Brent's Social CRM Blog

Will you be on the ISH List This Year? CRM-Ish List That Is...

At the end of last year Paul Greenberg invited me to put together a list of companies I thought were worth watching in the CRM space, from an SMB perspective. He included it in his awesome (and extensive) group of posts for his ZDNet blog, which he called his 2010 CRM Watchlist. You can check them out with the following links:

• 2010 CRM Watchlist Part I
• 2010 CRM Watchlist Part IIa
• 2010 CRM Watchlist Part IIb
• 2010 CRM Watchlists Part IIIa
• 2010 CRM Watchlist Part IIIb
• 2010 CRM Watchlist Part IVa (part one for SMBs)
• 2010 CRM Watchlist Part IVb (part two for SMBs)

If it's easier the folks at ZDNet turned the series of posts into an ebook you can download for free.

The companies I selected to watch weren't all what typically would be considered CRM vendors, but they definitely had products and services that I felt had the potential to impact how SMBs find, catch and keep customers in the Social Age. I think of these companies as being CRM-ish, which is why I called my list the ISH list... that's my explanation and I'm sticking to it.

Well 2011 is right around the corner, which means it's time for The ISH List to return. I'm in the middle of making my list - and checking it twice - which will be unveiled again this year along with Paul's watchlist. I've got a few weeks to pull it together, and feel pretty good about the companies I've been watching throughout the year. But, if there are companies you think should get ISH List consideration, please feel free to throw them into the comments section here. If something catches my I, it make find it's way onto the list.

So be on the lookout early next year to see which companies are The ISH. And in the meantime, check out the latest episode of the CRM Playaz. Paul and I talk about how to determine playaz from posers when it comes to who has real influence online.

Technorati : crm, ish list, small business, social crm
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The CRM Playaz are Back...and This Time In Technicolor!

Before I go into the return of The Playaz I'd like to thank all of the people who have shared their thoughts, prayers and concerns with me and my family over the recent loss of my brother, John Derrick Leary. I tend not to use this space to talk about things extremely personal in nature, but I've been overwhelmed by all the people that have expressed their sympathy and concern. We're going to miss Derrick very much, but it is comforting to know that there are so many friends out there that cared about him, and care about our family.

One of those friends that's always been there for me is Paul Greenberg. We've been doing The CRM Playaz podcast for a couple of years now, when we've each had some time to do so. We originally started doing them as audio podcasts. We were so used to talking on the phone about sports, music, tv and CRM, that all we had to do was pretty much push the record button.

We were kind of surprised to find that people not only listened to these shows, they actually liked them. So we thought it might be cool if we were actually able to turn the podcast into a video show. Well, it took us over a year, but with the help of Social Media Today and Microsoft, The CRM Playaz is now a video show!

The first episode of the new CRM Playaz show is now up on TheCustomerCollective.com - a SMT community site sponsored by Microsoft. We shot the first batch of shows up in Paul's awesome "man cave", a place I'd probably never leave if I lived there. We used this first show to get back into the swing of things,as it's been a whole year since the last time we did this. We also have a guest join us - Dean Halstead, a Visualization Expert for Microsoft. Dean joins us to discuss how the government is utilizing social tools and strategies to build better relationships with the citizenry.

We also talk about why either of us will NEVER rent a car from Dollar Rent-a-Car ever again. And I mean NEVER!!!

Paul and I really enjoy doing The Playaz, because we get to have fun talking about the industry. We also have fun grilling industry execs, which we'll do in the next batch of shows when we're fully back in the saddle. But we'd love to hear your thoughts about the show if you get a chance to check it out. And if there is someone you feel would make a good guest for the show let us know. Maybe we'll be able to get them on with us, so we can do a C-Level Smackdown on them.

Anyways, The CRM Playaz are back....I apologize in advance for what we may do... Thanks again to Robin Carey and the entire Social Media Today family, and to Microsoft for making this all possible. Be sure to "stay tuned" to TheCustomerCollective.com to see all the episodes - the shorter, edited versions, as well as the "Director's Cut" long versions - complete with bloopers, stutters, stammers and other mistakes I make.

It's good to be back.

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The CRM Playaz Invade Hubspot TV...a #SCRM Reality TV Experiment

Paul Greenberg and I will be up in Boston Monday and Tuesday (Dec 7-8) to check out the SAP Influencer Conference. So while we're up there we're going to storm the offices of Hubspot, takeover their studios and do a live video edition of The CRM Playaz.

Now I already know what you're thinking - Monday is December 7th, a day which already lives in infamy....are you sure this is a good idea? Well my simple answer to that is - probably not, but when has that ever stopped us before?

And we're not really invading Hubspot, they are good friends, sponsors of the show, and they have rolled out the red carpet for us. And we're really glad to have Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah join us on the show to talk about what's going on at the company, the current state of inbound marketing, and to fill us in on the new book he co-authored with Hubspot co-founder Brian (The Hooligan) Halligan - Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs.

And if that wasn't enough, our good friend Robin Carey of Social Media Today will be our guest co-host to talk about their new site TheSocialCustomer.com and to talk about the new free ebook SMT recently released - The Art of the Social Sale. But mainly Robin's really joining us to try and make us look good. I'm quite sure she has no idea of the challenge that lay ahead of her with that....

So please join us Monday December 7th 1:30-2pm ET at http://hubspot.tv. That's Monday....December 7th.... 1:30-2pm ET..... at http://hubspot.tv. And we want to hear from you during the show as we'll need your take on what the recent Gartner acquisition of AMR means to the industry, whether men of a certain age should wear a backpack, and how much gloating a Yankee fan should do in the face of his Boston hosts. So give us a look. We can't be as bad as the Terrell Owens reality show, can we??? Tune in to find out....

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A Word Or Two About Evolution

If you thought this was going to be some kind of Darwinian rant, you'll probably want to stop reading right here. This is about the CRM Evolution '09 conference that took place last week in NYC, sorry...

I expected to get a little R&R from this year's conference - no not rest and relaxation. Too much to do and see for that to happen. The R&R I was seeking was relationships and replenishment. With all the great people and information-filled sessions packed into unbelievably short days, I definitely received more than my fair share of both. In fact there was so much going on I could only take in a fraction of it, but what I did manage to see was top-notch all the way around.

The conference was put organized by the fine folks that bring you CRM magazine - folks like David Myron, Josh Weinberger, Lauren McKay, Christopher Musico, Jessica Tsai and many others. And of all the great decisions made in order to make this the best CRM conference I've been to in years, the best one was signing up Paul Greenberg to be the event chairmen (if being The Godfather of CRM wasn't enough of a cool nickname, now he's also The Chairmen of CRM). Paul and the CRM magazine folks put together a list of the some the best minds in the industry to speak, including Denis Pombriant, Ray Wang, Michael Krigsman, Marshall Lager, Michael Thomas and Bruce Culbert. I could go on and on with names of great presenters, but I guess I better stop there. And although I wasn't in town to hear Paul's opening keynote, I heard about it, which is to say he did what he always does - bring it!

Getting back to my R&R theme....

Relationships

Although I look forward to learning a great deal when I come to this event, the thing I enjoy the most is the chance to catch up with old friends, while striking up relationships with new folks. But social networking has blurred that line completely, as I met people for the first time who already feel like old friends thanks to Facebook and Twitter - especially the accidental Twitter community that is the #scrm group. So in addition to catching up with familiar faces like Paul, Michael (did a quick head nod in his session), Marshall, Denis, Ginger Conlon (who I barely got a chance to talk to), Ed Sullivan (from Radian6, not 1950s television) and many others, I met these #scrm expert friends for the first time - Jesus Hoyos, Mitch Lieberman, Esteban Kolsky (who started giving me grief before we even officially met at the conference), Michael Krigsman, CRM Outsider Colin Beasty and Natalie Petouhoff. All that was missing from the group was Prem Kumar Aparanji, John Moore, Brian Vellmure and the rest of the #scrm crew. And I can't leave out another Twitter friend, Oracle's Susie Penner, who always treats us blogger/analyst types like real people. And it was also great to finally meet Paul's brother Bob Greenberg and hear his take on social CRM in the public sector.

Hanging out with those folks would have made the trip more than worthwhile right there, but I also had the opportunity to meet expert presenters like Brian Komar from the Center for American Progress, Sales 2.0 co-author Anneke Seley, and Lithium CMO Sanjay Dholakia. Once again I must apologize, because I know I'm leaving some people out. But I think you're getting the point, that, as Brian Komar said to me - this was the influential CRM crowd. And not only were all these people influential, they were also a cool crowd of folks.

Replenishment

The good thing about hanging out with this kind of crowd is that you will also learn some stuff... a lot of stuff. And naming this conference CRM Evolution made a lot of sense, because every year things change in this industry. And this year it's hard to escape the exponentially growing interest in the area of Social CRM. Having been preoccupied with this subject for the better part of two years now, it's kind of hard for me to get used to all the attention that is now being paid to this subject - but I am very happy to see it. In fact the whole conference was infused with social crm sessions, panels and discussions. It would have been even more social, if the internet access would have been better in the hotel...

I also saw some really interesting applications of Social CRM by traditional vendors like SAP and Sage. SAP's Twitter integration looks to be very robust. But what really caught my attention was a demo Facebook app that allowed you to create new records in your SAP CRM instance, as well as edit existing records. Another interesting development with SAP is its partnership with SimplyBox, which allows you to highlight information on a web page and create collaborative boxes to be shared among team members. These information boxes can be easily associated with SAP CRM objects, like contacts and opportunities. I'm looking forward to learning more about SimplyBox from it's CEO Mario Mario Cavagnari, another person I had a chance to connect with at the event.

Sage EVP Larry Ritter gave me a sneak peek at ACT! 2010 - the latest incarnation of the venerable contact management app. The good thing about 2010 is that it doesn't look venerable, in fact it looks very fresh and modern. In addition to a much cleaner, easier-to-navigate interface, ACT 2010! also has added "that social touch". You can track your contact's tweets and view their LinkedIn profile right from within the app. This is all good stuff, but the other thing that caught my attention is the new email marketing and drip marketing capabilities. Email marketing may not be the most sexy thing out there, but small businsses still struggle with this, so these additions may have more immediate impact than the social stuff. I expect to get more hands on with ACT! 2010 and will have more to say afterward. But I am looking forward to seeing ACT! 2010 on the mobile devices. Be on the lookout for a TFBS conversation with Larry coming up shortly.

I also spent time with Sanjay Dholokia of Lithium, whose approaching Social CRM from the enterprise social network platform development side. Lithium has developed a series of applications aimed at facilitating collaboration between community members, turning the community itself into a service channel as well as an organic sales/marketing voice - a voice more likely to be listened to by other customers and prospects. The more I think about it the customer community's role in Social CRM development may be the single most important indicator of how successful a company will be in this area. I'll be keeping an eye on how Lithium progresses in this area, and hope to have Sanjay join me on TFBS to explore this further. Also, be on the lookout for Lithium's Social CRM Virtual Summit taking place in November, of which Paul Greenberg and myself are participating.

All in all I thought CRM Evolution was great. Hats off to the whole CRM magazine staff for pulling this one off. My hat also goes off to The Chairman of CRM - Paul G. - for bringing this awesome group of CRM minds together. Hats off to all the great presenters and attendees I had a chance to talk with. And a big thanks to all of those folks who caught my presentation (CRM and the Socially Empowered Customer) as well as me and Paul doing a live episode of The CRM Playaz. I had a great time doing both of them.

Here are a few links to more CRM Evolution posts you may want to check out:

Destination CRM - All the CRM Evolution Links You Need

Marshall Lager - After-Action Report 1: CRM Evolution '09

Anneke Seley - Can a Kinder, Gentler Sales 2.0 Rep Still Make Quota

Jessica Tsai - Not Your Kids' Phone (featuring Michael Thomas' presentation on mobile marketing)

Lauren McKay - The Social Customer Want's You! (thanks Lauren for covering my presentation here.)

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CRM Playaz - The Boyz Are Back In Town

It's been along time, we shouldn't have left you....but we're back - we being Paul Greenberg and I as The CRM Playaz. But there's a new place to check us out - CRMPLAYAZ.COM.

The new site is powered by our friends at Hubspot.com. These guys not only make a great internet marketing platform for the SMB crowd, but they are some cool folks. Just check out the Baby Got Leads video they put only a few days ago, that already has over 10K views:

These guys get it, although they were doing the Thriller dance routines in the video to Sir Mix-a-lot. But why didn't I see Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah or Mike Volpe in there? Or was that them hiding in the back?  We'll get answers to that when we get them on the C-Level Smackdown. That's right, just because you're a show sponsor doesn't mean you can't get smacked around when you come on the show...so be ready.

We're still building out the site, but we'll have it together shortly. And we'll be looking for folks to do some blogging on the Playaz blog, so give me a shout if you're interested.

While you are able to listen to the latest show over at the site (and get the show write-up), you can check it out here to find out why Paul Greenberg, in addition to being the Walt Whitman of CRM, is now also the Martin Luther of CRM.  We also have a little fun at the expense of CRM magazine's editor-extraordinaire Josh Weinberger - whom we both really like!  And we bask in the afterglow of the Rockstars of CRM event.  Check it out here:

Oh yeah a BIG thanks goes out to Radian6's Bob Beaton for designing our new logo. We really love it.

Well, we're back....sorry folks.

Social CRM, Superstar?

Who could have seen this coming? I know I didn't back in 2007. I mean, it hasn't been that long ago when CRM was still considered a 4-letter word. But here I am sitting in Boston about to go on stage with the likes of Chris Brogan, Paul Greenberg, Michael Thomas and Frank Eliason? To talk about Social CRM? And we're being called.... Rock Stars???

I can't speak for anybody else here, but I'm no Prince. Who am I kidding, I'm not even Milli Vanilli. But it's true, thanks to the fine folks at Radian6. Social CRM has come a LONG way in a relatively short time. Don't get me wrong, we're still in the infancy stages, but it's really on the map and interest in this area seems to be growing exponentially. Which is why it was kind of ironic that I only heard CRM mentioned once during the first day of the Enterprise 2.0 conference also going on here this week. But the one who mentioned it was Jascha Franklin-Hodge of Blue State Digital, the technology folks behind BarackObama.com and MyBarackObama.com. In fact he said that CRM was the foundation for much of their social media success... not to mention the success of a little project I (and my colleague David Bullock) like to call Barack 2.0.

The campaign's success not only raised the interest in social media that drove Oprah (and others) to Twitter, but I think it's also a key driver in the interest in social CRM. And if you are even just a little curious about this stuff, maybe you should join me and the other Rockstars of Social CRM tonight at 8pm ET for a fun conversation with a great group of people.

To join in the festivities use this link: http://radian6rockstars.eventbrite.com/.

I'm still prepping for tonight's event. Check out my preparation materials:

Technorati : chris brogan, frank eliason, michael thomas, paul greenberg, prince, radian6, run dmc, rush, social crm
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How to Use Social Media to Attract Customers - A Hubspot Joint

I'm pretty psyched for a number of reasons. I'm doing small business technology bootcamp at next month's Black Enterprise Entrepreneur's Conference. I did the same last year, when 1500 entrepreneurs attended. This year, even with all of the economic challenges they're expecting the same kind of crowd. And I just heard Spike Lee will be a keynote, so it would be very cool if I had a chance to meet him.

I'm also psyched because Paul Greenberg and I just "cut" the latest installment of the CRM Playaz. You can check it out over on Paul's ZDNet blog. We riff on a report that finds social media does not help B2B salespeople close deals. We also talk (badly) about celebrities on Twitter. But one thing we were happy to announce is our first sponsor - Hubspot.com. I've known these guys pretty much since their inception, which makes it special to see what they've accomplished over the past 2+ years creating their internet marketing platform. I've used Hubspot for Technology For Business Sake, and shortly we'll be putting up the CRM Playaz site on Hubspot as well. Thanks guys!

Speaking of Hubspot, they've invited me to participate in one of their free webinars tomorrow - How to Use Social Media to Attract Customers. I'll talk about how I've used social media, as well as how you can integrate it into a more traditional CRM strategy - in other words I'm talking Social CRM!

They have put on some great webinars in the past. You don't even have to take my word for it, just check out the Twitter stream of folks who signed up for this one:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=hubspot+webinar

This has nothing to do with me, but everything to do with the kind of content these guys crank out on a consistent basis. So a big thanks to the Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, Mike Volpe and "the crew" for inviting me to join them.

Here are the details:

Title: How to Use Social Media to Attract Customers

Date: Tuesday April 14th

Time: 2pm ET

Cost: Nada

Registration Link: http://bit.ly/hubreg

Hope to see you there!

Technorati : hubspot, social crm, social media, spike lee
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CRM Playaz Preview - Cuil...Isn't

As me and Paul "The Dean of CRM" Greenberg get ramped up to do our show (The CRM Playaz) he comes on Technology For Business Sake to help me out. We use his appearances as test runs to work things out. Today we recorded a segment for an upcoming show that was way to much fun to wait until that's ready. So here's a 5-minute clip for you to check. We "riff" on the new search engine Cuil. To put it mildly, Cuil, pronounced like cool, isn't really. Just check out the results that came back on a search i did on my name:

Yeah, you're seeing this right. The links are all about me, but look at these pictures. Phillip Michael Thomas? They got a picture of Ricardo "F." Tubbs next to a link about me. NOTE: for all of you under 30, there was a show in the 80s where cops ran around in pastel colored zoot suits, "roughing" people up, called Miami Vice. Just be thankful you weren't around to see this.

Now I know why they have this picture there, because my CRM Essentials co-founder's name is Michael Thomas. With all that said, Ricardo "F." Tubbs??? And it looks like a picture from his days on Miami Vice at that. Honestly, is this guy still with us? If he is he must be in the witness protection program or something, because I haven't seen him since he and Crockett split up.

Besides the pictures, and not one of them are even close, the results are terrible, with most of these links being old. I mean I had forgotten about the stuff Cuil returned on me. And I wasn't alone, as my friend Jeff Brathwaite found out early this morning. Paul. take it away:

Cuil, this really ain't cool. I guess I'll just have to be happy being Google's King of Social CRM!

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Social CRM: Google Says I'm #1... For Now

I've gotta make this quick because I literally don't know how long this is going to last. Thanks to all of you who've been linking, commenting, digging and stumbling, my blog ranks #1 on Google's result list for the term social crm. I made it to the top for the most part on the post I did about Social CRM in Pictures and Words.

But who knows, by the time you actually read this and do the search I could be knocked out of top 1000. But, thanks to my friend David Bullock's great suggestion, I have the screen shot to prove that I did stand at the top of the mountain for one brief shining moment:

In fact my article on social CRM for SmallBizTrends.com is holding down the #4 slot as well. This is very cool, but I really don't expect this to last, as the term is gaining in popularity, which will drive a lot more content on this topic than there is at the moment. And, although I will probably lose my title to the big guys, I actually welcome this because it will mean social CRM will be taking hold in the "socialprise", as the folks from InsideView would say - more on them in the very near future.

So thanks to all of you who helped me to the top of the heap! Oh yeah, if you prefer the term CRM 2.0, my buddy Paul Greenberg is holding down the top spot for that. I guess that means The CRM Playaz rule! Not bad since we haven't even done a show yet. Damn... I'm not #1 anymore. That didn't take long.

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CRM Playaz Preview - CRM Is Not Dead

Last week was something else in the CRM world. Salesforce for Google Apps, the interesting response from Zoho as the announced their new Zoho CRM Enterprise product (will have something on that later) and Microsoft coming out with CRM Online. I know the official announcement hit today but I found out about it last week. One of the other announcements that may have been overlooked by the masses was Infusion Software name change to InfusionSoft. And along with the name change, InfusionSoft now is positioning themselves as an eMarketing tools provider. And they also came out with a new marketing slogan.... CRM is Dead.

I like the products InfusionSoft put out. I liked the products when the company was still called Infusion Software. I like the people even more than the products they create. And I really like their passion for small business that was on display when I had the opportunity to speak at the Infusion user conference last month. But I have to say that the whole CRM is Dead thing sort of sounds like a ripoff of Salesforce.com's Software is Dead campaign.

We all know that CRM has not been as successful as it should be. But it's been getting closer because the products are easier to use, more accessible, more affordable and faster to get up and running with. But the biggest reason why CRM is doing better is that people finally see that it's not about technology. It's always been about people (customers, employees, partners, mgmt, etc.), but technology was the most obvious scapegoat. And as CRM seeps more and more into the business culture of companies, and the technology moves into its proper place (the background), CRM will grow in acceptance and success.

Now I'll be the first to say the term CRM is dated and comes with a checkered past. But it's a term that entered rehab and has made it back from the brink. And people seem to understand the basics of CRM - finding, catching and keeping good customers. Marketing, whether there's an "e" on the front or not, is definitely a huge part of the CRM equation. And, truth be told, marketing automation has typically been the weak link in CRM suites, particularly at the small business product levels. So I applaud InfusionSoft for creating a compelling suite of tools that include a robust marketing automation component. Along with other components like affiliate tracking and ecommerce capabilities, InfusionSoft has made good contributions to helping CRM live on. That's why it's a bit confusing to hear them pronounce it's dead.

My buddy Paul Greenberg had an even stronger take on this which you can read on his blog. InfusionSoft's CEO Clate Mask has a good response in the comments section you should check out as well. And as we get closer to breaking out The CRM Playaz show, here's a clip of Paul and I discussing InfusionSoft's move on my show:

Technorati : crm, crm playaz, emarketing, infusionsoft, paul greenberg, small business
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