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.

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.



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.

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.

Web-based source code management solutions. We always like to hear why our customers choose Helpstream and what goals they want to achieve with our technology.  CVSDude was kind enough to share their vision for their new Community Help platform:

• Deeper interaction: The new system creates a rich, searchable, interactive environment for CVSDude customers to share ideas, identify common feature needs, discuss best practices, and communicate with technical staff.

• Leverage community strengths: CVSDude recognizes that it has very smart customers who are always coming up with new ideas. They want to empower their customers and their employees to learn from each other.

• Outstanding customer service: As part of CVSDude’s focus on the business and enterprise sectors, they are striving to propagate their expertise and to deliver the level of service that companies clearly need to run their business.

• Real time alerts: CVSDude community support integrates with Twitter and the company’s Status Site, which provides up-to-date information on CVSDude system performance. They plan to build out this capability with additional developments in the future.

In addition to an improved customer service experience, which will drive increased customer satisfaction, CVSDude will bolster its sales and marketing efforts through the use of Helpstream’s new Social Marketing Module. By monitoring customer and prospect activities in both their Helpstream communities and in external social media sites, CVSDude will be able to approach these individuals in a way that makes sense. The end result is a more informed and effective customer service effort that turns customers into brand advocates.

We encourage our readers to check out CVSDude’s blog post for more information about their new Community Help platform.

Now that the series has wrapped up, we've compiled the insights, analysis and visuals featured here into an eBook titled "A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed With the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle.” I invite you to download it from our website and to use it as a practical reference guide to this burgeoning industry. Ultimately, our hope is that it will serve as the basis for ongoing discussion and idea sharing as we continue to witness the evolution of the CRM landscape. We look forward to continuing the conversation around Social CRM and invite you to share thoughts and feedback with us via Twitter, HelpExchange, Facebook and the comments section below.

There were some very nice Twitter threads covering these sessions and both Ben Kepes from the  CloudAve blog and Esteban Kolsky wrote nice articles about the events – I invite you to check these out.

What follows are my notes and thoughts on the most salient points of the two panels:

ROI

There was quite a lot of discussion among the panelists about the ROI of Social CRM initiatives – a carry over, to some degree, from the conversations coming out of the E2.0 conference in Boston earlier this year. There was general consensus that, unlike many general-purpose E2.0 initiatives, Social CRM has the potential to deliver true, quantifiable ROI.  Ray Wang struck a cautious note about when we can expect to see an ROI, stating that the scope of the initiative will determine (to a large degree) time-to-value. While companies like HP and Juniper agreed, I am reminded of what Brent Potts told Geoffrey Moore when asked what Social CRM costs: “not that much." Companies like Eloqua and OpSource shared stories about very quick time-to-value. This makes me wonder – might a good strategy be to start small? Maybe the best option when starting out is to secure an early beachhead and build a solid value proposition.

Culture

Though there was much agreement that customers who are already engaging with social media are driving Social CRM, by and large the panelists talked about the culture change required to internally adopt Social CRM. Phil Fernandez talked about how Marketo had an early community initiative that never got off the ground until he simply made it a mandate. Treb Ryan spoke about how making Social CRM a cross-functional initiative facilitates adoption as people learn how employees are seeing the value, followed by their desire to “jump in.” Natalie Petouhoff spoke about the need to develop a “C-level” position to drive culture changes – in her words, “every company needs a Chief Customer Officer.” Natalie went on to explain how she has talked to companies that have actually seen employee morale improve as a result of Social CRM. Could culture barriers be overcome by putting employees closer in touch with customers?

Compliance

There was also an interesting discussion about the risk of allowing employees to engage freely with customers in customer communities. Lois Townsend spoke about how HP overcame resistance from its internal compliance department by taking the approach “we are not asking if we should do this, we are asking how we should do this." Taking this approach allowed for internal buy-in without risking having the project stymied. Todd Shimuzu reflected on Juniper’s simple approach to directing employees with his mantra: “Just Don’t Do Anything Stupid.” Natalie Petouhoff asked rhetorically, “Who can recall any truly alarming incident where an employee acted exceedingly inappropriately in a community?” Maybe having employees acting ‘human’ in communities makes the customer feel as though real people are listening.

Customer Service and Marketing

Clara Shih asked the question “Is Social CRM about defense or offense?” – meaning, is this about lowering costs and answering questions or is this about driving revenue?  Phil Fernandez spoke to how Marketo started its Social CRM project with its eye towards delivering customer service in a cost-effective way. However, he explained how the company is now implementing Helpstream’s new Social Marketing module to help leverage its customer community for lead generation. Most panelists agreed that some ambiguity exists about who owns the customer community, while general consensus was that Social CRM is driving both customer service and marketing to work together.  If customer demand for Social CRM drives companies to realize that “it’s all about the customer" (as Natalie Petouhoff states), could we then see a joint effort for customer service and marketing to develop methods of driving improvements in customer loyalty, retention AND revenue generation?

It is good to see that the E2.0 movement is beginning to spawn Social CRM panels that feature discussions about the realities of making these initiatives either succeed or fail. And it is also good to see the industry begin to move away from the “why” and towards the “how."   If you were at the conference, we would love to know your thoughts.

Dion is truly on the forefront of exploring some of the most important business and tech topics on his ZDNet blogs, Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog and the Web 2.0 Blog. Here, he shares with us his thoughts on how social models are evolving the customer's experience, how Social CRM can help to further engage customers, and the companies he feels are getting Social CRM right. Please enjoy this exclusive content, and share your reactions in the comments below.

1. What kinds of customer issues do you think Social CRM is best suited to address?

While almost all aspects of the customer relationship can be transformed by social models, some are a bit more of a natural fit than others. This is particularly true when it involves deep knowledge of specific products or services (which customers often know better than the companies that provide them) or when it involves deep customer needs and requirements in certain settings, verticals or industries. The implication is that customer service and support for example, is a natural fit for Social CRM. So too is product development, where customers can just tell you what they need directly from a large sample, and you can interact with them as need to refine and clarify vital new business knowledge. Less clear is whether Social CRM will help with business activities like the sales process, though evidence is mounting that there are benefits here as well.

2. How do you think customer engagement via Social CRM will alter the customer/vendor relationship?

The global economy is – in the large – moving away from a focus on business value coming primarily from  transactions and is moving towards a model that places the highest value on relationships. This is reflected now by the fact that the largest economic output of developed nations is increasingly knowledge, and not physical products. In this new business era, customers are demanding closer connection to the companies they depend on and want more control and transparency. This will have a profound impact in coming years to the relationship between vendors and customers. Those who want to acquire and retain the 21st century customer must be willing to think of them as a real and valued partner in their business. Efffective Social CRM can make this partnership model possible and scalable (it's hard to think about conversing with millions of customers at once without the right tools.) In the end, Social CRM is just going to become the norm in CRM and the primary practice. But for the next 5-10 years, it's going to provide significant competitive advantage for those that are willing to engage in these new relationships with their marketplace.

3. You've written in the past that Social CRM is asymmetric when it comes to levels of participation – can you delve into what you mean by that a little further?

Sure, it means that Social CRM engages and mobilizes a large segment of your customer base to problem solve, help each other and create knowledge. The number of customers for most companies greatly outnumbers the number of employees they have. Thus, by enlisting customers to form constructive communities around their concerns and tapping into the value they create, a virtuous assymmetry is created where the largest and most valuable resource companies have, their customers, can greatly improve their own outcomes with your products and services.

4. You've mentioned that the biggest obstacle to adoption for Social CRM comes from the companies themselves, and changing their mindset about traditional CRM. How do you see this playing out in the future?

The real challenge in moving to new, high impact social business models (which include Social CRM) is not technology at all, though having the right tools to support the transition is a vital prerequisite. Rather it's the cultural, bureaucratic and political changes required in most organizations that is the biggest obstacle to moving forward with these new approaches to business. The customer suddenly becomes much more valuable than just a unit of sales, where activities like support are purely overhead costs that must be reduced as much as possible. It completely changes the conversation when customers become an integral part of the business, almost across the board for most organizations.

This is not a change that most business leaders are ready to appreciate fully and it will likely take a some years yet while the implications of social business are fully felt and responded to. But companies that are unusually slow to respond may find that their customers have moved to companies that are willing to have more productive, honest, open and effective relationships. 

5. Can you give some examples of companies that have gotten Social CRM right?

There are a number of interesting examples but it's services such as Fixya.com that are some of the most interesting and show how the rules are changing. These are essentially self-service CRM sites that have decided to provide better support in a more social and Web 2.0 form than the companies that originally made the products. Fixya has more than 5 million monthly users who are looking for mutual support on the end-user products that the use and go there for help. Because Fixya has decided to provide a better form of customer relationship than the originating product companies, they are becoming the preferred intermediary for assistance and consequently the owner of a key aspect of the customer relationship. And it works because Fixya doesn't do any of the work, their customers do. There are other examples but this situation is particular is quickly becoming a major and unexpected competitive issue for companies that haven't yet learned the Social CRM ropes.

6. Can you speak to the importance of having business processes tightly integrated into any Social CRM efforts?

Businesses that don't have a good connection with the knowledge flows, awareness and activities taking place with their customers will find that they can't respond effectively and quickly to both short-term market situations as well as long-term strategic business intelligence that's accumulating in their Social CRM ecosystem. These all can drive forward vitally needed transformations and improvements to product development, sales, support and other business functions if this information is integrated into existing IT systems in a strategic and effective manner. This is easier said than done of course and figuring out the best ways to do this is still an emerging field, but a very important one in my opinion.

About Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe heads up Hinchcliffe & Company and is an internationally recognized business strategist and enterprise architect with an extensive track record of building enterprise-class solutions with clients in the Fortune 500, federal government and Internet startup community.

Dion helps lead the industry by evolving the thinking for next-generation businesses in various social media including ZDNet's influential Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog and the Web 2.0 Blog. He is extensively published in leading industry periodicals and journals including the Microsoft Architecture Journal, AjaxWorld Magazine, SOA/Web Services Journal and is currently Editor-in-Chief of Social Computing Journal. His thought leading work has been covered in BusinessWeek, CNET News, Wired, CIO Magazine and other major news outlets.

• How the world has changed to put the customer in control of the conversation

• The Big Picture for Business of the different types of Social Media

• Gut level ways of thinking about how to be Social

• The Virtuous Cycle and how to start with customer service as the on-ramp for Social CRM

• Specific Social CRM strategies for customer service, marketing and sales

By now, hopefully you’re excited about starting a Social CRM initiative for your own organization. How should you go about doing this?

1:  Start with customer service; it’s the on-ramp for Social CRM

You have to make sure your house is in order before inviting guests.

Customer service is the on-ramp for Social CRM, and it will be a lot harder to succeed if your own customers are not happy and already social. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, the person your potential prospects are most likely to trust is “a person like me.”  Without the strong backing of your own customers (those people who are similar to your prospects), you won’t be maximizing your credibility.

The second consideration is that your own customer base and customer service are the easiest places to drive traffic to your community. Getting strangers to engage in your community leaves you with much lower engagement rates. The familiar “Rule of 10’s” states that for such communities, 1 in 100 people will ask a question, 10 of 100 may answer and everyone else simply watches. At Helpstream, we see engagement rates 3 to 10 times higher for customer service communities. Take advantage of this to accelerate the growth of your early community efforts to get to critical mass.

2:  You need a community. don’t bet the farm on Twitter or Facebook

It’s attractive to think about getting started right now with Twitter or Facebook. It’s all-too-easy to just start Tweeting or subscribing to feeds of various kinds. However, this is not an organized effort focusing on producing long-term results. You’d just be riding on the hype wave from those select “hot” properties. It’s not a strategy, it’s a tactic. As such, it’s better than nothing – but not much.

I’ve likened Twitter to the crowded bar you may go to in order to meet new people. That’s great, but if your only relationship with them is in the crowded bar, how deep is it going to be?  And don’t forget, we also talked about starting with your own customers. Why would they want to talk to you about anything substantive in the crowded bar?

3:  Be conscious about strategy and culture: Social CRM is a lot more than products and rechnologies

Let’s face it, social software is very cool. I love working on it at Helpstream. But software alone is not enough for you to succeed. It’s probably not even the first step, although there is an argument to get started with social and not spend too much time in a paralysis of analysis.

To succeed, you will ultimately need two ingredients – just as much as great technology. Your organization must have a good idea about what strategies it will pursue with social and it must have a culture that is capable of supporting that execution.

If you have no idea why you are engaging with customers using social media, or if nobody in your organization wants to engage (or if they’re terrible at it), it will be difficult for such engagement to be a success.

There is one offsetting advantage social usage has over conventional CRM: the feedback loop is much more pronounced. It’s much easier for the old Centralized Command and Control CRM to go on about its business of droning out messages than it is with Social CRM, where the customer controls the conversation. However, droning out messages is also a lot less effective.

Social CRM is not a black box. If you poke it, it pokes back. Eventually, it will train your organization what it needs to know to succeed, or, at the very least, it will convince you to quit poking the box!

It’s really not that hard to be social though. Remember the gut-level methods ­(which we already know) about how to be social.

4:  Put in place a program for measurement and continuous improvement for best practices

It’s very difficult to achieve repeatable results, show an ROI or improve from where you are unless you have some metrics to steer by. What metrics should you choose?  That depends on the business results you’d like to achieve. Get a clear idea of what those are and then figure out how to measure them. There are well-understood methodologies for all of the obvious ones like customer satisfaction or call center efficiency.

Also, make sure your metrics are layered; start from the highest possible level metrics. If you want to improve your call center efficiency, don’t start by defining metrics like ‘how long agents spend on the phone.’ Rather, measure that efficiency as abstractly and at as high of a level as possible, while still making it measurable. Perhaps something like cost of service per customer is an approach. At Helpstream, we have customers who have tripled their customer base without adding a single additional service agent while raising their customer satisfaction at the same time. Obviously they’re doing something a little different than optimizing call times. (For example, they’re persuading their customers to participate in the community instead of calling at all).

Be true to the highest layers in the metrics hierarchy. In other words, don’t change them often; annually at most is a good guideline. The lower the level of the metric, the more you should be willing to experiment and even ignore the metric in hopes of identifying new ways to optimize the overall.

Lastly, where metrics are concerned, look for benchmarks. Can your vendor provide you with benchmarks that give an idea of how others perform on various metrics? Can they help you to understand the best practices needed to improve your results relative to the benchmarks? Helpstream answers “yes” to both.

5:  Your social platform needs business process

A number of vendors talk about business process capabilities, but few deliver. You will need business process to optimize your results, and in many cases, even to successfully collect the metrics you’ll want. Business process means control over your workflows, data (custom fields and custom objects) and business logic. Integration with your existing CRM systems is another important consideration. Without business process and deep CRM Integration, your Social CRM project will wind up a siloed island. It will help, but it will never deliver optimal results because you’ll have too little control over the user’s experience where it really matters.

Conclusion

So that’s it then: 5 steps to getting started down the path to Social CRM. It’s actually not all that hard, but it does take a certain amount of determination and a sense of where you would like to get. We’ve tried to fill in as many of the details as we could in this Social CRM Manifesto. I’m sure you have a lot more questions, and we’d be happy to answer them! Let me suggest you start by joining our HelpExchange Community, which is our place for talking about Social CRM at a high level and disseminating our thoughts on best practices. You’ll get a chance to ask your own questions there as well as learn from what others are saying. When you’re ready, get in touch with Helpstream. We’d love to help you with a successful Social CRM project.