by Amrith Rajasekaran
What are companies and corporations doing to enhance their presence on the social sphere? For starters, they create accounts on sites like Twitter, Facebook and mySpace. They use these forms of social media to spread awareness about products and also do a lot of branding and marketing activities through these.
Continue reading "Social Media – Be Aware or Beware? – Part 2" »
by Satyajit Swain
Each day brings another milestone in the constant evolution of Social Media. Recently, Google launched Google Buzz to give a social experience to its popular mail service and the other day I was going through OneYoungWorld(the world’s first global youth leadership summit ) forum website and was amazed to find that it was inviting registration/selection of delegates not through its own site but through an application hosted on Facebook. The last time I checked OYW’s Facebook campaign had 6619 fans and the One Young World Facebook application had 12,305 active monthly users; these statistics could indicate an emerging trend in the way Social Media can affect us in the coming days.
Continue reading "Rendering a social experience to your Social CRM strategy" »
by Amrith Rajasekaran
‘Follow us on Twitter.’ ‘Become a fan on Facebook.’ These are now common messages on sites of so many companies wanting to reach out to their customer bases. The rate at which social networking has grown in the recent past is nothing short of phenomenal. Facebook crossed 250 million users as of July ’09 and Twitter has recorded a growth of over a thousand percent (year on year). What has that essentially done for the CRM space? Well, for starters it has really made the corporate world sit up and take notice of this new phenomenon of social networking.
Continue reading "Social Media – Be Aware or Beware? – Part 1" »
Busy day at Azune Solutions in Bangalore...
@impcust: @custsvc_azune: your prior solution did not work and i do not have enuff space to explain will send mail
@custsvc_azune: we value your mail and will respond back
Meanwhile in NY...
"The biggest question on our minds right now, here at the Corp HQ of Azune is the need to arrive at a strategy for our CRM offering with Social media in tow, the 'trend' of the year. We really wonder what we are doing with all the tweets/comments/bookmarks/Q&A aggregations!"
Continue reading "Let's get it straight - Social Media and Social CRM aren't twins!" »
The year 2009 has been quite an eventful one, and would be remembered for a long time for the action packed days..we’ve seen it all the … Government bailouts, companies being bought or dissolved, CEOs getting sacked etc etc..inthe middle of it this there has been something that has seen a tremendous growth - A beast called Social Media, digital consumer today has fuelled the engines of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other similar portals so much so that if you were to look at the following stats you would agree there is that there is something that is happening around us that neither the end customer nor the companies around can afford to ignore.
Continue reading "Social Media ... an eventful year for Digital Consumers" »
Ever heard of Arena X-Glide, polyurethane swimsuits? Or of the 16 world records broken in the recently concluded swimming World Cup? They share an uncanny resemblance to our own superstar, Social CRM!
Allow me to explain…
Continue reading "Back to CRM Basics: Why Social Media-CRM can wait!" »
Has the emergence of social media as the next big thing (and not all that recently too!) totally displaced all other concerns and aspects of CRM hitherto considered important? Does having a nicely managed presence on Twitter, a super blog, smart wikis and generous media sharing guarantee that you have your social media act neatly in place? What are the benefits you expect? And does a perfectly executed social media strategy imply that you now have half your CRM strategy in place, in the new scheme of things? Would social media and CRM intersect in a Venn diagram, or does one figure as a subset of the other? Which is bigger? Are you sure?
Social CRM is the buzz word in CRM circles today, be it marketers enthusiastic to dig and tap into this gold mine of information, albeit unstructured, or CRM implementers at the prospect of taking CRM technology and infrastructure to the next level.
All is good about the intent of Social CRM and how it will benefit all involved. But a few nagging questions have not left me, and hence this blog.
CRM is about building relationships with the right customer segment. For CRM to be effective and profitable, it is imperative to have a targeted approach for each customer segment. With Social CRM, businesses are touting about getting access to reams of consumer conversations on the web, and be able to get insight into their needs, issues and proactively act upon them. All rightly said, but what is the use of information without correctly identifying the customer segment it is coming from?
Continue reading "Social CRM – is it that straightforward?" »
There is no doubt the amount of customer generated data in the social media these days are huge, to put it mildly. One of the main challenges that the organizations are faced with today is management of data. Managing data across the enterprise in the most efficient way is a challenge that can send shrills down the CTO’s spine. The MDM guys will vouch for it. And all this, is for structured data. When it comes to unstructured data, as generated from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, one can imagine the complexity of the data management technology. Traditional CRM systems are mature enough and they classify, transform and store data in a way that is not easily compatible with data generated from SCRM which is in its growth phase.
Scene-1
A tweet by client9 - @no1insocialmedia | thanks for the demo today. Would love it if the community creation in the tool could latch on to the private cloud.
Scene-2
Our Mike, Matt and John(the CIO) are in a meeting to pore over tomorrow’s sales pitches.
Matt: John, Mike was mentioning about some feedback he received on Twitter today from our client from the coast side, about cloud integration capability.
Scene-3/Act1 John: Yeah, Matt lets put it on our to-do list anyways the product management has a long list.
Scene-3/Act2 John: Great Mikey! Matt, let’s use this feedback and see if we can prioritize this one as client9 has been a good advocate of our business. Lets use this feedback effectively as otherwise we need to request such ones. It also costs you see.
I have a theory. In the English language, 'Customer Experience' is possibly the term with the most variety of definitions. I wish to add to this record and hence this blog.
There are two dimensions of Customer Experience that I need to lay emphasis on while defining CEM– firstly, it is measurable and secondly, it isn’t an engine that runs in isolation to generate success. I’ll elaborate on both these dimensions…
With the evolution of Social media on a rapid scale, what with Salesforce now coming out with Service Cloud 2; is it already time to think how much of this can be measured?
In the good old days of CRM and other evolving concepts/strategies the innovation, acceptance, implementation, integration, feedback, service quality etc. took time, effort and a lot of money. Over the years all of these have been dealt with and there are many a ready-made solutions and excellent products made available. We have seen CRM mature over the years. The TCO, ROI, scalability, flexibility and high-performance were critical factors to success and these were taken care of. The measurement per se, of CRM has been lost in this mêlée somewhere though not completely and it came in late. Measuring the CRM success via the Balanced Scorecard model is one way.
by Venkataraman Ramanathan
The comment from Ray in my previous post cannot be more relevant. The sooner MDM embraces social media the better it can serve and evolve. This is one parameter that will take the game more closer to the CRM+MDM realisation.
It was a hectic day for Michael (young Mike to us) and was traveling home, when he caught in a downtown traffic jam. “Well, why not tweet something for the lousy 15 minutes that I spend here. Let me vent out my ire here” and he picks up his iphone and puts in a tweet – “ Today, at work I found it very difficult to resolve all the false positives and false negatives. This just isn’t the way it should be for what I paid”. Now Michael is a consultant at his firm and has close to 3500 followers on Twitter. Some of them being the vendor consultants and sales people he is constantly in touch with. The next minute, he sees an alert on his iphone that says – “ Let’s set up a meeting tomorrow Mike, to discuss your issues with our product”.
I recently came across a research forecast that marketers would shave off 9.5% from market research spend over 2009, reversing a 20-year trend of annual spending increases. It appeared in Marketing Week and here is the link. The article highlights the following as one of the research findings: "….while survey data and company sales data continue to be used by nearly all market research professionals, other methods, such as focus groups, syndicated research and scanner data, have all experienced decreases. For instance, use of focus group data has dropped from 80% for the past two years to 74% to date for 2009."
While I do not know the reason for the drop in usage of focus group data (the research, the full report of which I have not seen yet, might have some pointers), to my mind, this inflection may point to a long term trend for focus groups. I believe that the increasingly available customer generated qualitative data around attitudes, preferences, opinions, reviews, etc. in the Cloud - specifically the Social Media - will eventually lead to that.
Over the years SaaS has been revolutionizing the software industry and the advantages are well documented. One of the main deterrents of this fastest growing deployment model is regarding the security the SaaS applications have to offer. While more efficiency in terms of private clouds and on demand solutions are looked at by companies mostly due to the significant reduction in maintenance costs and other associated benefits, the single most important deciding factor in these IT initiatives continues to be the security of the deployed systems.
I am a Liverpool fan. I regularly follow all the matches they play and visit a set of websites to capture the news at the club. Sometimes I don’t get to watch all the matches, if I’m travelling or attending some important meeting or busy with some personal task. I would be yearning to see if someone can send me the details through SMS for matches with video clips of the goals scored. I get some updates from a website which charges me way too much since it’s a UK based service. I have a Liverpool theme on my desktop and constantly discuss the club in Facebook and Orkut and other public forums. And this month when I visited the website of my mobile company to pay the bill I saw the link to download Manchester United ring tones etc. If you knew about the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester United in the past season, you would realize how much that link irritated me. I was thinking, “if only the company knew there are enough Liverpool fans in this part of the world. If only they knew I would be interested in such content on my mobile. If only there is a way for them to realize that I leave enough clues in public forums. If only…” This situation could be very true with IPL fans or in general any sports fan. This can be further extended to any interest that a regular person might have including cooking, travelling, etc etc.
Continue reading "Social CRM: The place where everyone wants to be" »
Continue reading "Cloud Computing Part 2: How is Cloud Computing different from SaaS?" »
I was browsing our internal Blog community and came across some interesting points penned down by Khanchana on the relevance of CRM investments in the current economic scenario. Here are some interesting excerpts to take away from her blog.
Continue reading "Investment in CRM – Is it relevant NOW?" »
Join us as we discuss the evolution of the cloud and try to understand how the clouds might transcend horizons and come offshore.
Continue reading "Cloud Computing Part 1 : Are we doing it already?" »
No this is not about a terrorist plot to spread communicable diseases rapidly to bring down an economy :) This is more of an advertising concept which utilizes the immense popularity of social networking in today’s age of Orkut, twitter & Facebook. This is an online and more advanced, quicker and larger form of the traditional Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing. This has been around for more than a decade now but it is yet to be leveraged by CRM product vendors.
Continue reading "Viral Marketing and CRM: A heady combination" »
In the past few months, I’ve had a number of interesting conversations & debates on benefits of Social CRM to sales organizations. I’m jotting down a few fundamental thoughts gathered from these discussions on ‘Social Sales’ vis-à-vis traditional sales here.
Continue reading "CRM and P2P networks - A good combination?" »
