Social Media has been around for some time, and lots of businesses are using it both for internal and external collaboration with employees, customers, and partners. They are realizing, little by little, that without a strategy the usefulness of the channels and tools is limited, and the calculated ROI are slowly disappearing as the cracks begin to show around the foundation of the business intent. The use of Enterprise 2.0 for internal social strategies and Social CRM for external social work has shown promise – but stops short of being a complete business solution. c
Top executives from Bay Area will tackle this subject at the upcoming event.
Our distinguished panel:
Dr. Volker G. Hildebrand – VP CRM Product Management, SAP
Volker Hildebrand is Vice President of CRM Product Management at SAP. He has global responsibility for go-to-market, business development and product strategy for the CRM product line. He has been with SAP for eleven years, building momentum in CRM and E-Commerce in various roles and leadership positions in sales, marketing and product management. Volker was instrumental in building a successful CRM sales team at SAP Germany when he joined in 1998. In 2000 he took over responsibility for SAP’s Internet Sales product and later joined SAP Markets to lead the product management team in Palo Alto. In 2002 Volker joined the CRM group driving success for the e-commerce product and later CRM partner channel management and CRM sales. An innovative and forward thinking executive he led the efforts to build SAP’s first java business application, the first Web-based user interface, and the first portal-based business application. He also initiated SAP’s entry in the PRM market. Under his helm SAP became a leader in Gartner’s B2B E-Commerce Magic Quadrant and market leader in CRM based on market share.
Mitch Lieberman, VP Strategy, SugarCRM
Mr. Lieberman is a senior software industry veteran whose career spans 15 years with experience in software architecture, management and a broad spectrum of transactional business applications. Building on his career experiences in product management, system architecture, implementation services and technical sales leadership, Mr. Lieberman is able to offer a unique perspective in the current technological landscape; such as Software as a Service (Saas), open source strategy as well as the up-and-coming Cloud Computing deployment alternatives. Mitch has spent the past 10 years focusing on CRM initiatives across many industries, and the past 3 years with SugarCRM.
Kira Wampler, Online Engagement Leader, Small Business Group, Intuit
From the beginning of her career, Kira Wampler has been passionately dedicated to customers. She had to given that her first job out of college was co-founder and president of her own company. She learned quickly that if you don’t serve your customers, you don’t eat! Nearly fifteen years later, Kira continues to bring her passion for customers to life at Intuit by driving community, social media and online engagement efforts that small business owners succeed. Prior to her current role, Kira helped launch Intuit’s community for budding entrepreneurs and developed Intuit’s Small Business Group’s policies, strategy and testing efforts around Word of Mouth Marketing. Kira received her MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and can be found on the social web on Twitter @kirasw.
Moderator: Esteban Kolsky, Principal & Founder, ThinkJar
Esteban Kolsky is the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management. He currently helps clients determine how to design, implement, and manage better experiences for communities and customers across all channels, including the new media and social channels. He also conducts research on SCRM and Communiities, which is distributed through his blog “CRM Intelligence and Strategies”.
Esteban has over 22 years of experience in the Customer Service and CRM space, spending more than ten of those years working as a consultant and advisor to some of the largest global organizations on their strategies for Customer Service, CRM and Experience Management. He also spent eight years at Gartner as an analyst writing about the future of CRM and CEM, including coining the concepts for Enterprise Feedback Management and Collaborative Customer Service, two of the hottest trends in social media.
Are we talking to ourselves in the industry- are are we speaking a dead language, one that our customers do not know? I often wonder with posts like this one- seemingly designed to show causality in the Web and implications on business today.
It falls Short
Humans are inherently Social Beings the Need to communicate and connect is almost genetic to our make up. Business is Social, examples like Best Buy- Blue Shirt Nation and the work of the past 25 years of Pioneers like John Seely Brown show clear, simple and concrete examples of learning organizations retaining tacit knowledge through such various social tools.
The internet many to many is indeed fostered by social media, as long as two devices have been connected via electronic means (telegraph) people have been using it-Socially.
-Kevin
Hi Kevin,
Your comment is well taken. However, I think you missed the core point of the discussions we will be having next week: is there a real business need and business support in separating Social CRM from Enterprise 2.0 from Social Media. Should internal and external processes be part of overall enterprise strategy? New or modified social strategy?
We probably agree on a fact that the social implications on enterprise business processes are significant. We are trying to to determine now if enterprises should structure their “social” strategy efforts independently for internal and external business processes or in integrated fashion under Social Business umbrella?
Best regards,
Tatyana
Tatyana, to your question on whether the internal and external business processes should be integrated, I think there is no doubt that they should. There surely are great benefits being able to provide a single application/platform/service for both internal team work and enternal customer/partner engagement. However, having such an integration really does not mean businesses cannot separate some internal processes from external processes. or vice versa. The latter can be just a matter of policy configurations of business integration application (or platform/service).
Tatyana,
Pity this is a physical event as I’d like to attend, but the commute from Australia is a bugger.
Will you be recording the event?
cheers
Mark
Is that you are all right, and none of the comments reflect in the writeup.
Just because humans are social does not mean business are inherently social. It takes time, learning, and commitment to teach an entity (a biz) to be social. Saying that there are examples and research simply proves the point – for each case you mention I can point to 10 that are not that way but the exact opposite.
The next few years will be the time for those businesses that are not yet social to become social. They will have to adapt to survive and even thrive in this environment. Same thing that happened when the internet and ecommerce came to town, a new business model has emerged and it is now a rush to adapt to it.
As for the issue of separation of internal and external processes – why would they be separate? they are all part of the same experience continuum, and they should be. The use of single tools for both collaboration movements, and one single community model for all affected parties is what makes a business social — and those business have single, continuum of processes that deliver experiences via the SCRM side and improve them via feedback on the E2.0 side.
I think these are the most common misconceptions we have today: that what we have just needs to shift a little, change a little and it will be fine and the same. Things won’t be the same going forward, the Social Customer shift has changed the balance of power and business need to adapt to it.
May we live in interesting times indeed!
Mark,
Events are usually recorded and uploaded about 1-2 weeks following the event.
Lots of interest in this one, so we may try to do it sooner…
Thanks
Esteban
Hi Mark,
I usually video tape the first hour of the meetup. So most likely this one will be video taped as well, and I will try to post it within a few days after the panel.
I have couple of recorded talks on Social CRM that you probably would want to listen to as well:
“Is Social CRM for real?”
http://www.cioitexec.com/2009/is-social-crm-for-real/
and
http://scrmworld.com/integrated-social-networks-analysis-communities-for-customer-support/
Best regards,
Tatyana
New technologies, Web 2.0 and Social Networks should cause changes, but this does not seem to be happening, companies using Twitter, XING or LinkedIn are typically only broadcasting their sales pitches. An effective customer portal, integrated with social networking sites could be of considerable benefit – both B2B and B2C customers are surprisingly helpful when it comes to giving feedback, supplying references or suggesting product improvements – if they have open communication channels, bidirectional communication channels!
David Duncan
Hello Tatyana,
I am doing some research on social media and came across this post from 6 years ago. It’s interesting how much things have changed since then. Anyway, you said above that you usually video tape the first hour. Where can this video be found?
Most likely on YouTube under my name 🙂