Twitter - just a temporary hype?

I just read a post from Jennifer Leggio talking about twitter presence and overall social media strategy of corporations. And I have to agree that twitter has a somewhat limited value in a CRM 2.0 strategy as well.

The Comcast example might not be the blueprint for followers.
On one hand the twitter user numbers still seem to be growing fast, on the other hand I see lot of the communication moving to other platforms like Facebook. User numbers not necessarily visualize the amount of valuable information that is transmitted through such a platform.

My personal feeling is that the future will be a mashup of several social networks. Users will be looking for applications that combine the data streams seamless. I am using TweetDeck which has Facebook and MySpace connectivity already.

The idea of short messages enriched with pictures, location information and links to other sites might stay, but will twitter be around in a couple of years? Who knows…

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Twitter,Social Media

Socialnomics: Social Media Revolution

Looks like there is a new name in town… what happened to the Wikinomics?! The short version of the video mentioned earlier also re-uses the business velocity theme.

Check out the interesting video response from tippingpoint labs:

Not 100% sure if the hula hoop is a valid comparison, though… what is the value add of a hula hoop, really? not much I would guess. Social Media has more to offer I’d say.

Technorati Tags: Socialnomics,social media,CRM 2.0

Salesforce.com the big winner in 2009 ?!

The CRM Magazine has published the winners of their CRM Market Awards for 2009. Looks like SFDC is the dominant player, winning the top four categories (not really playing in the other categories).

Marc Benioff (SFDC CEO) is listed as one of the eight most influential leaders (next to Anthony Lye from Oracle and Tony Hsieh from Zappos). I am missing Paul Greenberg in this list…
It is noteworthy that Tony is in this list as someone that is actually doing CRM 2.0, not just talking about it or selling software that is supposed to implement successful CRM. This is a good example of how CRM 2.0 can look alike without spending too much thoughts on the technological or theoretical side of it, but just DOING it.
Tim O’Rielly (Enterprise 2.0) is also listed, because of his vision of the modern enterprise. Again, Tony has shown how this vision can be executed… Let’s hope Amazon can keep up this momentum and learn from Zappos rather than applying the Amazon culture.

Besides the extreme dominance of SDFC there is not a lot of surprises in the list of winners. Microsoft is massively gaining ground and I am unsure how Deloitte won the consultancies category – looks like they have done some successful projects to pass Accenture, IBM and Capgemini…

Amdocs (ex Clarify) does not show up anymore – looks like they killed the CRM business and put focus (back) on billing and their QPass and Cramer acquisitions. Although Rogers finally decided to upgrade to CES 7.5 and SmartClient, I am not seeing any new logos for Amdocs CRM in the past year).

Technorati Tags: CRM,Market Awards 2009

Social Media Ad

just came across this YouTube video that has some impressive numbers to show that the rise of social media (through Web 2.0 technology) definitely has begun…

Interesting that it picks up the comparison of the time to reach 50 million users.

Technorati Tags: social_media,CRM 2.0,business_revolution

The future of the Web (3.0?)

Creating a CRM 2.0 strategy that is viable in ten years from now would be tightly connected with an accurate prediction of what the Internet (WWW) will look alike by then.

But the question must be asked if this prediction can be made at all? The world is turning faster and faster. Predicting the next 10 years of the World Wide Web would be like predicting the rise of HDTV and Flat TVs in the 1950s…

Remember my slides around Business Velocity?

Business Velocity

View more presentations from Guido Oswald.

Or do you remember your top bookmarks in 1996 (I was at university at that time convincing the Professor to upgrade the 56k Internet connection…)? comScore lists websites like WEBCRAWLER.COM, NETSCAPE.COM or INFOSEEK.COM amongst the top 5 – all dead and gone ten years later!

On one hand, the ®evolution of the Internet is going at the speed of light (Paul did recognize this a while ago :) – on the other hand, I believe that the cultural revolution that has taken place, initiated by the Web 2.0, has passed its zenith and will continue at a much slower pace the upcoming years.

With the acknowledgement that the future of the Web is hard to predict, a CRM 2.0 strategy should not solely rely on the most hyped platforms like Facebook or Twitter, but focus on a foundation that will last when they will be gone in ten years from now. “Covering the base” is the motto here rather than jumping on the short living buzz.

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Business Velocity,Hype,Future of WEB

Do we still need Operational CRM ?

According to Gartner “the ratio of operational CRM, analytical CRM and social CRM in packaged applications will shift from 90:9:1 in 2009 to 70:20:10 by the year 2020”. This means there would still be a strong focus on operational CRM and the so called ‘social CRM’ part will only account for 10 percent of CRM suites in 2020.

One one hand I have to agree that operational CRM will still be an important part when it comes to CRM software – even in more than ten years from now. On the other hand I strongly believe that the way companies will execute a CRM 2.0 strategy will dramatically change and shift more to the ‘social CRM’ part than Gartner predicts.

My vision is a software suite that comprises not only traditional CRM tools such as a call center frontend and a sales force automation application, but also all the enterprise 2.0 features such as

• wiki-webs
• forums
• instant messaging
• knowledge management tools
• intranet search (across all platforms)
• social networking applications (linked to external/public platforms)
• web-conferencing
• video-conferencing
• Document collaboration / store

This would allow to effectively execute a CRM 2.0 strategy and reduce the operational part to a minimum as customers can be invited to use these tools (some thoughts need to be spend on security here…) and actively contribute rather than getting stuck in a fixed sales or support process flow.

Currently i do not see any CRM suite getting close to this vision. SalesForce.com might get there soon, but their problem is that the perception on the marketplace is still as a provider of sales force automation – the curse of the brand – and that the networks need to get (much) faster to allow the SaaS model (I do not see them doing Cloud Computing, yet) to deliver an acceptable experience with all these tools. Implementing the full set currently requires a best of breed approach including tools like Jive SBS, Google, SharePoint, WebEx and many more…

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Enterprise 2.0,CRM Software,Vision

CRM 2.0 vs. Social CRM

According to blogpulse the two buzzwords are heads up with a small advantage for social CRM:

For me these two have the same meaning, but I am happy for any comments if you think otherwise…

See also the CRM 2.0 definition Wiki: crm20.pbwiki.com/

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Social CRM,buzzwords,trends