Last week, before the Social CRM Virtual Summit, our mobile guru Patrick pointed out many of the reasons why you need to engage your mobile community. At the Summit on the 11th we unveiled our new mobile community interface to rave response from the event attendees.

 

Below is the great demo of that interface put together by the team, and I wanted to make sure that you saw it. Check it out, and tell us what you think.  If you want a live demo, you can request one here!

 

 

 

Introducing Lithium Mobile from Lithium Technologies on Vimeo.

“Please Put Your Tray Tables Up for Takeoff”

Q: “Are Customer Communities and Social CRM mission critical?” 

A: “Seriously?”

 

Now, my answer has always been clear – having a business without a website would be crazy – having a business without a customer community doesn’t even make sense.  After attending several conferences this year focusing on everything from CRM to Web 2.0 to Toasters (ok, so I didn’t really go to a toaster trade show), we noticed that any track or presentation that sounded anything like -- “so, how do I engage my customers in this new social world?’ – was completely full. 

 

Companies today have realized that the ‘social revolution’ has long since passed ‘fad’ status and landed squarely in the ‘mission critical’ category.  As one executive said to me, “All I know is that if my prospects and customers aren’t talking to me on the web, they’re probably talking to my competitors.” But, candidly, many we have talked to are asking themselves and their advisors, “But, how should we engage with customers in the social world?”

 

We asked ourselves whether the time was right for the industry’s first conference completely dedicated to and focused on Social CRM and the Customer Network. 

 

The answer? Tomorrow’s Social CRM Virtual Summit has registered over 2,000 people!  We appreciate that everyone has too much to do and not enough time in the day – that all of these people are willing to register for this maiden flight is a testament to the business value of Social CRM.  We’re grateful for the response.

 

“The Flight Attendants are here For Your Safety and Comfort”

In addition to the overwhelming excitement and response from registrants, we are thrilled about the number and caliber of leading Social CRM companies that are sponsoring this conference.  From our partners at ON24 powering the virtual event platform, to solution providers like Cognizant, LivePerson, Ant’s Eye View, Forum One, and Genesys, to media leaders like CRM Media, leaders from all fields have come together to share best practices and begin an industry-wide dialogue. 

 

At the Lithium booth, for example, you will be able to see the industry’s first Mobile Community Platform.  I’d encourage you to stop by the Exhibit Hall at the conference and have a quick chat with all the sponsors – I guarantee you’ll learn something – I sure did.

 

“Please Direct Your Attention to the Front of the Cabin”

Our only regret is that we didn’t have more keynote time slots available to bring you all of the experts in Social CRM that were interested in sharing best practices with you.  But, the lineup that we do have is nothing short of amazing -- Paul Greenberg from The 56 group (who I think has been called the Godfather of CRM); Mike Fauscette who leads IDC’s Software Business Solutions Group;  Brent Leary, founder of CRM Essentials, analyst, and award-winning industry blogger; Kevin Ryan, VP of Social Media at Barnes & Noble; Bill Johnston of Forum One Communications; and Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang of the Altimeter Group.  We’re thrilled – and grateful – that these folks are with us and know that you will find huge value in their insights.

 

“We Have Reached Our Cruising Altitude” (now I’m really stretching these titles!)

One of the wonderful things about the Virtual Summit is the ability to engage directly in conversations with experts and practitioners who can offer practical, real-world results. 

 

Social CRM and Customer Communities are delivering hard dollar value and results to leading companies around the world.  We recently did a survey of CXOs and VPs at companies with more than 1000 employees to ask them what the value of a customer advocate or fan was to their business -- 60% said it over $50,000 per year. Companies that have taken the plunge with Social CRM and Customer Communities are building Customer Networks that have hundreds and thousands of these advocates.

 

And many of those companies are here to talk to you.  In addition to the Exhibit Hall and the Auditorium sessions,  be sure to visit the Networking Lounge for scheduled chat sessions with leading companies like T-Mobile, National Instruments, Barnes & Noble, Juniper Networks, Redfin, Lenovo, and Best Buy.  There will also be chat sessions with industry luminaries such as Dr. Natalie Petouhoff of Forrester Research, Inc. as well as Lithium product experts.  Come discuss how you might replicate the success that these companies have had with their Social CRM efforts.

 

“Enjoy Your Stay”

Setting aside my contrived flight analogy for a moment, I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has worked so hard to make this Summit a reality.  A tremendous amount of work has gone into making this first ever tradeshow dedicated to Social CRM a huge success and hugely valuable to all who attend.   

 

Social CRM has truly come of age and is already creating enormous value for companies that are doing it well.  We hope this conference helps you to drive forward your own efforts to create your own Customer Network and harness the power of social customer relationships.

 

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow!

 

On the eve of the Social CRM Virtual Summit tomorrow (Nov 11), Denise Persson, the Chief Marketing Officer of ON24 talks about the partnership between ON24 and Lithium, that makes the Virtual Summit a landmark event.

As Cher famously crooned, “The beat goes on.”  But now it’s the conversation that goes on, and on, and on.

 

This week’s Social CRM Virtual Summit, sponsored by Lithium and powered by ON24, illustrates several important developments in the rapidly evolving worlds of virtual events and social CRM.  First of all, the pioneering partnership between our organizations has resulted in the largest online conference to date for social media and CRM professionals and, the first virtual show to demonstrate how a social community integrated with a virtual event platform can result in a new business application—one that is more powerful and that offers more benefits than either stand-alone solution could provide. In other words, one plus one equals, in this case, three.

 

A problem with traditional in-person events has been support for ongoing communication among participants.  Event sponsors invest time and resources and encourage networking.  Attendees meet each other, exchange business cards and contact information…and then what? The same thing occurs in the virtual world—except that attendees are exchanging Vcards instead of business cards.

 

However, there is a shift occurring in the virtual events space; as illustrated by the Social CRM Virtual Summit, an evolving trend is the shift from stand-alone events to ongoing communities. Event sponsors, exhibitors and participants now have the ability to engage with each other on an ongoing basis, providing product updates, for example, and sharing information as appropriate. Instead of being abruptly cut off when an event ends, conversations can continue. The benefits for marketers include faster time-to-market and stronger relationships.

 

In his highly regarded blog, Social CRM Virtual Summit speaker Jeremiah Owyang has noted that events should, in fact, be integrated with communities and social networks to increase participant interaction. It speaks to the very nature of social communities.  They are all about building relationships—with no borders, no barriers.

 

Once seen largely as replacements for physical events and trade shows, the virtual event is increasingly not an event at all, but a persistent experience. It was the desire to maximize the benefits of an experience that can be ongoing that led to the ON24/Lithium partnership.  Through integration, a long-term community experience is made possible, fostering interaction, communication and relationship-building before, during and after the event.

 

Just think about the nature of networking at a virtual event. The communication is all about sharing information and connecting through a dialog that begins at the event. Why should that dialog end when the event does?  It shouldn’t, and THAT is the essence of our partnership with Lithium. 

 

We’ve created a real-time virtual event embedded in an ongoing, growing social community. We’ve taken the best of both worlds and created an industry first—an integrated, social-media enabled virtual event and innovative, next-generation solution for social CRM.

 

 

 

Roaming guest blogger and Lithium Director of Marketing, Dan Ziman is back from the windy city, with his wrap up of the Forrester Consumer Forum.

 

Reflections from Chi-town 

 

Some light rain and wind.  Yes, it’s good to be back in Chicago, though it’s not necessarily my top travel choice for the Fall. Nonetheless, it could have been a lot worse. For example, I could have missed out on a killer steak and potatoes meal. Ah, Chicago.

 

This week I attended the 2009 Forrester Consumer Forum (entitled “The Three-Dimensional Consumer:  Creating Breakthrough Multichannel Relationships”) at the Fairmont Hotel, as Lithium was a Silver Sponsor.  Two years ago at this conference (Fall 2007) – Josh Bernoff (SVP, Idea Development at Forrester) and Charlene Li (founder of Altimeter Group) announced ‘Groundswell’ – the smash hit, best-selling book with over 80,000+ copies sold [ buy Groundswell on Barnes & Noble | Amazon ]. The book was published in April 2008 and launched at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco soon after.  

 

As I attended Josh’s keynote on Tuesday evening -- where this year’s Groundswell award finalists and winners were announced --it really hit me home how much the social media and community space has really evolved since Josh & Charlene first embarked on their vision of enterprise transformation and the emerging embracement of a new communication channel. For one thing, a social media strategy wasn’t a strategy for most companies. There was just a sprinkling of early adopters who were eager to experiment and were laying the tracks as they chugged forward.  Even when comparing this year’s forum to 2008, there’s huge shift.  In 2008, when I asked, “What is your company doing to engage with customers online,” the answer was generally, “Well, there’s some people looking into that”. Now, the answer is “Oh yea, we’re doing a ton and we want to get better”. It feels like there’s so much more commitment to the cause.  

 

OK, so what about ROI? 

Yes, the $1M question. Or, is it?  For those who now admit to and implement a social media strategy, there appears to be three camps:

 

Camp 1 – Sophisticated metric tracking and management.  i.e. promoted URL in channel, followed by tracking conversion performance from channel to customer action. 

Camp 2 – Tracking volume (# tweets, followers, web traffic, Facebook fans, time on site). 

Camp 3 – Not concerned.  Really? Yes!  It was discussed repeatedly by attendees, panelists and speakers -- “if our customers are there, we need to be there and make it a rewarding & impactful customer experience”. Camp 3 was a revelation – it displays the early adopter, visionary mentality. What it really shows is that there’s still value in experimenting if you have a clear business objective in mind. The objective being we appreciate hearing from our customers positive or negative.

 

That brought me to the next big question… Is there value in “transparency”? The answer...a resounding “Yes!” Transparency builds trust. Isn’t that what you want from your customers? Think about why you trust your best friend. Cause you are willing to hear them say anything. Do you get offended? Taken aback?  Outraged or frustrated?  Yes, perhaps, but you also feel better because you’ve heard your friend’s true feelings and you know what you must address and how to respond. The same applies to customer communities that will reside on your web domain.  Much fear surrounds building community and “dealing with complaints”.  But, as Barry Judge, CMO of Best Buy stated in his keynote about embracing the social customer, “…the brands that figure this out will be the brands that succeed (in this new engagement model).”

 

Executive Sponsorship

One of the final valuable pieces I learned this week is how our customers and prospects are trying to assess and sell to their executive sponsors to get funding for social media initiatives. As Harley Manning, Vice President and Research Director at Forrester eloquently stated today, you first need to know what type of executives you’re dealing with. He articulated three categories:  passive, willing, and engaged.   Sage advice for any project you’re trying to get funded. What category does your boss fall into? If you’re one of those exec sponsors, what category would you put yourself in?

 

Congrats again to all of the Groundswell Winners and Finalists for exemplifying leadership in social solutions and a particular shout-out to a few of our customers, FICO, Lenovo, Juniper and Aflac, for winning a category and being finalists, respectively.

 

Kudos to the Forrester Event Team too - can’t wait to see what one year from now will bring.

 

 

You may have heard that RightNow has acquired HiveLive.  We believe RightNow’s acquisition is a strong validation of Lithium’s Social CRM vision (http://www.lithium.com/what-we-offer/#/lithium/video-tour/) of connecting online customer communities, traditional CRM systems, and the broader Social Web. 

 

Kudos to everyone who is realizing that CRM has to become social – Lithium and almost everyone we speak to believes this is an inevitable trend.  We congratulate RightNow on their early efforts here.

 

Lithium has partnered with RightNow at leading companies around the world who seek the best-in-class customer community platform to integrate with their eService systems, and we continue to value that partnership.  

 

Some of you may be wondering about our commitment to integration with RightNow. The quick story there is that we believe customers and the market will continue to demand the Lithium best-in-class solution integrated with their CRM solutions.  Only last week, CRM Magazine awarded Lithium its Rising Star award (http://www.lithium.com/events/press-releases/2009/lithium-technologies-wins-crm-magazine-rising-star-award) for our vision and proven success with the largest communities and companies in the world such as AT&T, Best Buy, SONY, RIM, and Univision.  Lithium was the only community platform provider given this award.  We are committed to offering the market and our customers the best possible solution for their needs.

 

So not only will we continue to support our integration to RightNow, we’re enhancing it. The latest version, which we’ve released this week, is very powerful: we built a widget framework so you can put almost any Lithium content in a contextually relevant place in the RNT customer portal; we made it so you can change the workflow to ask the community a question rather than creating a case; we’ve got configurable escalation rules between the community and the CRM system; and we’ve built a sweet integration to RightNow’s agent console to enable agents to close the loop -- see questions escalated from the community, search community content, then close the case back to the community – all without leaving their console.  This level of integration is unparalleled in the industry and will take some time for others to catch up.

 

But of course technology alone won’t make a Social CRM deployment successful.  You need a deep understanding of the dynamics of customer networks. You need the tools to be able to measure how you’re doing, and the wisdom to read the measurements properly. You need some successes to act as a benchmark, so you know what to when things don’t go according to plan, and what to do when you’re beating your plan. 

 

As many industry analysts have observed, customer community and Social CRM success relies heavily on proven methods and best practices in community management.  Lithium has over a decade of these best practices and will continue to offer them – as well as the industry’s best functionality --  to joint RightNow customers and everyone else.

Ah, now I get it

People have already acknowledged the dramatic effect of social media on individual behavior. After all, the world watched as Ashton Kutcher and CNN raced for Twitter followers. But, what is the implication for businesses? Where is the value? Not that there isn't immense value in knowing what Ashton had for breakfast, but we decided to take an unheard of approach to answering the question - we asked businesses.

 

Their answer? "It's about the customers, stupid."

 

It seems that these customers are the ones that actually pay employee and executive salaries and bonuses and drive stock prices through their purchases. One executive put it this way, "My customers are my company. The most important thing for any business is attracting, retaining, and growing the customer base. End of story. Besides, I can calculate an ROI with customer interactions. And, that makes me look good."

 

The Power of the Customer Network: A Business Revolution

Today, we are announcing the next generation in customer relationships - the first Social CRM suite. At our recent customer conference, many discussed this bold new vision for transforming the way customers and companies interacted with each other.

 

Simply said, Social CRM delivers the Customer Network.

 

The Social CRM Video Tour

 

From discussions with our customers, we are seeing Social CRM bringing 3 high level customer strategies and components together:

 

1. online customer communities;
2. workflow-based integration with social networks beyond the community;
3. workflow-based integration with traditional CRM systems and business processes

 

Integrating traditional CRM systems with social networks to enhance visibility to customer conversations is necessary, but not sufficient. That approach only creates another channel for the company to maintain the same 1-to-1 relationship that they have always had. The true power of Social CRM is in creating a customer network of advocates that can actually do a lot of the work for you.

 

Keeping it Real

The vision is being backed up in this launch with three new products: Tribal Knowledge Base, CRM Connect, and Social Web Connect.   While we talk about them in the press release, you can see some of the screen shots here (click to see larger images):

 

    

 

 

 

Here's a real example: A prospect asks a question about a company on a social network like Twitter, "Is ACME worth the money?" This is automatically fed into the company's online community where it is seen by an advocate, who starts a discussion thread based on it. That discussion automatically surfaces in the CRM system, alerting a sales rep. The sales rep can then engage other advocates -- a trusted source -- to weigh in on the thread, within the online community, on behalf of the company. The advocates provide honest and favorable commentary and the deal closes within a week -- at little to no cost of sales.

 

Now imagine that happening at a scale of thousands or millions. If you have built a bigger network of customers and advocates than your competitors, you win. And, here's the kicker, not only do your sales go up as you build a bigger network...but, your costs go down as your network gets bigger and those advocates do more and more for you.

 

The Payoff

We've been running a survey of enterprise CxOs and VPs asking them, "How much is a customer advocate/fan worth to your business on an annual basis?" Drum-roll please...well over 50% of the respondents said "over $50,000 per year".  Nearly 30% said "over $250,000 per year"! That's the value of one advocate. Now imagine if you had a whole network of these advocates to PROMOTE your company, INNOVATE on your products, and SUPPORT your customers.

 

What's better, here, is that this is already happening - this is not a theoretical discussion. Companies are driving hard dollar returns to their businesses. Some examples:

 

• FICO has found that prospects that participate with its customer network spend over 40% more;
• The Cisco Linksys customer network is deflecting over $7 million per year in call center related costs; and
• Sage Software has tracked a 20 point increase in its Net Promoter Score!

 

The ROI is real, it is measurable, and it is growing.

 

The Conversation

Based on our customer discussions and the research we are doing with business executives, we think the Social CRM opportunity represented by the Customer Network is an enormous opportunity that transcends traditional CRM and traditional online communities. What do you think? What would a Customer Network be worth to you?

 

There's an interesting article in this month's Atlantic monthly, ironically available in print but not yet on their Web site, about Barack Obama's fund-raising organization.

Written in the breathless style of news about the latest start-up, the article explains Senator Obama's fund-raising prowess by saying that Obama has built a SaaS-like social networking platform that attracts and cultivates super-users almost like an online game.

It's SaaS-like in the sense that rather than seek a small number of big donors (a la traditional software), Obama's campaign self-consciously sought a large number of smaller donors, then scaled them up. Mark Gorenberg from Hummer Winblad has advised the campaign on this.

The social networking angle was fairly obvious. One of the campaign's tech guys is a Facebook founder, and they've built a site that lets people form their own communities.

The game analogy was not explicitly drawn in the article, but you can't live and work among gamers without seeing it: the campaign encourages people to get involved, then when they get involved they move up to a higher circle, and so on. People can publish their stats on the site to create an environment of friendly competition.

Whatever your political persuasion, this is an interesting article to read because it underscores why the basic principles behind online communities are so powerful: they bring in people, they require less overhead than conventional organizational approaches, and they scale amazingly well.

Could you run a government this way?

Everyone should go read Clay Shirky's keynote from Web 2.0.

He crystallizes in a way that others have not why there remains tremendous upside in the potential for social knowledge creation projects. Specifically, he argues that Wikipedia represent 100 million hours of human thought. By contrast, Americans alone spent two billion hours -- 2,000 Wikipedias -- watching TV last year.

Shirky defines an interesting term: the cognitive surplus. It's the amount of time society spends watching TV or engaging in other non-participatory, anesthetic pursuits because we haven't figured out how to use the time that social change has left us with.

The cognitive surplus is the answer to the question we get a lot about super-users in a community: "Where do they find the time?"

The answer, at a high level, is that they're using free cycles in their brains in participatory areas rather than passively.

Shirky's other big  point, although he doesn't put it quite this way, is that you if you can lower the bar on participation, you'll tap more of the cognitive surplus. Digg is a great example of this. So are some of the new features we've built around social promotion of content.

If a person spends five minute on your site, and in the end contributes one quantum of human thought  -- I liked this article, for example -- then you've tapped into a bit of the cognitive surplus.

To build a useful customer community, you only need a small fraction of a slice of the thousands of unwritten Wikipedias waiting to emerge from our torpid minds every year.

That doesn't sound so hard.

 

Fred Wilson, one of the smartest and most provocative bloggers writing about social software, has a provocative post about enterprise social software. He questions whether anything an enterprise does can be considered social software, given enterprise requirements for security and control. He writes:

But to me, the heart of social software is the community of users that forms around the software/service. The community provides much of, if not all of, the value of social software. What would twitter or facebook be without users? Nothing. Same with blogger, flickr, friendfeed, etc, etc.

And most enterprises don't want their employees to be active members of a community that it can't control, monitor, and moderate. So the software that tends to be adopted by the enterprise is usually hobbled by the needs of the enterprise and cannot get that magical lift that an unbounded community provides.

It's a question well worth asking, and I think that in focusing on user adoption, Fred is asking it in the right way.

A few observations….

First, we shouldn't assume that employees are always the most important constituency of the enterprise. If enterprises are going to learn one thing from the Web 2.0 phenomenon, it's that enabling large scale participation by their customers can generate tremendous value.

If we accept that, the prospects for large scale, if not "unbounded," participation in enterprise social software become a lot better. There are many enterprises with enough customers for a thriving community.

But this is also where a lot of enterprises mess up: they think about customer communities as though they were employee collaboration tools extended out to more people. Let's call this the Employee Fallacy. We've learned that customers, who have weak ties to one another and to the enterprise, have a different set of needs from employees who use tools to get their jobs done then go home. If the software doesn't reflect those needs; if it's not more like "play" than "work," it has less of a chance of building a community around it.

The Employee Fallacy doesn't just impact what tools enterprises choose and how those tools work.  To an even greater extent, it affects the deployment process. One reason many enterprise community deployments fail is that companies extrapolate from their deployments of employee-facing tools to customer-facing tools. Common symptoms of the Employee Fallacy during a deployment include obsessive focus on mirroring organizational charts in the software, an "if you build it they will come" attitude toward marketing, and skewed expectations about how many people will participate.

If customers are the most important constituency, the question arises, "Don't customers have the whole Internet to play around in? Why should they participate in a community sponsored by a company?"

This, I think, gets to the heart of Fred's question. There is a tremendous competition for users' attention, and an enterprise's customers may also use Facebook, or Flickr, or other Web 2.0 services. How should enterprises think about that?

The first answer is, "You need to be part of the conversation." You don't need to corner the market on conversation about your company, but you need to give your customers some kind of space to participate, or your market share in that conversation will be zero. And zero isn't good. If your customers can generate interesting, high-quality content, your market share will be quite good.

The second  answer is, "Don't get greedy." An enterprise community doesn't have to be the next Facebook to drive tremendous value for your company. In general, communities that engage customers have more meaningful and quantifiable ROI than employee-facing applications. So you can ground your expectations in hard numbers, which is fairly refreshing for a software project.

The third answer is that in the future, we will see intermingling social graphs between enterprise communities, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Forward-thinking companies -- the ones that have shaken the Employee Fallacy -- are already moving in this direction today.

At the end of the day, if enterprises don't become more participatory toward their customers, competitors will beat them to it. That's what's driving the trend toward greater openness, and it's a positive direction for consumers.

Message Edited by JoeCo on 04-30-2008 05:14 PM