CRM at the Speed of (Social)ite: Live From CRM Evolution in NYC

Sitting on the floor of the CRM Evolution conference yesterday, away from people traffic, Paul Greenberg told me in a podcast interview, “The only thing that makes most people happy is interacting in someway. Business people are human too, consisting of a lot of human beings in an organized fashion. That’s it. that’s all they are.”

Greenberg is the author of CRM at the Speed of Light and co-founder of The 56 Group. Greenberg, the man who some call “the Godfather of CRM,” keynoted CRM Magazine’s annual CRM Evolution conference that convened this week along with sister magazine Speech Technology’s SpeechTEK event at the Marriott Marquis in New York City.

In his keynote speech Greenberg displayed “The Conversation Prism” originally created by Brian Solis Principal of FutureWorks a pr and media agency.

The question that was arguably at the heart of the conference was “how can business navigate the increasingly complex social online world?”

“Companies need to design everything around the concept that a customer should issue a satisfied prrr,” said Greenberg in our podcast interview. “People don’t have to have luxury–they just have to feel luxurious” and business needs to understand the customer on that level.

www.briansolis.com

The diagram above is the “conversation prism” Greenberg displayed in his keynote.  Each petal represents a a different channel and there are more than 60. In each channel there are six to ten examples.

The significance of this diagram is that business needs to understand the way people are conversing outside the corporate firewall.

Business’ Ears Are Burning

Greenberg said companies have to be aware of the conversations happening about them. This is scary for companies however it’s a reality. Greenberg’s answer to this is “Social CRM.”

Customers command so much more than they used to, and business has to capture all it all to figure out how to navigate this increasingly complex terrain.

Everything is more complicated today for business including customer segmentation. What do you do with your “low value” customers that have high referral value? Is Seth Godin your customer who buys almost nothing but can destroy you with one blog entry?

Greenberg spoke about the 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer that found 60 percent of people say the most trusted source for product referrals/and recommendations is “someone like me.”

This begs the question who are your brand ambassadors and what forums are they swimming in?

“Information Wants to Be Free”-Marshall Lager

CRM Evolution ended today with a panel moderated by Greenberg featuring Marshall Lager, Managing Principal of Third Idea Consulting LLC, Denis Pombriant, Managing Principal of Beagle Research Group, LLC, and Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Labs and author of The Facebook Era (Prentice Hall 2009).

Some interesting ideas included the danger of what Pombriant called “premature elaboration” to seek to understand before being understood (quoting Stephen Covey).

LinkedIn was hardly mentioned. However someone did volunteer the fact that the age of the average LinkedIn user keeps increasing. There are 250 million Facebook users and 40 million LinkedIn users. Shih, who is most well-known for building the mash-up “Faceforce” (the integration of Facebook and Salesforce), reminded us social conversations are crucial for CRM folks because Sales and Marketing need to be where there customers are.

We learned it can’t all be technology all the time from Greenberg and again from Lager, who jokingly added, “Humans must watch automation. It’s hard to be social with a machine, legally.”

*For more about Greenberg you can visit his blog here.