The untapped value of complainers. Even a single customer’s dissatisfaction and distrust can soon infect a large number of others. So complainers, if left to their own devices, can do immense damage to your brand. Fortunately, just as boiling water freezers faster than lukewarm, companies can transform their harshest critics into the most enthusiastic advocates.
Don Peppers via fastcompany.com
The Social Business: From Data to Insight to Action
(via patomonge)
Social Business Predictions for 2012 « Dachis Group Collaboratory
It’s that time of year again. Enterprise social media has had an impressive ramp-up in 2011 as well as being well-poised for a banner year in 2012. However, along the way, social business has become a very broad topic indeed, covering a wide range of topics that ranges from social marketing and Social CRM to collaborative product development and Enterprise 2.0, with a good number of specialty niches in between them for good measure. This includes social HR and talent management to social business intelligence and social business applications, to list just some of them. It’s fair to say that in 2011, social pervaded a truly wide swath of territory in terms of business capabilities. While social reconceptions of traditional business functions began showing signs of some maturity in select areas (especially social marketing and internal collaboration), strong early adoption was also a hallmark of a few quite recent developments, in particular Social CRM.
Thus, with all this activity, it’s not surprising that it was at the beginning of this year that some estimates of the total investment in the social business industry exceeded $100 billion, an impressive figure for an industry that’s just about five years old. The big question for those now investing in and promoting social business approaches in their organization is, namely, what’s coming next? Are there any new major new insights that will reshape the field? The examples of hard won lessons of years past, such as the need for community management in most social business implementations or that social business should be connected to the flow of work, have been critical ones. What else have we learned?
IBM and SugarCRM on Wednesday announced a collaboration that makes Sugar 6 available on the IBM SmartCloud.
Through this integration, clients can now take advantage of advanced CRM solutions, deployable in a matter of minutes, while achieving all the benefits of a private cloud environment.
The Sugar6 application deployed through IBM’s SmartCloud is the exact same version that customers can get from SugarCRM for on-premises or hybrid deployments, according to Nick Halsey, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of corporate development at SugarCRM. “It’s 100 percent the same.”
Sugar 6, the first CRM application available on IBM SmartCloud, enables businesses across all industries to achieve visibility into sales, marketing, and support. Sugar on IBM SmartCloud combines SaaS with IBM’s infrastructure, service, and support and also offers seamless integration with other IBM SmartCloud offerings, such as collaboration, business intelligence, and analytics capabilities. The offering also integrates seamlessly with Lotus Notes, Lotus Live, and other IBM business applications.
The Future of Social Customer Relationship Management | Mashable
Killian Schaffer is VP/Strategy Director, CRM for Cramer-Krasselt/Chicago. You can follow him on Twitter @kschaffs.
Currently there’s a lot of buzz around social customer relationship management (CRM). Social media platforms and technologies like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are transforming how companies market their products and engage audiences. But when you’re also concerned about delivering results to your clients, you’ll do well to study the evolution from traditional CRM to sCRM.
Like different forms of intelligence – abstract, practical, emotional – customer data reveals different value traits that help to assess each individual. Then we can develop programs to extract revenue from that data.
While “transactional” value has been a mainstay for decades, the web and its social media platforms have introduced new “relationship” and “influence” measures. The more comprehensive data complements CRM’s traditional indicators:
The seamless integration of what we call the “Value TRInity” — transaction, relationship and influence — will be the future of CRM.
“Work with your customers as if they were real relationships, not an entry in some database. This means not just knowing who they are but talking and treating them as you would a good friend. It is possible in small and large scale. The hard part is making that happen within the processes of your organization. This isn’t something simply for the support department to worry about; they just happen to get the brunt of it.”
Smarter Commerce Briefing: Paul Papas in the Virtual Center | IBM Global Business Services
Catch the replay of the March 14 launch of IBM’s new Smarter Commerce initiative, with this first-of-a-kind live webcast from the IBM Virtual Center.
Paul Papas, a partner in IBM’s Global Business Services consulting organization, is the global leader of this new program. You can also watch the Q&A session from the briefing.
Finally, subscribe to the IBM Global Services Webcast feed to learn about upcoming events and to sample past topics.
via smarterplanet:
Last year Douglas Rushkoff took on the conventional wisdom of brand marketers at the Pivot conference. Earlier this year we posted his talk and it caused a good bit of debate about the nature of so-called “brand conversations” in social media, and the future of branding itself. This is an important topic as social CRM solutions begin to proliferate. According to Gartner, 4/10 of the businesses it polled are planning to roll-out social CRM initiatives within the next five years. A presentation by branding agency Face takes a different view and advocates a synthesis of data-driven social media analytics and qualitative methods such as ethnography to make branding relevant in the social media age. The presentation quotes Mark Earls saying “Consumers’ most valuable relationships are not with brands but with other consumers.”
Source: Smarter Technology
The smartest place to be for a company, customer or entrepreneur is at the intersection of business needs and new technologies. Here are 10 projects I’ve been watching that I contend will have a big business impact this year.
Starbucks: No, not its new 30-ounce drinks, but its new payment system. Using a smartphone and scanner to pay for your Starbucks’ purchase is just the start of mobile payment systems in the United States.
Starbucks Card Mobile app (Source: Starbucks)
Social network-driven phone systems: Skype and Google let you choose your own number. Google lets you choose which number will ring on which phones as well as provide speech to text translations of voicemail. Enterprise IT will decide it is better to join in, rather than fight the tide. Expect organizations to start building phone systems around such phone-in-the-cloud providers.
The next stage of CRM: Maintaining and evaluating customer contacts is still a big part of corporate IT. The success of companies such as Salesforce.com was built around taking balky CRM systems and moving them out to the cloud. The next stage is to manage all customer interactions including social networks. Startups such as Nimble have the right idea.
Smartphones in pinstripes: One phone with two faces. A consumer face and an enterprise face. Lots of talk about this one right now, but no real contenders yet.
The tablet app machine: Tablets are the new in thing, but except for Apple and some Android offerings, they are still mostly invisible in the enterprise. That will change as companies reorganize their development resources to address tablet applications.
(Read more on Smarter Technology)
