, I figured that I'd get this party started with a "Get This Party Started" by Pink video - though clearly the video isn't Pink's official one. If you'd rather see Pink's version, click on this to go to it.

First the Personal Business Stuff

The most exciting thing - for me at least - being a narcissistic sort of being - is that I've been asked to be the Chairman of the CRM Magazine conference this year. This year meaning in 2009 - and on August 24-26 in NY. And, I accepted. I'm totally pumped for this. We're already just about done with the speakers and their slots and will be announcing them this coming week (I think). Sponsors are next on my agenda so all you vendors out there, pony up, babies!! You won't be disappointed - or maybe you will - I can't speak for you. I have to admit, I have a few trepidations because I've never chaired a conference before and I'm finding out that its a LOT of work. A LOT. A WHOLE F-ING LOT. But its a blast because I get to work with David Myron, and Josh Weinberger and Marshall Lager and the whole CRM Magazine crew - and they are a crew. They are also incredibly cool to hang out with. Believe me. No wait. Don't believe me. Come to NY (what a segue!), get a conference ticket and see for yourself. The only thing I'll tell you about the conference right now is that there is going to be a Live Performance of CRM Playaz at the conference with me, Brent Leary and some selected guests. I'll post links to this as soon as I have them.

I just finished a slew of presentations ranging from the Linkage Conference on Customer Value in FL, to a private presentation for GLG Group private equity and hedge fund customers to webinars for InsideView and Sword Ciboodle and finally an incredibly well produced, classy effort by Liminal Group, run by the inimitable Scudder Fowler. The latter event which I did in NY at the knockout beautiful Asia Society - amazing venue - was co-sponsored by Sage, who of course you know well from their CRM products and partnered with both CRM Magazine and InsideCRM. Josh Weinberger did an astonishing series of tweets via that ever-controversial CHANNEL (not social CRM application) Twitter that just rocked (or as Gen Yers and pretend Gen Yers like me say RAWKED). Here's the current way to access the four of them that could be accessed - needless to say though of course if it were needless I wouldn't say it - dumbest expression in history - which is why I'll keep using it. Where was I? Oh yeah, The GLG one can't be seen and I can't find the Linkage one (but I'm working on it) but here's the links to all the others and the appropriate notes.

In order of appearance (click on image to go to the appropriate page) (Again, these are for archived presentations - ignore the registration note on the images)

Sword Ciboodle Webinar: Serving them right: Maximizing the value of customers in a downturn - and beyond

InsideView Webinar: Real Customer Insights and Strategies in the Year of the YoYo

Liminal Group:

This is a rebroadcast (a very high quality one) of my presentation on The Era of the Social Customer. Also presenting at this event are Dave Van Toor, SVP of Sage CRM, who I've spoken of on these pages, and Penelope Trunk, a Gen X Business Leader who is an expert in managing Gen Y in the workplace. Here's a link to a sample of my stuff at this conference.

NOTE. This one costs $25.00 to see the entire rebroadcast. But, if you type in CRM20 its 20% off - meaning $20.00. The times and dates are:

Thursday, April 16, 2009 - 12pm - 2pm ET

Thursday, April 23, 2009 - 12pm - 2pm ET

Worth it. really. Click on the diagram and see the page for details and registration.

PERSONAL BUSINESS ANNOUNCEMENT

This one has me psyched! I've been honored with the chairmanship of the DestinationCRM/CRM Magazine national confab in August this year. That means that I get to speak, be MC, play around, put together the speakers lists (we have over 130 submissions/requests to speak), develop the program, play around, help drive sponsors and attendance and, play around. We have so many speakers of note and quality that we have three tracks this year. I'll keep you posted but for now just let me tell you that:

1. Its August 24-26, 2009
2. Its in NYC at the Marriott Marquis
3. There are marquis names speaking (what a segue)
4. I don't have the pricing but do have the sponsorship package.
5. I'm totally pumped about this.

Know why I'm pumped? I get to work with some of my favorite people in the world of CRM (and, in the world for that matter). That would be David Myron, who is the Editor in Chief; Josh Weinberger, who is the Managing Editor; and Marshall Lager, who is the Senior Editor. Truthfully, that's even more appealing than the conference itself, which is entirely exciting. They are wonderful people who are just a joy to hang with.

Period.

Status of the Microsoft-Salesforce Shootout

I figured it was time to let you know where the MSFT-SFDC configuration Shootout stood since it seems to have disappeared. Seems to have might be the operant term here. Its alive and well. And proceeding. For those of you who don't remember, about a year ago, I was upset with Steve Ballmer's declaration about the badness and "non-existence" of salesforce.com's configuration tools and the goodness of the MSFT CRM configuration tools so I put it to the test. Microsoft and salesforce.com agreed to a configuration shootout with each of them providing a team who would build certain processes and tasks and an independent panel of judges would decide which one did it better. The results would be announced.

Well, the rules are done; the tasks/processes are done; both Microsoft and salesforce.com have had them for a couple of months (the slow response is my fault not theirs. I've been on the road. Both have been exceptionally cooperative). Next steps are the following:

1. Finalize the agreement between the companies on the rules with the judges.
2. Start the shootout
3. Judge
4. Declare winner
5. Publicize results.

I'm estimating that we're either going to do this in the next month or so - OR we'll announce the results at the DestinationCRM/CRM Magazine conference in August. That's a little bit self-serving on my part, but might still be a cool thing. Any preferences? Next 4-6 weeks? CRM conference? Who cares? Let me know and I'll bow to the will of the people.

Now...The News

There is a news plethora, panoply, and pandemic. Let's look at it.

• The Open Cloud Manifesto - To a ginormous thud, IBM announced an "Open Cloud Manifesto" which basically seems to be a response to Amazon, Google, salesforce.com and others leading the cloud computing market - such as it is at the moment. The OCM was notable for the presence of a few like SAP, Cisco, EMC and others, but even more notable by the absence of all the market leaders. For more on this by me and others go to my blog posting on ZDNET. Also, in that ZDNET posting, I left one important (and really good) take on it by Josh Greenbaum. His perspective is right on the money. His second to last paragraph: "This is truly a case of getting so far out in front of a nascent market that it starts looking a little silly. Can we please organize our efforts around defining value for customers, instead of moving quickly to create a vendor war over a market that still needs a lot more careful thinking and definition?" Amen, Brother Josh.
• Sage Announces SalesLogix Online Community - Sage continues its accelerating thrust into becoming a "practice what you preach and provide" CRM (enterprise) vendor. Yesterday, they announced a SalesLogix Online Community for SalesLogix customers that does what communities do - engages customers. This is another forward thinking move by Sage in their efforts (successful so far) to revamp so that they are what they eat. A great move and welcome one. Here's a video tutorial on how it works that's worth a look.
• Salesforce Adds Twitter to ServiceCloud - Aside from the sex appeal of this offering - kind of like Brad Pitt teaming up with Angelina "Twitter" Jolie after he's already been with Jennifer "Facebook" Aniston - this is a great move by salesforce.com because it provides a decentralized channel-friendly approach to their ServiceCloud offering. While this is not the first offering like this - SAP seized that ground months ago - what it does do is both provide a useful capability to the customer service offering, cement salesforce.com's credentials as a full CRM suite provider (in addition to their platform offerings) - though their marketing apps are still weak - as are most of the CRM suite providers' marketing apps - and, most importantly, add to their portfolio for innovation leadership. I'm going to be writing a ZDNET blog entry on this, but, suffice to say here, salesforce.com might be moving back into the leadership of a CRM 2.0/Social CRM offering with the integrations with external social networks, the Ideaforce. offerings, and a number of other pieces they've added to the puzzle in the last few months. I'm truly impressed. I was worried for awhile that they were becoming too conservative a company in the places they shouldn't be - but I'm starting to think I shouldn't have been concerned.
• NetSuite Joins PaaS Battle Royal - On March 19, NetSuite unveiled SuiteCloud, their Platform-as-a-Service offering, entering the already crowded fray. This took their already well regarded NS-BOS operating system and combined it with a number of new tools and the SuiteCloud Developers Network, a network similar to the SDN at SAP or the developers network at SugarCRM (is that also SDN?). What makes their offering interesting is that it builds upon the NetSuite suite that already exists and, unlike the PaaS offerings of most of the vendors, it covers the enterprise applications gamut - from ERP to CRM so to speak (STS). NS-BOS was already an unusual offering because of it's purpose - building vertically specific apps for NetSuite through mostly its partner channel. There is more news coming from these guys soon. Stay tuned here and ZDNET.
• Sage (Again?) Adds SalesLogix Today Appliance to Offerings - SalesLogix Today is an internet plug-and-play appliance which means its a pre-configured appliance with SalesLogix locked and loaded. While I can't say this is a bad idea, I also am not as excited about this one as I was about the Online Community. This simply puts them in the camp of Cast Iron for CRM offerings - and Cast Iron has a big lead there - with applications pre-loaded on their appliance for salesforce.com, NetSuite, RightNow, Oracle CRM OnDemand, Microsoft Dynamics CRM - all as SaaS offerings and a host of on-premise offerings too. Then again, Cast Iron doesn't offer SalesLogix..... All in all, won't be easy and I'm not sure of what a good value this is. I'm going to need to be convinced. Brent Leary has a box and is running a test. I'll report back when I hear what he has to say.
• WhasSUP, SAP? - SAP continued its smart mobile strategy (I wish they'd be as smart with SaaS) by forming a partnership with Sybase to create a mobile Business Suite 7. Sybase? Sybase? The database Sybase? The one that you haven't heard a word from forever? THAT Sybase? Yep. The very same. Interestingly Sybase has one of the most advanced mobile platforms on the planet with Sybase iAnywhere - their Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP). This allows you to take any mobile application and, get this, on the fly, adapt it to the mobile operating system or platform that any device has on it. So you can take an SAP CRM application that has been optimized for mobile delivery and send it to a Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone and Nokia Symbian phone simultaneously and it will in real time (that's what on the fly means here, dudes) be usable on that phone's operating system. No special moves made. On the fly. Sybase's mobile platform has been named #1 by Gartner this year. SAP, in conjunction with their RIM partnership, is moving to take a strong position - and maybe even lead - in the mobile CRM/enterprise applications battle -which is a big, big deal. Obviously, time and results will indicate whether they are leading or not but right now, this is one smart move. And...Sybase? Sybase?
• Microsoft-Neighborhood America Integration: Social & CRM Integration Continues - This one is not suprising and surprising. Neighborhood America, one of my favorite companies in the world with great culture and a very, very good platform allied with Microsoft CRM Public Sector and integrated their social networking platform with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Not surprising is that Neighborhood America is involved in a significant step forward for the CRM 2.0/Social CRM strategists out there. Surprising is that Microsoft took a huge, though a little tentative step and was the one who led the way. Not surprising though, is that it starts in the public sector. With the Obama Administration firmly committed to open standards, transparency and citizen participation, public sector is not only one of the natural places for CRM and social platforms to meet up but is of real importance in the restoration of faith in the government. Neighborhood America has a lot of background in public comment so they know something about the public sector. They also have the current president of the CRM Association on board, Michael Thomas, and they already had a proclivity towards CRM so their role in pushing forward in this integration is not at all a surprise to me. Microsoft on the other hand is just starting to feel its new innovation legs as they wobble back on land so they are a surprising player but a welcome one in the evolution toward CRM 2.0. To take a look at the initial integration go to the Microsoft Public Sector Idea Bank.
• Helpstream Named "Cool Vendor of 2009" by Gartner and 2009 Rising Star in Customer Service by CRM Magazine - What can I say here? I'm gonna crow a bit. I KNEW I was right. I had these guys pegged for something special for a good long time now. Top-flight application, ownership of the category Customer Service 2.0 or Community-driven Customer Service; great knowledge of what 21st century customers needed - and how companies needed to respond. Ate their own dogfood. Great management (personable too!) with guys like Tony Nemelka and Bob Warfield, among others. All in all, my closest thing to Application Nirvana 2.0. Now the rest of the world is figuring this out. I'm really happy for these guys. They deserve the recognition. Of course, now they have to keep deserving the recognition so to speak. Their Rising Star award isn't up online yet, but is out with the April 2009 CRM Magazine print edition.

I'm done. See you guys with Episode #4 (later this week) of CRM Playaz. Got some announcements around that too. A bunch.

Heading to India

This isn't going to be my long winded usual post - partially because I'm writing it from my iPhone. But before I head out to Mumbai/Bombay, I wanted to raise a question which impacts more than just the parties to whom I'm speaking.

Now that we have President Obama in office, how he deals with the massive community organization he built using Web 2.0 tools is a huge issue for his administration - especially given his commitments to transparency and engagement of the citizenry.

The reason I say this Is because when you think about it his use of social tools was for marketing - how can you help the Obama campaign? Now they have to be put into action to serve the same constituencies. Meaning what can the Obama administration do for you? While there is mutual interaction on both propositions, the emphasis is radically different. What his administration does to meet that need can help shape the next four years.

OK. Off my soapbox and off to India. I'll report as best I can from there. I'm keynoting a conference on Loyalty. I'll keep you posted.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 - NOT LIVE FROM SF #10 - and Final

I've had a couple of days to rest my hands and brain, and think about Oracle OpenWorld away from the excitement of it all - which can generate a somewhat buzzed view. Let no writer tell you they are objective or dispassionate - especially in the face of passion and among the noise of 43,000 people who, for all you Shakespearian fanboys, were there to praise Oracle, not to bury it. Not only that, the distractions are now gone, like my 3G iPhone not allowing me to use (by crashing) every single app that was loaded onto it - except the default, Apple-loaded ones - which created enough of a grrrr condition to at times keep me from concentrating.

So, now, its time to review Oracle OpenWorld 2008 from a perspective that I can - CRM, and all things 2.0ish - and thus, you NEED to recognize the limitations of this review. There was a LOT more going on at OpenWorld than just CRM.In fact, the big announcement was that Oracle was going into the hardware business in an alliance with HP - The Exadata Storage Server - which, according to Oracle is an intelligent data server that uses the intelligence to direct the stream of data to allow for faster access and, for example, query results. There is a pre-configured version called the HP Oracle Database Machine - which is a series of the Exadata Storage Servers all running, what else, Oracle's database with Oracle's Enterprise Linux. I'm astounded at Larry Ellison's consistent fascination and commitment to hardware - given that he runs a software company - of course, with particular reference to his "the new model of computing is the appliance" - and the subsequent (in 2000) network appliance - which failed primarily due to it being prescient, not contemporary. Something like the steam engine invented by Hero of Alexandria during the reign of Roman Emperor Augustus. There was no cultural framework or infrastructure to make the steam engine anything but a curiosity so it ended being used as a weird toy until the centuries later "re-invention" by James Watt in the 18th century. (I remember this from reading Charles Beard's History of Business - given my age - I read it during Augustus' reign). Same with that "network appliance" which has made its appearance again as a thin client based on the Internet, with the culture and infrastructure there. So, I won't put it past Ellison to be right about the Exadata Storage Server ((I say this with grudging respect, given what I really think of the man) and the Oracle incursion into hardware.

Ellison also managed to get in an attack on cloud computing, I presume to maintain his image as irascible, with the following statement:

"The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

"We'll make cloud computing announcements. I'm not going to fight this thing. But I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud."

You'll note that he's "not going to fight this thing" because, I presume, walking the catwalk can be a way of generating some serious revenue, especially given the Oracle commitment stated at OpenWorld that they are going to probably be selling more CRM On Demand than on premise within a few years, so this might have been a bit of "bad boy" posturing. The discussion on cloud computing seems to sum up as "I think its ridiculous and stupid and I know we can make money from it so I won't do anything about it but fake a rant."

But I digress.....

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 - The Environs

First, you have to imagine the scene there - there being Moscone Center in SF. The city itself was DOMINATED by people in red badges, red teeshirts and red everythings else who were tied to OpenWorld. Every hotel near the Moscone Center was booked, reservations at restaurants were nearly impossible to get; the Moscone Center itself was packed with Oracleans who came from every country imaginable to be there. There were so many vendors who wanted to be on the Side of the Red that they had to break the Exhibition Hall into two exhibition halls - one with a third of the exhibitors and the other with (duh) two-thirds of the exhibitors. One entire street (Yerba Buena?) was shut down and covered with a tent top so that people had a place to go to eat lunch that was big enough to handle them. The scope was staggering. The noise and the buzz exciting - this is an "EVENT" not a trade show. Oracle has its fanboys and fangirls every bit as committed as the Apple variety. The difference is that the Oracleans do Oracle for a living.

Even the parties were huge. As I reported a few days ago, the Oracle Social CRM party was an event unto itself - which a projected pre-registered attendance of 400 which turned into a projected pre-registered attendance of 850 - before they shut off the spigot.

Huge.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 - The CRM 2.0 (aka Social CRM)-related Concepts

This is where Oracle stood out. Anthony Lye, SVP of Oracle CRM, recently named by me as "The Secret Vendor Intellectual" in my 2008 CRM Personality Awards, was dead on with his discussion of the transformation of the business ecosystem. He gave large audiences in packed rooms (there was a HUGE interest at the event in Social CRM) a very strong framework that was focused around what CRM 2.0 (not Web 2.0) is: "CRM doesn't have a clue what a conversation is and social sites have no idea what enterprise data is. That is where social CRM comes in." He spent a good deal of time showing the crowds how the addition of social characteristics and social tools such as collaboration technologies, recommendation engines, review and comment capabilities and of course the ever popular blogs and wikis, have a material impact on businesses when they are integrated with the "traditional" CRM transactional features and functions.

Anthony made another really important point in an AM briefing:

"Social CRM is a complement to traditional transactional and analytical CRM. It uses the conversation as its basis. On top of these conversations, we allow communities to form. I am not a thought leader, I'm a fast-follower. I'm taking what's worked very well in the consumer market and leveraging it in the business market. Consumer applications like Facebook are fun but they don't drive business. They're great for reunions and hanging out and throwing things at your friends, but in business you need the enterprise space that's around it. You need to able to bring in the ERP and CRM data; stuff that you'd never put on the public internet."

These are mission critical for all CRM 2.0/Social CRM discussions and Anthony spent a lot of time driving that home throughout the days of the conference - as did members of his SocCRM Crew. The framework for Social CRM was hammered home and into place by the end of OpenWorld 2008 - a good move by Oracle.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 - The CRM 2.0-related Content

There were two bows to the 2.0 world that I thought were culturally important and at the same time bolstered the Oracle argument that they were a true leader in the Enterprise 2.0 space (that said, they are A leader, not THE leader. Who that is remains to be seen. Long way to go yet).

Oracle Mix and New Culture

If you go to this URL, you'll run across something called "Oracle Mix." This is a social network that Oracle created, that was launched at Oracle OpenWorld 2008, but wasn't merely an appendage to OpenWorld. This is NOT an "event-driven social network" but a continuing one that was sparked by an event. What it consists of is a network with many subcommunities (groups) and a confluence of people, ideas, and reputations along with some social media tools thrown in which makes for a nicely organized appealing online community that is governed by the principles of what I call CRM 2.0 (though Anthony Lye, SVP of CRM at Oracle, doesn't like that term) or what Oracle and my good buddy Brent Leary call Social CRM. One and the same, always interchangeable. This is a walk the walk as well as talk the talk social CRM that Oracle is espousing. For example, as of this writing there are 73 members of My Oracle Open World Business Influencers Group - some who attended the conference some who didn't. Some are known business influencers and some aren't - known - but they might be business influencers. Here's a picture of my group:

Another sign of the times is the placement of bloggers/press tables in the Keynote Hall where the major keynotes were given. There were several dozen long tables that had electrical outlets on the floor with what turned out to be good wifi (at least for me) connectivity. The recognition of the importance of bloggers, while not a new event in the history of recent mankind, is still significant when it comes from a traditional software company that's re-inventing itself around a neo-culture that it wasn't very good at just a couple of years ago.

Like SAP, it seems that the cultural transformation of the company is being driven by a combination of external social forces and their specific CRM practice. Just as I saw at SAP's Sapphire event in May of this year, Oracle is also being changed - the "within" part being driven by the Social CRM group. They are not only engaged in their own applications development work, but are collaborating with other sections of the company - e.g. the Beehive people (Bee people?) and, from what I'm told, the Fusion folks to make their cultures collaborative and engaging - rather than siloed and suspicious - a HUGE change in how they do business and even act with each other. However, other than the CRM group, which is a major league outfit, they have a LONG way to go to get me to see a culture that is truly collaborative. But they are making strides.

Oracle Social CRM

This CRM related walking of the walk has been more than beneficial to what's coming out of the CRM group - its been materially transforming for parts of Oracle's culture. The social CRM applications that I saw at OpenWorld 2008 (#OOW08 for those who want to see the Twitterverse chatter) were considerably more complete than the ones I had seen just a month and a half before. Not only that, Sales Prospector was complete enough to be released as was Sales Library and Sales Campaign and their Social Marketing application was being developed in conjunction, with, gasp, a REAL CUSTOMER - L'Oreal in this case. The only weaknesses were a lack of any real customer service application that could be characterized as Social CRM.

I'm not going to cover the apps in major detail here - just a cursory look at one or two of them. First, I've done that before in prior posts. Second, they'll be in the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light. Third, this is meant to be coverage of CRM at OpenWorld 2008, not a deep dive on app features and functions. For a fresh look at them, check out Michael Krigsman's wildly popular ZDNet Blog, IT Project Failures in his take on the Oracle Social CRM apps - which I concur with wholeheartedly - from his look at the applications to his noticing the passion with which the Oracle CRM team works.

Oracle Social CRM was so prevalent and threaded so actively throughout the event, it was almost a theme of the conference. There were actually multiple demonstrations of the various applications and an astonishing number of presentations on them - almost too many if that's possible - done extremely well by Anthony Lye, Melissa Boxer, Mark Woollen, Tara Roberts, and Dipock Das. The demos of Sales Prospector, Sales Campaign, and Sales Library (my personal favorite) showed products at varying levels of maturity but still release-ready, if not client tested yet. The one that has the most to show - and the most to prove - is Sales Prospector.

Sales Prospector is premised on its ability, using the "like me" model, to forecast the rate of success of an opportunity. It "predicts" the likelihood of the deal closing, the time it is likely to close and the likely amount of the deal. It's based on the idea that the history of prior deals like "it" in combination with externally captured knowledge can generate a reasonably accurate map of the possibility of success - and uses the historic customer data of deals past to see which product mix would engender the best rate of success - in other words, an enterprise version of a recommendation engine. The purpose is to use history and social sources (external sources) to increase the likelihood of success - or, if you take the glass half empty approach, decrease the likelihood of failure.

Not only does Sales Prospector have this very useful purpose, but it looks pretty damned good too - with a UI that a salesperson can actually use. Here's a picture of it. Nice and clean. Almost easy to understand. Unfortunately, Oracle used this as their standard Sales Prospector demo slide and its a slide that only a high tech salesperson would love - I'd have been considerably more "ordinary" a.k.a. less complex than that. But, with that caveat, I think you can see how good the UI is for this under any circumstance.

Of course, the true test of Sales Prospector hasn't been passed yet. How accurate is it is pretty much what makes or breaks this app. If the forecast for likelihood of closure, time of closure and size of opportunity is close to accurate (100% would be a bit much to ask for anything made of digital pieces) then Oracle has a real winner that looks good too. If not....well. I'd give this some time. On the one hand, its been released and presumably is in the hands of at least a few customers at this point. So the test cases are coming. But, all in all, like all software, we have to be patient with the first phase of tweaks that will be necessary. We'll see how fast Oracle can roll them out as the results of the first "pilots" come in from real live production environments. I'm betting that they'll be fast because they are banking on the success of Social CRM for the whole company and this is easily the boldest and the riskiest of their applications.

Oh yeah, as a standalone it can be delivered with CRM On Demand. Forgot to mention that. Is that fashionably in the cloud?

Oracle Beehive

This is probably, at least the domain I can speak to, where Oracle just flat out fell down - though mostly due to the messaging - not the promise. Oracle Beehive was meant to be one of the dramatic surprises at OpenWorld 2008. It was surprisingly bad.

Presented as a Collaboration Server that, in effect, though the phrase wasn't used that I remember, was a Unified Communications platform that uses and integrates email, wiki, voice, conferencing, discussions, voicemail, blogs, chats as the communications channels and ties all of them to joint calendar, task, tags, contacts, search, presence i.e. the collaboration features. Sounds great, right up the CRM 2.0 alley and within the Enterprise 2.0 schema, but the demo showed us what? An Outlook interface, the ability to form groups within Outlook and the collaboration on a document - all in all something I could see five years ago on Lotus Notes or some whiteboard application - and less compelling that GotoMeeting.com, at least metaphorically. There were several problems. If that's how far along Beehive is so far, they should never have launched it or even pre-released it at this event - especially with the San Francisco citywide buildup it got. Ads on the sides of buses, for godssakes. If the functionality shown was an accurate representation of the development stage it was in, then it should NEVER have been show. If it was much further along than that, why show something that has long been surpassed by multiple other companies - like IBM?

Here's what it could look like in its ideal state:

The demo didn't even HINT at this, unless you allowed your imagination into almost impossible realms.

The idea of the Collaboration Server aka Beehive is smart and cool and progressive, though not game-changing. But when the best part of the Beehive event is getting a bee-shaped chocolate, there's a serious, though, no doubt, correctable problem. I hope that I'm shown to be wrong, because they have a potentially interesting product here - something built around a hot area in the world of Enterprise 2.0 - and especially CRM - and that would be Unified Communications - an area redefining the desktop and the way we actually use information technology to interact.

In Sum: Final Analysis

Personal expert biases aside, the discussion of Social CRM at Oracle OpenWorld 2008, was a major inflection point for Oracle's CRM applications. Probably the only criticism I have of it was that I thought that it was over-demonstrated - with a demo at the Oracle Social CRM party being inappropriate, given the expectation of a party was foremost on the minds of others - and it was a little repetitious throughout the conference. But all in all, the point was conceptually clear and the applications are just damned good. They need to get their services applications up to speed and their mobile Sales Assistant is nothing much to speak of, but everything else they have at this point is enterprise ready and will now be tested in the true battleground - the world of the enterprise. I think Sales Prospector is the one that is the most ready and carries the weight of risk on its shoulder - since its stated purpose is ultimately a more accurate forecast and a way of improving the odds of closing a deal. That's a lot to bear - but if it does - big time success - both for Sales Prospector and for proving that CRM 2.0 aka social CRM is now what companies considering how to engage their customers have to do.

This was an incredibly impressive event in sheer scope and level of organization. The Oracle CRM team did a great job of getting out the vote for Social CRM and giving it a conceptual framework. The failure was in Beehive which has some impact on 2.0 strategies of Oracle. Most of the other problems had had were not tactical or strategic but nitpicks not worth going into here. If I had to grade the event, I'd give it a B+. The Oracle Social CRM effort gets an A- and the minus is due to the spillover of the Beehive failure and the lack of a service component in any state of readiness for Social CRM.

Oracle OpenWorld 2008 - LIVE FROM SF #7

Ed Abbo is up on the stage now - new session - he's the SVP of Oracle Product Development (something close to that) - talking about the Oracle app strategy:

1. Product Lines - teams dedicated to each of the product lines e.g. JD Edwards
2. Teams dedicated to processes across applications - can be vertical
3. Taking advantage of Fusion based technologies - which means reusable components across product lines. PG - Follow Chris Carfi on Twitter for this keynote. They are focused on process innovation and business innovation - the user innovation side of things - not very structured and bottom up. Over past 10 years have automated biz processes w/in company's four walls. 40% of actions are outside of this according to Gartner - partners, suppliers etc. - extended enterprise. But there is also the people here. Partners/customers/employees interacting for new product collaboration and same with suppliers. Need to find out who has the most influence so that for example, one customer more influential over another. Gen #1 technologies fall short. Social networks etc. need to be invested in. McAfee has research to prove it works to invest in this. Tata Motors - Minoj Jain - Tata Motors - largest automotive mfg. in India and one of the largest in world. Investing $$$ in bio-diesel engines etc. Recently acquired Land Rover and Jaguar. They are using CRM Dealer Management system from Oracle. They went from 58% same day delivery in 2006 to 79% in 2008; post service satisfaction up from 77% to 92% in same period. They are selling this cute little car for $2500. (PG: I know the path to this car hasn't been that smooth though. Read up on it a few weeks ago) Doing a demo of Interactive Dashboards for the CRM Dealer Management System - supply chain metrics - supply, demand, material repository. Demo is okay. Not too easy to represent. Claiming complete visibility. Real time interactions are also claimed. Josh Weinberger Tweet: @kitson #oow08 #Abbo #Tata Ed Abbo has the kind of conversational dynamic that builds rapport w/an audience. He should be out there more. Now Wells Fargo HR CTO Adam Christensen: I'm skipping this one though its pretty interesting. Not my kind of turn-on though. Hand rest time again. I'll transmit some good tweets if I see them. Hmmm....Adam C. is showing Wells Fargo equivalent of Facebook for the enterprise - if that's true then the HR information not under the control of the employee is tied to her profile information which is controlled by the employee but hasn't said that). Tied to metrics for business performance. Really good stuff. Sorry for the silent treatment. Melissa Boxer is on stage talking about L'Oreal. Melissa is a really bright and long experienced person on the Oracle CRM team. Abbo: go to website and point of sale, they know who the customer is. Melissa: helping L'Oreal transition to new channels - mobile. iPhone in particular. Showing Body Shop iPhone app. Knows all my details through profile and replaces the loyalty card with native iPhone. Pulls up native CRM data. Can search for products on iPhone like Vitamin E Skin care. Can not only see an expert advisor rating but a "Person with similar skin" set of ratings, reviews. Has a Promotions for Me button and there is a uniquely targeted promotion - app knows point balance and allows you to use loyalty points to get discount. Can share promotion with friends, donate the discount in cash to charity or take the product. Show the loyalty id on the iPhone at the store and the transaction is done and the new data is included in the CRM system. Can see the updates and transactions and status on the phone. (PG: Saw this at Gartner. This is one of the best applications I've seen for the iPhone. Really good. Love to see this in more than a demo environment. Not sure if its in production or its beta or its proof of concept. Will find out and let you know.) Melissa is gone. Ed is talking about all the iPhone apps in the pipeline including sales etc. Now he's moving on to business process innovation: Looking at it from specific industries and also doing things like streamlining order to cash. For public sector they are looking at constituent service, case management, SRM/procurement, financial management - for example. Developing process integration packs for multiple industries. So for retail they have Loyalty management, PIM for retail and Financial Controls. Also app specific maps including an SAP specific integration pack based on their AIA architecture. "Not waiting for SAP. Being proactive." (PG: again, the stupid, though mild swipe. Just make the comment that you're doing it. Good enough. We know you're competing.) Anthony Lye on the stage (You go guy!): Demo of social CRM. Familiar Oracle portal is now more like Facebook, LinkedIn or Ning. I can design them, create them and invite people to them - with a strong governance model - and the ability to introduce enterprise level data. You can go to employees, yes, but also partners and customers. Conversations are occurring on third party sites. But this aids, facilitates the conversation. The sales productivity tools "understand the container they are working in." They understand the blogs, etc. The data sets are put together by members of the network. I can find a presentation and open in directly in the application. Captured social metadata so we can see the presentation ratings within the context of the specific social network. I can take the most popular content that uses the wisdom of the crowd that allows me to develop a presentation that is based on the application that is most used and most popular. In Sales Prospect, can "subsegment the data set" to see how to position something to my prospects. Can also use the external data from Reuters etc. to help decide the value of the oppty. and the estimated time to close. Which customer stories are the likely references is part of this too. Can run a sophisticated personal campaign into the combined company. SP understands that I can get information from CRM and the internet (e.g Jigsaw) and download those contacts that Jigsaw provides. Not only that, I can monitor my results. CRM was a tool that was built for managers. But didn't help sales people sell anything. But it is a fundamental tool and data is fundamental. We can improve on this through the integration of the social applications with the traditional apps. (PG: Now doing the 'why use salesforce.com' Anthony jumped past it it seems - thank you sir - by focusing on transactional, analytic and social). Anthony did a great job. Ed A. is showing future investment. Very interested in Siebel PRM 2.0 that they seem to be investing in. Plus their Loyalty management applications. Talking about PeopleSoft Web 2.0 user experience investment though don't know what they mean by that. Showing a video so fingers resting. Now a list of customers on latest release. Ahold, Cisco, Intuit, Baxter, Tiffany's, Ed Abbo is summing up as this comes to a close. Enterprise social networking and closing out.

Finally! Gartner CRM 2008 Wins Coveted CRM 2.0 Designation

I'm not a paid speaker at Gartner this year. Though I'm listed as a guest speaker. This is my subtle way of telling you that with what I'm about to say, I'm not pandering to anyone and that I have no proprietary interest in being kiss ass here. In 2006, I wrote a blog entry on the Gartner CRM conference that I called CRM 1.85. In 2007, I wrote a blog entry on the Gartner CRM conference called "Gartner CRM: A Kinder, Gentler Assessment". I'd say that they were at, oh, around 1.92 at that point. Nice clothes, comfy Mephistos on their feet but a little bit of paunch around the midriff, covered by the nice clothes. But, my loves, guess what? We've moved to a new realm here. There are 650 attendees actually hearing discussions that are as right brained as I've ever heard at an analyst conference. While I'm writing this, Dan Gilbert, Harvard Prof who specializes in social psychology, is doing a session entitled "Stumbling on Happiness", based on his book of the same name. Imagine that for a minute. An analyst conference with the subject matter of happiness. Lest you think they've gone soft in the right brain, don't. Happiness is something that drives customers now, doesn't it? When it comes down to it, its ALL based on how happy a customer is with your company (and, potentially you), isn't it? The metrics that analyst firms throw at you and that you scarf up like chips during a game are just simply what "proves" the case to you one way or the other. Oh yeah? Think of these numbers. You do a survey. You find that 34% of your customers are wildly happy with you, 24% are somewhat happy, 26% are somewhat unhappy and 16% were very unhappy with you. What would be your analysis of those numbers? That 58% are happy and 42% are unhappy? Yahhh, you could say that. But what's interesting really is that A. The numbers are supporting a survey of an emotional state B. There is an emotional granularity that you get right away though there are no numbers associated with it. Meaning you know the difference between somewhat happy and very happy, don't you? But could you tell me the importance of the difference between 55% and 58%? Okay, I admit that that I'm loading the dice in my favor with that statement because you could tell me the significance of the differential between, say 58% and 38% which is probably closer to the very happy and happy gap. But the key here is that the emotional states are as accurate a measure as the numbers are. More so in fact. But this is a digression. The fact that these were areas of interest at a Gartner CRM Conference is a staggering change. Gartner is really getting it. In fact, I was informed that they have a research practice/team at Gartner on social networking/social media - particularly social networking - that consists of 20 people - a huge leap forward for them and a big investment. And a welcome one. The presentations reflected that fact. What made the conference even more interesting or cogent if you have a taste for 2 buck words, is that many of the vendors showed the conference or me or both things they are doing that are actually interesting and innovative and takes what they've done already a significant step closer to that 2.0 happy designation. We'll blab briefly about them at the end of this tome.

First, Some Ambiance, Maestro

This time around, Gartner did it at the same place that Sage had held their conference in May 2008 - the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in what was Oxon Hill, MD and now has its own National Harbor designation. This is a monstrous, though attractively huge, indoor conference center that was designed clearly for Zeus and the other gods of Olympus to hold their annual events. High ceilings, marble floors, apparently weird rooms (being a local, I didn't stay there) and an atrium that had a Washington Nationals named kick-ass sports restaurant/bar, a steakhouse of the higher chops order, and a restaurant of unknown quality but distinctly Italian persuasion. The traffic flow was continuous, but orderly, the crowd buzz for multiple conferences going on, lively, the hotel staff friendly and the hallways totally confusing and dotted with couches so that you could rest after spending about 15 minutes wandering to where you hoped your conference track room was and it wasn't.

Okay, Enough with the Ambiance Already

The crowd roared, the eagles soared and Gartner's Ed Thompson kicked off what was a good conference with what I think was one of the best presentations I've ever heard on customer experience. I'm going to highlight it shortly. But there was a lot more to the conference. Michael Maoz, who you can see up on the mycrmcareer.com site with some snippets of his thinking (video, babies) did a presentation that I didn't attend but got some details from Michael about and some feedback from those who did on how social networks disrupt customer service. In fact, Michael has taken a, though I would venture to say, the, leading role at Gartner and to a large degree in the analyst community on the use of social interactions in what he calls "the Intent Driven Enterprise" - a business driven by the idea of collaboration for mutually derived and realized value. Something of course that I certainly love as those of you who know me, know I do. It didn't stop there either. The integration of social characteristics into the classic transactions that have defined CRM from its inception permeated the membranes of many of the presentations from Gartner analysts including high powered Twitterverse member and VERY senior Gartner analyst Scott Nelson, who drove Gartner's original 8 Building Blocks of CRM that are still the gold standard for breaking out traditional CRM's components in an approachable way. The vendor sponsors each had about 45 minutes or so to present their wares. Typically, the way they seemed to prefer doing this was with about 1/2 hour devoted to an idea or two of importance, a brief discussion of their application solutions and a customer who then told a story of, what else, successful user of the product? I attended both Oracle's and SAP's sessions. Oracle's was conducted by their SVP of CRM Solutions and a guy who needs to be getting some thought leadership due frankly, Anthony Lye. He outlined his view - which has become Oracle's - and, BTW, not the other way around - of how "social CRM" is the required CRM du jour and that increasingly the involvement of the customer in the actual nuts and bolts of the companies processes (a different approach than, say, SAP's), through their ability to access peer knowledge through the company was going to be an important part of successful sales organizations of the future. The reason that this was important was due to a Gartner stat he quoted which was that 40% of all business outcomes happen outside the control of one enterprise. As he put it, "Conversation is the biggest disruption in CRM." He also made the very important point that the move to a social CRM doesn't eliminate the transactional, it is added to it. As he put it "CRM 1.0 + Social CRM = Complete CRM." I'll tell you about the products in my Vendor showcase at the end of this conference look. SAP's SVP of Enterprise Solutions Richard Campione, did a bang-up job on showing the collaborative nature of the relationships between the customer and the company and how they permeated all aspects of the value chain that the enterprise presented. He called it, rather nicely, a "network of interaction" The biggest question was "how do I make advocates? The answer? From those who interact with me. One important - very important - point that Rich made was that interaction wasn't enough - it had to be real time. I've been a huge advocate of this for a long time. I think the core that this statement goes to is pretty straightforward. The social change that we're going through is a revolution in how we communicate that changes the expectations that we have of the results of those communications. When we twitter, or SMS, or even get on a mobile phone - we expect instantaneous - or nearly so - response. With 450 million broadband customers in the world, we expect no latency when we order on line. When we reach acustomer service rep. we expect instant gratification - and a solution to our issue that "works for "me." - Not just "works." Those are difficult standards for a company which has complex rules, workflow, relationships, and high volume activities relative to any one customer or individual, to meet. But, as customers, we don't care about that stuff. It needs a real time response - and if we expect that and don't get it - we get unhappy fast - and, in real time, go after the company that didn't meet our expectations - sometimes without mercy or recourse. SAP emphasized the coordination of execution and the synchronization of planning and like Oracle, revealed a product that I loved that I'll tell you about when I get to my showcase.

Some Interesting Snippets

Some piecemeal factoids, with some left-brained stats thrown in that will keep me in the good graces of those of you (or not you) that still love the left-brain more than the right-brain. From Michael Maoz/Ed Thompson's Joint CRM Predictions to 2013:

• The lag between drops in CRM spending after a GDP downturn is 15 months.
• In 2008, there are 1.4 billion on the 'Net and 450,000,000 have broadband.
• By early 2007, over 50% of some categories of consumer electronics were sold via the web.
• Google UK is now bigger than the largest UK TV station as an ad carrier
• Operational CRM's "critical uncertainties" thru 2013 are SaaS delivery, SOA promise realization, open source displacing commercial CRM; organizational ability to absorb new technologies; virtualization of businesses and BPO.
• Innovative vendors are Advisor Systems, Land Sonar, Vitrium Systems, Aggregate Knowledge, CVent, EveryScape, GetAbbey, The Fizzback Group Lemonade (EASILY the best name), SuppportSpace, Ydilo, Xmonic, Saepio Technologies, Salescentric, Orchestra Networks, Top Quadrant, Xoomix.

To some degree, the one place I disagreed with them on how they viewed the largest vendors and their moves toward the new CRM that was the theme of the 3 1/2 days. They saw:

1. SAP - Restarted the engine
2. Oracle - Regaining speed
3. Microsoft - in high gear
4. Salesforce.com - in high gear

. They commented that neither Oracle nor SAP had a "glam factor" and "were not known for innovation." On that front, I don't think that this is true any longer. Both SAP and Oracle have released new versions since last year and revealed solutions and application improvements at this Gartner Conference that were not only valuable additions to their product portfolios but are the height of fashion when it comes strutting on the CRM 2.0 catwalk. I also don't know that I'd put Microsoft in the high gear category either. THey have the potential, they have the horses, they have the leadership, they have the technical prowess and even some of the culture, but even Michael and Ed said their limitation was that they provided "core functionality" and not much beyond. So high gear might be overstating the case. As far as salesforce.com in high gear. As we say in Yiddish, Voo dan? or for those of you who aren't "What else?" However, they did, rightfully see SugarCRM, Zoho (I was SO right about them :-))and NetSuite as challengers that salesforce.com has to watch for. I'd say NetSuite will challenge SAP in the SMB market too. But they might have different criteria for what they see as high gear and they are two of the analysts that I trust in toto so..... But now to Ed's presentation and then we'll take a quick trip to the PG Gartner Exhibition Showcase.

Ed Thompson, Improving the Customer Experience - It Does

Back in 2005, when I spoke for the first time at Gartner, I found out after the show that they rank their speakers by the evaluations. I was told that out of the myriad of speakers, I had come in second. Being a New Yorker, the first question I asked my host from Gartner was, "Who beat me?" It was Ed Thompson. Now, fast forward to 2008, and I listen to Ed Thompson give a discussion on "improving the customer experience" and damn, if it isn't the best discussion on a customer experience methodology that I've ever heard - and I teach that. Once again, number 2 to Ed Thompson. Ed's specialty at Gartner, clearly for good reason, is customer experience management - a term that you know I hate - but still explains what it is he does. He started out by pointing out some stats:

1. 80% think customer strategy is more important than 3 years ago
2. 95% see customer experience as the next competitive battleground

YET

1. 43% of those same execs don't think their products are worth the price they charge
2. 56% don't think they deserve customer loyalty
3. 59% of them stopped using multichannel after one year of bad experiences
4. 60% of them think that technology makes customer experience worse.

. We know from Michael Maoz and Ed's prior discussion that CRM doesn't seem to improve much in the way of customer satisfaction (though in my case, I don't trust customer satisfaction as a valid metric at this juncture) so the world seems rather despairing. To make it even more difficult, says Mr. Thompson, there are different ideas of what customer experience is across companies, across depts. at the same company, and a wide range of ways that people measure it. For example, sales, service and marketing measure it in satisfaction, loyalty, advocacy. Marcom departments are looking to brand extension & reputation; product engineering is looking to quality. Okay, so far, so sad, but Ed took it and ran here. After making sure that we were clear that "customers had long memories" and that "satisfied customers aren't necessarily loyal customers" he made one of the most important points of the day - there is a difference between rational loyalty and emotional loyalty - something I think bears heavily in politics and the thinking that has to go on in public sector' constituent engagement strategies. Rational loyalty takes the form of "if I am committed to this company, I can get this from them." Emotional loyalty is "I LOVE this company and will tell everyone I can think of about it." Rational loyalty does NOT drive advocacy. Emotional loyalty does - and it drives profit. But rational loyalty is predominant. Great proponents of customer experience recognize that it engages the senses - all of them when done well. But one done well is a huge step forward. No one in the universe particularly can tell you Intel's logo. But if I say "Intel Inside" you'll hear the music. If you hear the music on its own, you can identify Intel as the owner. That's damned good. There is so much more to this, but I want to truncate it. I'm going to briefly outline Ed's 7 Pillars of Customer Experience Approaches from Left to Right Brained" which were the centerpiece of the presentation. In order from left-brained to right-brained:

1. Listen-Think-Do - This would be automation and control systems that enhance experience. Automated feedback processes, workflow that alerts management when an algorithm detects something that triggers the alert. The metrics of experience. Standardization of complaint management tools and process. Customer example: Honeywell ACS (not much of a surprise if you can figure out what ACS stands for)
2. From Out to In - This is where customer experience mapping sits. Ed calls it (as do many others) "moments of truth" analysis - a granular look at how the customer interacts with your company and what's the most important of those interactions to your customer. Customer example: Kaiser Permanente
3. Act As One - This means that the messaging is consistent across channels. Make sure that your internal operational consistency is effective in getting across your messages. This is one that I think diminishes in the face of authenticity of messages. I think that customers are willing to accept some "inconsistency" if they think that the company is trustworthy and authentic. I think I'd emphasize things here a little differently. the more effective and authentic the experience, the better. Customer example: MacDonalds
4. Be Open and Exclusive - This means be accessible 24X7, provide many tools for self-service, be trustworthy and respectful, provide reviews and recommendations for reputation and validation. Customer example: Club Penguin
5. Get Personal - Provide the means for the customer to personalize their experience with you - monograms, personal pricing, recognition on the site, mass customization (in the spirit of the Pine & Gilmore Experience Economy) and yet make sure it can be done easily without a lot of baggage or strictures. Customer example: Nike.
6. Alter Attitudes - This is when a company starts to engage actual face to face humans in the process of enriching the customer experience. For example, Southwest Airlines hires people who know how to smile, which is one of the make or break hiring criteria. When you have the personnel, you need to empower them and provide them with governance in what they can do - so you give them the power to spend, to provide discounts, you compensate them for successful customer experience that you measure, you give them flexible hours but a goals-based job responsibility, etc. The employees are empowered to provide a rich customer experience. Customer example: Southwest Airlines, Best Buy
7. Plan and Design the Customer Experience - Decide on the ideal customer experience(s) and then work out a plan to get there. Customer example: Disney

All in all, this was the most comprehensive and important discussion of customer experience that I've heard, and I have to admit, most in line with what I think and teach, so needless to say, I have a deep bias in this direction. It was on opening day but it reflected the kind of thought that went into the content of this years Gartner CRM content and for that, I'm glad. For all this, and because my hand hurts and I need to stop writing, I'm going to finally say after several years that Gartner truly gets it and this is CRM 2.0 and Gartner 2.0 that we're talking about. WHOO-HOOO!!

Vendor Exhibition Hall

Here's a few of the releases and segments I found really intriguing from the major vendors who attended - though didn't necessarily actually exhibit.

• SAP Twitter Services - I found this to be my favorite of the releases. This is a customer service capability that can be embedded in SAP CRM 2007 that goes out to Twitter can find customer service issues, do a "sentiment analysis" (a linguistics mining engine that SAP inherited with their Business Objects acquisition) so that they are able to see how serious a problem there is. Based on the analysis of the problem, business rules are acted upon and workflow triggered to make sure that the appropriate parties in the company are notified and actions are taken. Service tickets are auto-generated to deal with the issues. The name of the company (fictitious) they used to show this was "PC4U" which explained why I was getting tweets over the last couple of weeks explaining how a service ticket from PC4U was generated. I had no idea for what. Now I do. Cool. The dashboard can not only see he status of the service tickets but can sew outside consumer reports on the products or issues in question.
• Oracle Social Marketing for iPhone This is my second favorite, but is perhaps the most dazzling in the sheer number of Oracle Social CRM products coming out and the incredibly smart use of the iPhone by Oracle. While there are multiple products, which I'll write on at a later date, the one that truly reflects creative thinking is the use of the iPhone to allow customers to get product reviews from "people like me" from the product providing company. The iPhone Social CRM application would not only provide say, the standard reviews and specs for a Canon Videocam but would have a button to touch that would give the customer the opportunity to see consumer ranked customer reviews of the product. It could use the iPhone GPS to make them locally based. It is an excellent use of the iPhone capabilities to provide a way for a company to have some say in the conversation between consumers about the products its provides without controlling that conversation.
• SalesLogix 7.5 contextual filters - I saw the newly improved and radically better SalesLogix 7.5 - something that I would recommend for small and midsized businesses. Not only are they using the increasingly popular REST (Web Oriented Architecture) to do things such as scrolling within the browser (rather than the more standard "Next page" paradigm) but what I found really great was their contextual filters. Think about them this way. You have 1000 customer accounts. They encompass 30 states. When you want to use the filters, the only states that will show up are the 30, not all 50. As new states are added, they join the filter list. You get to do filter and use what you need to. This is a great feature that carries over into all categories and tags.
My favorite three.

Enough No More

Okay, folks, that about wraps it up. My hands are still sore from the accident so I can't write much more than this, but I have to say, I was jazzed about Gartner's content this year. Best yet. The analyst organizations seem to be on the move as they undergo the same consolidations as the IT industry. But at least what's left is getting better all the time. Gartner 2.0. Ahhhh.

So Much to Hear, So Little Time: Me, Brent, Jeremiah, and Sugar

Three things for you today.

First

A reminder. I have a webinar on Mobile CRM - the fourth and final in a series with SugarCRM that I've thoroughly enjoyed. The format is different. Few slides and a conversation between me and Martin Schneider, Sugar's Analyst Relations honcho.

Click here for the registration link.

Next....

Jeremiah Owyang, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Group and a social networking expert and rock star with a blog that's read by about 10 zillion did a podcast at Marketing Voices on the value of social networks to marketers. Its abso-friggin'-lutely solid as a rock with its focus to what has to be done by enterprises seriously considering social initiatives as part of their customer strategies. I would thoroughly recommend listening to it, since the CRM community is rather insular when it comes to acting on the changes it needs to make sometimes. This one makes you realize the importance of social networks for the enterprise in an era where the customer wants to be engaged, not managed.

Check it out and listen CLOSELY!

If

your browser doesn't support JavaScript, you can hear this at http://www.podtech.net/home/5308/forresters-jeremiah-owyang-the-best-and-worst-of-social-marketing

Finally...and of course most importantly

Brent Leary and I did a number on Cuil, the now totally maligned search engine on his popular broadcast, Technology for Business Sake. This was the predecessor for our much anticipated series (at least much anticipated by Brent and me) CRM Playaz, scheduled to debut someday either this year or early next year. That's why its anticipated. We kicked Cuil's butt around the table a little bit and had some fun with the clear issues that the engine had. Here's five minutes or so - consider it a preview for what you might hear on CRM Playaz. Way cool (not...oh you know).

Technorati : Brent Leary, CRM at the Speed of Light, cuil, social networks

Whoa Dude! This is Really Funny!

My pal, Guido Oswaldo a CRM veteran who gets the whole 2.0 thing, just dropped this piece of very cool UGC into his CRM 2.0 blog (always worth a look see). With some serious extensions of the musculature a.k.a. stretching you can find a CRM 2.0 reason for this if you want to or some deeper social commentary but it is just really well done. Really funny too. And a strong case of "true dat." A notable aside here is that it comes from Current. For those of you unacquainted with Current, its actually Al Gore's TV station. The business model is built around a collaboration between the viewers and the station. The content of the station is almost all viewer-created and there are monetary and other rewards if your stuff is created. Their slogan is "you make the news. We put it on television." Gore got into this about 3 years ago - maybe 4 - with people laughing up their sleeves and within about a year had 3 million viewers and an incredibly high valuation but I forget what that is.

You go, Gore.

Check out SuperJosh.

Technorati : CRM 2.0, UGC, social networks

Project VRM Meeting LIVE on UStream

Hey everyone, this is a DO IT NOW!! Blog posting. The Project VRM meeting is being streamed live from U-Stream. This is an important trend that represents the customer side of the CRM 2.0 equation. CRM 2.0 is the response to what VRM represents. It is a project run at Harvard and it is something I'm an ardent student and supporter of. Lots to go on this. Here's the stream.

If you prefer it on the site, click here on this link.

WATCH IT!! REALLY!

Technorati : CRM 2.0, VRM, Vendor Relationship Management, social media

I Dig (not Digg) Diigo (not Digg-o)

I think I finally found the Web 2.0 social tool I love. It has captured my heart. It's put a spring in my cerebral step. Its made my life easier because it is sooooo easy to use and so many people who I've invited to this particular dance have come. This is a dance that has a bit of hip hop, a little paso doble, a bit of the ballroom and some jazz. This is easily the best social bookmarking and research tool that I've run across on the web and given that I'm in a geeked out frenzy most of the time trying out zillions of tools that's saying something big time. Most of them are tried, not bought if they cost, and discarded within about 2 days which is my ADD-tested and approved patience limit. For example, I figured out in a more fevered state that I've tried 13 Twitter clients already - settled on 2 - OutTwit and Tweetdeck.

That would be Diigo. Spelling D-i-i-g-o. Two eyes? Two 'i's"? Whatever. Spell it right and then go get it.

Diigo is one of the few Web 2.0 tools that I find both useful and utterly cool. It actually has value and purpose, because it best represents social bookmarking - which has value and purpose. Lots of it to someone who lives on research -feasts on knowledge and spits out judgments which may be questionable at times (many times) but at least are raising information-soaked questions, not judgments devoid of content.

Let me show you my Diigo dashboard first. (not a friggin' WORD about that picture. Understand?)

This should give you a good idea of how the whole thing works. You can create "groups" which are communities of interest really; you can communicate with individuals by sharing bookmarks to data. On the dashboard you can see the bookmarks you taggeds, the lists you've created to organize the bookmarks, the tags you've created to reflect the bookmarks to the community at large and find like bookmarks, the sites that you focus on and, of course, the groups I just mentioned this is coupled with a very cool toolbar that makes it easy to capture a bookmark. See the next Figure (Click)\

What makes this remarkable is that I can not only save web content that has research value to me in an organized way that's easily accessible but I can share that content as I pleasure and receive bookmarks from others who participate with me as my friends or as members of an open or restricted community also. So it gives me the ability to get what I need while I write CRM at the Speed of Light to make a ubiquitous example even more so, and then to solicit the links from someone who is supporting the effort. Wow. MAJOR MAJOR benefit.

Try it out. Use it. Join a group. Create a group. You want to understand social bookmarking as capabilities for engagement and community? This is the one you need to know. No other one comes as close. Period. And I've looked.

Technorati : Diigo, Social Bookmarking

Check Out Brent's Webinar on Barack Obama and Social Media; Very cool stuff. Coming To A PC Near You....

Brent Leary, THE small business CRM expert in the good old U S of A and a specialist in Online Business Development, Dave Bullock are going to be giving a webinar on July 9 at noon that I think you should register for. Maybe I'll keep you in suspense and I'll....NAH. Its on how Barack Obama used social media to parlay his way into becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for President. Its an amazing story being told by an amazing storyteller so the lessons learned will be good - and from a fresh direction. If you don't want to go to the site and register. Heres the info you need to do that.

Here's the info:

Brent Leary (Inc Magazine and Black Enterprise Writer / Radio Host)
David Bullock (Business Owner / Online Business Development Specialist)

Topic: Barack Obama's Social Media Lesson to Small Business
Host: Brent Leary
Date and Time: July 9, 2008
12:00 pm , Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -04:00, New York)

-------------------
To register for the online event
-------------------
1. Go to https://demo3.webex.com/demo3/onstage/g.php?d=695278719&t=a
2. Click "Register".
3. On the registration form, enter your information and then click "Submit".

Once the host approves your registration, you will receive a confirmation email message with instructions on how to join the event.

Don't miss this. I have one two hours later. More on that in about two hours. Gotta keep consistent.

REGISTER!!

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