A few thoughts on Luxor CRM

The Luxor CRM team reached out to give me a briefing on their company and their product set and it was great to learn more about them.  The company, founded in 2000, is located in Toronto, Canada.     They have a relatively small set of customers, around 50 – 60, ranging in size from  5 users to 3000+.

I like that they consider themselves a boutique firm, focused  more on customer success than bringing on new customers.    Their thinking is that 90% of the time CRM deployments fail due to lack of adoption (I agree) and their focus is to create a deployment plan (free deployment) and customized experience that maximizes value while minimizing adoption issues.

What about pricing?

Luxor CRM is confident in their overall solution, their ability to deliver a solid product backed up with services and support to make their customers successful.  They offer a month to month option (no contract required) and see most of these customers convert to a standard contract.  The month to month option speaks volumes and I am hoping to see many more vendors embrace the flexibility this offers customers.

Deployments

As with most CRM systems, fields can be added, fields can be hidden, languages, currencies,and date/time formats modified, and so on. During the deployment process the Luxor CRM team works closely with a customer-designated CRM admin.  This process, which I like, works well as it trains the customer on how to support their own system and it educates them on the types of customizations that are possible, leaving the customer better educated when they “go live” with the system.

Logging in

While Luxor CRM is a web-based application it is modelled upon the Windows desktop.  As records are opened they can be minimized to a task area at the bottom of the page, allowing easier multi-tasking within the CRM system. This was one of those special features that I really liked.

The out of the box home page is built to show you what you need to know.  Tasks that are due now are right in front of you and, for sales people, a nice quota meter (using the standard gas gauge control) helps you, and your managers, know how you are doing.

While the primary focus for the solution is sales they are seeing good traction in the restoration market (think insurance companies, car repair, etc..) and have a support module for those that are looking to leverage the solution for their customer service needs.

Adding Leads

There are three ways to add leads to the system:

• You can add them manually through the CRM’s web interface.
• Web to lead.  This model, which you find with other systems like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, and others, enables you to add code to  your website’s forms to capture user information and automatically push that form data into the CRM system.
• Bulk import.  Data can be bulk loaded into the system through CSV files.

Luxor CRM is flexible enough to model your sales process and leads.  As leads are added and converted into opportunities they will follow the process you have defined.

Reporting and Alerts

All fields can be reported on and customers can create reports and dashboards easily.  Alerts can also be created, based upon customer-generated views, to keep users up to date when they are not logged into the system.

Architecture

Luxor CRM is a web-based SAAS solution, built on the Microsoft technology stack.  What is different, from many systems, is that customers can choose to accept, or skip, new features.  Features are always released to all customers as disabled and, after the  customer has a chance to review the new features, they can decide if they need them and want to enable them.  This ability is one of the most exciting pieces of the application as it focuses on giving the customer and flexibility to avoid burdening their users with features they don’t need (which always leads to confusion and frustration).

Overall I feel that Luxor CRM is a solid CRM choice for your business.  While very similar to the dozens of other CRM products on the market today their focus on adoption and customer success means you should consider them when talking to vendors.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

Hopton House Bed and Breakfast on using social media (via Chefforfeng’s Weblog)

You can never find enough case studies or interviews about people successfully leveraging social media. Check it out, worth the read.

 This will be first in the series of Inns and Lodging using social media to help their businesses. It occurred to me, that while I can help and try to convince innkeepers I work with, that using social media can help their businesses, it’s even more helpful and relevant as well if information and examples of how lodging is using it and how its helping their businesses, comes straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak. I forget exactly when I firs … Read More

via Chefforfeng’s Weblog

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

Helping people understand government 2.0 at the local level, not easy

I have had several great conversations this week.  One that I wanted to share with you was a discussion I had with Alex Reed, an Independent candidate who is running for the Maine House of Representatives (District 99).  We spent our time discussing how to bring collaboration and communication strategies and tools to the local level, an important goal,  a difficult challenge, especially in a state where broadband penetration is relatively low.

Note that Alex has a lot of experience in this area, having worked with several non-profits in social media roles in recent years.  He sees need for Government 2.0 and, even more importantly, the need to get citizens the information when, and where, they need it. 

A common complaint that he hears is people want more visibility into how their government is spending their money.  Another problem, people often do not understand that strategies and technologies exist to help answer budgetary and other questions that surround government.  How do we change this?

Education is the starting point.  Alex sees real excitement from people he engages with when he explains what is possible with Government 2.0.    The challenge is taking the one to one, or the one to small group, conversations to a larger, more scalable, level to help people understand how this can benefit them and their personal needs.

Having infrastructure in place is another challenge in Maine.  There is not a large digital/tech industry in place to build upon initiatives like opening up government data.   While Maine has done a good job at the State level, bringing this same success to the local level is challenge.  In fact, in chatting with Alex he feels that most local government web sites are not being run well, few are updated regularly, many have lots of broken links, the sites are treated as low priority initiatives.

How will he bring more action to the local level?

• Education.  Explaining the value of Government 2.0 to people on a personal level.
• Performing a state-wide audit of local governments to build benchmarks.
• Deliver this information to local governments so they can see how they are doing against other local governments.  This is a second level of education.
• Make Government 2.0  available at the local level inexpensively.  Many of the tools are free or inexpensive.  More education, easier access to tools and knowledge holders, will be critical.

These steps can help all of us at any level.  In fact, soon I’ll spend time to pull together a good template for auditing government 2.0 at the local level.  If you know of ones that already exists, or have insights into what you think should be included, please let me know.

Also, keep in mind that I have a survey in place to gain an understanding of how people feel government is doing in terms of using technology to communicate and collaborate with citizens.  If you can, please take time to answer this survey and share with your friends.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

Social Media ROI and Hippy 2.0… It all made sense..

I had the pleasure of doing this week’s radio show with Luis Suarez of IBM and Mark Masterson of CSC.  We started our conversation with a discussion of ROI for Social Media and ended up discussing Hippie 2.0 and a world without e-mail.  If you listen to the audio podcast it will all make sense.

This podcast ran 56 minutes with the first 5 minutes and 20 seconds being my coverage of top stories, the last 51 being a great conversation.  Feel free to either listen live here or navigate to the show page to listen and/or download there. 

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

The Social Ecosystem: Developing Social Usage Guidelines

Rules….   Guidelines….  It does not matter if you are in the 38% of companies blocking social media (in the United States), are leaving social media access wide open, or are looking to strategically leverage The Social Ecosystem.  Guidelines about what is, and is not, acceptable, are critical to the success of your Social Organization.

There are hundreds of great examples of real-world Social Usage Guidelines available across the web.  This post is providing you with a template that you can use to create a set of guidelines for your organization, your Social Organization.

Note that any set of organizational guidelines need to be regularly enforced. I would recommend that Social Organizations review these with new employees and give regular, quarterly is best, training sessions for all employees.  The use of social media is too much a part of how people live to simply train once and expect people to remember your rules.

Also note, only 20% of companies worldwide have a policy for their employees (according to Manpower, see below).  Do not make this mistake.

Without further ado, here is our template.

OVERVIEW

You should make it clear, at the top of your guidelines, that the document applies to both internal and external usage of social media strategies and tool.   Helping people understand that different expected behaviors on both sides of their home/work life is critical for establishing guidelines that make sense to everyone.

Clearly note that this guideline document is supplemental to other existing employee guidelines such as the employee handbook.

LICENSING

Clearly state ownership rules for content created by your employees.  I favor the use of Creative Commons, as used on my blog, but what you use is dependent upon your market, your business, your legal team.  Whatever model is used simply make it clear in the licensing section.

Note that you may also have exceptions in place worth noting.  For example, perhaps research information follows one licensing model while marketing information follows another.  The rules are up to you, of course,  just make them clear.

If you are interested in learning more about Creative Commons check out their web site.

DEFINITIONS

Take the time to clearly define the terms being used by your organization.  The State Department’s Social Guidelines provides a good example. 

GUIDELINES

While the guidelines you define will reflect your Social Organization there are some basics that I feel you should add.  These include:

• There should be different expectations and guidelines established around the use of personal and organizational accounts.
  • Provide guidance on how to indicate if the account is private or organization owned.
  • Make it clear that personal accounts reflect personal opinions, not the opinions of the organization.
• Be clear about what happens if your employees fail to follow the guidelines.  No one wins if you are unclear.
• Note that employee goals and objectives, or equivalent, will go into more detail about how these tools fit into their job function and that achieving defined goals remains the number one priority.
• Provide guidance on the use of appropriate language
• Provide guidance on the types of information that can, and cannot be, shared.
• Provide guidance on how to respond to various request types (e.g. customer service or sales requests).
• Remind employees to listen first, respond second.
• Be clear that comments made are always on the record when responding through the organization’s accounts. 
• Be clear about ownership. If you respond to customer through a social channel the customer considers you the owner of their questions.  Don’t fail them.

Let me know if there are other pieces you would like to see added.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

An excellent video, Social Media in the UK in 2010

The folks at SimplyZesty.com have done an outstanding job with this video and you should watch it.  The statistic that caught my eye?  Users coming from Social Media sites are 10 times more likely to buy something on your site than those coming from some other place (71% versus 7%).  The Social Customer lives.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

Remember that written communications are imperfect

I came across this excellent post that reminded me of just how easy it is to misunderstand the tone of an email, a tweet, a Facebook status message. Take a look at the statistics from the original post and try to keep this in mind as you send your next message.

It’s dark-thirty and you’re at your bathroom counter hastily going through your morning routine, getting ready for the day. You grab a tube, squeeze out a line of gel and start brushing your teeth. You gag as it hits you that the tube on your counter is NOT toothpaste. The right product, applied the wrong way has tainted your day before it even got started. Congratulations if you don’t have any memories of an experience similar to the one here. B … Read More

via LifePoint

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

The Social Ecosystem and The Old Spice Guy

This is not another analysis of the Old Spice Guy campaign.  At this point, if you haven’t formed your own opinion you’re not interested and you will not be swayed by my thinking on the topic.

The point of this post is that I have seen more discussion about what class of marketing/pr/CRM/advertising/you-name-it that this campaign falls into.  If you look at posts like this one from Wim Rampen,this one from Harish Kotadia, PHd, and this one from Prem Kumar you will see little discussion about the effectiveness of the strategies and tactics and instead see a debate about if this campaign is Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Marketing, Public Relations, and on and on and on.  At best we have a lack of clarity about these concepts, at the worst we have an industry-wide confusion made worse by:

• Lack of clear and agreed upon definitions.
• Lack of agreed upon guidance and “standards”.
• Vendors who are promoting Social CRM solutions with little clarity about how these solutions really fit any core set of definitions and capabilities.

Organizations and individuals simply want to find clear pathways for reaching their goals.    They want consistent language and terminology.  They want easy to understand strategies and tactics.  They want case studies they can learn from and use to justify spend to the budget holders.  They want to understand how their Social Organization can best interact with their Social Customers to meet their goals.

In short….  They want The Social Ecosystem.  Join me and The Lab as we explore and weigh in on where we fall short.  Together we can make sense of all of this so that you can do the one thing that matters most to your organization…. Reach your goals.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

IBM, right in the middle of offerings for The Social Ecosystem

How many of us still think of IBM as that group of old-school business types that just don’t know how to keep up with the pace of business?  I mean, come on, they still talk about things like mainframes, how much can they really understand?

IBM invited me in for a briefing last week to learn more about their offerings in the social software space and I was pleased with both what I saw and what I heard.  While IBM suffers from an inability to build buzz around their solutions they have a good solution and are making some solid sales.

One of the first questions I asked Jeff Schick, Vice President of the Social Software division, had to do with why they were not even mentioned by Gartner in the Social CRM space.  Truth is, the Social CRM space is important but it is only a part of what they offer.  I agree with Jeff.  Social CRM is but a piece of what they offer, IBM is creating solutions for the entire Social Ecosystem and Social CRM is but a slice of that universe.

From a Research perspective IBM began working on social software solutions in middle of the decade.  They were focused on Enterprise 2.0 solutions, learning a lot from how their thousands of IBM employees used the systems.   This learning, which is an ongoing process, was first visible in 2007 when they released their first version of Lotus Connections.  The solution baked in Facebook-like Walls, Twitter-like microblogging, as well as other social software norms that we expect to see today. 

Capabilities?

As noted, Connections has been around since 2007 and the concepts have been used internal to IBM for nearly a decade.    This is not Version 1.0 software, which is why they have had success selling it to both their very large, and very small, customers.  I mentioned microblogging and walls, here are a few other key capabilities worth noting:

• Wikis and blogs.
• Social bookmarks (think delicious.com)
• All content can be tagged.  Not just articles but files and bookmarks as well.
• Their file sharing offerings remind me a of Microsoft SharePoint.
  • Files can be public, privates, or shared with a set of users.
  • Other users can share your files (unless you lock it down). 
  • I love that you can see sharing history to find how far out the file has gone, through which individuals people have seen the file, and who has what version of the file.
  • If a user has an older version of the file they will even receive a notification of updates, ensuring users can stay on top of changes.   Note that this applies to all users who have the file, not just the first set you invited to view it.
• Accounts are based on global profiles and you can set up permissions as needed for any deployment.
• Connections is used for both internal and external purposes.
• Connections has demonstrated that it can scale with internal deployments from 5 to 500,000 users and external deployments in the hundreds of thousands of users.

Connections has a REST-based APIs which is being used to integrate with several other products (including Cognos in the near future).  These integrations are critical for building a marketplace for their customers.

Connections is not the final answer to all of your problems and there are plenty of capabilities I was disappointed not to see in the solution.  However, it is a very good offering worth checking out along with Jive, Lithium, and others.

For those of you that are wondering, IBM is not currently a client, partner, or any other relationship with me or with The Lab. 

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

Have an iPad? You have to start using Flipboard

Do you have an iPad?  Do you use Twitter and/or Facebook?  If you answered yes to these questions you have to download the new Flipboard application.  This is the Twitter and Facebook application that you have always wanted,you just did not know it until now.

Flipboard bills themselves as the world’s first social magazine.  While not perfect, I love the first version of this app more than any other iPad app I amusing (except for Evernote which is in its own class).

Flipboard enables you to view, in a magazine-style format, your Twitter and Facebook feeds.  Here is why this is different, worth paying attention to:

• You can put Twitter lists, search terms, or individuals into their own sections and view these streams.  While Tweetdeck, and others, achieve the same results via columns the Flipboard experience is better.
• As you dive into the sections you have defined you see a mix of individual tweets and, the real win, you see the articles that people were tweeting.  You no longer need to click upon random URLs to decide if you want to view the content.  Instead, the graphics and text of the original article are right there in front of you.    Not happy with seeing the page rendered in Flipboard, just click “Read on Web” and you are off into the browser to view it directly on the original site.
• You can see who else has retweeted the article and choose to follow, if desired, as well as reply, RT, or share the article via e-mail.

Visually, this is a better experience than Pulse and others that have also taken unique approaches. While others raised the bar, Flipboard has gone i a direction that is intuitively better, “more right”.

Flipboard does need a few more features, however, before I could really live within this platform.  Here is a short-wish list:

• Allow an unlimited number of sections.  Right now I cannot find a way to go beyond 9 sections.
• Let me load in e-mail as a section.
• Let me pull in other channels like RSS feeds, YouTube, Flickr, and other platforms.
• You can also include your Facebook updates but the inability to further refine and filter results leaves me wanting more.

That’s it for now.  A really nice version 1.0 product, looking forward to seeing what comes next.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.