Good friend, professor, thought leader, VP at SugarCRM and great guy to hang out with, Mitch Lieberman has put together a slick presentation using the awesome Prezi.com as only a professor with real world business experience can do.

His post gives some background on the presentation and provides context too. So please ensure you go through it.

His prezi helps you get your bearings if your thoughts center around:

• whats new with the customer (what does a Social Customer mean?)
• why is the power of communities increasingly important (what's new with online communities?)
• how are they affecting Business As Usual (is it all a risk or an opportunity or just a new way of life?)

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This is an interesting question that I see cropping up of late, since the news about the arrival of the new kid on the block - Social CRM - is reaching new ears. Is it just old wine in a new bottle or is it something more disruptive? I have been asked this when I meet people & strike a conversation around Social CRM, mostly from the CRM folks, who have just heard about it. The technologists are fine with it, its just another channel to be integrated to CRM, like an email or a call center, and they are happy if you give them the specifics on the integration modules.

But then people who are not too deep in CRM technology or who are involved with CRM from a business perspective (the later I have been interacting more only in the past couple of years), are not too happy with yet another prefix to CRM - it brings to them memories of the previous attempts like eCRM & mCRM.

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There's a great debate/discussion going on about Whuffie & Social Capital and how it applies to the social media & online networks/communities on blogs & twitter.

It all started with a post by Brian Solis, a very well reputed leader in the PR world & social media, titled Social Capital: The Currency of the Social Economy. He deeply derives on the book called The Whuffie Factor by Tara "missrogue" Hunt.

Venessa Miemis kicked off an animated conversation on twitter around the difference of Social Capital (as suggested by socio-politico-economists) & Reputation economy (as suggested by Whuffie). She topped it off with an excellent post titled: Social Capital is not the same as Whuffie that I highly recommend everyone to read before proceeding further. Worth every minute you spend reading & digesting it.

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Image Source: Flickr

I woke up this Saturday morning, yet again, to an important announcement that was made the evening of the US' Friday. And I find the world changed yet again. :)

I am of course talking about the humongous report on what consists of Social CRM at the moment that the Altimeter group has come out with - "Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management".
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During my discussions around Social CRM in the past couple of years in the social media/networks and realspace too, I have had to face some prejudice from various people that was directed towards me as though I were a software vendor with the best interests of my products' revenues in mind and not my customers.

Their prejudice is not without reason nor without basis. There has been a long history of vendors trying to skew the message & brainwash the market into believing that the software is the panacea to all their business ills.

Well, am no software vendor - I work for an organization that is into Consulting & Systems Integration (along with market research, BPO, etc. among other things).

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As an innovations manager at the Customer Solutions Practice of Cognizant, I had been enabling the teams to come up with new ideas, build on them, provide support to develop them into offerings, market them, the whole shebang.

We even built a system that allowed people to submit ideas, comment on them, rate them, categorize them, allow the management to evaluate them (Neuron Magic Quadrant), provided a hosted project environment for collaborating on the building and an application exchange for the finished offerings.

Thats how the whole idea of integrating social technologies with CRM systems came up. I took a personal interest in it & started looking into it in full earnest & over time with passion and increasing conviction & commitment.

Lithium is one such organization that has the conviction, commitment & passion in leveraging the power of the communities for business.

I had been to their offices during my San Francisco visit earlier this week to discuss on our new partnership & chalk out joint strategies to help our customers dig into the whole social thing.

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I have been in the US this past week. The journey from Bangalore to Washington DC in itself was quite interesting. A three hop flight journey (BLR-DBX-ATL-IAD) that took away ~32 hours of my life, but since I traveled west (& I gained time) I lost only about 21 hours. Yeah, I know, convoluted. (This is similar to that guy Louis Wu in the Ringworld series who kept traveling west to extend his 200th birthday celebrations!)

The reason I am here in the US is to 'evangelize' Social CRM. But before I got to tell parables of the 'Customer' gospels to the flock I went for my baptism by the Pope of Social CRM - Paul Greenberg. :)

Ok, enough with cliche and cryptic ranting.

I came to US to attend what is now being called the #SCRMSummit and follow it up with meetings with my peers, clients & partners to discuss & get things done around Social CRM.

I got caught in the worst blizzard in more than a century at Washington DC, cooped up with other thought leaders, analysts, consultants, systems integrators, vendors & practitioners of Social CRM. We were 68 of us and if you hate Social CRM, this was the place to obliterate it. Sorry, you missed the chance though we have been talking about it for weeks now.

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Avatar 3D has no new plot line, but is very different experience & supposedly a big game changer.

Social CRM has no goals vastly different from CRM, but it is very different in thinking through (strategy) and implementation & supposedly a big game changer.

Avatar 3D is not a mere mash up of Pocahontas plot and 3D. The differences are in the nuances. Not much difficult to imagine a land from your history to draw it up on your storyboard. But very difficult to imagine the planets, moons, flora, fauna, technology, etc. of the future and put it on the storyboard. But the most important thing in Avatar 3D is possibly applying the underlying, inherent "white man's guilt" onto a completely new environment & culture. Old wine in a new bottle, not just wrt the plot, but also the colonization aspects.

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This is a post to contribute to an experiment initiated by Esteban Kolsky & Venessa Miemis wherein we all write about what we discovered about Twitter and tag the post with #MonTwit.

I have been on Twitter since April 2008. As with most new things that I try out on the web I created my "scorpfromhell" profile out there. Thats kind of my perpetual beta account. :) I had known it for a year by then but took me a lot convincing to get onto that since I was busy exploring other stuff, especially for building a social technologies framework. So I had built some presence on Twitter pretty soon in the Indian users segment. I connected to various people from various walks of life. Very few were known to me from before, not even 10 in all. It was like settling in a new city and getting to know new folks & taking your time to settling down, helped by a couple of old acquaintances.

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I am sure you have heard of the adage that the Content is King and also of the addendum to that adage that Context is Queen. If you haven't well then think about it a moment and then continue. We are not talking about media alone, but for everyday, normal walk of life. The content of what we speak means differently in different contexts. The context could be the situation or event at which we are speaking or the context could be the past experiences of the speaker & the listener (prejudices?).

Content alone doesn't provide as much value as it can with proper context. And this is true in Social CRM.

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