Avatar 3D : Pocahontas :: Social CRM : CRM

Avatar 3D has no new plot line, but is very different experience & supposedly a big game changer.

Social CRM has no goals vastly different from CRM, but it is very different in thinking through (strategy) and implementation & supposedly a big game changer.

Avatar 3D is not a mere mash up of Pocahontas plot and 3D. The differences are in the nuances. Not much difficult to imagine a land from your history to draw it up on your storyboard. But very difficult to imagine the planets, moons, flora, fauna, technology, etc. of the future and put it on the storyboard. But the most important thing in Avatar 3D is possibly applying the underlying, inherent "white man's guilt" onto a completely new environment & culture. Old wine in a new bottle, not just wrt the plot, but also the colonization aspects.

Social CRM is not merely a mashup of CRM and Social Media or Social Networks. Not much difficult to imagine functions in your organization whose purpose is to transact with the individual customers, not converse and throwing storage capacity around that. But very difficult to comprehend a networked customer (not just online BTW) who converses with the organization & its ecosystem and throw not just storage capacity but also computational capability to derive actionable insights.

Integrating social technologies with your systems serving the existing CRM functions is not very difficult to draw on the storyboard. I did it in Dec 2008 and still holds good for the most part.

I would add more meat to the SMM, BI & Dashboard part of the diagram - and make it Social Analytics. They would take in the noise from the social web & community platforms, traditional systems, et al. and provide insights.

A new addition I would make is a BPM element in there, which would help in converting the insights derived from the Social Analytics into actionable work/tasks. This would require easily reconfigurable business rules that would parse the signals coming out of the Social Analytics end and route to the appropriate work baskets and track their status too. The tasks could also be initiated & assigned manually after going through the reports from the dashboard of the Social Analytics piece. The BPM tool also helps measure & analyze the actions taken and ties in with their effects on the social web.

I am open to suggestions on how to put all this into the old SCRM IT Landscape diagram. Hopefully I am able to update my diagram soon. :)