I am following the #scrm11 hashtag on Twitter to be informed about the Social CRM event in Paris, France and then I see this tweet (being reported from the event, not the person's question, I presume):

It seemed to me from the tweets (please correct me if I am wrong, I had limited visibility) that SugarCRM wanted to share a vision where the social networking site would be of the user's choice and the CRM system would be able to connect to any of them, as opposed to what happens currently.

Lofty goal, pretty cumbersome. And the only way currently possible is very inefficient, thanks to the absence of any widespread...

There is a huge discussion going on over at thebrandbuilder blog & on twitter too over the definition of social CRM, especially the Paul Greenberg version as adapted by Esteban Kolsky. There is a nice effort at wordsmithing the definition and this is what Oliver Blanchard concludes with in that blog post:

[Social] CRM is a business function supported by a system and technologies whose aims are to improve a company’s ability to derive insights into customer needs and behaviors by adding to their transaction data the lifestyle data they share online.

Definition discussions, yet again? :)

I laud the efforts at trying to wordsmith the definition to make it simpler for the audience in question, but the simplicity is too limiting IMHO & proposes that a (social) CRM doesn't do anything, just gains insights. Please do not mistake my...

Bob Thompson, Editor of CustomerThink.com and a friend who graciously threw a dinner party for me at a fabulous Italian Restaurant last year when I was in San Francisco area for the first time ever, has a very intriguing post that has got the knickers of many in knots. Well, it is titillatingly titled

"Social CRM" is Dead, Long Live the Social Customer Experience

where Bob definitely does a great job figuring out a pattern from a spate of events that have happened in the recent past in the product vendor market around Social CRM - they are all moving crabwise around the term Social CRM.

And yet something stuck me odd about getting into the nomenclature/definition/classification debates all over again. I mean, we are no longer fumbling in utter darkness, we are all fumbling around with a matchbox each in utter darkness. And...