Brent's Social CRM Blog

Enter The Pod

I took my first dip into podcasting this week thanks to my buddy Paul Greenberg allowing me to do a guest commentary on his new podcast show, Route 56.  For those of you interested in hearing where CRM should be going, please subscribe to this.  Paul, in only the way he can do it, really gets into what's going on in the industry  - the good, the bad and the ugly.  He also pulls in the heavyweights in the industry for Q&A sessions, like the interview he did with Salesforce.com's chief strategy officer Tien Tzuo.  He even throws in some guest commentary from folks in the industry and I'm thankful to Paul for letting me "get on the mic" this week.  Now the podcast is pretty long, clocking in at 52 minutes or so, but it doesn't seem that long.  I encourage all of you to check it out if you can (click here to download the full podcast).  If you don't have time to listen to the whole podcast, below is a link to my commentary - 5 minutes long.  Let me know what you think.  I'm gearing up for my own podcast show so I can use all the feedback you can offer.

Definitive Proof That CRM Success Is Not Technology Driven

CRM Vendors have given us pretty much everything we could ask for in terms of functionality, delivery methods, tools and methods for integration, seamless integration to our favorite applications like Outlook and Office, access to our customer data from any mobile device we can think of, etc...etc....etc.  We can blast out thousands of emails in a single click (and track responses), get real-time updates displayed on pretty dashboards and even get hundreds of users up and running in weeks instead of months....or years.  And with every passing week it seems like the vendors gives us more and more stuff.  Pretty cool.

And the vendors, who have provided us with all this great technology that allows us to do pretty much what we want, have helped to prove one thing - CRM success doesn't depend on technology.  It really can't because you have to believe that the vendors are using this great technology to run their own CRM initiatives.  So if we can assume they are eating their own dog food, then what could possibly be the explanation of a Customer Respect Group study that found that CRM vendors ignored 27% of customer email questions?  The report also found the vendors scored below average overall on how they treat customers online, and scored way below average on communicating with customers... OUCH!!!

Well I bet one thing the vendors won't blame their shortcomings on....technology.   And I would agree with them absolutely.  Because even with the greatest technology in the world, your CRM initiatives are doomed to fail if you don't concentrate on.... yup, you guessed it...people and process.  It just goes to show that before you buy anything get the right people together from the beginning and work on what processes should be addressed.  You may want to ask potential vendors about how their processes are handled as part of your selection process.  And you better call them if you really want an answer.

Akeelah, The Bee and The Maverick

This is going off subject for me but I was really happy to see the commercials for the movie Akeelah and the Bee.  Yeah I know, it looks like your typical family drama where you laugh, you cry , you hurl...ok you're not supposed to hurl but I couldn't resist.  But here's where the curve ball gets thrown....Akeelah is a drama for the family with a great message about family, educational achievement, and realizing ones potential against all odds....starring black people.  I'm not kidding....really I'm not.  There are no men dressed as overweight women, thank goodness.  Hey I sort of liked Big Momma's House, but did we really need another one as well as Tyler Perry's Madea?  I think the black-man-dressed-as-overweight-old-black-grandmother genre has run it's course...at least one can hope.  You'll also notice in this movie an alarming development - the lack of thugs, rappers, wannabe rappers, and the glorification of thuggish rapper wannabes.  I almost thought there was an amendment to the US Constitution stating that all black movies must include these and other negative stereotypes - see cinematic masterpieces ATL, Get Rich or Die Trying and Hustle & Flow... which gave us the Grammy winning tour-de-force "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" (on a side note, shouldn't it be hard out there for pimps?).  Better yet, don't see these movies at all.

What surprised me even more than this kind of movie being made (which says a lot) is that Dallas Maverick's owner Mark Cuban was an executive producer, putting some of his impressive net worth into this project.  I always liked Cuban and thought he was the kind of owner you'd want for your favorite team.  I also consider him to be extremely intelligent.  All you need to know is that he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo! for a cool billion or so right before the Internet bubble burst.  So this guy could do anything he wants, and he chose to spend his time and money being a part of a positive family movie starring Ike and Tina Turner (better known as Laurence Fishburn and Angela Bassett).  That's cool enough on its own, but then Cuban went above and beyond the call of duty when he announced a program that lets teachers see the movie for free, and by encouraging kids from their schools to see the movie, a lucky school could win a $100,000 donation.  On his blog, Cuban explains how much he believes in the movie, and his enthusiasm for this endeavor is really great!

Maybe this more about CRM than I thought as this is a great way to promote to your target audiences.  I mean this is the guy who handed out vouchers for free plane tickets to 19,000 Dallas Maverick fans as part of a fan appreciation campaign.  I'm just glad he's bringing his maverick ways to the movies.  Boy did we need it!

A Word To The Wise

I'm proud to say I write a regular column for a couple of popular regional minority business publications - The Atlanta Tribune , New York based The Network Journal and Minnesota based Black Pages Monthly.  Thousands of people rely on these and other publications like them as a primary source of business information.  In fact, research shows that minority professionals tend to be more loyal readers of their favorite publications than the general public.  And with minorities going into business at 2-4 times the rate of overall population, business should be booming, in both readership and advertising dollars.

At least that was my thinking before reading this Target Market News article that reports a one percent drop in March 2006 ad revenues of the top five black publications from March 2005.  In the same time period, the Magazine Publishers of America found a five percent increase in the industry as a whole.  Black Enterprise, the leading national black business publication fell 6.6%. 

Now I still believe that many mainstream advertisers don't frequent minority business publications due to a lack of understanding for how these magazines are followed in their communities, as this interesting article in Target Marketing Magazine points out (not to be confused with Target Market News).  Technology companies outside of telecommunications spend next to nothing (relatively speaking....barely) with minority pubs, and most of the deals are one-offs and not sustained campaigns.  That aside, I think minority business publications need to embrace technology in order to increase their revenues....and should do it quickly. 

Look, small business is the target audience for basically the entire technology industry, and eventually advertisers will figure out that minority and women owned businesses are growing in number at a much faster rate than the overall.  But will these publishers be able to give advertisers what they're looking for?  Not right now.  More and more advertising is being done on-line with emphasis on real-time interaction and analysis.  That calls for websites built to foster collaboration with the readership, frequently updated with fresh content, and multiple channels of communicating with readership, including webinars, webcasts, etc.  In fact, readership should change to membership, as the term member demonstrates a more active relationship than the term readership.  And let's face it, the more interaction with members, the more valuable they become to you in the eyes of the advertiser.

Minority publications fill an important need in the community as many of the businesses and professionals highlighted, and other stories and features, would never make the pages of Businessweek, Inc., or Entrepreneur magazines.  This is why they enjoy such a loyal following, because they were there chronicling the developments when no one else was, and few outside of them do today.  For that they deserve a great deal of credit and our support.  But they need to step up and use the available technologies to form even closer ties to their readers.  This will also allow them to court the big advertisers who want to select from multiples channels on how to reach the audiences they've built over the years.  If they did this they would make more money with their on-line marketing vehicles than print ads, just like the big boys are.

Tales from the Dark Side: Community Relationship Mis-management Rears Its Ugly Head

Back in February of 2004 my CRM Essentials co-founder and partner Michael Thomas and I were asked by the leadership of Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) to take part in a meeting of a small group of minority technology professionals.  TAG is a non-profit organization that serves the technology community in Georgia and is one of the largest state technology associations in the nation. It is made up of several thousand members representing technology leaders from over 1500 Georgia-based companies, affiliated technology and business organizations.  One of most dynamic and important groups in all of Georgia's technology community is under the TAG organizational umbrella - the Women In Technology (WIT) society. 

Needless to say Michael and I were excited to learn this meeting was to explore the possibility of starting a special interest group under the TAG umbrella aimed at promoting visibility and advancement of ethnic minority technology entrepreneurs and executives in the state of GA.  All who attended the meeting were in agreement that Georgia needed this kind of organization to support the growing community of minority technologists, and felt that it would have a great opportunity to flourish being affiliated with the TAG brand.  Michael and I immediately joined the board of this new special interest group, Michael as marketing communications chair and myself as programming chair.   That initial group of four grew to about ten key people. At that time we knew this endeavor was a go, but something was missing.....a name.

As there were really high hopes for this organization everyone realized how important it was to get this right.  We didn't want to have any negative baggage come over from failed attempts at putting together this kind of group, so Minorities in Technology (MIT) was out immediately due to the untimely (and unpleasant) demise of that organization.  Also tossed aside was Minorities in Technology Forum because that was already in use by the MIT Enterprise Forum, a rather well known national organization with a very popular chapter in Atlanta.   So after much consternation and debate, the group came up with the Minority Technology Council - with MTech being the catch phrase.  It was a name EVERYBODY liked and immediately got behind.  We all felt it was a classy name that would create a positive, professional and engaging brand minority technology professionals of all ethnicities could identify with, and seriously consider joining.

Under the MTech name, and thanks to a core group of hard working people on the operations board, our first three events were unqualified successes, averaging well over 70 people at each program.  Our inaugural event, a free open house used to introduce MTech to minority technologists, drew over 230 people!  In a very short time-frame MTech had become pretty well known with its target audience.  Our database of close to one thousand email addresses had open rates close to 40% with 10%- 15% click-through rates for our email blasts. 

We were able to create a pretty loyal following of people through communications with key people and organizations in the minority business community.  Groups like the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Black Data Processors Association, Asian Chamber of Commerce and the Georgia Indo-American Chamber of Commerce (to name just a few) all helped spread the word about MTech.  This was crucial because using the typical TAG promotional channels would not have worked, as a strong majority of the folks who attended are meetings weren't TAG members and didn't receive TAG emails or frequent the TAG website.  I would assume that's why TAG reached out to us to begin with - for us to leverage our relationships to reach out and engage an important part of the Georgia technology community vastly under-represented in the organization.

So, after building a brand for the Minority Technology Council and MTech with members of Georgia's minority technology professionals and entrepreneurs, imagine how surprised we were (board members as well as these professionals) to hear that TAG had decided to change the name of the group to.... TAG Minorities....... 

It doesn't happen very often where a group of people (more than one) unanimously agree on anything, but when the MTech board found out the name of the organization they worked so hard to put together, had gone from MTech to TAG MINORITIES, no one was happy.  I guess from TAG's perspective that made sense as a way to more closely affiliate our group to TAG proper, as it had been stated on several occasions by TAG officials that people didn't know what MTech was.  If those officials had asked the people attending the MTech events about this, I truly believe they would have found out two things:

1. MTech meant a great deal to the people the group was developed for - minority technology professionals
2. A severe negative reaction to the name TAG MINORITIES

I know those of us on the board at that time were shocked and saddened by the name change, not just because we were not involved in the decision, but also because we saw MTech the brand really taking hold in the community.  Plus let's face it, TAG MINORITIES, well....stinks.   Technology Association of Georgia Minorities....Could you imagine WIT changing their name to TAG WOMEN?  Actually I believe that thought had crossed a few minds, but  went over like a lead balloon with the WiT folks, and rightfully so.  What about  a few sub-groups underneath TAG MINORITIES like TAG Blacks, TAG Hispanics or TAG Asians for example.  Would that work?  I don't think so....NO!

Although I am no longer on the board, I sincerely hope the special interest group formerly known as MTech becomes a big success and fulfills its potential to be a force in Georgia's technology community.  There remains good, hard working people involved who I think can get the job done if just a few things happen for them.  But there are serious challenges in front of the organization as it tries to build and sustain credibility.  With all that faces them, the last thing they need to distract them is a name the very people they are trying to build that credibility with can't stand.  Especially when they were kind of digging the original name.

Just another sad case of CRM....Community Relationship Mis-management.......