Brent's Social CRM Blog

A Few Minutes TechCrunch Co-editor Erick Schonfeld

It was a sad day when Business 2.0 magazine folded up a few years ago. It was definitely one of my favorite mags. But before it closed its doors I had a chance to have then B2.0 editor-at-large Erick Schonfeld on my show to talk about their list of 50 people who matter most in social media. Come to think of it it's kinda fun to look back at that list and see how influential the people are now, but I digress...

I really enjoyed having Erick on as we had a great time with him. Although I was not happy to hear of the demise of B2.0, I was very happy when Michael Arrington announced that Erick was joining TechCrunch as its co-editor back in September of 2007. So while it had been some time since his last appearance, last week I finally had the opportunity to have Erick back on the show to pick his brain on what's going in technology today.

One thing about Erick is he's a prolific writer, so I decided to have him expound on "a few" of the articles he wrote last week on TechCrunch, including:

• On eBay, Twitter Followers Are Worth Less Than A Penny Each
• Facebook Now Has Yahoo In Its Sites, Already Bigger In Pageviews (ComScore)
• Where Did Internet Explorer's Browser Share Go?
• Why Amazon Cannot Afford To Lose The eBook Wars To Apple

I have to admit the Twitter follower story - about them being worth less than a penny - really caught my attention as I was writing my own Twitter follower rant seemingly at the same time Erick wrote his article. (To hear the audio version of that rant check out my conversation with eCommerce expert John "Colderice" Lawson over on his blog.)

Also Erick's take on why Amazon has to fight Apple tooth and nail for the eReader market is really interesting. In fact, the whole conversation with him is great, and definitely worth a listen.

Click the player below to hear the conversation, or click here to download the mp3. A big thanks goes out to Erick for sharing his time to do this!

Technorati : amazon.com, apple, facebook, ipad, kindle, techcrunch, twitter
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In the Attention Economy, Context (not Content) is King

I've been on this Attention Economy kick for a while now. My first Inc.com column of the year talked about it a bit. But I really started thinking about it after writing an ebook (made possible by the folks at Sage SalesLogix) back in September titled Social CRM: From Information to Engagement - Trends for Reaching The Social Customer.

I started out the book with an estimate Google CEO Eric Schmidt made back in 2005 about how much information was on the web back then - approximately five million Terabytes. To me that's an incredible amount of information. But when you think about the year in which he made that estimation - before social media and smart phones really hit the masses - it's even more mind blowing to think of how much content is being created now.

Five years ago, even if the amount of information was five million Terabytes, I didn't feel as overwhelmed with information - not like I do now. In fact it still felt like I needed more. Which is why I believed in the mantra - Content is King.

Now, in the age of easy content creation, and easier content distribution, there's a new king in town... and his name is Context. In all reality, context has always been king, but many of us got swept up in content and all its glorious formats.

But now there's so much content (good, bad, ugly, etc.) that there's no way to keep up with it. Forget the bad and ugly, there's so much good content - especially from people I know and respect - that I can't get to it all. But when something's on my mind, I definitely make time for content that speaks to it. And I bet I'm not alone on this one.

There are people, blogs, magazines and newspapers (yeah i still read those things) that have amazing content, but if it's not aligned with my current needs I can't read/listen to/watch it until I've solved my immediate challenges. And if it I find something that helps me with that challenge, it doesn't have to be aesthetically attractive or use pretty prose - the beauty is in its ability to help me get past that obstacle.

So, in the age of pretty pictures and high definition videos, it's context that trumps everything. And from a business perspective, the context comes from those we're looking to do business with, which means we need to take a strategic approach to listening.

Listening can give us a better understanding of what's going on inside the minds of customers and prospects. It can provide valuable insights and give us the proper context for creating content that should captivate their attention, or at least give us a fighting chance.

In the Attention Economy....during the Social Age...if you had to boil it down to a simple equation, it might be something like this:

Context + Content = Conversation (and maybe Customers...)

So I'll go with Context being king, but Content can make your kingdom a lot bigger.

Technorati : attention economy, content
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Revisiting and Revising the AAAs of Social CRM: Free #SCRM Webinar

I can't believe it's coming up on two years since writing about the AAAs of Social CRM for my monthly Inc.com column. And oh what an almost two years it has been. Back then there was next to nothing going on with it. Now it really does seem to be what everybody is talking about - which is great as I've had a front row seat to seeing things develop.

The best thing is that small businesses have a chance to pull strategies and tactics together that can help them connect with people who can really use their services, and do so in a ways to establish serious engagement.

While we're still early on in the development of Social CRM, there are tools and strategies we can begin to use to create more (and better) opportunities to leverage the web and build long lasting business relationships.

Tomorrow, as part of Intuit's free small business expert series, I'll be presenting a webinar to talk about tools and tactics for mixing social with traditional crm to "win friends and influence people" in today's business world. I'm including a new look at those three As - automation, analysis and audacity - as so much has changed since 2008.

Here are the details:

Title: Integrate Social Media into Traditional CRM

Date: Wednesday, February 3rd

Time: 1pm ET/ 10am PT

Cost: Free

To register for the webinar just click here.

Hope to see you there!

Technorati : #scrm, intuit, social crm, webinar
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Please Stop Automatically Equating Number of Twitter Followers With Real Influence

Ok... I've gotta blow a little steam off on this one. Last week I received the following tweet:

This is a threat...an automated threat... from a guy I'll call WrongMind23... warning me that I will lose him as a follower if I do not come to my senses and follow him back. So instead of making WrongMind go through the arduous task of unfollowing me, I saved his Twitter automation tool the trouble and blocked him. Blocked him so fast I made Usain Bolt jealous.

Where WrongMind went wrong (Insane in the Brain by Cypress Hill comes to mind right now) is thinking that he could influence my decision to follow him by threatening to revoke his follow of me. I guess he thought I'd look less influential with the loss of a follow. I also guess he thought that would be important to me. Wrong on both counts.

Since I never spoke with WrongMind I really don't know what he thought. But I know he never tweeted to me directly. He never left a comment on my blog. He never sent me a link to something he thought I'd be interested in after reading a few of my tweets. And he never recommended I follow someone he felt I would benefit from connecting with.

If any of these kinds of interactions would have taken place chances are I would have started following him. But apparently the only thing WrongMind wanted from me was a follow, because he thought having high follow numbers would make him appear to be influential. Again, at least in my eyes WrongMind was, well...wrong.

He's not alone though. Just this week I was contacted via email by someone who introduced themselves by telling me his Twitter followership number right after saying his name. My reaction to this made Usain Bolt jealous again - email deleted with reckless abandon.

Once again someone has mistaken Twitter followership number with importance and influence. Or is it more of a popularity thing? The more followers I have the more people will like me? But then again that can't be it, since folks like WrongMind don't even seem to really care at all about the person - just that they follow him. So I'm back to thinking that there's a number of folks out there that want to appear to be influential, and pointing to the number of followers they have as proof.

It's not everybody that thinks the way WrongMind does. But there are those like him that are using Twitter Automation Systems (TAS) to grow their followership number. These tools are actually kind of impressive, as they use algorithms to figure out how to raise followership. They can find out the people who are most likely to follow you if you follow them, and then automate the process of following them. You can automate the process of following followers of those you follow (try saying that fast five times...). And there are a ton of other ways you can use TAS to gather a huge followership.

These tools can actually be good for helping to locate people of like interests, and accelerate the process of finding good people to follow. But folks like WrongMind these tools are used to pad numbers, not meaningful relationships. So you can use these tools to automate the appearance of influence, but you can't automate influence. Or maybe it can help build influence on Twitter, but influence on Twitter is a far cry from influence off of it, where the vast majority of people live.

According to this great post over on Social Media Today, there are roughly 75M people on Twitter, but only 10-15M are active. With 51% of active users living in the states, that narrows things down to 5-7.5M active users. That makes for a pretty limited group of people you're looking to impress. And even when you truly are influential on Twitter, it's still hard to influence people to act.

My friend and ecommerce expert John "Colderice" Lawson looked into this a bit. He points out that Mashable has approx 2.3 million followers according to the text posted on their home page. When you look at the amount of retweets on any given story (by the Tweet button) you see an average of about 500 tweets per entry. That is about a .000217 % rate of "actionable Twitter followers".

There's no doubting Mashable has created a great deal of influence, but it was built well before they were on Twitter. Just like Guy Kawasaki was influential for years before he became influential on Twitter. But it's safe to say that Twitter helped to expand and extend their influence quickly and inexpensively. And while Chris Brogan, Liz Strauss and other well known personalities leveraged Twitter and social media to become influential, they were at the forefront of the movement - they helped to make it popular. So their influence parallels the rise of social media. And they used Twitter and other tools to actually connect with people, not just to hit them up to become a follower. They've worked hard for years in building relationships with people they encountered using social media, which in turn made them influential.

So can Twitter make you appear to look influential in a short amount of time? Apparently so, because people will give you the time of day if you have thousands of followers. Can you automate the process of appearing influential on Twitter? Absolutely - I've seen people's followership rise quickly.. people I've never heard of before (regular non celeb types), even when they weren't tweeting all that much...mostly through using some kind of service.

Look it's not all that surprising to see people gaming the system. And using tools that were primarily created to help speed up the relationship building/management, instead to stock pile a number of "followers" to drive up numbers. But people like WrongMind don't really care about anything other than the numbers - totally not getting that the appearance of influence is nothing compared to the real thing. And while you can use tools to help you automate the appearance of influence, it takes work to create real influence. It takes being interested in people beyond them signing up to be your follower. It takes creating interesting content on a consistent basis.

And now a special comment directly to "my boy" WrongMind:

I know you want to look like a big deal, but you should really want to be one as well. Looking like a big deal and being a big deal are two totally different things. They don't have to be mutually exclusive. In fact there are lots of folks out there who both look like and are big deals. But these folks worked hard to become big deals. They worked with people to become big deals. They treated other people like they were big deals. And while you can automate certain things to help on your way to becoming a big deal, you can't automate human emotions, feelings and sentiment. That comes from real interaction. And that interaction is what moves people...real people.

And if you want a great example of someone who moves people let me point you to my friend Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe on Twitter). If you're not in the CRM industry you may not know him, and you WrongMind wouldn't know him because he doesn't have 10,000 followers. But within a span of a couple of days (and a few tweets), he was able to move a group of highly influential people from around the world (and at their own expense) to attend his training event taking place next week in Virginia. And when I say from around the world I mean places like Canada, Columbia, France, India and The Netherlands - that's in addition to people coming from all over the States. 

WiseMind I would suggest you try to attend the training ('cuz you need it badly) but it's already totally sold out....

Now the fact that people are coming from all over is cool, because most of us can't get people to click on a link in a tweet, let alone get them to travel half way across the world from one. But Paul not only got people to do just that, he was able to get executives from the most influential companies in the industry to attend, including:

• Oracle
• Microsoft
• SAP
• Salesforce.com
• Sage
• SAS
• RightNow

I couldn't list them all because it would take too long, but I'm sure you're getting the picture. Now all this activity didn't come from just a tweet. It came from years of great work, and from Paul's genuine interest in people. He takes time to know people - way beyond their name and number of followers. And so when he does tweet something to the smart people who follow him, they read it... and click on the links...and re-tweet it....and in some cases they book flights to come half way around the world - on their dime.

That, WrongMind, is the difference between the appearance of influence, and the real deal. The appearance of influence is fleeting - it may get your foot in the door for a minute. But if you don't have anything to back the appearance you'll quickly end up like Joe Jackson - Shoeless. So step up and put the work in to turn the appearance of influence in to the real thing. Use your automation tools for good, and stay away from the Dark Side. Yeah it will take some time and effort, but the benefits can be massive and long lasting. Just ask Paul, he'd probably tell you directly if you'd ask him. He is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of CRM.

So go ahead and take my advice WrongMind, but what am I talking about... you're not following me now anyway.

Technorati : influence, stopthemadness, twitter
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Ten MORE Minutes with Ramon Ray - Mobile Commerce, Texting While Driving & Grouply over Google Groups

I spend another quick ten minutes with SmallBizTechnology.com's Ramon Ray to kick around a few tools and tips that could impact how we do build relationships and do business today. We cover a lot of ground in ten minutes, including:

• New GPS-enabled software called proTextor, blocks incoming and outgoing text messages and phone calls while your vehicle is in motion. The software sends all phone calls directly to voice mail and all texts are logged when the vehicle is traveling over a preset speed. We go back and forth on if we need this kind of service to save us from ourselves, but also touch on the positive way texting impacts our lives, like the way we used texting to help Haiti.
• A cool story about not blaming the market "if your business model sucks".
• How you can use Grouply.com to migrate from a Yahoo or Google groups (and the archives) and create your own web site, with powerful applications and membership tools. Also discuss Twubs.com - a tool to turn your Twitter hashtag conversations into real communities - Accidental Communities.
• With the arrival on Google's Nexus One mobile phone it's easy to get wrapped in the device, but don't forget about looking into support and service before buying.
• The growing importance of Mobile Commerce - like the fact that people buy something from ebay every 2 seconds...from their mobile devices.

Use the player below to hear the conversation, or click here to download the mp3 file.

Technorati : ebay, google groups, grouply, proTextor, texting
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Does IBM Really Want to Get Small? Thoughts From The Lotusphere with Laurie McCabe

I'm still in recovery from writing a few guest posts over on Paul Greenberg's CRM blog over at ZDNet. I put together a list of companies I'm keeping an eye on in 2010 I'm calling my Ish List... no, it's not what you think.

Ish is short for CRM-ish, and the company on that list are providing products and services that are aimed at helping small business find, catch and keep good customers. I talk about why these companies have caught my attention, and what I'm looking for out of them. Here are a links to parts one and two:

• CRM "Ish" List Pt I
• CRM "Ish" List Pt II

One name you won't find on that list is IBM. Let's face it most people don't think of IBM when it comes to serving the small business sector. That may be changing with the Lotus Live service they're rolling out.

Ripped right from the Lotus Live site is their description of the service:

"LotusLive provides a range of capabilities - host online Web presentations, choose from our hosted e-mail options and network inside and outside of your company. And the best part is, all of these tools work together!"

Being curious about how serious IBM is about the small business market, I caught with friend and small business technology analyst (and fellow University of Delaware alum) Laurie McCabe after she just returned from the Lotusphere conference. Laurie shares her opinion of what she saw at Lotusphere, what Lotus Live has to offer small business, and whether or not IBM is really ready to fight for the little guy against Google, Microsoft, Zoho and a host of other players. We even get a chance to reminisce a bit about the very first Technology For Business Sake show, as Laurie was our first guest!

To hear the conversation click on the player below, or download the mp3 file by clicking here.

Technorati : ibm, laurie mccabe, lotus live
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The Future of Customer Service is Here - Are You Ready For It?

An increasing percentage of interaction with customers is coming by way of social networks and online communities. Included in these interactions are requests for information, ideas for product improvements, pleas for assistance, and customers helping each other with questions and concerns. With all these open conversations taking place, not only is it important to respond quickly and accurately to keep customers happy, but it also can convince potential customers of our ability to serve them as well.

This Thursday (January 28th) I'm moderating a free webinar of experts to discuss how customer service is changing to serve socially-empowered customers - today and beyond - in order to build long lasting relationships with them. This event is brought to you by TheSocialCustomer.com, and features a great group of panelists, including:

• Frank Eliason, Senior Director in National Customer Operations at Comcast
• Michael Chui, Senior Fellow of the McKinsey Global Institute
• Mark Yolton, Senior VP of SAP's Community Network

As you can see from this lineup of experts, you will hear a great mix of experience, best practices, and real examples that will help us all understand how we can build better customer experiences for those we serve. Here are the details:

Title: The Future of Customer Service is Here

Date: Thursday January 28th

Time: 1pm ET / 10am PT

Click here for more information and to register for this free event.

Also I'm in the midst of playing "editor-in-chief" for an ebook project we're doing at TheSocialCustomer.com on this very subject. The ebook brings together a wealth of knowledge, experiences and insights on how companies are engaging today's customers in order to provide the kind of customer experience that will build long lasting relationships. Told from the perspectives of service professionals, industry analysts, company executives, and service providers, you will find various approaches, best practices and lessons learned.

Expert Participants include:

• Chris Brogan
• Frank Eliason (Comcast)
• Emily Yellin - Author of Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us
• Dr. Natalie Petouhoff - Sr.Analyst at Forrester
• David Alston - VP of Marketing and Community at Radian6
• Sanjay Dholakia - Chief Marketing Officer at Lithium
• Scott Rogers - Director of Strategic Planning for David's Bridal
• Mark Simmons - VP of Customer Service at Six Apart
• Ellen Filipiak - SVP of Customer Care at DirecTV

As you can see TheSocialCustomer.com is bringing an "A List" of experts together to fully cover this area. Stay tuned for when this book becomes available, and I hope to see you on Thursday at the webinar.

Technorati : customer service, social crm, social customer
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Have You Thanked Your Frientor Today?

It's Sunday and I'm in between football games. So let me take a minute to thank a group of people who have really helped me over the past year - My Frientors. Just in case you don't know what that is, here is my equation:

+

=

Paul Greenberg

Anita Campbell

Ramon Ray

Pat Lottier

Wanda McKenzie

David Bullock

Michael Thomas

Jeff Brathwaite

John Lawson

Robin Carey

Peggy Duncan

This ain't rocket science, it's just good fortune. And if you are half as fortunate as I am to have these kind of people in your corner, you're going to be ok. I can't thank them enough for all their guidance, encouragement, example, assistance... and for having a good sense of humor (this is definitely a must when dealing with me). They didn't have to help me out, but I am sure glad they did. Thank you all for being in my corner.

Ok, the Chargers-Jets game is about to start.

Technorati : friend, frientor, good people, mentor
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Penetrating the Attention Economy in the Age of Social Media

My latest column for Inc's technology site was posted yesterday on the idea economy vs. the attention economy, and how one is overwhelming the other. You can probably guess which is the overrun-er and which is the overrun-ee.

There's always been idea and attention economies, and they seldom match up. One seems limitless, while now the other is extremely limited (especially in my case). Not too long ago a large number of ideas never made into the attention economy because of transportation issues - cost and complexity. Who could afford to buy advertising and create commercials, etc. Because of that we had to focus way too much attention on the relatively few ideas (not even the best ones) that could navigate between the two economies, and also pay all the tolls.

I think a lot of great ideas weren't developed because people knew they couldn't pay the toll and navigate the currents. Even worse, the focus on the "mechanics" of crossing that chasm may have dulled some of our enthusiasm and creativity for thinking up interesting stuff.

Now we're in a completely different environment where we effectively have no chasm - we can move ideas into the attention economy (AE) at break-neck speeds at next to no cost at all to potentially get in front of large audiences. So once again we're at an imbalance - this time we have too many ideas and not enough attention.

In the past we had too few good ideas getting moved into the attention economy, now we have too many marginal ideas overwhelming the AE - making it difficult for us to find and focus on the ideas that should be fully realized. And a major reason for this has been the focus on the journey between economies (idea to attention), instead of on the process of creating better ideas. But now is the time to spend the time on creating better, bigger, more captivating ideas, since today the costs and complexities of crossing the chasm have been greatly diminished.

If you get a chance check the column out and see how my friends at Hubspot are successfully navigating the economies to grab a chunk of our attention. Thanks!

Technorati : bookgrader, content, hubspot, inc.com
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Intuit Small Business Expert Series Starts This Week - It's Got Social CRM (#SCRM)

Intuit is kicking a three month long webinar series aimed at helping small business get off to a fast start in 2010. And after last year, we need as much help as we can get to make sure 2010 is a year to remember to wipe away the after taste of 2009.

The series will cover topics like marketing, social media, technology and something else... oh yeah something called customer relationship management (CRM). A big thanks to Intuit for inviting me to participate alongside three of the most respected people in small business today - Anita Campbell (Editor-in-chief of Small Business Trends), John Jantsch (technology coach and author of Duct Tape Marketing) and Ramon Ray (technology evangelist and publisher of SmallBizTechnology.com).

I'll kick things off tomorrow (January 12th) at 1:30pm ET with the following webinar:

Social CRM: What is it and How Can It Help You Get More Customers

To register just click on this link.

Each week, starting tomorrow and going though March, will feature a different webinar from Anita, John, Ramon and myself. To learn more about the series you can check out this post from the Intuit small business blog. I hope to see you there!

Technorati : anita campbell, intuit, john jantsch, ramon ray, small business
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