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There was a fantastic article in Forbes yesterday from IBM's vice president of social business. Follow the link and have a read as it's a really in depth look at what a lot of businesses are now facing. They key points I took from it were how social business really does increase productivity, enhance innovation and reduce cost. It's the continuing evolution of communication which means failing to keep up leaves you with a distinct disadvantage.
For a sales professional or account manager who spends time racing up and down motorways, keeping up with paperwork and generally trying to balance 8 plates on one, thin pole hearing sentences like 'take a while to get to know social media' is probably not a very favourable suggestion. In fact, though they'd probably never admit it to their bosses, that line probably wakes up a few internal neighbours with continuous expletives being held back from actually making it past the voice box.
Cloudforce 2011 hit London today and the message seemed very, very clear: The cloud is the new place to woo customers through social engagement. If you didn't believe the hype around social CRM then you may be surprised to learn it's already here. "We were born cloud, now we’ve been reborn social" was the stand out statement from Marc Benioff's key note speech at the Royal Festival Hall this morning.
When you see a global brand like Coca Cola launching a 'listening review' you know the signs are good for social CRM. Last time I checked (and this is a school playground fact I picked up many years ago, so maybe wrong) Scotland is the only country in the developed world to not have Coca Cola as the number one selling soft drink (Irn Bru if you're interested). Even if that fact is no longer correct, let's not pretend like Coca Cola is not a dominant force on the world stage.
Read a really interesting article from Gartner analyst Michael Maoz this morning which looked at the idea of jumping into unknown waters too quickly, just because everybody else was donning their swimming caps and readying a dive. He argues that businesses are guilty of taking this approach a bit with social CRM, realising they're joining the game late and wondering how it can all really make things better.
Finding the relevant data
Autonomy's mantra on their website best concludes what we've all known for a long, long time: "Human-friendly or unstructured information is not naturally found in the rows and columns of a database, but in documents, web pages, presentations, videos, phone conversations, emails and IMs". The web is changing and that is only good news for the enterprise.
I watched with interest last week as many media pundits and social experts alike blamed a better way of communicating for causing the shocking riots that rocked much of the UK. Indeed, many spectators and opinion leaders were calling for the sites to be banned, not just temporarily but altogether, as if a leech on society draining it of common decency (admittedly the latter did spring from the Daily Mail). Forgive me for being naive but surely better ways of spreading a message and sharing conversation can not be classed as 'dangerous' just because of a certain niche audience that choose to abuse it?
