Google Trends Smackdown: Enterprise 2.0 vs. Social CRM

Posted by Bob Thompson on November 7, 2009

1 comments | 4025 reads

This year social media has been a huge topic on this site and others. "Social CRM" has been a hot topic for debate, including how it relates to "Enterprise 2.0."

But after returning from the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference and observing, Where is the Customer in Enterprise 2.0?, I wondered just how prevalent these terms really are.

Fortunately, Google has a app for that! Here are a few charts that illustrate trends for both searches and published content, courtesy of Google Trends.

Note: all of the charts were generated for global traffic for all years that Google has data. According to Google:

Search data is scaled based on the average search traffic of the term entered
News volume is not scaled, it simply shows the number of times the term appeared in Google News stories.

First, to set a base line, let's look at two major terms: ERP and CRM. Search volume has been trending down since 2004, although news volume has been steady the past couple of years. Clearly these terms are not going away, with CRM having a slight edge. Google Trends: ERP vs. CRM

Now let's look at "social media," all by itself. As expected, a big run up in search and news volume this year. Google Trends: Social Media

But how significant is this? Although still trailing ERP and CRM in search volume, "social media" news items have actually surpassed ERP and CRM this year. This clearly shows the media frenzy surrounding the next big thing, but that people are still searching more often for the last big things. Google Trends: ERP vs. CRM vs. Social Media

How about social media for business? Here we see that Enterprise 2.0 has been a hot term since 2006, but Social CRM really didn't really exist until earlier this year. Google Trends: Enterprise 2.0 vs. Social CRM

However, when you compare these newer terms to ERP, CRM, and Social Media, they barely register on the Google Trends charts. Google Trends: Let's Get Ready to Rumble!

Conclusion: these trends charts show that while interest in social media for business has been growing rapidly, "Enterprise 2.0" and "Social CRM" still have a long way to go to challenge ERP and CRM in search and news volume.

Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson is CEO of CustomerThink Corp., an independent research and publishing firm focused on customer-centric business management, and Founder/Editor-in-Chief of CustomerThink.com, the world's largest community dedicated to customer-centric business. Thompson is a popular keynote speaker, blogger and author of numerous reports, articles and papers, including CrowdService: Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds in Customer Service and Support.

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Mike Boysen

November 8, 2009

I've been doing the same research - I love Google Trends

Hi Bob,

I've been using this tool for a while now for some website research I do for my sites. I took a long look at Social CRM before deciding to write about it. It's so low it's almost a waste of time, but it is trending in the right direction, so I though, what the heck.

It's interesting to compare it to strategic planning, change management, business process and other things that easily attach themselves to CRM. Social CRM is still lagging well behind. Not sure if it will ever catch up because I believe the term will die out eventually and it will simply be another bolt on to a CRM initiative.

I guess we'll see, won't we?

Mike Boysen
Effective CRM

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