(feature image courtesy of http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-the-social-consumer/)
Top bloggers in the Social CRM (SCRM) space are a pretty tight-knit group with many standout blogs.
If you are into the Social CRM scene, Paul Greenberg, President of The 56 Group (and fanatical New York Yankees fan), is a must-follow. His definition of Social CRM is the one most cited by other experts in the field:
“[Social] CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”
Paul Greenberg has been an evangelist for Social CRM for several years and publishes two blogs and speaks all over the world about CRM. He is also the founder of CRM Idol, an annual contest for small companies that provide customer service and support and CRM software products and services.
On the subject of influencers, Greenberg wrote a two part blog series denoting the good, the bad, and the ugly of being considered an influencer and what truly makes an influencer. Beyond influence, being able to build relationships with credibility is one of the most important things anybody can do in the social media world.
Says Greenberg on his PGreenblog, ”[this is a series of posts] that will provide whoever reads it with the rudiments of how to deal with and think about influencers and the basics around building an influencer/analyst program”.
In a guest blog from 2010, Greenberg notes that Social CRM is not a specific product, but more of an umbrella term, and it doesn’t matter if what you practice is called SCRM as long as the building blocks are there and it works. He continues to lecture and present about SCRM and act as the voice of reason for what is becoming a more mainstream practice.
2. Brent Leary
Another important voice in SCRM is Brent Leary, who takes a more technological look into SCRM products and services. His most recent post is a review of Jim Fowler’s newest baby, InfoArmy, an information service based on crowd-sourced (read “social”) intelligence. Leary gives it a good initial review while noting that content curation will be critical for using the service.
Harish Kotadia, of the Blog on Big Data Analytics, Social CRM and Business, has produced a treatise on so-called Big Data, showing that Big Data is for making decisions, not just collecting the data to say you have it. So rather than start with big data, start with a business problem you want to solve and go from there. At least you will be able to figure out which data is relevant and which is trash.
And Forrester’s Zach Hofer-Shalls is keeping an eye on the SCRM “arms race”. He observes that M&A in the social CRM sector is heating up with such events as Oracle purchasing Vitrue and Salesforce.com buying Buddy Media only a year after purchasing Radian6. These firms and others know that the customer is now in charge of the interaction and are attempting to rapidly enter the market before it is saturated. These companies and Hofer-Shalls also know how difficult Social CRM can be and hope to educate businesses before disaster happens. The next challenge is to get these new acquisitions to work with their existing products.
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