If you've been to our home page this morning, you know that today we've introduced Lithium Social CRM, the next generation of our solution for customer communities. It's been many months in the making. In many ways, it's the natural evolution of everything we've done and everything we've learned for the past 10 years. To mark the occasion, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts about how and why the worlds of "social" and "CRM" have come together, and what it means to the average business (i.e., our customers).
The topic of Social CRM actually goes to the heart of what this blog is about. Because I call this blog "Inside Enterprise Communities," I'm often asked, "How are enterprise communities different than any other web community?" The answer is that an enterprise community is created within an ecosystem of technologies, processes, and relationships. There's already a "there" there -- you are adding to it, harmonizing with it, integrating with it -- not creating it from scratch. This is fundamentally different than just you or me putting up our shingle on the web and trying to attract members.
But integration with that ecosystem has been a long time coming. For many years, customer communities were nothing more than a message board at the far corner of the company website. These communities were disconnected from other systems, often requiring a separate username and password. They were also disconnected from other business processes. For example, if you called the customer support line and asked about an issue well-documented on the company's support forums, you'd often hear, "Sorry, that's not a known issue."
This isn't to say that these companies were wrong or stupid. As computer scientist Phil Agre says, technology changes rapidly, people change fairly rapidly, and institutions -- that is, that bundle of processes, policies, practices, roles, and responsibilities we call "the organization" -- change very slowly. So it's taken about 15 years since the arrival of the commercial web to see the Internet fundamentally change the way companies work. Social CRM is a milestone in that process of change.
So let's look at what Social CRM means. Last part first: Everyone presumes you know what CRM means, but it's actually sort of a messy term. If you look up Customer Relationship Management on Wikipedia, you might think CRM is just another term for "enterprise systems," since it seems to include just about everything companies do with technology. Perhaps not surprisingly, when I ask companies what they use for CRM, I get three or four or five answers rather than one.
Further down in Wikipedia's description you get to what I think of as CRM:
There are several different approaches to CRM, with different software packages focusing on different aspects. In general, Customer Service, Campaign Management and Sales Force Automation (SFA) form the core of the system (with SFA being the most popular).
Sometimes companies refer generically to CRM systems as "our customer database," but that leaves out the "RM" part. The idea of CRM is not just to capture customer information, but rather to use it.
Ok, so what is "social"? Unlike CRM, which predates the web, "social" is something new. Human beings have always been social, of course, but those social interactions never achieved a scale meaningful to business because they were limited by boundaries of time and distance. With the arrival of the web, social networks grew into the millions and hundreds of millions. Suddenly, what people are saying about your company matters in a way it never did before.
For companies, "social" has two pieces: on-site, and off-site. The on-site piece includes all the traditional elements of web communities, including forums, blogs, idea exchanges, and product reviews, with the additional ingredient of reputation, which allows communities to form. The off-site piece, often referred to as "the social web," is the continuously evolving ecosystem of blogs, social networks, and content-sharing sites where people are also talking about your products and services today. All three pieces -- CRM, communities, and social web -- are critical to any company that wants to compete effectively now and in the future.
Some people wonder whether social elements on websites are still necessary in the age of the social web. The answer is that no social web rivals the concentration of interest you can achieve on your own site. Few people realize how large these on-site web communities have become today. The largest community on Lithium today has more than 6 million registered members. The average community on the Lithium platform -- and remember that we work with middle-market companies as well as the Fortune 1000 -- has more than 100,000 members. Take a look at the Facebook group for almost any large company, and I think you'll see the difference. Will Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks continue to grow? You better believe it. But so too will web communities. More than 70% of Lithium communities are less than two years old. They are just getting started.
Why is concentration of interest on your site important? It's because that's where you get your work done. That's where you sell to customers -- even if most of your transactions are still offline. That's also where you keep your customers, by providing the service and support they need to use your products successfully. It's your home field -- it's where you win. It's also where you gather the data that helps you keep winning.
But there's one more advantage, which our Social CRM whitepaper, released today, describes this better than I can. Bringing tens or hundreds of thousands of your customers together in one place amplifies your message, generating waves of influence that travel far beyond your site. On-site and off-site don't compete -- they work together. That's why our Twitter integration is so exciting. Bringing the conversation on Twitter to your site enables your advocates to join in. It's the only way your activities on the social web can scale.
Paul Greenberg sums it up nicely when he says:
You also have the integration of social media and community building tools with traditional CRM tools which are providing effective combinations which are leading toward SCRM. I want to emphasize. These are all good tools. They are worthy of any company's consideration. There is just no SCRM suite out there - as of yet or in the near future. Which doesn't matter one iota.
Where is this all going? Paul see that too, when he says that "co-creation, mutually derived value, is at the core of SCRM."
I hate to say "I told you so" -- except when I enjoy saying it. Back in 2002, a customer asked me the same question -- "where is this all going?" -- and I put together the following timeline. The time frame is a little longer than we're used to seeing in a business context, but I think it's important to think about timing in terms of when every company will be doing this, not just the enlightened few.
Today we're in a middle phase of this generation-long evolution, which I called "Learning how to listen." It's reflected in all the conversation you hear about "listening platforms," but it goes deeper than that -- it's really the same question of capturing, managing and using data that is the heart of CRM. As we progress though this phase companies will be better prepared to have the relationship with customers that they will increasingly demand -- a partnership in which they speak, we listen, and every decision we make is informed (though not dictated) by their experience. I'm happy to be playing a small role in helping that partnership come about.
![[URL]](http://lithosphere.i.lithium.com/skins/images/88446EE8FCCED8821BE340C5AA4123A4/base/images/message_has_url.png "Contains a hyperlink")
