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.

Hiring or job hunting, do not forget these resources

There are so many great resources on the web, on social networks, in person in life.  Since today is Wednesday that means it is #workwednesday on Twitter. If you are not sure what this means, feel free to check out my video about this weekly job sharing fest.

I wanted to quickly note, before I list the other resources I am making available, that this cartoon was found at http://www.apnijobs.com/, another site focused on sharing jobs.

Some of my personal resources:

• My LinkedIn group is pulling in the #workwednesday RSS feed from Twitter.  Anything that you have missed can be reviewed there.
• If you do not have someplace to post your resumé, job tips, or job listing you can share it here.  As long as it is not offensive, go for it.
• My Facebook group can be used to share video resumes if this is a preference of yours. Please remember, however, that video resumes, while powerful, should always be kept short and to the point.  If you fail to do this no one, and I mean no one, will take the time to watch the video.

My highlighted job of the week is the Government Liaison role that Twitter is looking to fill.  If you want to impact how the government, and I believe the private sector as well, uses social media, check this position out.

What hidden resources have I missed?  Share them here, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, or on Twitter.   Our goal is to help people find those hidden jobs, the ones they have looked for, the ones they will be passionate about, the ones in which they will excel.  Of course, failing that lets, at the very least, do all that we can to help people find A job.

John

mySchools, an interesting social media solution for schools and students

I found this great picture of my Alma mater on Flickr (by wallyg) and I knew it would be perfect for this post. 

I chatted with Sasha Peterson, President at Hobsons EMT, about their mySchools offering. Similar to the way Parature brought its helpdesk CRM integration directly into Facebook, Hobsons EMT is bringing their enrollment CRM application directly into Facebook, benefiting potential college students and universities in the process.

For those of you unfamiliar with Hobsons EMT, or Enrollment Management Technology, the solution is a CRM application specifically designed to enable higher education to manage the application and enrollment process.  They have more than 650 installations and were looking for a way of helping their customers in higher education to more easily interact with their customers (the potential students) where they were already hanging out. Facebook was, and still is, the right place to engage with these users.

The Facebook application is fairly light-weight for now.  Hobsons is on an eight to ten week agile development cycle and expects to deliver much more in the near future.  For higher education customers of Hobsons the application is free, it is simply another tool that enables them to reach out to their audience.

For potential students using the Hobsons College Views and/or College Confidential applicationsthey will be able create Facebook badges to dynamically display their top five schools. Not much, not yet, I agree.   However, this starting point should lead to additional buzz as students discuss their college choices, as others want to display their badges, and ultimately lead to more promotion for the  institutions using the product.  Ultimately, that is goal.

As a father of a soon to be college freshman I could see this starting point being of value.  However, if Hobsons wants to fully leverage this channel for their customers they should also consider improvements such as:

• Dynamically updating as the student narrow their choices down to the last choice.  Perhaps showing a new badge as the top choice.  Something that will further give students a reason to discuss the school.
• Enable wall updates based upon news feeds from the higher education institutions.
• Hobsons could offer value added wall updates like general tips discussing tips and best practices for students going off to school.  The goal,provide great information while giving students more to discuss.
• I am also a big fan of some level of game integration, even if nothing more than quiz-style games that enable students to work through a pretend degree program.  Fun, engaging, building awareness of the university and Hobsons.

While not directly related to the Facebook product, it’s worth noting that the Hobsons EMT product enables organizations to manually define rules about how to best communicate with a given student.  For example, if one student spends the majority of their time on Youtube while another spends hours on Facebook the solution will deliver information to the student over the channel that they are most actively using.  Smart approach.  One that is far better than the carpet bombing approach many companies use today.

What else would you like to know?

John

Quick! Call 911 to get the 411 on 311

There is a lot of discussion about the need for governments to become more open, more transparent, sharing data with citizens.  311 services, anything considered non-critical services, are getting a lot of publicity now with Washington DC and San Francisco making big public splashes around their open 311 efforts.  Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO, said this about Open 311:

“Too often, people grumble that their complaints about government – be it city, county, state, or federal – get swallowed by the bureaucracy.  Open 311 is an answer to that problem, placing the role of service evaluator and service dispatcher in the power of citizens’ hands.”

These open datasets give opportunity for businesses to build applications around, for citizens to get more valuable information from their government, and for government at all levels to better manage individual and group performance.  That may sound like a lot to expect, but it’s a sunny Sunday morning and anything is possible.

Before the details John, why should I care?

There are several reasons to care, of course, but let me start with MONEY.  Do you have any idea how your dollars are being spent?  Probably not.  Outside of a handful of people in any town no one, not even the State government, has a clear picture of where those dollars are going.  Each town, each city, reports different data in different formats and it is nearly impossible to find anything from the information being provided. 

Performance.  How are the towns really doing with their core services?  The data, turned into useful information, enables transparency.  Potholes, the gateway drug for citizen engagement, are one of the better examples people point to.  Citizens report potholes, the data given to geomapping services that show where the holes are, how long since they were reported, etc…  Town governments can point at this data, available to everyone, and ask hard questions about why things are not being resolved quickly enough. 

CRM providers, software developers, a heads up.  Helping towns and cities manage this data is a huge opportunity.  There is a major need for those that can help cities and towns better track this data so that it becomes actionable information (CRM), that serves the data to other application providers (web service developers and third party development shops).  Take a simple example from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.  The Department simply provided raw bus schedule information in machine readable format (XML)to anyone that wanted to use it.  Within a month, several applications were built to leverage this data at no costs to the Department or to citizens.  Hey, anyone want to help me write an iPhone application for my blog?

Alright, I see the need, tell me a little more

Yes, I know, you are about to fire up Visual Studio or Eclipse and start cranking out some code.  Slow down, though, here are a few important points before you get started:

• Open 311 is not really a standard.  You can check out the Open 311 site, but keep in mind it is really the result of Washington DC, San Francisco, and some talented developers working to define the starting point of what could one day grow up to becoming a real standard.
• Along the same lines, I have already suggested to Kevin Novak, EGOV Chair at W3C, that they should consider taking ownership and making this into a real standard.   If W3C takes ownership we could see this grow up to becoming a truly useful standard, similar to what has happened with HTML and other key web-related standards.
• Small towns and cities are lucky if they have 1 IT person who could work on this effort.  States and Federal Government are really not much better off when it comes to having money to spend.  The smart vendors will look at alternative pricing models where they help these cash-strapped towns create and maintain Open 311 data at little or no cost but then take a piece of  the revenue from application developers.  Does this require a new way of thinking?  Absolutely.
• State Governments will need to take a stronger role in demanding standard reporting formats and information.  Each town provides data in different formats (PDF, CSV, etc..) with different pieces of data being reported.  Standardization must be demanded from the top.
• Washington DC and San Francisco must look at Open 311 as more than a showy political statement and continue to be thought and technology leaders, open sourcing their efforts.  I look forward to seeing them open source their code on sites like github.com..
• There will be resistence from many directions on providing this information.  Small towns that are struggling will fear looking bad, potentially hurting political careers.  Again, the State Governments must demand it.

Will this make a difference in our lives?  Possibly, but only if the points above are taken into account.  If not, this will just be another great idea that ultimately goes the route of the Sony BetaMax.

Finally, what can the private sector learn from this?

There is great opportunity in the public sector for those creative application development shops, for CRM vendors, and for others.  However, the is not the gold rush of the mid 1800s.  While there is great need there is little direct revenue to be found.  However, look to leverage these opportunities for indirect revenue opportunities.  For example, if you can build mash-ups that tie public information with private information you might find some very interesting, lucrative, applications.  Be creative and be smart.  Who knows, you might just create the next big thing.

John

Using social channels for recruiting

I have always been a fan of recruiting via networks, generally following this kind of search pattern when I have a new job I am looking to fill:

• Starting with existing employees.  If someone working at your company has the skill set, or the potential, and they have interest in the role, give them a shot.  Promoting from within is rarely a bad idea.
• Reaching out to my personal network.  Those superstars that you have worked with in the past should always be on your short list.
• Reaching out through your larger extended network. 

I have recently come across more than one government agency that is locking down recruiting on social networks.  I have to say, I don’t get it.  If you are already leveraging social channels to extend your brand, to offer customer service, than you would be making a big mistake not using these same networks to recruit new talent.  Swimfish is a small company but I have found a couple of great additions to the team through Twitter alone.

Unsure how to begin?  Here are a couple of quick thoughts:

• Your web site.  You do post jobs here, don’t you?
• Use job boards like Craigslist.  I am always amazed by the quality, and quantity, of replies I get from this inexpensive source.  Craig Newmark, as always, my hat is off to you, great job.
• Use Twitter.  There are great hashtags to follow, starting with #workwednesday, my favorite, to #jobs.  Leverage these hashtags.  They are free channels for getting the word out.
• Use your Facebook presence to post jobs.  Don’t have one?  I recently created an extension of my blog on Facebook with a discussion board for you to post all of your jobs.  You have no excuse now, right?
  • Yes, the above is blatant self-promotion but this is my blog afterall, right? 
• Use LinkedIn.  While I cannot recommend the steep job posting fee on LinkedIn I do recommend using your LinkedIn connections, and their networks, to get the word out.
• Your support community.  Do you already have support communities that use software from INgage Networks, Jive Software, Lithium?  Setup an area where you can post jobs and where your customers can post their jobs too.  I know, this has nothing to do with providing customer service or marketing.  It does, however, give value to those customers.  Guess what, they will appreciate the help you are providing.

How do you leverage social channels for you recruiting?  If you are not using these channels, what is holding you back?

John

In honor of HireMonday a guest post by Rebecca Denison

I was fortunate enough to meet Rebecca through twitter as the result of asking about social job hunting success stories.  Rebecca was able to leverage her activities on social platforms into a job and I asked her to share her story.  I hope you find her story useful as an example of the possibilities that social media holds for job hunting.  Enjoy .

Bloggin’ and Tweetin’  My Way to a Bonafide Grown-Up Job 

By Rebecca Denison

John asked me to share my experience with you, but I’m honestly not sure exactly how I got where I am.  When I graduated in May, I already had an internship with Edelman, a PR agency, in Chicago.  During that internship, I started blogging and Tweeting about my passion: measurement.

Officially my job search began last fall during my second-to-last semester as a college student (at the best school in the country).  Truthfully, though, my job search did not really gain momentum until July 7, 2009, when I Tweeted my first words.  Not to say that I hadn’t been trying hard before this time, but I wasn’t focusing my efforts until this point.

I had been on Twitter for a long time, but I had been using a personal account to keep up with college friends and friends from my hometown.  In July, after noticing how people were interacting on Twitter and realizing it could be a great learning tool, I created a professional account which I wanted to use to learn more about public relations measurement and social media.

Twenty days later, I created my own blog, which was something I never thought I would do.  Blogs are for geeks and nerds who are obsessed with tech toys and video games, right?  Absolutely not.  Blogs are for people and professionals who are passionate about what they do, and want to share with and learn from others.

I had done some research, but I was still unsure what I should write about or how often or what to expect from readers.  It didn’t stop me.  I made an effort to blog almost every day, and I spent time each weekend reading blogs and articles about social media and measurement.  I would bookmark posts I wanted to share and crafted Tweets ahead of time in a Word document so I could Tweet during the workday without actually taking away time from my work.

It’s important to know that even though I was working hard to be involved and interactive online, I never let this stop me from doing the work at my internship.  And I never let my online activities prevent me from doing something to the best of my ability.  So I didn’t blog every single day, but I tried hard and proved myself at work every day.

Because of my presence online, I ended up connecting with someone who worked in a different department at Edelman, the Digital group.  She noticed my passion, and I had plenty of questions for her, so we met up for coffee one day.  I asked her about the work she did and if I could help with any projects.  Because I was an intern for a different department, I couldn’t technically help, but it didn’t stifle my passion at all.

I continued to blog and Tweet as much as I could without taking away time from my day job.  On the second to last day of my internship, I was asked to interview for a new open position with the Digital group.  And I got the job!

I know that my social media presence was not the only reason that I got the job, but I am convinced that it was a big reason that I was the first person Digital thought of when there was an opening.  And my continued presence has opened up new opportunities for me at work.  As my colleagues notice my passion, they have offered me work on projects they realize I might enjoy.  How cool is that?

There is no simple formula for using social media to get a job, and I would not recommend using social media as your sole means of job-hunting.  I know that my hard work at the internship I had, as well as in-person networking ultimately helped me a great deal.  Without showing my passion and knowledge about measurement online, however, I am confident I would still be searching for a job today.

Conversation with Bill Odell of Helpstream

Bill is the Vice President of Marketing at Helpstream and he was kind enough to take some time out of his schedule to chat with me about his company.  While I have been critical of what I have seen from Helpstream in the past, this conversation answered some important questions about the company, the customers it is serving today, and where they are headed.

One of my first questions for Bill had to do with Helpstream’s ability to deliver value to Small and Medium Sized Businesses.  The good news, this is where they are focused.  In fact, out of their 200 plus customers only one customer does not fall into the SMB space.   From a pricing perspective I was pleased to learn:

• They use a subscription-based model. This is a standard approach and avoids the uncertainty that is found when going with view-based pricing.
• According to Bil,l their pricing is comparable to Salesforce.com.  While I am concerned about this, feeling that SSCs should be lower in price than the broader solutions like Salesforce, at least it indicates that pricing is not out of reach for SMB customers.
• There is a free version of Helpstream available to non-profits.  You can sign-up on their home page by navigating to the “Getting Started” link in the bottom left corner of their home page.  I will be signing up to try the product out, I’ll let you know what I think.
  • Note that the free version is ad supported, at least for now. 
  • The free version has some limitations which I will be able to better speak to after I finish my evaluation.
• Bill and I did not discuss integration and customization fees but I will ask him if he is able to weigh in as a comment to this post.

 Bill acknowledged that Helpstream came out of the gate completely focused on Social Support Communities where there is a clear need and easy to document ROIs.  In fact, they have done some really good work with Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, an analyst at Forrester that I have a great deal of respect for.  From a SSC perspective, at least for SMB users, they should be considered an option.

What’s next for Helpstream?  They have recently released a marketing module and sales modules are also on the way.    Bill felt that it was too early to provide any ROI information.  I was glad that Bill skipped the opportunity to hype sales/marketing ROIs.  While I am sure the ROI will be demonstrated in time, it was refreshing to hear him acknowledge that it is too soon.

My final question for Bill was why users should consider Helpstream over other SSC solutions.  I am paraphrasing Bill, to be clear.  He stated that Helpstream integrate the notion of community with business process, allowing you to do some interesting thing with your community.  This is an enterprise grade product with a complex rules engine whereas many of the alternatives are not built as Enterprise solutions from the ground up.  Helpstream offers robust permissioning schemes so you can control who can view what information, clearly critical for many SSCs.

As I chat with other companies and evaluate their products I will let you know what I discover.  Stay tuned.

John

Behind the CRM Thought Leaders: Esteban Kolsky

Esteban is another one of my favorite CRM Thought Leaders and he recently took the time for this interview.

Q.  Esteban, you spent some time at Gartner, what did you focus on in that role?  How has that shaped your current opinions of CRM?

I came to Gartner with the idea of creating a research agenda for eService (keep in mind this was in 2000 – very little existed).  I spent 2-3 years building the research agenda, the main documents (market and vendor briefs, magic quadrants, best practices documents, presentations) and rode the growth in the market from a few million dollars in revenue to over 2 billion at its heights.  Careers at Gartner are cyclical, once a market is mature you can choose a new one if you have the expertise.

Back in the days of high school and early college years in Argentina my father had a consulting practice to which he added a market research arm, including political polls.  It eventually became one of the largest ones in Argentina. I used to work there in the summer and after school learned the art of surveying.

24 years later I saw a necessity for businesses to complement the empty promises of holistic customer knowledge that CRM attempted to deliver by complimenting it with Surveys.  I wrote the first paper on Customer Feedback Systems in 2003, and later renamed it to Enterprise Feedback Management for wider market acceptance (working with Jeffrey Henning at Perseus, a pioneer in the EFM world).  The next three years were spent growing that market from few million dollars in revenue to what today is the hottest opportunity for organizations.  Feedback is the future, even if they still don’t see it like that.

When I came to Gartner my experience with CRM was from running projects and creating strategy (the end user version of strategy) for a couple of companies.  Gartner amplified that by giving me access to vendors, practitioners, and end users in quantities I could have never imagined.  My understanding of CRM changed dramatically from being a technology that you implement with some business needs attached to becoming a strategic discipline that can make or break an organization.  The Job at Gartner was the most amazing experience of my life and would recommend to anyone to work there if they can.
 

Q.  How do you see Social CRM evolving in the next 3 – 5 years?

First, I don’t fully support the concept of SCRM.  Let’s just say that I am going along for the ride.  There are two ideas behind the concept. 

First, multi-channel CRM that has been maturing for some time and is beginning to show results.  I expect we will see some cross-channel measurement and tracking deployments that will create justifications for cross-channel deployments. 

Second, the concept that Paul Greenberg calls Generation C (generation connected).  Getting people to connect to each other and to corporations – the S in SCRM.  I expect to see a quiet societal evolution that will culminate with a radical change in the way customers interact with organizations and with other customers. 

Communities are the basis for it.  Organizations will migrate from the current 1-M (one-to-many) or even 1-1 (one-to-one, personalized) setup to a M-M (many-to-many) architecture where organizations, partners, and customers will engage in common platforms to interact

It is going to be very cool what we are going to accomplish.  Before you laugh me off, remember that I predicted in 2005 that collaborative customer service was going to be a major force for CRM in 2010.  It is printed somewhere.
 
Q.  If you could do anything else with your career, something that is not technology focused, at would it be?
Medicine.  No doubts. 

The only thing more complicated than a computer is the human body.  The intricacy of the fine balance of protein chains that are supposed to react to each other if off balance is something your body does every day in millions of combinations with infinite accuracy.  Can you imagine being able to control that computer?  Or work with the brain?  Fascinating! 

Q.  I know you earned a minor in economics when you went to college.  What was your interest in economics at that time?

I had it in my mind that I wanted to be an investment banker, and read somewhere that the best place to work doing that was Wall Street.  And the best way to get to Wall Street was through economics.  In addition, I grew up in the wild economy of Argentina (we were the first country to have a currency of 1,000,000 australes – the name back then – and that is worth about 1.E26 cents now), and economics was a very intriguing thing. 

I started to read and learn and realized that what is not a guess is a wild-guess in the world of economics.  The only thing that I found interesting back then was that people move economies with their beliefs.  An early version of wisdom of the crowds, and I still believe in the power of the crowds to move mountains. 

Q.  When you are not working, what do you like to do to relax?

I don’t have any hobbies per se, but technology always interested me. I picked up my first computer when I was 16 and to me technology is a hobby.  I am a tinkerer, always looking for new ways to do things with technology, always trying new things.  I have to have the latest toys as soon as they come out and figure out how they work without the help of a manual.

 
Q.  Are you interested in sports?  What’s your favorite sport?  Favorite team?

Of course, you expect me to say Soccer (Football to the rest of the world), but I hate that sport.  The only time I watch it is during the world cup or they would take my citizenship away.  I don’t really enjoy watching sports, which is ironic if you knew some of the events I attended in my life.
 
Q.  Have you read any interesting books lately? 

Let’s see.  I just finished re-reading the first six books of Harry Potter before going to see The Half Blood Prince.  II also have a kindle with about 10-12books all the time and jump around between them.  I am now reading 1984 and Treasure Island on the kindle, and just downloaded a new book from Dr. Joseph Michelli (The Ritz Carlton Way), which I am browsing through. 

My ultimate goal is to have my own book in my own kindle and read it.  Someday.

Behind the CRM Thought Leaders: Prem Kumar Aparanji

With extensive experience in CRM, business process management, quality assurance, and solutions & innovations management, Prem Kumar Aparanji leads the Social CRM/CRM 2.0 initiatives at Cognizant Technology Solutions. In addition to his deep interests in the social web and the free/libre and open-source technology movement, Prem also writes frequently on rice. On Twitter, where he appears as @prem_k, he’s commonly engaged in — and often leading — conversations using the #scrm hashtag for “social CRM.”
 
Prem, thanks for taking the time to do this interview.
 
Q.  We frst began chatting on Twitter when you invited me to follow the Social CRM discussions (#scrm), what has motivated your passion for this topic?

John, thank you for taking a risk with me & doing this interview. I am overwhelmed by the recognition that #scrm has got me and I am a bit pleasantly surprised too.

To understand my passion for social CRM, I need to give you a glimpse into how I got into this. It was part destiny, part innate need to get my five minutes of fame.

I have been using IRC, IM, forums, chat rooms, blogs, wikis, social networking sites and other social media & their precursors for more than a decade now since near the end of my college days.

I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity back then since we did not have much internet penetration in India in those days & it was very expensive to get a connection or even use the cyber cafe, if accessible. I was  enamored with the fact that I was connecting in real time with some students far away in a country I had only read in Geography called Romania.

Being a geek, I was not exactly a socialite in my college days & was more comfortable with the Internet & the communication possibilities – in this, I am a bit like Brent, but am neither an introvert nor an extrovert. The other aspect that drew me to the net was the ability to publish ones own content. I latched onto geocities pretty early in my Internet days. I was also the first (along with my fellow student) to setup a web site for our college back then.

So together, the ability to communicate across geographies & publish your own content, pushed me deeper into the precursors of the current social media.

After college I joined Cognizant as a fresher & got into Pegasystems, which was positioned as a workflow automation system, especially for call centers, back then. I lived in a new city as a bachelor in my own pad (I was in a hostel in college). So my social circle grew smaller still. However I was getting almost non stop access to computers & if lucky, the net too. At office. So, slowly my time was spent more & more on the net, reading, researching, experimenting and socializing. In fact, I contacted my wife over the net & our initial interactions were over emails.

But even at office the net was not for everybody. When it was made available, it got me into blogging in 2003. But then this was short lived too since websense was applied and the access though now available for all, was restricted to business related sites. I had to wait till my Switzerland stint where I had net connection at home too. When I returned to India in 2004 broadband was making inroads. In mid 2005 I got one at home and got very busy on Orkut that I had joined in 2004 just to be geeky. I had also created a community for Cognizant on a lark. In 2006 college recruits started joining the community & asked a lot of questions that freshers typically ask. These are folks not yet initiated into the corporate world and are unsure of what to expect when they join us. I helped them with whatever information I could provide and counsel them to the best of my knowledge. Over a period of time the community grew and now has over 17500 members, most of them joined as freshers – the talent market for Cognizant. I do not know if this can be considered social CRM, may be social HR?

Then in 2006 our then CKO & current Innovation head, Sukumar, launched our internal blogs that was open & available for each and every employee of Cognizant. This was when I started using enterprise social software. I took a few months to join it but then went on to become a top blogger. I was successful in creating a very lively & thriving community of open source enthusiasts in an organization that was predominantly dependant on proprietary software for its own usage as well as revenues. Siebel or Pega dont come for free now, do they?

I got into CRM & BPM QA, where we defined our own validation & verification processes to suite the requirements of the Siebel & Pega projects. AFAIK, we came with a complete testing life cycle & processes customized for CRM & BPM for the first time in India, and possibly the world too. I built a test & defect management suite built using open source tools and also built some rudimentary social integrations with wikis & forums. This was when I transitioned from a user of enterprise social software to builder of such systems.

By mid of 2007 I had built a stack of social software using open source as well as then recently launched Lotus Connections. But I had problems proving their worth in a CRM or BPM context. We did integrate Siebel with Lotus Connections, but we did not have compelling business case. That was when my quest from a business perspective for use of social technologies in CRM.

In early 2008 when I joined Twitter, I had know idea what I was gettign into. This was yet another social technology that was the hype and I had to try it out. I slowly realised that other people were also discussing about social media in the business perspective and started following a lot of social media mavens and that is how I found Brent. Then I got to know the rest over a period of time, Paul, Graham, Mitch, Jesus, etc. Brent in the meantime has created the #scrm hashtag to just collate his social CRM related tweets. I intuitively started using it & tried to get others to use that hashtag when they tweeted about social CRM. I had many doubts since I had been listening to only the social media marketing type of folks, mostly the agency people. And when I asked my doubts on #scrm they would lead to many insigfhtful discussions between the gurus! I learnt & correlated with my own experiences in both CRM as well as social technologies and my own ideas about their integration. And the rest of the story is known to you. The number of people just grew & somewhere in June or July it reached a tipping point and now its got very popular for social CRM aficionados. And since most of the folks were initiated into it by me, am fondly remembered & I am thankful to you all for remembering me.

So as you can see there was no one reason to motivate me to be passionate about social CRM in general or #scrm in particular. Good Karma you could say.

 
Q.  How do you see Social CRM evolving in the next 3 – 5 years?
 
Crystal gazing? I have never done that, but always wanted to for the fun. So I will try, but dont hold me against it if I am way off! After all the world was supposed to need only 5 computers!

Currently most businesses implement half cooked social media initiatives, ones that are limited in scope and do not fit into the overall business strategy of the organization. I am only considering big businesses here, since I do not have any experience with small businesses. The initiatives are still siloed and are not overarching. But over a period of time I see a more strategic implementation & even the internal organization structure evolving to adopt to the new ways of working. Enterprise 2.0 will happen internally in a disjoint manner in the near term, but eventually it cross paths with the social CRM initiatives and may be after 5 years they will both meld together. Well, that’s at least my wish, if not a prediction.

So I see a death for social CRM as we comprehend it currently. In its place will be something unthinkable currently, but these would remove the boundaries between employees, partners & customers. Everyone would be working collaboratively together, across geographies & timezones.

But do not despair. The investments business make now for social CRM, either for creating a strategy or defining new business processes or organizational change management or the technology implementations, will all be in good stead. Just like the traditional CRM systems are not going out of the window to incorporate social CRM, the future model that will replace social CRM will also leverage the investments made in social CRM as well as the current Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

 
Q.  If you could do anything else with your career, something that is not technology focused, at would it be?
 Hmmm … some thing in the food business. Both my mom & wife are excellent cooks. So am sure they would be awesome in running a food business. Who knows it may come to pass as yet.

Q.  If you were to start a food business, what kind of foods would you make?
It would be a not at all hoity-toity restaurant with a cafe, where many people come to socialize as much to eat. May be have a section for some romantic minded folks too. Cuisine would be mostly ethnic Indian, especially south Indian, with some north Indian and easy continental recipes thrown in. It would even have books in there for folks to read. The habit is dying thanks to Orkuts & Facebooks.
 
Q.  When you are not working, what do you like to do to relax?
 Books, movies, family. No specific order but I guess my wife will say that this is the order I follow.

Q.  Are you interested in sports?  What’s your favorite sport?  Favorite team?
Not since I went to college. I used to play football, cricket, badminton, roller skating, cycling.

Q.  I always ask Peter Thomas about Cricket as I think it’s an interesting sport.  Do you follow it at all?  If yes, what’s your favorite team?

I used to follow Cricket very passionately until a few years back. In my school days I was a spinner, but very bad with batting or fielding. I had to undergo a nose surgery due to an injury while fielding when I was around 9 years old, guess that put a fear of the deuce ball in me. Currently the T20 version of Cricket (much like what Twitter is to Blogs) has made me watch it a bit again, but that’s because the frenzy is too high to avoid them! Favorite team is easy, India of course. I don’t follow the County, Ranji or other league matches, so wouldn’t be able to even name such teams.
Q.  Have you read any interesting books lately?
I now mostly read SF&F (science fiction and fantasy) and a splattering of business books in between. I finally read the sci-fi classic Dune recently and in business I read Tribes & Tipping Point a month back.

Offshoring updates: Getting rolling

After a couple of months of negotiating with a potential off-shoring partner we were finally able to come up with a reasonable agreement.  It’s one that I hope is mutually beneficial for both of us and I wanted to share with you some of the key points to get your feedback. 

• We have a six month pilot period where both of us can demonstrate that this is a mutually beneficial relationship.  If it’s not working for either side we walk away with 2 weeks notice.
• All work is done project based with up-front estimates being provided and approval required before work begins.
• I have to sign-off on all members of the team, interviewing all of them before they can join the team.  I will not keep this restriction in place forever, but it is a critical piece of starting this relationship.

We’re starting off on the right foot.  How does this compare to your approach?

John