Despite being published just over 11 years ago The Cluetrain Manifesto is still provocative, outrageous, and smart – the Cluetrain.com web site went live in April 1999.  As Thomas Petzinger, then a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and author of “The New Pioneers: Men and Women Who are Transforming the Workplace”, states in the foreword of the 2000 edition: “I’ve seen the future of business, and it’s The Cluetrain Menifesto.”

The Cluetrain Manifesto was written by Rick Levine (@ricklevine), Christopher Locke (@clockerb), Doc Searls (@dsearls), and David Weinberger (@dweinberger), all well experienced technology users.  The book quickly climbed the best-seller lists.  But, only now has the Internet matured enough for the books predictions to start ringing true:

The Cluetrain Manefesto - Online Markets

Essentially, The Cluetrain Manifesto is a set of 95 theses, with associated commentaries, predicting how business will be done on the Internet. The 95 theses are a list of declarations aimed at the misconceptions that corporate leaders were applying to customers in the late 90′s, and are put forward as a manifesto, a call to action.  Here are the first four:

1. Markets are conversations
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, un-contrived
5. …

Wordle: The Cluetrain Manifesto 95 Themes

So why should the Cluetrain Manifesto be required reading?  Social CRM!

What is Social CRM and why it is so important:

Social Networking sites have seen an unprecedented growth in the number of users in the last few year. Brian Solis (@briansolis, a “prominent thought leader and published author in new media“) estimated (August 2009) that Facebook alone recorded 370 million unique visitors globally.  Similarly, Twitter registered  66 million unique visitors worldwide.

So there is a big opportunity for marketers to engage their customers through Social Media channels.  Indeed, in the ENGAGEMENTdb Report “The world’s most valuable brands. Who’s most engaged?” by the Wetpaint/Altimeter Group (@charleneli, “a strategy consulting firm that provides companies with a pragmatic approach to disruptive technologies“) it states that they “… have gone beyond surface case studies to measure the true financial value of social media.”  That there is ” … value in social engagement on top of social presence — it pays to actively and continually participate and invest in your networks.”

The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools of the 90′s where process driven; operational and tactical – structuring & controlling the data to help manage the relationship more effectively.  Whereas, Social CRM is young and difficult to define; but it is about people and not technology. Taking the Cluetrain initiative: it’s the conversation – stupid!  It’s a new era for business customer relations.  Business are no long in control.  With the Internet, with Social Media and Social networks, the consumer has more choice – and, the relationship data is unstructured and much more difficult to categorise.  The conversation is not merely business to consumer; but consumer to consumer!

According to Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe, author of “CRM at the Speed of Light, Fourth Edition: Social CRM 2.0 Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers“), an outspoken advocate of CRM 2.0,  Social CRM is a “philosophy and business strategy designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment.“  So, Social CRM cannot be done with existing CRM tools alone.

For a more detailed attempt at defining Social CRM see Martin Walsh (@martinwalsh, Head of Digital Marketing at IBM – also on LinkedIn) slide show, including Video’s, on Social CRM Definitions … enjoy:

However, there are signals that the Social CRM market is maturing – see, for example, “M&A & CRM: A timeline of the tumult” at CRM.COM.  Marketers are spending IT and marketing budgets on tools and technology to engage customers on Social Media channels.  For example, Cisco (“the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet“) currently has a team of 7 dedicated staff to manage the companies social media presence – this will rise to 20 to 30 by 2011.  Even TechCrunch has named Social CRM as one of the top ten technologies that will “rock 2010!”

Finally, a video discussing the intersection of Social CRM and the enterprise.  This was recorded at the Social CRM Summit held by Paul Greenberg, February 2010.  In the video industry analysts Michael Fauscette (@mfauscette, IDC “the premier global provider of market intelligence, …“) and Natalie Petouhoff (@drnatalie, Forrester Research “an independent research company“) answer questions by Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman, CEO of Asuret, Inc., “a consulting company dedicated to reducing technology implementation failures.“) … enjoy:

So, The Cluetrain Manifesto is required reading … and, if you don’t have time to read the Manifesto in full, from cover to cover, at least read the Wikipedia entry at Manifesto …

Notes and further links:

• “Social Media Strategy Before Tactics“  See the blog post by Lee Odden (@leeodden, April 2010), “It’s a debate that’s more common than you might think. Strategy or Tactics first when it comes to social media?”
• For a blog post on the Evolution of the Social CRM Process read Jacob Morgan (@jacobm, “the Principal of Chess Media Group, a social business consultancy.”)
• What’s a Cluetrain?  From the Urban Dictionary: to become aware of what’s going on; to “get with the program”
• Theses: there are claims that the 95 Theses are based on the Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, commonly known as The Ninety-Five Theses, written by Martin Luther in 1517 (Wikipedia)
• “Designing social websites”, Christian Crumlish talks to O’Reilly Media about designing social websites (YouTube)

Related Posts:

• Social Business through Social CRM – Video – March 2010
• Social CRM Strategy? – March 2010
• What the hell is Social Media? – Video, March 2010
• Social Media predictions for 2010 – February 2010
• Social Media Policy – February 2010
• Social Media strategy – Video, January 2010
• Dell kicks up a Storm with Social Media – January 2010
  

Just come across this very accessible video that seeks to clarify the emerging Social Business – Social Customer – Social CRM trinity.  It’s from Mitch Lieberman (Strategic Solutions, SugarCRM) using Vimeo … enjoy!

I’ve just finished reading a couple of posts on Social CRM Strategies.  This prompted me to re-read Forrester’s “Topic Overview: Social CRM Goes Mainstream” (January 2010), by William Band, Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D., with Connie Moore, Andrew Magarie … and so to this post.

The free Forrester document focuses on Forrester’s latest research on the rise of social web and the changes this has caused in the way “customers” interact with organisations. The authors relate this change to the hot topics of customer management, business process, and the business value of “Social CRM”.  The document introduces Forrester’s seven steps of Social CRM success – see below).

Many traditional CRM, pre-Social CRM, projects failed (some analysts reported failure rates as high as 60%) because they didn’t resolve the classic issues of cultural change, performance and incentives, integration, or that most basic requirement, that’s essential for any successful CRM implementation, of data quality. These traditional CRM solutions would have brought together sales and customer data from disparate parts of the organisation and provide a view of an individual customer (B2C), or company (B2B), to help sales and marketing. Traditional CRM will continue to be implemented and used to aggregate customer data, provide analysis of that data, and automate work-flows to optimize business processes.  Social CRM merely adds new layers of complexity – mainly collaboration, ideation, and (preferably) to enhance the overall customer experience.
Continue reading…

The Gartner Group have published their Social Media predictions for 2010 and beyond.

Gartner analysts acknowledge that a lot has happened with social software and collaborative software in 2009, and that there’s been a growing use of Facebook and Twitter by business.  But their predictions for beyond 2010 don’t read so encouragingly.

The five predictions are:

1. By 2012 over 70% of IT department led Social Media initiatives will fail

• similarly, only 50% of business led social media initiatives will succeed
• but, even to enable these successes the Gartner analysts warn organisations that they will need new skills sets around designing and delivering Social Media solutions

2. By 2012 over 50% of organisations will be using microblogging.  But, only 5% of these will be stand-alone/single purpose enterprise microblogging applications – the rest being consumer services like Twitter

3. Post 2012 social software market growth will accelerate as will the overall impact of Social Media on business and society

4. By 2014 social media will replace email for 20% of users for business communication

• essentially, microblogging is better than email for status updates and expertise location within the organisation
• therefore, Gartner recommends organisations must develop:
  • long-term strategy for collaborative and social networking software services, and
  • policies governing the use of consumer services for business purposes

5. In terms of analytic’s, by 2015 some 25% of enterprises will utilise social-network analysis to improve performance and productivity.  Social-network analysis (and here)  is used to examine interaction patterns and information flows among people and groups within the organisation, and among business partners and customers.  The Gartner analysts claim that this is an untapped source of insight – but requires trust and buy-in, due to privacy & confidentially concerns

More information available from Gartner: “Predicts 2010: Social Software in an Enterprise Reality” – http://www.gartner.com/resid=1243515

It’s official: “Salesforce Chatter accelerates the demise of Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus” – so claim’s salesforce.com in their press release of 17th February 2010.

The SaaS leader buys time with the launch of this beta that offers real-time feeds from consumer services “Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz” (though, in a ZDNet post, this is clarified by salesforce.com: “Chatter at this time doesn’t integrate with Google Buzz.  Google Buzz was used in the press release as an example of a popular social consumer network.”)

There will be 100 companies in this private beta program, including Reed Exhibitions, Schumacher Group, and TransUnion.  Chatter should be delivered sometime in 2010.

For more on Chatter see my earlier post “You won’t be able to get too much Chatter.”

The Google Trends site, at http://www.google.com/trends for “worldwide traffic”, is an invaluable research tool.  For example a search on the trends in Google searches of the phrase “Social CRM” (include the quotes) produces the following chart

Notes: this in excess of 25 search volume index means that the “traffic” is 25 times the average for the 12 months.  Similarly, this isn’t absolute search traffic numbers – instead, Trends has scaled the results for “social CRM” so that the  average search traffic in the 12 months is 1.0.

Curiously, the results claim that “No [related] news articles were found”, and that the regional breakdown of the search phrase “social crm” has India (adjusted to 1.00) as the main source of the query, followed by the United States at 19% and the United Kingdom at 17%?  So there’s more than five times the interest in Social CRM in India than there is in either the US, or the UK.  I wonder what this chart will look like in twelve months time?