Another Social Media webinar for you to view. This one is from Customer Think Corp, and is called “Showcase: Social CRM” – tagline “harvesting the power of Social Media and CRM systems.”

After an introduction by Bob Thomson (CEO of CustomerThink), three companies make presentations: Lithium (“the leading Social CRM solutions“), HelpStream (“the first company in the world to deliver a truly social customer service and relationship management system”), and SAP (“the world’s leading provider of business software“).  Of the three Lithium made the most valuable contribution to the webinar – the remaining two appear to have not fully appreciated the implication of the new marketing paradigm …

Bob’s introduction to the webinar included reference to a venn diagram showing the intersection of the external Social Media cloud, and the internal Business CRM system.  It’s the intersection where the interesting conversations exist – real message of the show.

The Lithium’s contribution to the webinar captured my attention: the crucial dependence on Super Users for successful on-line support forums.  Essentially, it’s not possible to create a customer network, it must be allowed to grow.  These super users will promote you wares on your behalf; it’s not merely a matter of “if you build it, [they] will come.”  The excellent example in the webinar is from a Logitech (“… designs personal peripherals to help people enjoy a better experience with the digital world”) support forum – where the super user like KachiWachi appears to spend the majority of each day resolving Logitech’s customers problems for free … and, in doing so, converts many potential leads into sales.  But there is a price to pay: these super users must be rewarded – and their reward takes the form of expert ratings – an acknowledgement of the expertise and collaboration with other users of the forum.

This on-line support forum community will even address the risk of competitors seeding the forum with misinformation.  Your on-line advocates will quickly pounce on the perpetrators and expose them …

Earlier this week, 30th September 2009, Google opened up their Wave preview to about 100,000 people.  Salesforce.com, with their interest in the service cloud , are naturally one of the first to demo Wave integrated with their CRM.  In a Salesforce Force.com Blog entry called “Getting in Front of the Wave” you will find background details on Google’s Wave and a YouTube video  (see below) on how the Wave platform might be integrated with Salesforce.com …

Just come across an interesting Blog post by Lauren Ingram, a software QA engineer at Salesforce.com.  The full title of the post is “The Digital Age: Reading in Reverse: How to make a profit.“  It’s well worth a read …

In Lauren’s Post there’s a reference to a Gartner research note (G00168995, 22 July 2009).  In this research note Gartner state that despite a decline in sales due to the economy they have not seen a drop-off in their customers requesting vendor evaluations related to Sales Force Automation (SFA).  The note includes, of course, one of Gartner’s classic magic quadrants.  The magic quadrant, a square (shown here on the right – click to enlarge) divided into four “quadrants”, is essentially a visual aid for comparative discussions of vendors attributes.  Of course, the placement of vendors in the square needs careful interpretation.  All the SFA vendors in the square offer Software as a Service (SaaS – read as service in the cloud), one of Salesforce.com’s key marketing attributes – and, Salesforce.com is in the prestigious top right-hand corner of the magic quadrant.

Lauren summarises the theme of his Post in the final sentences, “… Salesforce is betting on the service cloud.  Today, we’re reading in reverse, making our customers available to their clients.  And it’s all because you, the reader, insist on using that Twitter account.”

I couldn’t resist this Post – after all, it is a cloud!

Go to Wired for some more weird clouds …

I’ve been listening to several of Leo’s podcasts over many years now.  His TWiT podcast has proven to be essential listening for me at the gym.  So when Leo started TWig – This week in Google (and the Cloud) – I new it would be worth downloading.

Take for example This Week In Google 4: Filers vs. Pilers, it’s probably one of the most accessible of the current series.  The cast is usual suspects: Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, Jeff Jarvis and the guest, for this session, Kevin Marks (Google: Open Social, and now BT).  It’s talking heads at its best.

Kevin introduces the word phatic, a social scientist term, in relationship to much that is Social Media.  According to Kevin, Social Media is “full of social gestures that are like apes grooming each other.”  That is, full of expressions that only function to perform a social task, rather than to conveying information.

Other nuggets from TWig#4 are that:

• there is a limit (i.e. accessible by API) of 3200 tweets on Twitter
• Google Wave, is best viewed as tool that will support collaborative editing of a stored document – rather than a new email paradigm (Kevin)
• TWig’s has a friendfeed at http://friendfeed.com/twit-twig