Way back in 2001 (gee that seems like eons ago) I had the pleasure of keynoting a CRM conference in Singapore, speaking about PRM. Preceding me on stage was this Oracle executive named Lisa Arthur. And if memory serves she got even better speaker evaluation scores than I did. Drat!

Well, a few months ago Arthur popped up again, this time as CMO of Aprimo. Turns out that after our paths crossed on the other side of the globe, she went on to lead Oracle CRM marketing, then all of services marketing. Huge jobs. After serving her time at Oracle, Arthur become CMO at Akamai followed by a stint in consulting.

In August 2009, Arthur joined Aprimo as their fearless marketing leader. Aprimo, founded in 1998, has a good reputation in marketing circles, but their industry profile has been a bit low key. In the announcement Arthur said that "Aprimo is the best kept secret in marketing,"—quite a statement for a company that sells, um, marketing solutions.

This morning's San Francisco Chronicle newspaper reported that teens prefer Facebook. And that they are spending less time blogging.

Now, my son Matthew is an excellent writer and also a heavy Facebook users. But emails, blogging or even Twitter are not popular with him or his peers. That's why the stats collected by Pew Research Center last summer came as no big surprise.

I've been hearing for the past few years that MySpace was no longer cool with the kids. Maybe it still is with middle schoolers, but in high school, Facebook rules.

The drop off in blogging surprised me a little bit. In 2006 28% of teens (age 12-17) and young adults (18-29) blogged regularly. By mid 2009 that had dropped about half. One factor, says Pew, is that MySpace encourages members to blog while Facebook features short status updates.

Twitter is kind of an odd duck. One might think that youngsters would gravitate to the next big thing in social media. Especially when celebrities and artists are jumping on board. But, no. Only 8% of online teens say they've ever used Twitter. Instead, 2/3 send text messages.

Great, nobody writes letters anymore and soon, no more emails. Wait, maybe that's a good thing. But one has to wonder what this means for the work world in the next few years.

This month marks the 10th anniversary of this community. What a fabulous experience it has been for me!

Please indulge me as I reminisce about what's happened over the past decade. Join me for a look back to recognize those who helped launch and support the community. Together, we've created a special place to learn what it takes to build a customer-centric business.

The pioneers

After a 15-year career at IBM and then 3 years running a technology reseller, I took the plunge in 1998 to become a CRM consultant. Why? Because CRM seems like a wonderful blend of business strategy, customer-centric thinking and technology.

Well, as some may recall, my early days were spent mostly as an expert in PRM (Partner Relationship Management), which was an emerging niche in the late 1990s. But I also found time to start a general CRM newsletter ("On the Front Line") in mid-1998. And then an email-based discussion forum ("CRM.Talk") in 1999.

Both grew like crazy, but were hobbies that I supported as a sideline to my "real" business as a PRM analyst/consultant. Read more »

I'm partnering with Andy Rudin of Outside Technologies in a very interesting study of sales risks.

In other words, what are the factors that keep sales reps and organizations from meeting their revenue objectives?

If you are involved in sales or other direct revenue producing activity, please take 15 minutes to share your input. It will help us advance our thinking about the risks that matter and what can be done to mitigate them.

Of course, you'll get a copy of the results in a detailed white paper after the research is complete.

Still need some encouragement? Then how about this...

As soon as you finish the survey, you'll get a free download of these two white papers:

• Five Tactics to Manage Sales Risk, by Andy
• Best Practices to Improve Sales Productivity, by yours truly

To take the online survey, just click this link and follow the instructions.

http://www.customerthink.com/survey/salesrisk

Thanks!

If you've struggled to keep up with the hyperactive social media industry in the past year, you've got lots of company. Well, me, at least.

Got 10 minutes? Then you've got time to enjoy Rob Cottingham's video recapping major social media events of 2009. Key players include Facebook, Oprah, Obama, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon and Zappos, Pizza Hut, United, Twitter and much more.

Visit Rob Cottingham's blog here.

Tip of the hat to Axel Schultze for recommending Clementine's ReflectionOf.Me blog, where I found this video and a lot of other thought-provoking posts. Highly recommended!

What will 2K10 bring in social media? Post your comments/predictions below.

Happy New Year! Read more »

Wow, what a year! We started the year in the depths of the Great Recession, with bank bailouts and a new U.S. president making headlines. And finished a turbulent year just short of historic change in our health care system, while Tiger disappointed many fans (including this one) with his "transgressions."

Throughout the year, nearly 200 CustomerThink authors generously shared their insights on what could be done to tackle today's problems, while preparing for better days ahead. In all, we had about 1300 posts (blogs and articles) that were viewed 1 million times by our site visitors. Amazing!

It's not easy to pick the top 10 posts for an entire year—less than one tenth of one percent of all posts. To do so, I gathered candidates from our highest rated and most viewed lists, and looked for those that really engaged our community in a healthy debate. Here are my 10 favorite posts of the year.

Acronym watchers take note. VOCA—Voice of Customer Analytics—is coming, courtesy of Big Blue.

In "voice of customer" circles, EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management) is the most common term used for systems that capture, analyze and report on structured (e.g. survey-based) customer feedback so that customer issues can be addressed. But in the past couple of years it's becoming clear that unstructured information—both text and speech—is also a great source of insight into customer issues and operational problems.

I've been wondering, when will a vendor emerge to put it all together?

Well, that vendor is IBM. After a year of development, IBM is entering the "voice of customer" space with a managed service offering that analyzes both structured and unstructured data.

IBM's Kevin English, who heads up the CRM analytics part of Big Blue's BPO team, says they developed VOCA entirely with IBM software. In addition to its own research labs and core DB2 database technology, IBM has compiled an impressive amount of data and text analytics technology via Cognos and SPSS acquisitions, and other smaller vendors like RedPill.

Guest post from Jennifer Major, Business Development Manager, Communications, Media and Entertainment Practice at SAS UK

We’ve seen the blunders big companies have made by not monitoring and, more importantly, not reacting intelligently and expeditiously to social upheaval in the digital space – how can we forget United Airlines' fate following musician Dave Carroll’s infamous YouTube video of United Airlines Breaks Guitars and its sequels? In today’s current market, businesses and their reputations cannot afford to take that kind of hit.

Through blogs, message boards, fan pages and the like, the Internet is fast rebalancing the relationship between customers and companies, while social media networks, such as YouTube and Twitter, are giving consumers instant and, occasionally, very powerful ways to 'strike back' and make their voices heard.

This week Salesforce.com unveiled Chatter -- "a new secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform."

This is a significant announcement that brings Enterprise 2.0 apps into the mainstream. Or will, when Chatter becomes available sometime in calendar year 2010. This strikes me as a freeze-the-market move designed to keep Salesforce.com customers from investing in enterprise social solutions from companies like Jive, Socialtext, Yammer, etc.

Chatter will include a decent assortment of common E2.0 features like profiles, status updates, and groups. [Yawn] Nothing particularly innovative based on the demo I saw.

But the power of tight integration comes into play when feeds are used to give status updates of applications and content changes. For example, a sales manager can be alerted when a important deal changes status. Another way for management to keep tabs on the sales reps, which is why they love SFA so much. But all sarcasm aside, this is an example of a true "social business" application that integrates Enterprise 2.0 functionality with SFA.

Consona is an interesting company, formed from the acquisition of numerous ERP and CRM vendors over the past few years. That can make it difficult to put Consona into a neat bucket, because depending on the industry or application, it can compete well in small, medium and large enterprises.

Tom Millay is general manager of Consona's CRM division, which now includes 7 products including Consona Knowledge Management (formerly known as KNOVA). Here is a summary of a recent briefing, with some observations on what's in store for the future.

Service vs. support

I've been as guilty as anyone of using "CSS" -- Customer Service/Support -- as a shorthand for all the solutions that handle customer service or support. As if they are pretty much the same thing.

They're not. As I've come to learn, there's a world of difference between a service interaction with bank customer asking a question about an account, and a support interaction where a user is trying to get a technical problem fixed. While there are some common function (case management, knowledge bases, etc.), that doesn't mean one size fits all.