David Sims

Relationships -- it's CRM's middle name. Yep, it's all about the relationships. And now you can compare the size of yours with your friends.

Taking Kevin Bacon one better, a Salt Lake City-based company named 7 Degrees is offering PeopleMaps, an app which they claim will show people "how they are connected" to any person or company. It comes in free and "Professional" editions.

As industry observer Stephen Arnold correctly notes, this is nothing new -- "Companies like i2, Megaputer, and other vendors offer these types of systems," except for the fact that...

Kana Software says the social CRM capabilities in their service experience management platform, Kana 10, have been "enhanced."

To punch up the "collective intelligence capabilities" of the product, what agents use when navigating, cross-selling and up-selling, the product integrates Baynote's Collective Intelligence Platform to swoop down with predictive analytics for on-site customers.

Great. So how's that "social" CRM enhancement, exactly? Oh yeah -- the Kanians say it'll also enhance search results ranking "based on common search patterns and build communities of customers with similar interests and orientations." Social CRM is based on the idea that it's possible to employ the "wisdom of crowds" to improve service delivery. As people who've been to hockey games know (bada-bing!).

Social CRM is cool, lots of good uses for that, lot of success being...

You may have heard scuttlebutt or rumors about Google Wave. If you're lucky enough to have had an invitation as part of the extended invite-only roll-out of the past couple weeks, our congratulations.

Ours is, um, still in the mail.

If you are using Wave, let CRM Tool Academy know how you think it'd be useful for CRM. As far as this reporter can see, it might be a good platform for companies who keep yammering on about their "conversation" with the customer to actually have one.

Google Wave is best described as an online conversation participants can enter and leave at will. It's like a living bulletin board post -- instead of writing an e-mail to organize a boat trip, say, and copying and BCCing and replying, a message is posted on Wave and participants added simply by dragging and dropping icons.

In fact, the operative metaphor for Google Wave is "hosted conversation."

Picture it as a live e-mail message everybody's...

This reporter has officially arrived on social media: Here before you is the first fully Facebooked interview of my career.

I met David Mangen, principal of Mangen Research Associates, on Facebook through a mutual friend, probably Paul Greenberg. We friended each other, got to know each other, and I found out he has an interesting take on customer-focused companies. I sent him a note suggesting a brief interview for CustomerThink.

He agreed, I messaged the questions for him and he sent back the answers. So there really wasn't any need to ask about the effectiveness of social media, was there?

DS: David, we've heard businesses talk about becoming "customer-focused" for years. How can you tell which ones are walking it and which are just talking -- what are the ones who are serious about it doing that the others aren't?

DM: These days I assume that the company is not customer focused...