Third Idea Consulting

Hey, just a quick update to let you all know that a book I worked on is now available for preorder on Amazon. Dancing with Digital Natives: Staying in Step with the Generation That’s Transforming the Way Business Is Done has been a long time in coming, and I think I speak for all the authors and editors when I say how gratifying it is to see it in print.

My chapter deals, surprisingly enough, with social CRM and how business can use it to form close bonds with the digital customer, as well as how businesses are built upon social principles. There’s a load of good stuff from other contributors as well, so expect to learn from pages I’m not even responsible for. ^_^

Yes, I did just use a Japanese-style emoticon on my professional blog. I like them, and the regular ones screw up my formatting.

Sorry for my recent absence—I wonder what it says about my personality that so many of my blogposts begin with an apology—but I’m mostly to blame. I’ve been doing plenty of writing lately, but I have been trying to coordinate my posts here with those on another site (since I’m guest-blogging for them and crossposting here). Their schedule has reduced the frequency with which I get page time, and I let my posting here follow suit.

You deserve better than this, O my loyal readers, so here’s one to chew on while I wait for my updates. To be honest, this is one of the posts I’ve already written, so it would have wound up here anyway. But blogs are useless when left to gather dust, and I owe you for finding my work interesting.

Getting Schooled in Social CRM

Good news from the world of academia shows me there’s hope for the future of business. There’s at least one MBA student who takes customer experience seriously. The evidence can be found on 1to1 Weekly, in a news article by Elizabeth Glagowski detailing Breanna Vanstrom’s paper on the subject.

It’s all fine and dandy for businesses to talk about social CRM as the Next Big Thing in the continuing effort to better serve customers—merely saying so puts a company in a positive light for at least a little while. But businesses are too often more about inertia than action; making a few superficial changes to CRM tactics is much easier than revising the entire CRM strategy, and achieves quicker results for shareholders. The customer often receives no long-term benefit. The phrase “business as usual” has negative connotations for a reason, y’see.

Knowing that the next generation of business managers is learning from the start that a business can’t truly succeed without serving and delighting the customer is heartening to me. Even putting aside the PR angle—the customer relationship marketing course that produced the paper is taught by Dr. Tom Lacki, a member of Peppers & Rogers Group’s 1to1 Faculty—this is a sign that the stereotypical soulless MBA is becoming a thing of the past. Good luck to Vanstrom and her classmates.

For a look at some companies that are delivering great customer experiences, take a look at this news piece by destinationCRM’s Lauren McKay about the leaders in this year’s Customer Experience Index from Forrester Research’s Bruce Temkin.

I was thinking today about the similarities between bad CRM practices and owning cats. I realize that telling you this and then writing about it may hurt my credibility, but (1) it’s true that I was thinking this and (2) I am really tapped for better ideas today, so here goes.

The dialogue, if you can call it that, between cats and their owners is mostly in one direction. I buy a new toy or type of food for the cats, and then try to interpret their interest—marketing. We don’t speak the same language, just as businesses often don’t think of a successful product in the same way a customer would.

Once I’ve started the marketing campaign, the next step in KRM (Kitty Relationship Management) is trying to close the deal, turning up the pressure in order to sell the cats (their names are Cookie and Dr. Harbl, in case you were wondering) on the wonders of these new rawhide mice, or frozen raw venison burgers, or whatever. Again, the success or failure of my efforts is dependent on factors I can neither predict nor understand. In time I might develop some insight to what these particular cats prefer, but I can’t necessarily communicate that information to somebody else, nor can I apply it to other cats.

Kitty customer service? Again, failure to communicate is the order of the day. I am prepared to respond to certain requests from my cats, so every time they provide input I try to interpret it in light of those expected requests: feed me, pet me, or clean the litter box. It took a while to learn that last request, mainly because my own data told me I was doing an adequate job. If I’m not doing what the cats want, they have limited means for setting me on the right track, and if they don’t lodge some kind of protest, I continue with what I’ve been doing.

Good CRM, especially the social kind, is like speaking cat language. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement, but trust me—it’s huge. If you’ve ever had a cat deposit its “customer feedback” on your laundry bag, you’ll agree.

The busy part has ended for the moment. Here’s what you missed—or got from somebody else, I don’t mind. For those of you who might criticize me for cramming multiple updates into one post, too bad. I want to get these things off my plate, and they’re conceptually related.

1. Salesforce.com announced updates to Service Cloud, the award-winning customer service component for its SaaS business computing environment. It’s now called Service Cloud 2, based on changes to the way it all works as the integration with InStranet has progressed. Salesforce.com fans will be glad to know that the Twitter integration is available now for free download, and tentative dates have been attached to the other two components (the knowledge base and the crowdsourced customer service).

I will tell you it’s looking very good, and I stand by my assessment of Service Cloud’s potential in the first linked article. One of the key concepts Service Cloud is built on is that a great many customers turn to the Internet for help before (or instead of) asking the vendor, and building customer service around this is going to be big for Salesforce.com. The announcement, however, is very similar to what we saw in January—if there’s one thing I can regularly ding that company for, it’s the issuance of multiple press releases for what is essentially the same news. It’s more a journalistic quibble than a complaint about their business practices—the fact remains that Salesforce.com has become a billion-dollar concern by making sure nobody forgets what they’re up to.

2. RightNow signed an agreement to acquire HiveLive, the social networking platform vendor. I’ve met and spoken with HiveLive before (though not recently enough to have had any inkling of the buyout), and I’ve got to say this is potentially an excellent move by RightNow. Greg Gianforte’s Bozeman, MT-based RightNow has always been very strong in the customer service end of CRM, and the move to community-based help environments impacts that. HiveLive’s platform is highly customizable and capable, so if all goes well RightNow will have just what it needs to make itself the go-to provider of SaaS customer service, Web self-service, and e-commerce apps.

There are a number of ifs, of course. Buying technology isn’t the same as integrating it; I’m still waiting for the Salesnet acquisition from 2006 to bear visible fruit. And I can’t say for certain where the deal came from or where it’s going, because—unlike rival Salesforce.com—RightNow tends to be very closed-mouthed about its activities, and the company doesn’t make nearly enough regular noise for its own good. (This time it’s understandable though, because certain messages need to be held until the markets close.)

Caveats aside, I think it’s a good move. I am imagining the combined product and it’s awesome. Here’s hoping there’s something to see very soon, at least by the RightNow Summit this October.

[UPDATE 9/15/2009, noonish] Regardless of what I think about RightNow having slipped a bit in the industry’s perception, the company is still doing right by its customers; Three of its implementations won Gartner/1to1 enterprise CRM awards today. Congratulations to RightNow, iRobot, Distance Minnesota, and National Cable Networks. See the release here.

3. I spent Wednesday afternoon at the live component of an Acxiom Webinar, which you can view here. David Daniels of Forrester Research was the leadoff speaker, giving a great talk about the relevancy of the messages and channels businesses use to engage customers. He was followed by Chriss Marriott, Acxiom’s global managing director and vice president, who presented his ideas on “Winning Elections in the Marketing Democracy,” a clever way of discussing the use of social CRM for marketing. It was a pretty low-key session, but informative and even inspiring. If you need a primer on the ROI of social media in marketing, you could do worse than watch the recording. David and Chris are both very engaging speakers, and the day provided me some new ideas on how to open discussions.

Friend and former coworker Jessica Tsai wrote a good entry on the destinationCRM blog today, and I decided to comment on it there. I did so, but it’s still gnawing at me a bit. Rather than let it go, I’m going to expand on my comments.

Back story: Jessica’s post had to do with a segment on the Today Show where author and brand expert Martin Lindstrom discussed what he found in a focus group of boys and girls age 9 to 11. Mostly, he discovered something we probably knew but tend not to think about too much: children learn the language of brand early, and it affects their behavior. (It affects older people as well, but Lindstrom was turning his cognitive-psychology eye toward tweens.) My response was that, while it’s good to develop critical thinking, there’s a danger of making kids more likely to tease and bully each other over clothing choices.

We were all young once. All of us should remember how horrible some kids can be to each other. Lindstrom has statistics and quotes that show things haven’t changed; if anything, they’ve gotten worse. When your entire world consists of people exactly your age competing for attention and dominance, youths will latch onto anything that can help oppress others and aggrandize themselves. Clothing is immediately visible, and fashion choices are easy to criticize.

Encouraging kids to serve as a marketing force by flooding them with brand messages and engaging them in online conversations makes excellent sense in some ways, as it shapes young consumers’ preferences and lets them put pressure on their parents. It’s also a recipe for making some poor kid miserable if his/her parents don’t have a lot of money to spare, or don’t want to start their kid down the road of superficiality.

Most of the time, I’m in favor of unmoderated conversations between customers and businesses. When it comes to something polarizing like fashion, though, and when kids are involved, I recommend heavy monitoring and participation by the company. It’s not enough to delete inappropriate comments. If you’re going to engage minors in commercial conversations, you have a duty to guide that conversation in such a way that the seeds of elitism and bullying never take root. But it has to be done without patronizing, or you’ll dismantle your brand.

Somebody reading this is probably thinking I’m one of those people who always says, “Won’t somebody think of the children?” whenever a potentially uncomfortable topic comes up. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m all for treating young people like people, as grown up as they can handle, and believe that nothing teaches like experience. The best way to teach a kid why sharp or hot things shouldn’t be touched is to let them touch those things once (as long as they aren’t in danger of serious injury). But that sort of pain is momentary. Getting a reputation as a budget-rack shopper can happen with one bad choice and one cruel comment, and it can last for years.

Maybe I shouldn’t worry. Kids’ clothing should be marketed to kids, because parents generally don’t have a clue-I know for a fact that some parents would dress their kids in “adorable” sailor suits and jumpers until those kids can beat them in a brawl. But parents have to get involved somehow, and social media makes it easier.