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About
Notes and views on CRM, open business models, and what the Web means for customer relationships. [more]
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Speaking at:
Telecoms CRM, CEM and User Experience 2008
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Maybe CRM *can* save your soul
I am speaking about the “customer ecosystem” tomorrow. It’s a Telco event here in Prague. My talk isn’t Telco-specific but then, anybody can benefit from opening up a little, except perhaps prisons.
Soul-less businesses stand no chance in this brave new world. Just look at the beating AP gets for its ridiculous attempt to charge bloggers quoting its stuff. It’s time to cut those neckties and get real, folks.
Sphere: Related ContentHow not to drown in crowds
I have been waiting for this sacred cow to be slaughtered - it’s about time: Sometimes Crowds Aren’t That Wise. Good that someone noticed. We need to clear our vocabulary of this collectivist crap: social this and social that, crowds; you name it, I hate it.
Back to the point, though.
Inviting “crowds” to collaborate with you shouldn’t mean you give up control. Your website isn’t subject to democratic rule. It’s your website.
It means an ongoing elimination of trolls and other vermin so that those who have something valuable to add to the debate can do so safely.
The best examples of co-creation (P&G Connect+Develop, Dell’s IdeaStorm) all show that: you let the public in, but set the rules and stay engaged. Crowds aren’t wise by default, they must be steered in the right direction.
via Broadstuff
Sphere: Related ContentStill selling your attention?
I just noticed a couple of low-profile ads in Prague trams luring passengers to get paid for receiving 4 commercials SMS’s a day.
It’s ironic how little are certain industry changing, even though the change they are facing is more an opportunity than a threat.
Consider this: the technology we’re using every day, such as cell phones, has fundamental advantages over the old one, such as newspaper or TV. Cell phones are location-aware. They are interaction-capable. One would think the ad agencies (don’t they employ creatives?) would come up with something more, uh, sophisticated.
Get this, geniuses: a mobile phone display is not just a miniature TV screen.
How viral is too viral?
Imagine this: you walk into a bookstore, pick a title, walk up to the cashier’s desk only to be told you have to woo 8 other customers into purchasing the same book, otherwise - no deal.
Ludicrous?
Facebook apps do that. I’ve given one, What’s your real age? or somesuch, 5 minutes of my time, only to realize they wouldn’t reveal my “real age” to me unless I signed up 8 of my “friends”. At that time, I’ve only had 6 of them there, and wouldn’t bother any of them.
Sure, it’s a *free* app, free in the sense I don’t have to pay with my money. But I still had to pay with my time, which is of infinite value since I’ll die one day. How are they going to refund me now that I am pissed?
This isn’t viral marketing, it’s a school-bus-hijack marketing done by companies who either don’t have a product capable of gaining momentum based on its quality, or have seriously misunderstood of what “word of mouth” is.
For the slow learners among you culprits: it’s when your customers talk about you because they want to!
Drunk on Twitter
Is it just me or is *everyone* (read: too many) drunk on Twitter? It used to be Facebook. Wherever that ended up? I’ll have to undramatically de-list half of my Google Reader subscriptions to get rid of this nonsense. Twitter this and twitter that. Get a grip, everybody, it’s just another chat-room! I used to like you better when you were blogging about, uh, other stuff, too.
(no links to give the perpetrators their last chance to repent)
Sphere: Related ContentNo Socialismo, o Muerte
[Warning: RANT] I get shudders whenever people throw “social” like a piece of mud at things that are quite nice on their own:
- social responsibility
- social media
- social crm
- social capitalism
I get shudders because I once lived under a regime that had “social” as its all-encompassing imperative attached to everything. And yes, it was anti-social in all ways imaginable.
My good pals in the Anglosphere don’t have this frame of reference, at least not personally. They don’t immediately get this or similar association:
So I don’t blame Hugh for getting a bit carried away today, but I must say I WILL get off this boat should this get any worse.
Shudders. And yes, I turn my nose up at this. Hope he’s joking. I guess he is.
And since I use “social” oh-too-often myself, I should clarify what it means here. In my book, the social part of “Social CRM” (CRM 2.0 aka marriage of CRM and Web 2.0 thinking) is:
- empowering individuals to make decisions for themselves - especially where they are now powerless or less powerful than they should be - which means less power for organizations
- empowering individuals in business interactions to get the value they are seeking and provide the value they are offering
- empowering individuals to self-organize and form voluntary groups to achieve a common goal with minimal overhead
… you get the idea.
This has been rather a pre-emptive strike to clarify any and all future doubts, especially if these words (social media, social crm) get slanted in a bad way. Social, yes, but not as in “Socialism” but rather “social beings, acting as they damn please”.
Sphere: Related ContentShow Me The Money
I am interested in the world of ideas. At the same time, I only have time to be interested in the world of ideas of my own. Isn’t that true for most of us?
Point being, I keep writing about CRM 2.0 and the way companies should relate to customers, yadda yadda, and there are folks out there who are even further away, talking about how individuals should seize control of the B2C relationships are make them C2B, but you know what?
Talk is cheap.
Punditry is cheap.
In the days of Andy Warhol, everyone was supposed to get his or her 15 minutes of fame. I believe we are now at 30 seconds. Ideas coming and going all the time. Not much sticks. Stickiness is, still, a function of action. Not just talking but doing.
So I pledge to spend less time on taking cheap shots at companies struggling to “get it right”, whatever “it” might be. It’s easy, and tempting, to take on the big guys, and I should know, I’ve blogged like that too often. No, this isn’t me taking anything back, this is me saying we need less ideology and more pragmatic action. In business as well as in the world of ideas.
Sphere: Related ContentWhy CRM won’t save your soul
Rude shop-keepers. Web-mail that doesn’t accept your ID anymore. Trains that are 2 hours late, yet no refunds are forthcoming. We keep expecting things will behave according to an agreed-upon set of rules, and whey they don’t, we feel like we’ve accidentally slipped into a parallel universe - one in which we do not exist.
This happened to my wife’s friend in Bulgaria: she went to the passport office with her mother, and they told her, this cannot be your mother, your mother is dead. They flashed their IDs to no effect: the officer refused to acknowledge that the woman standing in front of him was, actually, not dead and indeed there.
Maybe you haven’t experienced anything as dramatic. Maybe it’s only happened to you that an operator at the other end of the line couldn’t match your name with your account that you kept with the company for over X number of years. And you be who? Sorry, Mr Smith, we do not know you.
Why is that?
CRM’s traditional answer was: bad information. Disconnected siloes. Employees unable to tap the information they needed at the right time. Centralize the data, unclog the information pathways, and all would be well.
But it was the wrong answer. Or put differently, it was the right answer to the wrong question.
The real question was, indeed, how do we as a company manage to treat our customers with some sense of dignity without actually bothering to zoom in on them from the extreme wide angle (customer base, segments) to telephoto (households, individuals). Hence the effort to power up the operational CRM with capabilities of analytical CRM (that is, building some sort of number-based insight into the scary X-gigabyte swarm of operational data).
But the analytical CRM cannot build any meaningful “insight” into who your customers really are while treating the customer data as any other kind of transactional data. We humans are made of shape-shifting bits. We don’t stay transactional very long.
Which is where CRM 2.0 comes to the rescue. No, it won’t save anyone’s soul. But the simple acknowledgement that customers (=people interacting with your business) are relational and want to interact on a peer-to-peer basis is a good start. When people inside an organization have the tools and processes to not only “tap into” but be part of the vast “social network” of their company’s “customer base” (I know, too many scary quotes don’t make for a fine article), they won’t say I do not know you, Mr Smith anymore.
Because they will know Mr Smith. Even though their internal “CRM” doesn’t know much about Mr Smith, the network he belongs to does. And the people inside the organization will, too, if they are belong to it as well.
I believe the quest for CRM 2.0 is one of finding the real network that can connect us all. It won’t be Facebook. It won’t be the blogosphere. It might not be a single network at all. And until we find it, we will, from time to time, feel as if we were teleported into a land in which we do not exist.
How’s that for metaphysics.
Sphere: Related ContentI want to believe
I fall for every April Fool’s joke, including today’s post by Tim Ferriss, later retracted, that he’s been outsourcing his blog writing for a year.
It made me reconsider my long-standing conviction that you can always tell a hired gun from the real thing. For a while I thought, Tim has sounded authentic for the past year, so perhaps you can outsource your own writing and still remain authentic; and yes, perhaps you can, but we’ll have to wait for another example.
True, the idea sounds ridiculous from the get-go. Having someone write your personal observations of the world around you? But then, we’ve grown accustomed to companies hiring anonymous grunts who could care less to write their friggin’ mission statements, mantras, press releases, announcements; and this is perhaps why I haven’t paused for a second. It’s so believable.
Good for Tim he was joking. If only the rest of the serious corporate world wasn’t.
Sphere: Related ContentA gratuitous Flickr self-link
… because right now, I am starving for light, color, sunshine, beauty, warmth much more than for perfect CRM; this sorry excuse for Spring must end (it was snowing last week, for chrissakes).
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