There are so many aspects of what you are saying that are wrong, I don’t know where to start.

Let’s see…. for once I guess you missed the point of the post. There is no OLD and NEW CRM. There is one CRM with more channels and functions added. “Social CRM” is about bringing the voice of the customer to the “relational database” like you call it. In many ways that it was no possible before. I wrote in another reply how that brings more perspective to what we know about the client — what we are trying to do with CRM.

The comment about bringing transparency… apparently we know different companies. I don’t know a single company that wants to put their “dirty laundry” out – their data out for customers to see. They do want to address public concerns – but that has nothing to do with dirty laundry… it is about,again, giving the customer voice. BTW, before we had this “revolution” customers would also complain. Difference was that companies were not listening, not acting, or not getting recognized. This only changes the degree of value that customer complaints have. In the old days there was no way to integrate that into CRM – but by implementing social media integration we see that information making its way into the “old relational database”, into product marketing for improvements, etc.

When you talk about transparency… you do realize that social media today is still a one-way channel? there is limited value on information that goes back to the originator (be it the customer or the company). As long as integration between KM (for example) and Twitter does not exist, most interactions will be solved on a one-bye-one basis or escalated to a channel that can keep track of it.

I will ignore, because i don’t understand, the sound bite about old dog-chow. But to close my comment…

There is not a new software or technology or tool called Social CRM. the fact that someone in your position of advising customers wants to make the distinction scares me for the same reasons I wrote in my post… CEOs and other Sr. Management don’t want to think there is something new to replace what cost millions to implement. Yes, they want to expand and increase the value of what they have — but if you tell them to “move from the old dog-chow CRM” to a new, shiny Social CRM they will either ignore you or ignore the social media integration.

And — that is the danger of not seeing SocMed integrated with CRM.

Thanks for commenting…

Great comment. I like it. I will allow you to continue to use Social CRM as long as you make two concessions:

1. There is no ROI for social CRM (or whatever we are going to call it) because we have no idea what we are doing yet! We are learning as we grow (amazing how many “experts” and “gurus” we have for something we don’t know sufficient about… Kinda like having someone who is an “expert” at nano-robotic operations in humans). You mention that in your comment, so I think we are in the right place already.

2. It is all about the aggregation of data as the end result here. I mean, what else are you going to do with SCRM if not collect more data to augment your knowledge of the customer? (I wrote more about this in my reply to John above)

One more thing. You say that you are not familiar with forum extensions. I will concede that it has been done very poorly, but the eService vendors have had Forums as part of what they do for some time. OK, there is difference between offering and selling… But they are there. The DELL ideastorm is considered a form of forums as well. But they all still suffer the same problem: they cannot categorize information, or to say it better… They cannot quantify quality (no saying comments or forums are good quality, just saying that the non-quantity data is considered quality data). This has been ny pet peeve with forum vendors for a very long time. I am not even sure we can claim a solution to this before we arrive at the Contextual (Semantic) web — in any generation of it.

But that is the fodder for another post…

Thanks for a great comment!

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I appreciate your comment and I think you have nailed it when you said the difference between social CRM and CRM with extensions is understanding on the part of the people signing the checks. Which is the ultimate goal – right? at However, I want to make sure we don’t add too much to the “possibility” that social CRM or even CRM with extensions can bring. Look, when we look at bringing in social aspects to CRM (and I wrote about this in 2003 – before we had “social media” as a term) we are really looking at the ability (ais someone mentioned it in another comment) to truly bring the voice of the customer and the voice of the collective into play. That is all we are doing, seriously. We are bringing what they say or do in L-in, F-book, Twitter, etc. to bear — but the ultimate goal as far as CRM is concerned is to augment what data we have about them in our systems to increase our ability to interact with them. If we learn more about them, including their opinions, we have better profiles. And those profiles are the promised behind CRM working as expecting – with predictive analytics and all that.

There is not a lot of magic behind running a CRM system, despite the many years things remain the same: collect data, analyze, use that analysis in predicting behavior, use that prediction to grow your company.

While I appreciate the new stuff like anyone else, and even embrace it, I want to make sure that all of us doing CRM are somewhat pushing or pulling in the same direction.

And, if we need some taxonomy for that as Mitch said tongue-in-cheek earlier, this could be a starting point. I hope.

Thanks for the great comment!

>

To paraphrase Scott McNeely – There is no ROI… Get over it.

If you cannot find formula is because there is no proven value – yet – on these implementations. Social Media adoption for CRM is still all about Leap of Faith. And that brings my favorite sort of ROI calculation — the famous black-box ROI.

In go the costs and benefits, out comes the ROI — don’t know how it happens.

At least that is my 250 yen (you can add that to the benefits)

>

Because old CRM lacked the transparency of a witness. The data about customers was all there… but it was/is stored in databases that no one can see.

Social CRM- is on the internet, is there right before the public, for every CEO to see the dirty laundry exposed. When the dirty laundray stays in the database, its not actionable.

If Old CRM wants to catch up, it needs to figure out how to be transparent and witnessable…

otherwise it’s just a bunch of bits and bytes that will forever stay stored in a relational database that has little ability to change customer relationships.
@drnatalie

First, you are very welcome. I am nothing to happy to oblige. I just wish I had more time and less things to interfere with writing and continuing the blog. I do agree with you that social is becoming more important.

It is not that the social media was not there before, it is that some of the tools we had today did not exist, the value was not evident to businesses, and they did not adopt it. They are certainly listening now. The phrase “jump the shark” is replaced in business settings with the phrase “peak of inflated expectations” from the Gartner Hype Cycle. I have never found a better tool to explain how all these — thingamajings (to use your word) progress through organizations. It is very valuable.

However, my concern is that once tools and technologies reach the peak, they begin their descent into the “trough of disillusionment” – or the point where people stop talking about them and being interested. Of course, as with any good rollercoaster or any other ride, the speed of descent is directly linked to the speed of ascent. And we moved very, very fast and with lots of hype about Social Media.

I am concerned that as the decline begins (read Oprah and Ashton forget what was good about Twitter and people follow suit), we are going to lose the momentum we have. And having a silly label like social CRM will make it harder to sell and continue the process of adoption. I am fighting that by making it another channel because I know we can, as Mark Behrens said, convince Biz leaders of the value of CRM Using Social Media — but not on the value of “Social CRM” which they may perceive as a “new” thing. I hope that message gets across…

While I will agree to disagree on the terms I agree with all else that you wrote. There is a clear ROI for these social extensions, but there is not yet a clear method for demonstrating the ROI. I have made some poor attempts in this area but am continuing to find the right formula.

For now I will stop pushing on the name and return to focusing on the vision for what this needs to become.

John