Brent's Social CRM Blog

What Can We Learn From This Year’s Holiday Season?

In conjunction with IBM's Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today's customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them. This is the fourth post in the series.  

Christmas 2011 is a great example of Smarter Commerce in action.  It’s a lesson in why businesses need to transform the way they market and sell their products and services.  According to the National Retail Federation, retail industry sales for the 2011 holiday season increased 4.1 percent year-over-year to $471.5 billion, beating its expectation of 3.8 percent growth.  And while the overall numbers probably made for a pleasant holiday for the industry as a whole, what was happening online was astounding:

• US online holiday shopping season reaches a record $37.2 billion, up 15 Percent vs. 2010 – a rate of increase almost 4X higher than the overall rate for retail.
• A post-holiday 2011 retail study from Kabbage, Inc. focusing on small-to-medium online merchants found 69% of respondents reporting increased sales. On average, study participants experienced a 32% hike in sales compared to the 2010 season.
• As late as one week before Christmas 2011, one-quarter of consumers hadn’t even started holiday shopping. (Consumer Reports)
• 93% of retailers have offered free shipping at some point during the season vs. 85% last year. (USA Today)
• The 2011 US Holiday Season edition of the ForeSee Results E-Retail Satisfaction Index of the top forty Internet retailers increased by a point from 78 to 79 (on a scale of 1-100)
• Almost one in four retail searches online on Christmas Day were made using mobile phones or tablet devices, according to the British Retail Consortium (BRC).
• The number of adults in the United States who own tablets and e-readers nearly doubled from mid-December to early January, according to a new Pew Research study. (New York Times)

Technology’s Impact on Behavior Is Accelerating

The world is changing.  While still a fraction of the overall sales figures, ecommerce is growing at a much faster rate than traditional retail.  And not just for the big retailers.  As the Kabbage study illustrates, small and midsize online retailers enjoyed tremendous growth as well.  This in part stems from the effect technology is having on the customer buying process, and the ability of companies to adapt their business processes to support online shopping.

When you think about twenty-five percent of shoppers not starting their Christmas shopping until after December 18^th, it really hits home how the process of shopping has changed.  Five to ten years ago most people still were going to multiple stores in search of ideas for things to buy, to find recommendations, compare items, and to look for deals, so they had to start their shopping efforts earlier.  Now they can do most of that online – with a lot less time involved.  And from the online retailer’s perspective, they leverage the latest technology not only to provide this information to online shoppers, but also to deliver the goods on time as well.  Jewelry specialist Blue Nile offered free FedEx shipping guaranteed to arrive by Saturday, December 24, for all orders placed as late as 7 p.m. the day before (Friday, December 23). And other online retailers offered similar shipping capabilities.

This all adds up to shoppers more efficiently finding what they want, knowing the price they want to pay and having the confidence of getting it in time – with the added benefit of not having to wrestle with issues like parking, crowded malls, weather etc..  And as both companies and consumers accelerate their technology adoption, look for ecommerce to steadily increase its portion of the retail pie while customers leverage social and mobile to decrease the time and effort it takes to buy things.

Technology’s Impact on Behavior is Dramatically Affecting Expectations

One of the more interesting developments is how technology is impacting customer expectations as well as their behavior.  Now that companies like Amazon can get items to us in two days for free, we expect this kind of service all the time.  And while 93% of them did offer free shipping at some point during the holiday season, a study also showed 73% of consumers recently surveyed by MarketLive named "free returns" as a top promotion in determining their online purchasing behavior. 

This is a great example of customers understanding what technology can do, and expecting vendors to find ways to leverage it to continuously improve their shopping experience.  And improving the experience is crucial to keeping customers satisfied.  According to the ForeSee study, satisfaction scores are important because a one-point change in website satisfaction can predict a 14% change in revenues generated on the web.  And when they were highly satisfied with a purchase:

-   64% of survey responders said they were more likely to buy from the same company the next time they needed a similar product;

-   67% were more inclined to recommend the company to others; and

-   65% felt a sense of ‘brand commitment’.

This illustrates that investing in improving customers’ web experience is a terrific way to build brand loyalty and capture the benefits of viral marketing (or something like this).

A Christmas Carol…

You really don’t have to look much further than Christmas Day 2011 to see how technology has changed customer behaviors and expectations.  Digital content & subscriptions (digital downloads of music, TV, movies, e-books and apps) accounted for more than 20 percent of sales on Christmas Day. On any other day of the holiday season, that number was only 2.8%.  And these numbers were driven by the rise of mobile devices, with the iPad leading the way on Christmas Day with a staggering 7% of all online sales coming through just that one device – accounting for 50% of sales that day, according to the IBM Coremetrics Benchmark.

While the numbers tell the story, it really hits home personally when I saw my parents (both octogenarians) sitting at the kitchen table Christmas Day  - my father with his iPad, and my mother with her Kindle Fire.  And my mother, having received the Fire as a gift, was reading an ebook she purchased Christmas morning… with an Amazon gift card.

This is a totally different story of Christmas than Charles Dickens told in the 19^th century, but it’s a tale of what to expect in the 21^st century when it comes to customer engagement.  Because of technology and its empowering effect on customers, they are developing “great expectations” their vendors must live up to.  Which means vendors must be smarter in their approach to smarter, more informed customers.

This is the fourth of a six-part blog series by SMB Group and CRM Essentials that examines the evolution of the smarter customer and smarter commerce, and IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions. In our next post, we’ll look at key points to consider when planning a smarter commerce strategy. In our next post, we’ll look at IBM’s Smarter Commerce offerings to help illustrate how midsize companies can reshape the way they do business to meet the expectations and needs of smarter customers. 

 

Goodbye Assistly, Hello Desk.com

Just as the CRM Idol judges (Paul Greenberg, Denis Pombriant, Jesus Hoyos, Esteban Kolsky and yours truly) were ready announce the four finalists for the Americas award, another announcement beat us to the punch.  Saleforce.com dropped the news they were buying Assistly… the same Assistly we were about to announce as a CRM Idol finalist.

Now we had already made the decision to put them in the Final Four based on their excellent presentation to the judges and great 1-on-1 Q&A session.  You can see what we thought of them by checking out our review of Assistly at the CRM Idol site.

We liked what we saw, so it really wasn’t a surprise when the acquisition announcement was made – seeing that Salesforce.com was already an investor and was in the middle of a yearlong shopping spree.  Plus it just made sense given what Assistly offered by way of functionality, and focus on the SMB space.  But today’s announcement – coming just over three months from the acquisition – that Assistly has been integrated into the Salesforce fold and is now Desk.com is kind of surprising.  Not that they did it, but that they did it as quick as they did.

I recorded a conversation with Desk.com’s SVP of Marketing Matt Trifiro for my One-on-One series at SmallBizTrends.com that will be published Friday.  But here are a few things he said on the whys and hows of this move:

“Being able to bring the power of a Service Cloud type product to small businesses with fewer than 200 employees was really one of Salesforce.com's strategic objectives, and so they acquired Assistly and basically set us up with a task of [creating] what is the killer application for the social help desk for small business, and Desk.com was the answer.  We completely rebuilt everything that we had produced.  We have developed a new mobile client, a new agent interface, we rebuilt all of our API’s, and we invested in a new infrastructure”.

The new agent interface is nice and clean, and makes it pretty easy to manage service interactions coming from different channels (Facebook, Twitter, email) in one universal inbox.  And one thing that was hinted at during the CRM Idol competition was a mobile client for the contact center agent was coming.  Well it’s now here with Desk.com Mobile - built with HTML5.

Another thing Assistly brought to Salesforce.com was an innovative pricing model and gamified onboarding experience, which I’m glad made the crossover to Desk.com.  Pricing starts at $49 USD, per full-time agent, per month, for unlimited usage. Flex pricing is also available for $1 per part-time agent, per hour. Desk.com Mobile is generally available today at no additional cost for full-time agents.

It will be interesting to see what impact Desk.com will have on the adoption of “social service” at the SMB level.  The new interface and mobile client for agents – coupled with the “old” pricing and onboarding – should pave the way for more small businesses to provide service experiences better aligned with the needs of today’s customers.  It will be interesting to see how this gets integrated in with other pieces of the Salesforce.com pie down the road.

It so hard, to say goodbye... to Assistly.  OK I was never the biggest Boz II Men fan so I'll stop with that, but although Assistly is no more, the spirit lives on in Desk.com.  

 

 

 

Social Blog Carnival: Getting the 411 on Social ROI

This post is part of the Social ROI Blog Carnival at Think Customers: the 1to1 Media blog. Visit the blog carnival post “Calculating the ROI of Social Media” to check out the full lists of posts from numerous well-known social media thought leaders.

As part of the One on One conversation series I do over at SmallBizTrends.com, I recently talked with Cory Hartlen, a product marketing manager with Radian6.  During our discussion Cory mentioned quite a number of things that hit on the topic of social media ROI.

One story that really caught my attention was around how some of their clients were using listening tools from an HR perspective. By listening for mentions of people that have graduated with their MBA, or are looking forward to graduating with their MBA, a few of their clients had success in finding potential candidates for their junior executive training programs. So instead of having to rely on more traditional avenues for recruitment from headhunters, they were able to use social listening to help reduce some of those costs.

From a more traditional angle, Cory said Radian6 themselves listen to social conversations so when people reach out to their social networks and ask for advice, they can lend a hand and share a link to our review of monitoring systems. Then those conversations are very measurable because they can figure out how many leads they are getting from the social space over a given time period and get those input into their system.  Then they actually see how many of those leads they are able to close on over a given time period to get their ROI from a program like that.

One last point Cory made is that he believes when it comes to social media ROI it all comes down to goals and strategy. And this seems to be backed up by the results of CRM Essentials/SMB Group Social Business Study performed last year. 

Our survey of 750 executives at small and mid-size companies found that companies who characterized their approach to social media as strategic seemed to find more success with it than those who felt their organizations were more informal with its use.  In fact, people working at strategically social companies were twelve times more likely to predict an increase of twenty percent in 2011 revenues over the previous year, compared to more informal social media users. And employees who said their companies did not use social media were twice as likely to expect a decrease in 2011 revenues compared to strategic users.

Below are a few differences in approach to social between strategic vs. informal users:

• Strategic users 2.5X more likely to have Sales involved than Informal users
• Strategic users 2.5X more likely to have HR involved than Informal users
• Strategic users almost 3X more likely to use social media for product development than Informal users
• Strategic users 2X more likely to use social media for research than Informal users
• Strategic users 2X more likely to use social media for internal collaboration than Informal users
• Strategic users 2X more likely to have integrated CRM with social than Informal users
• Social media was 2X more likely to be selected as top activity for improving customer service by Strategic users than Informal users

And along with the differences in how strategic organizations leveraged social media throughout the organization, they also kept track of KPIs differently:

• Strategic users 5X more likely to measure customer retention metrics than Informal users
• 3X more likely to measure sales conversion rate from online community
• 2.5X more likely to measure number of followers on social networks
• 2X more likely to measure net promoter score
• 3X more likely to measure share of conversation
• 1.8X more likely to measure new ideas generated

 

When asked about the ROI of social media, Cory says you could very easily ask what the ROI of his telephone is.  Without a goal and a measurable strategy, you pretty much are left in the dark. But if you decide to make three more sales this month, then you know you need to make X number of phone calls to be able to close that number of sales.  So now you have a goal and a strategy which can be measured to prove how successful you were. 

He thinks that social media is no different, and the numbers seem to back this up.

 

 

Come to Atlanta to Get Down to Social Biz…and for Some Biscuits

I have the opportunity to go to a lot of CRM/Social events during the course of the year, most of which are held in cool places like San Francisco, Boston and Orlando.  And while I love going to those places, I’ve always wanted to have one of those events down here in Atlanta.  And while I’ve threatened to do
it, I would always find an excuse (or 200) not to do it.  Not the right venue, not the right time of year, nobody in the industry would come, nobody likes me… man I better stop before I really depress myself.

Anyway, thanks to my friends and some great sponsors, I’ve completely run out of excuses.  So I have no other choice than to say that on Friday February 3^rd I’d love for 
you to join me in Atlanta for the Getting Down to Social Business conference being held at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) Conference Center.  It’s also being called Social Biz Atlanta because the event site is SocialBizAtlanta.com.  And it is free to attend if you register online in advance.

This is a full day event that will focus on the need for companies to transition their approach to “social” away from a narrow, reactionary set of disconnected activities, to a full-fledged corporate culture strategically aligned to build long-lasting relationships with today’s empowered customer.  And it's aimed directly at small and mid-size businesses - and even you enterprise folks working at the departmental level of your organization operating like a small business.  

Now I said my friends deserve all the “blame” for this making this happen, and let me tell you why…

A Venue I Couldn’t Pass Up

I’ve said to many people that I’d only organize an event if I could get a space like the GTRI Conference Center, because it’s a great location in Midtown Atlanta, has great amenities for attendees, and even has free parking.  This made for a great excuse for not doing something, until Donna Ennis of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute said I could use the GTRI venue.   Gee THANKS Donna!

Incredible List of World Class Thought Leaders Volunteering to Come

 Now that I couldn’t use the venue excuse, I really was relying heavily on the “nobody would come to Atlanta” excuse.  And, of course, not only did people want to come, many of them even offered without me having to ask.  I mean, who would’ve thought a group of thought leaders, experts and influencers like this would say yes:

• Anita Campbell, CEO and Publisher, Small Business Trends,  
• Robin Carey, CEO, Social Media Today,
• Ginger Conlon, Executive Editor, 1to1 Media,
• Bert DuMars, Vice President of Digital Marketing and eCommerce, Newell Rubbermaid,
• Donna Ennis, Project Director, MBDA Business Center,
• Art Hall, Director, Alvarez and Marsal,
• Cory Hartlen, Product Marketing Manager, Radian6,
• Jeanne Hopkins, Vice President of Marketing, HubSpot,
• Paul Greenberg, President of the 56 Group & Author of CRM at the Speed of Light,
• Adam Naide, Executive Director of Social Media Marketing, Cox Communications,
• Jeff Nolan, VP of Product Marketing, Get Satisfaction,
• Larry Ritter,SVP & General Manager, Sage CRM Solutions,
• Michael Thomas, Customer Success Manager, Microsoft,
• Matt Trifiro, SVP of Marketing, Assistly,
• Lauren Vargas, Community Management Strategist, Aetna,

Emily Yellin, Author of Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us

OK so I knew Paul G. would come and do it even if it were just me and him…which would have made it a CRM Playaz episode anyways.   But who knew all these great folks from great companies would say yes? Now I was down to my last excuse…

I CAN Have Regular Guy (or Gal) Food For Lunch At One Of These Things?

This is the biggie.  Having been to a number of cool events, the lunch situation can sometimes be dicey.  And I said to myself if I ever organized an event I’d have to have some “regular guy” food available.  Something I could sink my teeth into like some Chick-fil-a; a chicken biscuit perhaps...  And just when I thought it was illegal to serve this kind of food at a business event, I found out that I could actually do it.

No More Excuses…I’m Talking to You!

So now I’m all out of reasons for why I shouldn’t host a social business event here in Atlanta.  And due to having great sponsors like Microsoft, Radian6, Sage, Assistly and Georgia Tech, we’re able to make this whole event free! So if you work at a small or mid-size business and live in or near Atlanta (or you’ve been looking for a good reason to come here) you’ve run out of excuses not to attend.  Let’s see:

• Great Speakers – Check!
• Great Venue – Check!
• Great Location (with free parking) – Check!
• Great Eats (if you’re like me and dig Chick-fil-a) – check!
• Great information on an important topic – Check!
• And it’s free – Check! (or is that no check since you don’t need your checkbook )

In all seriousness we really do think we’ve put together a great day of content coming directly from experts, practitioners and vendors who can help your organization transition to becoming a social business.  So here are the details:

Title: Getting Down to Social Business: The New Business as Usual in the Age of the Collaborative Relationship (AKA Social Biz Atlanta)

Date: Friday February3rd

Time: 8:30-4pm

Place: Georgia Tech Research Institute Conference Center

250 14^th Street NW

Atlanta, GA 30318

Cost: None with online registration

Event Site: SocialBizAtlanta.com

I hope to see you there!

 

HubSpot Introduces Marketing Grader

The folks who brought you the Website Grader, the tool that has graded over four million sites to see how SEO-friendly they were, is at it again.  HubSpot – the makers of the popular Internet marketing platform and a host of free tools to help measure your effectiveness on Twitter, Facebook, writing press releases, etc. – released their latest creation: The Marketing Grader tool.  And yes, in the tradition of the other grader tools, it’s free.

According to the press release:

"Marketing Grader analyzes 30+ measures of marketing effectiveness – usually in under 60 seconds – and grades the business on a 1-100 scale.  Marketing Grader evaluates performance at the “top of the funnel” (ability to generate new interest and traffic), “the middle of the funnel” (whether that traffic converts into prospects, leads and customers) and analytics (measuring and comparing the right things)".

As popular as the Website Grader tool was (and still is), I think this one has the capacity to be even more popular, as we're now in the place with content then we were in 2006.  Content goes to where the people are, so Marketing Grader may be able to give you a better picture of how successful you are a getting your message to the people, compared to getting the people to you.  As I think about it, they are both important, so you probably should use Website Grader and Marketing Grader to get the full picture.  And it won't cost you a thing to do it either.

This is just another reason why I think 2012 is the year marketing automation hits big time at the small business level.

One on One Back Story: Jeff Haynie of Appcelerator

My latest One-on-One conversation just went up at SmallBizTrends.com.  Jeff Haynie, ceo and co-founder of Appcelerator joined me to share his perspective on the fast moving area of mobile app development.   Appcelerator is a platform and services company that enables Web developers to build applications for smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops.

Appcelerator also partners with IDC on a great quarterly survey of mobile developers to track what trends are taking place in the industry.  The latest report came out earlier this month and can be downloaded for free.   A couple of nuggets that stood out for me include:

• Kindle Fire is the Android device mobile app developers in North America are most interested in creating apps for...already
• Kindle Fire’s low cost and numerous content offerings are the two main reasons driving this interest
• Windows Phone 7 is has separated from the pack to become the clear third choice (after Apple and Android) among mobile platforms, while BlackBerry slips further behind
• Connected TV app development continues to slide.

There’s a ton of stuff in the report, so if you have any interest in what mobile app developers are focusing their efforts on check out this report…each quarter they put it out.

You can check out the conversation and see an edited transcript by going to the show page at SBT.

Here’s a quick take Jeff had on the impact of app marketplaces, and in particular the Amazon Android marketplace:

“There’s a perfect storm from external factors. Apple has helped the world understand how to buy things digitally. Apps have been somewhat removed from the traditional process of [software] distribution and maintenance, which has really helped oil the machine.

Amazon has a phenomenal consumer transaction engine, combined with Web services infrastructures, which is a bigger and bigger part of their core business. That is going to propel the adoption of applications, and it provides a great community from a distribution and marketing standpoint”.

I couldn’t agree more about what Jeff said about Amazon, but if you’ve read this blog recently you probably already knew that.

In addition to all the great insights Jeff has to offer about mobile app development, he also shares why he moved to Silicon Valley from Atlanta to start Appcelerator – and why he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what he has with the company anywhere else.

So check out the conversation today if you get a chance.  Jeff can’t, because he and his wife took their family on a mission trip to Mexico.  In his own words – “This week we decided to take the family down to experience life in a different world and work in an orphanage. Let's all be thankful for what we have and remember that a lot of people have very little this holiday”.

I couldn’t have said it any better…

 

Reaching The Social Customer: New Tools, New Strategies - Webinar from Social Media Today

I know our collective minds are beginning to focus on turkey and football - ok I guess my collective mind has turned to turkey and football - so before I dive mouth-first into Thanksgiving there is one thing I wanted to mention.  My friends at Social Media Today are hosting a free webinar next Tuesday (November 29th) at Noon et focused on tools and strategies for reaching today's social customer.

The webinar, sponsored by Marketo, will focus on:

• New tools and strategies to communicate with the social customer
• Why listening to customers is essential
• Sales intelligence to learn more from the customer
• Engaging and retaining customers
• Customer-centric vs. customer service?
• The Use Cases for Social Customer Management

I have the pleasure of moderating the following great panel of experts:

• Jon Miller, VP of Marketing and Co-Founder, Marketo
• Adam Metz, VP of Business Development, Metz Consulting
• Michael M. Lazerow, Chairman and CEO, Buddy Media, Inc.

Here the details:

Title: Reaching The Social Customer: New Tools, New Strategies

Date: Tuesday November 29th

Time: Noon ET / 9am PT

 

Cost: Free

Registration: You can use this link to register. 

Hope you can join us next week.  And I hope each of you eat as much turkey and watch as much football as I plan to over the course of the next 4 days...although I don't think it's possible.

One on One Back Story: Phil Fernandez of Marketo

I host a conversation series over at SmallBizTrends.com called One on One.  I’ve been doing it for about a year. The series is sponsored by RIM, and allows us to gather some really great insights from some of the best and brightest folks driving small business and entrepreneurism today.

 

The conversations are typically published on Fridays right before lunchtime here on the east coast.  Just think of them as informal chats with people who have been there, done that, still doing that….and because of their experiences have great insights to share with those of us who want to do, well….that. People like Nimble's Jon Ferrara, Hearsay Social's Clara Shih, Zuora's Tien Tzuo, Google's Rajen Sheth, Social Media Today's Robin Carey, and a host of others.

The latest One on One posted a few days ago features the Phil Fernandez, CEO of revenue performance management vendor Marketo.  Marketo  built its reputation as a leader in the marketing automation space, and recently announced a service geared specifically for SMBs, with Spark by Marketo.

With companies like Marketo  InfusionSoft, HubSpot, Pardot and others focusing applications and services to help SMBs optimize their marketing efforts, it was great to hear Phil talk about how automation can impact customer retention.  In fact he encourages their customers not to think about marketing automation as just a customer acquisition tool, but as a way to cost effectively stay in touch with their customer base over time to build deep customer relationships.

You can check out the edited transcript of the conversation over at show page on SmallBizTrends by clicking here.  And you can check out the full conversation down below:

With more marketing automation vendors focusing on the SMB space, 2012 should be a big year for adopting more sophisticated, integrated marketing initiatives.  I haven't seen Spark as of yet, but plan to get a briefing/demo in the near future.  But after talking to Phil, and knowing Marketo's reputation in the space, I'd be surprised if Spark doesn't become a player at the small business level.

Amazon is on Fire, But Kindle Isn't Prime Reason They are the Company to Watch in 2012

I've been playing with my new Kindle Fire for the past 24 hours, and I have to say it's a nice little device. The display is nice and crisp. Video streaming from Amazon worked great, or maybe I was just really excited watching episode one of Felix the Cat while walking around my house...

You do get the feeling that they've optimized this device for streaming content from their servers. That's really important since it only has a 6.54G hard drive. Netflix streaming is good as well. Battery life seems about on par with other devices. Sound quality is pretty good as well.

It's a nice little device, but you really need to be an Amazon Prime member to get the most out of it. This is definitely a content consuming device, and you Prime gives you access to no cost downloads and free book borrowing. And I can't wait 'til they beef up their movie/tv content libraries.  

But I'm not writing this to do an in depth review of Kindle Fire.  Believe me you'll be able to find those anywhere you look. I’m writing this because year in and year out Amazon does things that impact customer experiences and business models.  And while so much of our collective business focus is on Google and Facebook and Apple - which is totally understandable - Amazon is the most fascinating company to watch for me.  I expect that to be the case in 2012 as well.

I think I bought my first book on Bezos and the Amazon.com crew in 1995 or 1996, back before I ever  Googled anything and before Mark Zuckerberg was born…ok not really, but he had to be in grade school at most.  And when many people panned them for not turning a profit in the early days of ecommerce, they stuck with it and proved to everyone buying online was the future.

They perfected the art of distribution and logistics, and turned fulfillment into competitive advantage.  They used the transactional and behavior data from the things we bought and the products we looked at to recommend similar things…in order to sell us more stuff more efficiently.  And by applying extreme analysis and business intelligence tools and best practices, they combined their logistical expertise with their customer knowledge and created Amazon Prime.

I’ve been an Amazon Prime member since the beginning, because paying $79 a year to get free two day shipping on anything I buy seemed too good to be true.  Apparently I wasn’t alone in this thinking as millions of people jumped on board.  So Amazon turned sporadic purchases into a membership program that –at least in my case- led to more buying (and more regular buying) than would have occurred without it.  To me this was a stroke of genius, and one of the early examples of the power of The Subscription Economy.

I haven’t even got to how they changed the way most of us buy books with the original Kindle.  Or how when they added profiles years ago to your Amazon account they created a more social experience to buying stuff long before most people knew what social networks were.  Or how once they built out their infrastructure and best practices for running their business they made it available to other business and became pioneers in cloud computing.  Or how they created their own Android App Store to leverage the power of mobility. Or now how they’ve created their own Android tablet in the Kindle Fire – which is optimized to work with their cloud services for streaming content…with their new Silk browser.

Yeah the Kindle Fire is cool little device that is getting a lot of attention, and at its price I’m sure it will expand the tablet-buying population, making these devices even more popular.  But this is just another example of how Amazon keeps doing things to stay connected to their customers.  Giving them what they want buy knowing what they want, how they wanted, when they wanted..etc, etc, etc,  And they know we want access to content immediately from wherever we are.  They still need to work on the video content, but with the opening Netflix has given them you have to believe that will be addressed in 2012.  But what may be even more interesting is to see what they do that we aren’t expecting.  They have a habit of doing stuff like that. 

It’s Time to Put the ISH back in CRM…OK I Definitely Need to Explain This…

Back at the end of 2009 Paul Greenberg was going through his extremely thorough process of creating his CRM Watchlist for 2010.  As the focus of his list tends to be on the enterprise players, I started thinking it would be pretty interesting to put together a list of vendors in the industry I thought were worth watching that catered to the SMB space.  I tossed the idea at Mr. G, and he graciously invited me to post my list on his ZDNet blog in conjunction to unveiling his Watchlist. 

Since Paul was using Watchlist, I needed to come up with something else.  And really many of the companies that were doing interesting stuff at the time weren’t your traditional CRM vendors, but they were doing things that I thought were CRM-ish…especially in today’s social world.  And even though some of them probably didn’t view themselves as CRM vendors, they were CRM-ish to me, which made them important to watch because they were poised to impact what CRM is (and will be).

With that, the CRM-Ish List was born, and because CRM-Ish List is kind of awkward to say, I just shorten it and say the Ish List…which of course leads me to do a lot of explaining – believe me I think highly of companies I put on this Ish List. 

The initial Ish List was rolled out on Paul’s blog, and the folks at ZDNet created a pdf document combining Paul’s Watchlist with my Ish list in January of 2010, which you can check out here below.  I received some pretty good feedback from the list, and with so many developments taking place throughout 2010 I was really looking forward to doing a 2011 Ish List, and was really happy Paul invited me to roll it out again in tandem with his Watchlist.  And as I was beginning to go through the process of scheduling briefings and doing some initial analysis, my brother unexpectedly passed away on November 4^th 2010. 

The thought of doing briefings, analysis, writings and anything CRM related was gone for me for quite a while.  So there was no CRM-Ish List for 2011.  But I’m glad to say that there will be one for 2012, and once again it will be rolled out in tandem with Paul’s 2012 Watchlist.  There will even be some interesting (hopefully) new wrinkles to it – that is if I’m able to pull a couple things together in time. 

Now I have a number of companies in mind already, mainly ones that I have been watching over the past couple of years, but even since the last list just two years ago things have changed dramatically.  There are so many companies out there I won’t even front like any one list can include every company that deserves watching.  But I will try to put together a list that will help small businesses find some solutions that will help them find, catch and keep good customers.

I'm setting up briefings, and doing some digging and analysis stuff.  And if you know of any vendors that I should talk to, STAY TUNED as I will be posting instructions on how you can nominate companies (you can nominate yourself too) very shortly.  And stay on the lookout for the #crmish tag.

So with that, I’m glad to say The ISH is back, baby!  And this year we’ve even got a logo!