Today, we're excited to have a guest post from Helpstream friend, Esteban Kolsky. Esteban has decades of experience in customer service, market research, and technology. He is currently working as an independent consultant, using his vast knowledge of the CRM and customer service industries to help vendors create market strategies that engage end-users and retain loyal customers, a cause those of us Helpstream deeply support. Esteban is also making his mark in social media helping clients adapt strategies and prepare their organizations for social networking and implementing social business applications.

This post is in response to my three-part series on The Rise of the Social Business Applications. Please read on and join the discussion in the comments below.  -- Thanks, Tony

I read with interest the three-part series that Tony (Helpstream CEO) wrote here on the Helpstream blog (read it here, here, and here).

I must confess, I was very curious as to what Geoff Moore would say about this nascent field of social media. His work on Crossing the Chasm was the cause for most of the innovation in the years since the book came out. I think that the view of creating new markets instead of technologies was one of the main reasons for the speed at which we have progressed in this new Internet world.

I reached out to Tony to get a better idea of what he had said, and what his opinion was of the social “revolution.” Tony told me that Mr. Moore emphasized the lack of information available to the middle manager in the organization to make good decisions, and how social business applications are the first technologies to come around in a long time that may help them. He also added that the terms Social CRM, CRM 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and similar that we are using are not used to define markets, rather technologies, and that the real market to be created is by helping middle managers get access to better information to make better decisions.

I agree with Mr. Moore’s position on what the market is – totally. Very often we create “markets” around technologies to satisfy our marketing needs at the present, without consideration on how to evolve a technology into a market.

I agree with the idea of a social business application, and I think that Tony did a good job of describing what Helpstream and others in the field have done to deliver such an app.

However, I must say that I am a little disappointed in the way that the vendors are delivering on the vision of a “social enterprise.”

The approach indicates that social business applications are a continuation of what we have been doing until now, but with an added community flavor. Almost as if the community has merely been added to the organization and social media is merely there to support the addition.

This is where I think they are missing a big, big thing. This wave of social media may just be exactly that, and some vendors are correct in what they are delivering, but they are missing the bigger picture.

What has changed for the organization is not the relationship with the customer – the customer itself has changed.

We went from a customer-as-a-lamb model – where the customer had limited knowledge and power with the organization and was at the mercy of the corporate will – to a much improved model where the customer is truly in power and the relationship has changed from a one-way seller-to-buyer one to a collaborative relationship where customer and organization must partner and both will benefit.

This new customer is, thanks to the Internet, knowledgeable, connected, and loud; they want to be heard. They think nothing of the digital world – they actually embrace it and prefer it. They are the first generation of what is called a “digital native” – people who were born and used technology all their lives. They relish communities; they don’t know any other way to work. They were educated and brought out in teams. They are a collective looking for power – and they are finding it as customers.

I don’t agree that continuing to do business as usual with these new customers will work. And that is where Tony’s definition, and Geoff Moore’s by extension, of a social business application should have gone further. Sure, today it is about providing the hybrid customer base (old customers and new digital natives) a way to connect and reach into the enterprise.

Alas, the power of these applications can only be summoned by looking at how this new customer – the digital natives – will use the tools to interact with the organization. I want to see social business applications embrace new ways for organizations to work, new ways for customers to aggregate, and new power being added to both.

Then we will have the best social business applications.

Excuse me for the Romeo and Juliet reference, but I do think there might be an undercurrent of unbridled passion for any term we might offer up to describe the integration of social networking to any enterprise application. There is most certainly a divide (perhaps unconscious) between two camps of very ardent supporters of their preferred terminology and nomenclature. On one hand we have the Enterprise 2.0 or E2.0 enthusiasts. One the other we have the CRM2.0/Social CRM/SCRM camp, arguably a sibling of the former or a distant cousin perhaps – related for sure but in some people’s view not as worldly or well rounded. The E2.0 camp might say “we are a platform, we have broad applicability and can enable a number of critical applications." The SCRM camp might say, “we solve a specific business problem and help companies engage customers in a more productive way which is THE most critical application of all.”

I have been tracking with great interest the Twitter threads coming out of the E2.0 conference this week in Boston, with posts by folks such as Rachel Happe, Dion Hinchcliffe, Gil Yehuda, Sameer Patel and others. I have been tracking the #SCRM thread for some time, where you will find Paul Greenberg, Brent Leary, Esteban Kolsky, Natalie Petouhoff and others. It has been fascinating to see how these two threads paralleled each other all week, with so much in common yet so very far apart. I even asked a simple question of each thread – “who on this thread is also tracking the other?" I got one response. The themes are so consistent: How do we drive adoption? Where is the ROI? This is not about data it’s about people. Here is another great case study. Interesting to witness for sure.

Paul Greenberg, penned a superb blog post today on his experience at the E2.0 conference. I think it’s fair to say Paul was more than a little excited about the conference, essentially calling it one of the most vital events for anyone interested in the social enterprise. Yet he also noticed the same divide and was a bit surprised that there was a dirth of content on SCRM. Curious given the strategic importance of customer oriented initiatives these days. Has this omission of SCRM from the E2.0 event dissuaded Paul from carrying the social enterprise flag?  Far from it. In his words as he looked forward to the Rockstars of Social CRM panel for which he was a speaker (more than 500 attendees expected at last count) – “Rock On, Social CRM."

Tony Nemelka has visited with folks in both the E2.0 and SCRM camps over the last several weeks. He too noticed the divide. After several exchanges on which terminology to use, his final comment was simply “neither." Neither really does much to help the ultimate consumer understand what we are all about in the end. Tony finds the term Social Business Applications inclusive of both camps and perhaps more appealing to customers who have been inundated with ___ 2.0 this and ___CRM that for so long they have become virtually meaningless. And Geoff Moore most certainly would agree we would all be better off if we would get together and collectively help companies understand what we offer and make all of this safe to embrace.

(This is part three of a three-part blog series on the Rise of Social Business Applications based on a meeting with Geoffrey Moore, world-renowned business consultant and author, Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive Software, and Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext.)

A Customer is a Terrible Thing to Waste

In my two previous posts, I mentioned the need to include customers in your social computing strategy, so let’s dig into this topic a bit more.

Simply stated, customers are the most neglected asset in companies today. Despite the fact that huge investments have been made in systems theoretically designed to manage customer relationships, these systems were actually designed primarily to keep customers at arms length. Deflecting customers and reducing the costs of resolving customer problems has been the primary design criteria for the vast majority of so-called customer service systems in use by most companies. This is the sad but true reality, and we’ve all been victims of it for a very long time.

In essence, companies have done to customers the same thing they did to middle managers. Though companies rely on customers more than ever, they’ve isolated customers and deprived them of the tools they need to positively impact the business. In a world where lower levels of the organization are being asked to do so much, companies haven’t provided a way for their people to truly engage with customers and solicit their help and participation.

Customers who have already spent money with you are very likely to spend more money with you. Customers have experience using your product and they know what works, what doesn’t, what needs to be improved. Customers are a tremendous source of ideas for new products and innovations you might not uncover otherwise. Customers will refer you to other customers if they are happy with you. Social business applications are the critical component for unlocking this value.

Helpstream’s mission is to lead a new wave in customer service, one that is focused on engaging and leveraging customers. Helpstream provides social, community-aware business solutions that turn customer service into the most strategic activity in the company. We believe the next-generation of customer service professionals, particularly those in middle management, will be focused on helping companies leverage their customers to build community, solve problems and increase the value customers receive from the company’s products and services. Our job is to provide the technology platform to make that task easy and rewarding for everyone involved.

(This is part two of a three-part blog series on the Rise of Social Business Applications based on a meeting with Geoffrey Moore, world-renowned business consultant and author, Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive Software, and Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext.)

What To Look For In A Great Social Business Application

A well-designed social business application should provide several avenues for driving more informed decisions. Management should be able to leverage the wisdom of crowds, identify and communicate with experts, and aggregate and analyze input in real-time to quickly eliminate bad choices from consideration. But with so many vendors jumping into the “social” fray, what should a company look for to make sure it doesn’t choose the wrong solution? There’s an awful lot of “social” makeup being applied to some truly ugly “process” pigs, so I’ve compiled my top 10 list of things required in a true social business application:

1. The application should be organized around people, not transactional data. Business transactional data should be secondary to the primary task of connecting people to people and people to information, leveraging expertise through the entire collaborative process.

2. ROI should be driven by unlocking the productivity of people, including customers. Real-time ROI metrics should be continuously available to help guide best practices and ensure delivery of real ROI.

3. The application should be deployed with a specific business focus, but with the potential for broader applicability.

4. The application must be effective across departmental silos.

5. The application should be designed to inform the middle manager’s point of view. Metrics, reporting and real-time analytics for middle management are essential, as are powerful search and other exploratory capabilities.

6. The application should enable “collaboration in the moment,” providing for rapid, mass collaboration to resolve issues and get to answers quickly.

7. The application must be social-channel rich. It should leverage the heck out of popular social media and emulate their best features.

8. The application must include robust permissions and access controls around both people and information. Companies must have control over what people can do and the information they create and access.

9. The system should provide plug-and-play connectivity to both existing business systems and to communities in the cloud.

10. The total solution must be incredibly easy to deploy and require very little training. SaaS and application appliances are great for this, as is a consumer Web app look and feel.

If you have a corporate strategy to push decisions down in the organization while leveraging social media and customer relationships, but you don’t have a system that meets these social application requirements, then you will fail. Period.

Last week, I was privileged to meet with Geoffrey Moore, world-renowned business consultant and author, to discuss the future of social business software and applications. I was joined by Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive Software, and Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext – comrades in the war against process-driven enterprise irrationality ☺. Much of what follows came out of this very insightful meeting.

In the grand scheme of things, the 1990s were the golden era of enterprise IT. Fueled by an insatiable desire to drive efficiencies by leveraging powerful, low cost computing systems — and accelerated by fears of a Y2K-driven collapse of existing systems — companies automated and re-engineered their business processes like never before or since. For the enterprise IT industry, it was an era of unprecedented growth. Since that time, consumer IT has emerged as the dominant sector in the IT industry as nearly every human on the planet has plugged into the cloud and become part of the technology infrastructure.

As information technology has transformed both enterprises and the customers they serve, companies have greatly reduced resources by eliminating layer upon later of middle management. The middle managers who remain are under tremendous pressure. They face the daily task of making quick judgment calls and course corrections, yet they rarely have the time or resources required to make sure they are making the right decisions. This problem has only grown worse as executive management has continued to push decision making lower in the organization, right onto the virtual desks of middle management.

Social Business Applications to the Rescue

Addressing this urgent need in organizations — helping middle management make sound judgments faster — is where social business applications really shine. When developed and deployed with specific business requirements in mind, these applications can greatly improve the speed and agility of people performing a wide variety of decision making tasks, especially those decisions benefiting from the collaboration of a lot of people, particularly customers.