Having spent many years in marketing, I tend to often think a lot about how people make decisions and how to provide them with the best information to make the most educated decisions for their specific needs. Call me simplistic, but that’s what I think marketing people are supposed to do. So, as I ponder where we are with Social CRM at the end of 2009, I am naturally inclined to apply a framework I often rely on as a marketer – The What, The Why and The How. Let me explain.

The What

In my experience working at companies pioneering new products and creating new markets, customers typically struggle trying to understand what the new-new thing is all about. I think back to my days at Sun Microsystems where we spent a lot of time, along with a lot of other vendors in our ecosystem, explaining what client-server computing was all about. Similarly at Latitude Communications (now part of Cisco), we spent a lot of time explaining what Unified Communications was all about. In fact, at both of these companies it took awhile before such naming conventions took hold in the market, and so we struggled with the many different ways to describe what we did in simplistic terms that the market would understand.

In 2009, the Social CRM industry certainly struggled to help the market understand what it was all about. If you followed the #SCRM Twitter thread at all, you would have seen vigorous definitional debates where various industry pundits, vendors and interested parties alike argued about what exactly to include or not to include in any definition of Social CRM. A number of outstanding contributions towards the definition of Social CRM were made by folks like Brent Leary (the creator of the #SCRM “accidental community” Twitter thread), Esteban Kolsky, Sameer Patel, Mark Tamis, Graham Hill and of course Paul Greenberg. And there are many, many others who participated in that discussion and who continue to be active on the #SCRM Twitter thread.

Though no single unified definition emerged in 2009, I found many people were very fond of and have since quoted Paul’s simplified definition which seems to so elegantly capture the spirit of the underlying Social CRM movement:

“…<Social CRM is> the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation."

Whatever definition of Social CRM one prefers, I believe a tremendous amount of progress was made in constructing a framework which the market can now consume. And in my experience, the coming together of a common naming convention with a definitional framework that practitioners can understand and begin to evaluate is a clear sign that the industry is taking shape and is moving forward.

The Why

I have found that once people begin to understand – in their own terms – what something new is all about, they will next ask the question “why should we care?” It’s very easy for participants in an early stage market to celebrate the coming together of a definition and a naming convention. And why not, it takes a tremendous amount of work to get to this stage in a new industry. But unless the question of why someone should care is answered sufficiently, it will be very difficult for the new industry to move much further. This is the phase of a market in which many vendors articulate their value propositions, essentially explaining that an investment in The What will yield some positive value to ultimately justify The Why.

In 2009, there were plenty of Social CRM value propositions being put forth in the industry. From ROI whitepapers, case studies and panels of experts at industry conferences and events, it was hard to not to pay attention to the tremendous amount of information published on why Social CRM is a good investment. The industry saw excellent work on ROI from Natalie Petouhoff at Forrester Research. Natalie also pulled together excellent case studies on Social CRM. There were two terrific Social CRM panels at the E2.0 conference in San Francisco, hosted By Oliver Marks, Sameer Patel and Clara Shih. These panels featured speakers from analysts such as Ray Wang from Altimeter Group and Natalie Petouhoff, as well as from vendors such as Wendy Lea from Get Satisfaction and Bob Warfield from Helpstream. But perhaps more importantly were the panelists from companies of all sizes – HP, Juniper Networks, Eloqua, OpSource and Marketo – talking about why they invest in Social CRM.

Perhaps the most striking and most often cited example of why companies might consider investing in Social CRM is the United Breaks Guitars video posted by Dave Carroll on YouTube that garnered some 5 million hits, including the attention of nearly every national TV network, only 48 hours after being produced. So, looking back on 2009, I think it’s safe to say there is evidence the industry might have made significant progress on validating why Social CRM makes sense.

The How

Once an emerging industry has provided customers with a clear understanding of what the new-new thing is all about and why it’s a worthwhile investment, people next look for guidance on how to get started and how to be successful. While folks may know they should or even have to do something different, it’s not always easy to know exactly how. Back at Sun Microsystems we would often get the question “what does it take to set up a network of Sun workstations and how do we deploy the applications we need?” At Latitude we were asked, “how do we get employees to start using MeetingPlace (our Unified Communications solution) and stop using AT&T (or MCI or Sprint etc)?” With Social CRM, as with most E2.0 applications, there are often questions about how to get employees or customers to adopt the new solution and overcome resistance to change.

There is certainly an increasing number of companies making public the fact that they are successfully embracing Social CRM, which should give us comfort knowing that the questions about how to be successful has been answered. Lithium has a number of wonderful customer testimonials on its Web site, as does Jive. Salesforce featured some impressive customers at its announcement of ServiceCloud2 at Dreamforce 2009. And at Helpstream we have certainly highlighted our fair share of customer stories on our blog, including most recently a profile of how Joe Manna has successfully implemented Social CRM at Infusionsoft. But is all of this evidence about a true progression detailing a more mature phase in the industry? I am not sure.

I think there is ample evidence that there is still work to be done on answering the how question. Susan Scrupski has set up the E2.0 Adoption Council with a consortium of industry practitioners to address just this question. Rachel Happe has set up a similar organization with the Community Roundtable. If you look at who is involved in each of these organizations you will find a who’s-who of industry experts as well, and perhaps more importantly, people in the trenches at the companies getting their hands dirty and developing the experience on how to make Social CRM and other E2.0 initiatives succeed. We should all get behind these organizations and track their work. It’s very, very important that we do so.

As I wrap up this look back at 2009, it appears to me that we have made great progress in answering The What and The Why, but we still have work to do in answering The How. That’s not all bad news. It means we have crossed some very important industry maturity milestones and we should take comfort in knowing there is good work going on to help us advance forward. In looking ahead to 2010, it might be worthwhile to point to an event held in September where Geoffrey Moore explored the question of where we are with Social CRM with a panel of executives who made investments and who have real-life experience with the topic. Moore is arguably the most well-known and well-read expert on the evolution of disruptive market innovations. The question Moore targeted with his panelists was “Have we crossed the chasm to Social CRM?” I invite you to take a listen and decide for yourselves how we best approach the year ahead.

In addition to heading up sales and marketing at LoopFuse, Matt Quinlan is also in charge of “customer success,” which made him a perfect candidate to answer a few questions for the Helpstream blog. We got the low-down on how LoopFuse’s Helpstream community helps keep their customers happy, why Matt thinks customer communities will eventually be as important as having a company Web site and how he defines the “R” in CRM. Read on for more, and share your thoughts and reactions in the comments or via Twitter.

1. As LoopFuse's VP of Field Operations, you're responsible for "customer success." What does that phrase mean to you and how has your Helpstream-powered community helped you achieve it?

While it may sound trite, success is a happy customer. It's really that simple. A happy customer will provide insightful/thoughtful feedback. A happy customer will tell her friends about LoopFuse. A happy customer will introduce LoopFuse into her next company as a result of her experience at her current company. While you can build complex models and metrics to measure customer success, the reality is that you can define the current state of 99% of customers with a :) or :( emoticon. My job is to ensure that our customers have everything they need to be successful with their LoopFuse implementation. In the early days of a company this is typically one-on-one assistance. However, as LoopFuse continued to grow it became increasingly difficult to scale that kind of interaction. By deploying Helpstream we have been able to provide the assistance our customers need in an interactive, searchable, digital environment without sacrificing the quality of interaction.

2. What do your customers seem to appreciate most about the Helpstream community you created for them?

Because LoopFuse OneView is offered exclusively via SaaS, we decided to integrate Helpstream directly into our product to provide a seamless user experience when a customer is looking for documentation, asking a question, providing feedback, or opening a support ticket. Each screen within our application has context-sensitive help articles that are directly linked from within the interface. Once they have clicked through into our Helpstream portal our users are particularly impressed with the global search feature which simultaneously searches knowledge base articles, questions, ideas, and even the general Web.

3. What would you say to other companies that are debating whether to implement a customer community?

Think back to 1997 when your organization was debating whether to implement a website. While this debate seems absurd today, many people just didn't believe that their organizations needed a website or would benefit from one. Today, websites are no longer a publishing medium, but a communication platform that enables a multi-directional conversations between customers, partners, prospects, and the company. You are going to do it. Your customers will demand it. The only questions that remain are when and how. Helpstream provided us with a turn-key community, knowledge base, and support solution that allowed us to focus our efforts on content creation and customer service rather than wasting time building a piece-meal solution.

4. What is your take on the state of the CRM industry and the burgeoning field of Social CRM?

The CRM industry has experienced a sort of renaissance that has been fueled by two primary forces. First, the market has made a dramatic shift away from traditional on-premise CRM systems and towards on-demand systems that are delivered purely as a service. As a result, the capital expenditure associated with launching a CRM system is now approaching zero, which has lowered the barrier to entry for SMBs. The second force is the explosion of technology that has been developed around CRM systems to augment, extend, and improve the value that CRM provides. For example, LoopFuse automates the delivery of qualified leads directly into the CRM system, enabling the sales team to leverage LoopFuse without changing their work habits.

5. Beyond the benefits of Social CRM at the customer service level, how do you see it aiding and supplementing the sales and marketing processes?

While the traditional CRM system was primarily for the benefit of the company, Social CRM solutions, like Helpstream, alter the very nature of the relationship between vendor and customer by providing a bi-directional conduit that empowers the customer to engage and participate in a community rather than passively consuming content. This is practically the definition of the R (relationship) in CRM.

About Matt Quinlan

Matt is responsible for sales, marketing and customer success at LoopFuse. Prior to LoopFuse, he was vice president of marketing and community at Appcelerator, leading the company's brand awareness, community development and user adoption programs. Matt founded the JBoss evangelist & sales consulting team, the open source middleware leader. After JBoss was acquired by Red Hat, Matt started Red Hat's "Rockstar Program," through which he was responsible for the recruitment, training and evaluation of all customer-facing technical talent. Prior to JBoss/RedHat, he spent eight years as a professional consultant for Tallan and Interwoven, writing custom software solutions for startups and Fortune 500 companies alike. Matt is a graduate of Purdue University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in computer science.



At Helpstream, we've found that a great way to gain insight about how our customers are using our solution is to speak with the community managers. To that end, we've posed some questions to Joe Manna, community manager for Infusionsoft. Joe is the resident social media expert for Infusionsoft, where he runs the company blog and helps solve customer issues via Twitter. He is also one of the leading customer advocates at Infusionsoft and helps convey customer feedback and requests to various departments in the company, including product management, the executive team, customer service and IT.

Joe was kind enough to answer our questions about how Infusionsoft's customers are using its Helpstream community, what he's learned from it and how it's impacted Infusionsoft as a whole. Read on for his insight.

1) What are some of the most important lessons you've learned from your role as the Infusionsoft community manager?

I’ve learned first-hand that a business community is very diverse; much more diverse than people think. You could say that I also learned and solidified my thoughts around community on the Web at large – it must be done on customers’ and prospects’ terms, not the business’. People inherently have more trust on platforms that aren’t necessarily controlled by the company, which is fine. In practice, it’s relatively easy to “let go” of control that you once desired when you are helping people in the long run. One additional lesson learned is aligning the success metrics of community to the success metrics of the organization.

2) Can you share feedback from some of the small business owners and entrepreneurs who participate in your community about the benefits they've received and what they use it most for?

Our customers frequently use our community resources to get further assistance outside the scope of our software support. Because a few of our developers are actively engaged in our forums and customer feedback, they are able to investigate issues deeper and provide solutions. This is a huge win for our customers because they can receive assistance on virtually any small business or technical concern they have. One such incident concerning a merchant gateway that caused a subset of international users great pain was actually solved in about a week purely from community involvement. We get detailed feedback as well concerning our product strategy and growth and it allows us to be in touch with users’ feedback.

Outside of our forums, we receive many compliments regarding our awareness and support of users whenever they need help. This includes Twitter, Facebook and our blog. We focus on transparency and keeping our users as close to us as possible when it comes to software changes, new features and system status. That’s something that we’ve seen that correlates with our retention and satisfaction.

3) What kind of content do your customers find most helpful?

All kinds. I’m partially kidding… but it’s true. Our users definitely enjoy videos, pictures, diagrams and solid advice for their business. Video is huge as it allows us to communicate things that just can’t be done through text. We’ve had good response to video, but it does have its limits, too. Too much of any one kind of content loses interest among our audience so I try to keep it dynamic and exciting for them to hear from us. Our blog is our strongest asset at sharing our content, no matter the format, followed by Facebook and then Twitter.

I can tell you about what’s unhelpful in a business community: pitchy sales and fluff. No disrespect to our marketing or sales teams, but our users want to connect with the brand and with others. They don’t want sales offers, ads or “fluff” if it doesn’t help them in some way. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; the more organic value you provide, the more flexible and tolerant (and interested) users are to sales offers when it’s made to them.

My advice for any businesses out there – just do it. If it feels right and is genuinely useful or interesting, just do it. Listen and monitor what people do with your content.

4) How has your Helpstream community impacted Infusionsoft's business?

Helpstream, unlike other support portals I’ve used before, adds a great deal of accessibility, customization and accountability. I don’t particularly mess with the reporting too much, but I do often review cases for users and have a need to see the status of them. This helps our community because we can collaborate on the same platform to help customers. The integration that we have with our user records is very cool and helps us a great deal at helping the customer at the right time.

Helpstream has also added many more efficiencies to our business. We’re able to quantify the impact of software changes, process changes and all those fun business analytics in one for support. Before, we used spreadsheets and telephony stats – not exactly a cup of tea to do on a regular basis. We also gain huge advantages with the article publishing, allowing us to insert rich content and measure the resolution rates from it. Even though the number of users is continually increasing, our support team has managed to stay lean and efficient. We credit Helpstream for making that possible.

5) What do you do to publicize your community and drive adoption? What has or has not been successful?

We do big media buys… I’m kidding again. We’ve organically grown our community from the needs of our users. What I mean by that, is we tell them about it, mention it in our emails that we send them and link to it on our Web site. Users who are in need of community interaction will go out and find it. Many entrepreneurs are savvy enough to find what they want, when they want it. That said, we occasionally run promotions on one or more of our community assets to let people know it’s there and they can use it,

Another incentive to increase engagement is to add exclusivity. I try to break stuff first about our company on Twitter whenever possible. But I tend to share more in-depth articles, polls and engagement on our Facebook and keep it there so there’s an added benefit in keeping close to us socially online. It’s all about value and giving the right value to our audience at the right time.

About Joe Manna

Joe Manna is the community manager for small business marketing software provider Infusionsoft. With an extensive background in social media and community management, his passion revolves around advocating for people's technological needs and helping others leverage new media to solve modern problems.

You can follow his daily thoughts on Twitter (@JoeManna). When he's not blogging, Tweeting or browsing Facebook, he's enjoying balmy Phoenix, AZ and playing games on his XBOX.

I recently came across this article on CIO from David Taber, author of "Salesforce.com Secrets of Success" and CEO of SalesLogistix. Taber discusses when and why customer service should run the CRM show. Of course, this is a topic near and dear to our hearts here at Helpstream. We've always believed customer service is the "on-ramp" to community and is the first phase of the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle. Taber says, "Nirvana comes when sales, marketing, and customer service are all equally using — depending on — the CRM system for their success. But few companies achieve this. And besides, somebody has to go first." Beyond just incorporating customer service into your CRM system, letting it take the lead allows your company to move beyond CRM to Social CRM.

Taber goes on to discuss how any company whose business relies on repeat customers and long-term customer relationships is an ideal candidate for CS-led CRM. We couldn't agree more. Our thriving online customer service communities are a vital first step in Social CRM. Bringing your customers together in a community means they are able to engage with your company and other customers to solve problems and share insights, while creating additional sales and marketing benefits, such as generating word-of-mouth marketing, learning the opinions of your customers, and effectively nurturing leads.

The difficulty of getting employees to use your CRM system is also addressed by Taber. Our take again goes back to the importance of the social experience. If your customers are actively engaged in your customer community, your marketing, sales and product development departments, to name a few, will be clamoring to take advantage of the customer insight that comes from community participation.

Taber concludes by pointing out that "the customer support function has more interaction with customers than nearly any other group. Getting them fully leveraging your CRM system creates a data asset of tremendous value." We take this concept even further by engaging customers and letting their support needs and feedback speak for themselves. After all, that's what the social Web is all about — leveraging individual voices for the betterment of the group.

This week, we were lucky enough to connect with Enterprise 2.0 and social media expert Rachel Happe. Rachel pens The Social Organization blog, which explores the ways in which social media is changing communication and organizations, and is the founder of an incredibly important group, The Community Roundtable. The Roundtable is a network of community managers and social media practitioners looking to advance the adoption of online communities and role of the community manager. Rachel gave us her insight on customer communities -- what makes them successful, who's doing them right and what your company can do to drive adoption. Enjoy the read, and let us know what you think via comments, Twitter, Facebook, and even on our own HelpExchange Community.

1) What do you think are the keys to implementing a successful customer community?

At The Community Roundtable, we've put together a framework called the Community Maturity Model that has eight core competencies to being successful with community. They are:

    * Leadership
    * Culture
    * Community Management
    * Content & Programming
    * Policies & Governance
    * Metrics & Measurement
    * Tools

While those are the disciplines required for success, success also depends on the goals for the community – is the primary goal for customer support or to create customer advocates? Those two different goals will create a difference in strategy, culture, content, and how the community is managed. Engagement rates will also look different. Support communities need to create accurate and trusted answers, which is a very different thing than creating passionate brand advocates who do a variety of really interesting things with your product or service but may not be the people who help with specific technical issues.

2) In your experience, what are the most successful ways social media and community managers can drive community adoption?

Community adoption is driven by content, conversation, and people who are worth the target audiences' time, because participating in a community requires a time commitment – it's not a read and leave type of thing. Most of your audience is not going to be passionate enough about the success of your product to commit a lot of time – they are, however, interested in their own success. Scope the community around the success of your target audience and include everything required to foster that success, even if your own product plays a relatively small role in that.

3) What are some examples of companies doing social community right? What are some of the strategies they've employed?

There are a ton of good examples but some of my favorites are SAP, Intuit, Southwest Airlines, EMC, EDR, Nike, and Newell Rubbermaid.  Even that small list represents a lot of different approaches and a lot of different goals but they are all managing to engage and develop a new rapport with their customers through new “social” channels.

4) You said in a recent blog post that "savvy customers can easily know more about their vendors than the vendor employees do." Can you elaborate on why this is a good thing for companies and how it can be used for their advantage?

I think companies generally want to do the right thing by their customers – they have good intentions. However, in big complex organizations it is really hard to maintain consistency over the lifecycle of a customer – from lead to end of life. Often the internal champions of cross-functional consistency don't get heard because they don't have hard data by which to back it up.  Having customers talk online with each other helps the voice of the customer take higher priority within companies and it in turn drives quality improvements that are good for the customer and the company. A recent example I heard about was a large retailer who uses market research communities to generate feedback from design through merchandizing – they have improved the quality of their product and reduced waste in store inventories that used to get donated or written off which drives higher profitability – all while making the customers involved in their community pretty happy. It's truly a win-win.

5) There have been a lot of case studies done around successful customer service communities. Why do you think customer service is often cited as a successful use case for enterprise communities?

Customer support was one of the first functional use cases where hard cost savings benefits were easy to track from communities. Customer support organizations because they are typically very operationally disciplined – know exactly how much each transaction costs them.  In many cases customer support is separate from the rest of the organization so they were looking for discrete ways to improve product experiences and may not have too much influence over quickly improving product quality. They set up communities so information could be exchanged in a scaled way to more customers. It turned out to be pretty successful.  From a budget perspective – which is also critical in the success of customer support communities – the investment and the return are both attributed back to the same group, which is not always as easy to do when building an advocacy or market research community.

About Rachel Happe

Rachel is an independent consultant helping organizations understand how to become "social." Rachel has over fifteen years of experience working with emerging technologies including eCommerce and enterprise software applications. She has been both a product manager and a management analyst, and brings multiple perspectives on technology development and use to her research.

Until recently, Rachel was Mzinga’s Sr. Director of Social Media Products and was responsible for the product management, marketing, design, and documentation of Mzinga’s Social Media Application Suite and Mzinga’s Social Enterprise solutions.

Rachel covered the enterprise social media market for IDC prior to joining Mzinga. While an analyst at IDC, Rachel published groundbreaking research; The Social Enterprise (Dec '07), Modeling the Digital Marketplace (Sept '07), The Landscape of the Digital Marketplace (May '07 ), and the first enterprise social networking market forecast (Aug '07).

You can follow her on Twitter at @rhappe.