Category Archives: Rants

No Socialismo, o Muerte

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[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”.

Show Me The Money

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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.

Why CRM won’t save your soul

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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.

I want to believe

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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.

Small is the new… small

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When it comes to innovation, it pays to be small. Or does it?

I think sometimes programmers forget how much work it is to create software at large companies. What may seem like a no-brainer five line code change to us on the outside is perhaps five man-weeks of work once you factor in all the required process overhead. – Jeff Atwood

And the same goes for any other ideas; those who are represented by a programming code, and all the others. If you run a one-man shop, you only have to convince yourself to do such-and-such. If you have five bosses, you have to convince them and their bosses and a dozen more stakeholders, etc. So, how come big companies are still able to innovate at all?

Maybe it’s got something to do with the millions of dollars and man-days.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to a man with a vision. And the guts to make his vision a reality. Some of these men, despite the popular misconception, work at big companies. And somehow, somehow, they disrupt the existing order and by-pass the processes, regulations, compliance, and make shit happen.

And when they do, they have resources that small-timers can only dream of. That’s why Silverlight was developed at Microsoft and not in someone’s garage. Having the money and/or the clout helps.

Small it beautiful. Small is also… small. It’s only those times when markets change, completely, when a single guy with an idea and determination can change the world on his own, such as Wozniak did with Apple. As much as it pains me, those times are far and few in between.

Word of the day

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Target Marketing’s annual survey of marketers revealed that direct mail delivers the strongest ROI for customer acquisition and second strongest ROI for customer retention (behind email).

My take: The direct mail-naysayers can take all the potshots they want — the marketing community has spoken. I would, however, like to see Target Marketing add WOM marketing and social media to their list of methods next year. Cumbaya marketing — the darling of some of you (you know who you are) — didn’t make the list this year, and hopefully never will.” – Ron Shevlin [emphasis mine]

Kumbaya marketing – hey, yeah, that’s me alright.

Tell you what, though: whoever purports to find “ROI” in direct-mail, of all things, in customer acquisition and retention is right in the sense that dead-tree mail is cheap and there are still people out there opening and reading all their mail instead of putting the spam-mail where it belongs, the waste basket. Fine with me. But is it really the method of reaching 21st century, educated, opinionated customers? Is it really?

Yes, the shock of seeing where the market is vs where it should be.

“Me, Inc.” revisited

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What if all cubicles had a security camera streaming a live feed to YouTube? What if they do? What if the cubicle-dwellers are playing theatre as if they were, in fact, being broadcasted to unknown masses?

Via Johnnie Moore – “64 per cent [of Brits] said they in effect became somebody else as they reached their desk.” (Financial Times) As opposed to a third of the straight-talking Dutch, and I suppose the number doesn’t get any lower than that.

And come performance review time, there is no actual person in the room: only avatars.

I have just finished the Free Agent Nation, so count me biased. As much as I’d like to blame The Man, I can’t: we do it to ourselves voluntarily. Accepting the caste system (Junior Widget Cranker, Senior Widget Cranker, Vice President Of Widget Cranking), feeding on the corporate new-speak (team-player, goal-oriented, place-your-dash-separated-slogan-here), separating work (as in creating value to be exchanged for another value) from life itself; such is the unfortunate legacy of the Industrial Age. So yes, it’s only natural to play Kabuki theater while being “at work”. An actual human being wouldn’t survive there.

It will take a generation of free agents to change that.

Oracle, Hot or Not?

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Does Oracle “get” CRM 2.0? Depends on who you ask, apparently. I waited until the hotshots have spoken and can now stand atop their shoulders and look at the bigger picture. Which one, you might ask? The one composed of both clear victories and dangerous misconceptions.

Let’s get down to business.

Oracle has peppered its Release 15 of CRM On Demand with Web 2.0… thingies. The gist of which I can summarize by quoting Larry Dignan of ZDNet’s BTL blog:

  • Oracle CRM On Demand can be customized via widgets, gadgets and personal portals.
  • Can incorporate information such as contacts from iGoogle or MyYahoo. Other sites can be added via RSS.

Widgets, gadgets, thingies. Thinkies? Not really. If all there was to Web 2.0 was widgets, then yes, it would seem that Oracle has it covered. The one part of Web 2.0 ecosystem, the driving part that has gone largely unnoticed by traditional vendors, is the behavioral shift from consumption to co-creation, from listening – however passively – to conversing. Which has led some, for instance Christopher Carfi, to comment:

While an interesting technical step forward, the fundamental embrace of true, big-R customer Relationships is still missing. The product, the presentation, the glossy online video demo — it’s not about the Customer — it’s all about how the two fictional sales reps are closing the next deal

Indeed. It’s still a tool sold to empower businesses to “take on” their customers, to get to know as much as they can about them, so that they can sell to them, better.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course.

But it’s not just a technical step forward. Look, CRM 1.0 was all about building silos. Actually, about connecting multiple company siloes and merging them into a single one. An intra-company bible of everything the company knows about the customer.

Which isn’t much, really, but you would wait a long time before a CRM vendor would admit that. Or the company itself, for that matter.

That businesses now realize there is a world around them, full of information and interactions that are relevant to their business, is huge. No dancing around that. Opening up that big CRM silo and mashing it with outside bits and bytes amounts to a small revolution. Let me re-play the second bullet from Larry Dignan’s post:

  • Can incorporate information such as contacts from iGoogle or MyYahoo. Other sites can be added via RSS.

Yes, it’s the on-demand version of Oracle CRM, and the on-site users might wait a bit before Oracle hits them with Web 2.0 goodness. On-Demand is supposed to be sexy, after all. It has to. But still: this is no small feat. The hierarchies, the business rules, the workflows written in stone; all that is getting disrupted by this innocuously looking feature.

Once you let the devil in, there is no going back.

I believe Oracle will not lead the CRM 2.0 wave. Not because of their product legacy, not because of their customer legacy. And primarily not because CRM 2.0 won’t be a shrink-wrapped product but rather a loose collection of rather cheap yet very effective tools: company blogs that promote actual human contact between the organization and its customers, wikis that let the company innovate with, not only for, its customers, etc. You know the drill.

Still, it’s heart-warming (yes, about time we sing Kumbaya) to see actual progress done by the software behemoth. And it provides some clues about acceptance of Web 2.0 mindset by large organizations. May that be a sign of good things to come.

Are Web 2.0 Companies Getting Serious?

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Perhaps there wasn’t much to twitter about at SXSW08, but this is certainly a healthy development:

These days, many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest are working hard to turn their visions into sustainable businesses, or they’re toiling away within the larger companies like Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) that bought them out early on.

“Serious people” don’t take Web 2.0 seriously. And many times they are right to laugh at it. Nobody wants to ride into another Bubble.

What makes it different this time, though, is that big players are getting onboard. Web 2.0 might have started as an insurgency but it’s being co-opted by the establishment. Company-wide “Twitters” will be as common as company-wide IM.

Selling out to the enterprises is only one way to monetize but it sure could be a good way, given how enterprises like to throw money bags at buzzwords that have gained momentum.

(via Alan Patrick)