R "Ray" Wang

Early Adopters And Pioneers Have Benefited From Social

Across executive board rooms and even in living rooms, social business is all the rage. In 2010, social crm (SCRM) and Enterprise 2.0 (E20) rose into mainstream conversation. Despite the mindshare and awareness, a majority of business leaders have yet to begin these initiatives. The good news - those organizational leaders who have adopted disruptive technologies in social, have already realized the benefits. Those benefits include:

• Faster product time to market and customer adoption
• Reduced marketing spend and increased marketing engagement
• Reduced incident to resolution times that lead to greater customer retention
• Greater market influence and brand awareness
• Improved collaboration across...

In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the "Five Stages of Grief" in her book, On Death and Dying. These five stages can be summed up as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. When applied to disruptive technology adoption by organizations, the "Five Stages" framework provides clear insight in anticipating how likely an organization is ready to embrace change. Recent conversations with line of business operations managers about Social CRM identify both lack of awareness and high levels of internal resistance towards adoption. In a recent phone and in-person survey of 31 front office operations owners (i.e. sales executives, support executives, and COO's) about their attitudes on Social CRM, 67.7% (i.e. 21/31) expressed denial, 16.1% (i.e. 5/31) felt anger, and 9.6% (i.e. 3/31) experienced bargaining, 3.2% (i.e. 1/31) encountered depression, and 3.2% (i.e. 1/31) achieved acceptance (see Figure 1).

Figure 1....

Analyzing The Demand For Use Cases In Social CRM

Since joining Altimeter Group, I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with my colleague Jeremiah Owyang on Social CRM. On a daily basis, the requests for Social CRM strategies escalated from all parts of the organization. In fact, requests...