Social CRM Innovation - Where Is It?

Yesterday (March 18th) there was a CRM Innovation Event in The Netherlands. Speakers like Paul Greenberg and Alan Rosenblatt told an audience full of CRM experts how Social CRM would change their world.

But the CRM industry isn't that far with Social CRM yet.

The state of the CRM business quickly became apparent from the many dark business suits and a relatively high average age of the attendees. (Our own company had 2 people there, 24-32 years old, and some asked if they were students...)

And what did the dark business suits talk about and demonstrate to each other?

They discussed brand monitoring. Checking out what people are saying on social networks. So we asked them: "Are you monitoring what your own customers are saying? Because the information on Twitter and Facebook from paying customers might be most valuable." But the answer was no, they couldn't do this yet.

And they demonstrated framing social profiles. A good old-fashioned IFrame in a CRM system, showing the LinkedIn profile page of a customer. So we asked them: "Does your CRM know when the profile information on LinkedIn has changed?" But again, the answer was no. That was still a bridge too far.

To us it seemed that people were only talking about social networks. They were not really using them. For example, conversation on the Twitter backchannel during the conference was less than impressive when compared to other "social" conferences. And where was the Twitter wall?

Come to think of it, where was the real innovation?

Our own people walked around with a MacBook, showing the business suits that it is possible to make real connections between CRM contact data and social network profiles, where LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are actually updating the stale old data in the CRM system. And people thought this was very interesting. One even recognized it as the first real innovative stuff he had seen at the conference... But getting their systems ready for such forms of integration still seems far away. We heard "We are not ready for this yet," and "We have other priorities right now," and "Why should we need that?"

The CRM business seems like an aging horse, pulling an old cart that lost a wheel, and a wooden bench that has been eaten away. How are the business suits able to keep up with the jockeys who know how to harness the speed of social media every day?

Fortunately, there are some people who do understand that the business needs racing horses. We compliment the organizers of the event for putting Social CRM at the heart of a day that should have been about innovation in CRM. Even if it wasn't really there yet.

But it's a start. And a few young horses are getting ready. Let the race begin...