Is my face red? Should be… you know what happens when you assume – right?

Well, to me the demand was a given considering the interest in the market, but you are absolutely right – if no one wants it, it does not matter. My bad on that one.

I am very much in agreement with the rest, even with the part where you say 100% agreement is not necessary. That is the biggest caveat that I can add to my post: you don’t have to agree 100% on a definition, as long as we can get close enough.

I just want to contribute my 2 drachmas to the subject, trying to control the hype and prevent end users from being confused as to what to do in the new “market”. If we can prevent that, as I said, we have a better chance of growing and becoming better… and be able to focus on best practices, deployments, etc.

Which is the fun part of this.

Thanks for your contributions — very valuable and appreciated.

Thanks
Esteban

As for ‘S’CRM – I have been following it now for some time with the accidental community (I’ll come back to that) – and agree, it’s not a market.

At best to me it’s just another channel, in the same way that E or M or X is a CRM channel. ‘Social’ is simply another channel, the key difference being that in my view, previously an organisation that was trying to manage the Customer Relationship would almost always own or be a part of the interaction, it would be one to one, two way between a customer/prospect and an organisation.

Then came communities, forums, groups and otherwise – enabled by some very cool technologies, the rise of Mobile and more important mobile data and we have accidental communities, we have flash mobs we have meetups, niche groups and otherwise. These aren’t accidental, these are people who get the same joy/rewards etc from expressing and interacting on ideas to move things forward. This has been well covered in Clay Shirkys book – Here Comes Everybody with some great examples. We all like spending time online, talking to people, my wife and son all go to meet the other young mums and share experiences in a coffee shop, more accidental communities. Here the organisation doesn’t own, or may never be involved or engaged in the conversation. My wife will come home and talk about how they compared products that worked and didn’t work for the new mothers.

From a vendor perspective – we are now able to listen, understand and interact – and from an organisations benefit we do that to improve service, build and protect brand. Traditional vendors such as salesforce.com have not really released a new product here, they have extended their platform with the service cloud, Oracle have enabled us to capture these external interactions in some of their Social CRM modules that enhance Siebel for example and here at Corizon we let you do what you want with Enterprise Mashups – just take the bits you want and mash it up to create what is right for your business. Even though there are already vendors out there dedicated to supporting these new channels alone, I don’t think it is a new market.

I also don’t think we need to agree 100% – perhaps a close general consensus as ultimately each business that will adopt and embrace it will do so in different ways – so I think it will always be subjective. Thats my rant over for 5 mins.

I like the CMDT moniker better, I was not one to chose CIH, I just came up with the concept, the naming was done in committee.

As for why there wont be a market for SCRM, add the super speed at which new social technologies come & go.
.-= Prem Kumar Aparanji´s last blog ..Social CRM: some temporary definitions =-.

Thanks for your comment. I agree with all your points – but unfortunately the problem is that without a clear concept and a definition we end up with vendor overhyping their solutions to be SCRM products (not solutions) and the hype and the lack of results will kill the chances of doing it right the first (and probably second) time around.

This happened to CRM, ERP, and so many other solutions that ended up being technology push because there was a market. My push here is to have the corporations and end-users understand that this is not a packaged solution so they can begin focusing on the need to create a strategy, put together a plan, and deploy a solution.

I know I am screaming at the windmills here, but this is what I think / know has to happen now. If we can focus on the solution as you say (and keep the vendors at bay on the whole “market” idea) we have a good chance of getting some good deployments there.

Thanks for the comment, always up for intelligent conversation!

If that is true then I have to feel bad for you

Thanks for the compliment. I have your blog on my reader and am looking forward to read it tonight — you make a good point on how to compensate engagement, curious to see where it goes.

Thanks
Esteban

Very interesting post. I am looking forward to taking this to your blog and comment there – make sure it gets more views and more comments. As for the size, I made a comment on the size below (i think), but the addressable market for Social CRM as a market is quite small. Sure, if you actually start mixing all these things together then you can increase the market size — but you won’t get a single vendor to become a SCRM vendor (I commented on John’s comment to that respect).

If it is a matter of revenue, then this market (Social CRM) is not a real market. There are components to it that can raise the market size – but even then, 1 BB over ten years is not a real market…

Let me know when you post this expanded in your blog…

Thanks
Esteban

Great comment (and not, it is not negative — it is well thought out and intelligent)!

While we can have a discourse on whether each bullet item applies to SCRM or not (not to worry, some vendor will come by and do that for us shortly), I think that the issue of providing significant change is much more interesting. I am not sure whether significant change can merit assigning a label to a market or not – but there is definitely something to debate there.

Is a new market a significant behavior change in business? I am not so sure, but I will think about it and come back once I get an idea either way for sure.

Thanks for the comment