Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Via Brian Solis: http://www.briansolis.com

As the headline implies, even though Social CRM exists as an official category, what it is and what it is not is blurry and hotly debated. Think about the vast array of vendors selling social media solutions for a moment. Many of them are positioned as Social CRM or sCRM tools, but when you examine true capabilities versus stated positioning , you will find that many vendors are in fact stronger players in social media management (SMMS), social CMS, listening, collaboration, intelligence, and conversation management.

If you think about this from a business perspective, it’s almost impossible to identify which vendor is truly qualified to deliver against the goals of a new social CRM system.  Decision makers have to spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to sort through what is true and what is simply good marketing. Often, they must recruit experts to help survey the landscape and qualify vendors.

Earlier in the year, I met with Houston Neal to discuss the state of Social CRM, where it’s headed and where it needs to go. As you can see, I believe that 2012 is the year when we finally start to accurately segment the market while better defining what Social CRM really is and how businesses need to think and rethink their approach to customer relationship management. It’s part technology and part philosophy. Because, in the end, it’s about relationships.

Here’s the transcribed conversation…

Houston Neal: To begin, do you think a true social CRM suite exists in the market?

Brian Solis: That’s a good question. Let’s first take a step back. The thing that’s a little bit more interesting about Social CRM – and definitely one of the things that’s under appreciated – is the idea that it forces us to rethink the definition of CRM. By that I mean, CRM was originally about putting together an infrastructure, processes, and methodologies to support customer and sales processes. What we see now is mainstream social media. So, the whole discussion around socializing CRM is about the introduction of new touch points within the business ecosystem that we didn’t design around originally.

When you ask if there are any solutions out there, the answer is yes and no. What was CRM and what will be CRM are two very different things. And, quite honestly, you’re actually going to see a complete transformation in business in general. It goes by names like “social business,” “adaptive business,” and “holistic business.” What we’re learning now with the democratization of information is that individuals are in control of the brand and brand experience as much as the business. This is paramount. This is at the heart of what’s fueling the socialization of CRM. If I could put it into one nutshell statement it would be that brands used to be defined by the marketing department. That was because they controlled the media. Now that people are starting to take control of the media, brand equity becomes this collective of brand experiences. Those brand experiences are shared through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, forums, you name it.

When you try to design software around capturing this activity, you have to begin by questioning your business strategy. What is it that you are trying to accomplish? Are you trying to steer experiences at the beginning, during, or after? Or, all of the above? Tools are starting to emerge that allow you to identify decision making processes at every step. They are all, in one way or another, adapting to certain parts or many parts of this social CRM idea. But if indeed social CRM is much bigger, as we’re discussing here, then it’s just getting started.

Finally, just to make things a little bit kookier, what we are talking about is removing the “C” from CRM. It’s not just about customer relationship management. It’s now about this idea of what I call SRM. Drop the “C” and call it social relationship management. Or just drop the “S” and call it relationship management. The thing I like about RM is that we’re not just talking about relationship management. This could mean reputation management and a whole bunch of things. This is really what we’re talking about, right? Because you can influence the decision of someone before they’re even a customer. You can manage the whole information work flow process, channel it within the organization so that you’re not just learning and responding, but so that you are adapting as a business to be better structured to handle the customer of the future.

Moving on to a more specific question, what type of applications do you think would make up a social CRM suite?

I recently wrote an article about Dell and Gatorade building these rooms called social media command centers. They look like NASA with screens all over the wall showing things like conversations, relationships, keyword clouds, and whether certain words are becoming more or less dense. They’re monitoring sentiment in real time. It’s pretty crazy and it’s cool at the same time. But if you imagine like this futuristic world of CRM, it would start there, right? It would look a lot like that because essentially what they’re doing is they’re monitoring all of the activity that’s taking place. Who’s saying what and where, who’s asking what, who needs a reaction, who needs a response?

This is one way that the social CRM system would really start to begin. From there, it’s a matter of technologies and work flow that allow you to hear, see, process, respond, and adapt all within the infrastructure in the way the business is designed.

Take Nimble for example. It will allow you to track all of these different individuals, then at a point of engagement it, let’s say its Twitter, channel one individual to someone in customer service or product management.

So, let’s say I send a Tweet. Customer service then takes this tweet, and using a tool like Nimble, it could bring in more information than what you would normally find in that tweet. For example, the person’s name, what other accounts they have across other networks, etc. It would then build a database around it. Customer service can then push out a response and track the response. The database could also send a signal to the listening agent to say, “we’ve got this one handled, you can check it off your list.” If the listening manager finds a sales opportunity, they could funnel it over to sales. That tweet can then also populate the sales database and sales can use this to respond and track the status of the opportunity. This is just one, very light way that this can be done today. Over time, it will get more sophisticated.

If you look at my blueprint for the social business you’ll see this thing called the conversation cloud on the left side of the blueprint. You’ll notice Get Satisfaction. What they represent is this conversation cloud that channels conversations into one place. So, let’s just say somebody asks a question on Twitter, or somebody asks a question on Facebook, or somebody goes to the website to ask a question. The magic with Get Satisfaction is that they can put together common responses and common answers from a knowledge-base, directly to the individual. So it can just constantly serve up the right answer without even having to have a human being present, which is huge. It saves them a massive amount of time. This is yet another dimension to CRM that we really haven’t seen before.

So, when you look at Get Satisfaction, combine them with Nimble, then combine with a command center, we’re starting to see pieces of this complete social CRM suite emerge. Then there is going to be some type of glue that brings it all together. That glue is probably going to be somebody like Salesforce who buys all of these pieces to offer one complete solution, or parts of the solution.

What trends are you seeing in the market, both in terms of product development, and general market activity?

I’ve seen a lot of innovation in tools that are called social CRM, even though they’re really one facet of a bigger discussion around social CRM. I’m also seeing a lot of enterprises either innovating or acquiring social CRM type solutions. Though, I’m not sure that I see anything that’s comprehensive. Nor do I see a lot of strategic messaging and real expertise around that messaging. In general, I think we’re going to have more confusion before we have clarity. I think everybody is just learning here as we go.

One trend I hope to see – and I don’t know that I’m going to see this immediately – is the definition of the need. People need to have a better understanding about what it is. Before executives spend any real money or resources around designing infrastructure on the activity, they need to understand what it means. This trend is going to take a little bit of time. Right now social CRM either lives in a silo in marketing, public relations, or customer service. The most important trend we’ll see in 2011 – and going into 2012 – is the understanding of social media’s impact on the entire business.

So basically coming up with use cases?

Ahh, use cases. Lets see. I’ll give you one. But, let me preface it. Dell is often used as a social media success story. Some people believe that it’s overused. But let me tell you why it’s an excellent example of social CRM.

Dell has innovated around a problem. And that problem was that people hated Dell. If you remember it was called Dell Hell. Dell Hell was really the collection of negative experiences through blogs and Tweets. What ended up happening was Michael Dell – and the rest of the company – took it so seriously that they innovated with social CRM systems around it. And it’s still evolving today. When there’s a problem on Twitter, blogs, Facebook, or anywhere else, they watch to see which issues gain momentum. As this happens, they unearth what the problem is, get a team to fix it, then push the fix. This completely extinguishes those discussions. So that means that it went from a listening component to a development component to a distribution component of a CRM system. Phenomenal, right? They’ve got the same infrastructure for sales, human resources, finance and legal. This is what I’m talking about. Dell is able to understand the nuances of its brand and brand experiences at any step of the decision. They’re building an infrastructure, and more importantly, a methodology of philosophies around engaging with those experiences, dealing with those experiences, or managing those experiences. So while they’re far from being the complete example of an entire solution, Dell is by default, building a social CRM system for the entire organization.

I also wanted to send a special note of thanks to Lauren Carlson, Houston Neal,  and the Software Advice team for including me in the 2011 Authority Awards. Other winners include good friend Mr. Paul Greenberg and Denis Pombriant, who is someone I look forward to getting to know better in 2012.

By Katie Scott, Wired UK

Newspapers could be used to power cars, a team of molecular biologists from Tulane University in New Orleans claim.

The team from the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology has discovered a new strain of the bacteria Clostridium, TU-103, that can produce a biofuel when breaking down newspaper.

The biologists state: “TU-103 is the first bacterial strain from nature that produces 
butanol directly from cellulose” — in the presence of oxygen.

Other strains of Clostridium have been used to produce butanol before, but they’ve had to be genetically engineered to do so. Others can produce butanol, but not in the presence of oxygen, while still others must break down the cellulose into sugars first. And some can break down cellulose but don’t produce butanol.

The Tulane team identified their strain in animal droppings, cultivated it and developed a new methodology (for which the patent is pending) for using the bacteria to produce butanol without having to isolate it from oxygen.

Butanol is touted as an alternative to ethanol because it can be used in automobiles without modification, it contains more energy than ethanol and it can be distributed through existing fuel pipelines (although there are concerns about its toxicity).

“This discovery could reduce the cost to produce bio-butanol,” says associate professor David Mullin. “In addition to possible savings on the price per gallon, as a fuel, bio-butanol produced from cellulose would dramatically reduce carbon dioxide and smog emissions in comparison to gasoline, and have a positive impact on landfill waste.”

Dr Oliver Inderwildi, who is the head of low-carbon mobility at Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and was not involved in the study, called the discovery “a breakthrough.”

“The scientific results are convincing, especially the point that the bacterial strain works when oxygen is present is a breakthrough,” he said.

He adds: “Up to now, only bacteria that are destroyed by oxygen worked and that is a major issue for the large scale production. At present butanol is either produced chemically using a two-step process, which is relatively energy intensive (the butanol consequently has a high carbon footprint and the energy balance is not good). Biochemically it is produced by fermentation of sugar or starch and this should not be done on a large scale due to the food-fuel trade off. Therefore, the results from Tulane could help to produce significant amount of butanol sustainably.”

The Tulane biologists will now test whether the bacteria also will produce butanol when let loose on bagass, a fibrous waste material they obtained from a sugarcane processing plant. But they are also sequencing the bacteria’s genome in order to single out the genes that are responsible for producing butanol. The hope is that these genes could then be engineered to increase the biofuel production.

Photo: JuniorMonkey/Flickr

Follow us on Twitter.

Like us on Facebook.

And soon enough we’ll start seeing +1 or circle us on Google+.

I would like to talk about an inflection point in social media that requires pause. I am not suggesting that there will be a social media 2.0 or 3.0 for that matter. Nor do I see the term social media departing our vocabulary any time soon. After all, it was recently added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.  Instead, what I would like to discuss is the end of an era of social media that will force the industry to mature. It won’t happen on its own however. Evolution will occur because consumers demand it and also because you’re willing to stake your job on it.

From Social Network Fatigue to Deals Fatigue to Follow Fatigue, businesses are facing a crossroads at the intersection of social and media. Following the path of media continues a long tradition of what Tom Foremski refers to as “Social Media as Corporate Media.” Following the path of social is a journey towards relevance.

As Foremski states, “Social media is not corporate media…if corporations try to turn social media into a corporate sales or marketing channel then they risk losing the naked conversations, and the insight into customer behaviors.”

His point is that there’s more to social media than clever campaigns and rudimentary conversations. Talking isn’t the only thing that makes social media social. Just like adding Facebook, Twitter and other sharing buttons will not magically transform static content into shareable experiences. Listening, learning and adapting is where the real value of social media will show its true colors.  Listening leads to a more informed business. Engagement unlocks empathy and innovation. But it is action and adaptation that leads to relevance. And, it never ends.

Indeed, there really are more examples of media than there are that of social media in many of the celebrated examples out there today. Even though distributing corporate media in social channels sets the stage for dialogue, there really isn’t much that’s social about it. In fact, study of many social media initiatives have led me to believe that much of what we benchmark against is actually anti-social in its approach.

The future of social media comes down to one word, “value.” Without it, businesses will find it much more difficult to earn and retain friends, fans and followers (3F’s). As adoption of social networks soared in previous years, growth is now plateauing.  eMarketer estimates that Facebook growth will hit only 13.4% this year after experiencing 38.6% acceleration in 2010 and a staggering 90.3% ascension the year before. Facebook isn’t alone in its sobriety either. The  rate of Twitter user adoption fell from 293.1% growth in 2009 to 26.3% this year.

Don’t get me wrong, people are still embracing social networks. However, the severity of competition for consumer attention is now unmistakable. Once liberal with their likes, Retweets, and follows, consumers are becoming much more guarded and realistic. Therefore brands will now have to more effectively listen to markets to make more informed decisions about how social media impacts the enterprise and in turn customer experiences.

The GlobalWebIndex “Wave 5 Trends” report delivers insight into how consumers are using social networks and technology in general.  According to the report, growth in social network usage among 16- to 24-year-olds in the US is stalling. And, in a few countries usage within this group is declining. In fact, one of the key insights shared in the report is subduing, “Facebook is no longer the one stop shop for the total internet experience.”

However, the report is not a harbinger of social networking’s demise. It is merely a lens into how behavior is changing. This is important for any business to realize that business as usual in social networks is in fact anything but.

Between June 2009 and June 2011, the following changes were noted in Facebook activity:

- Uploading videos is experiencing a modest increase around the world up 5% in the U.S. and 7.6% worldwide.

- Installing apps is on the decline, down 10.4% in the U.S. and 3.1% worldwide.

- Sending virtual gifts may not be gifts worth giving after all, with numbers declining 12.9% in the U.S. and 7.5% around the world.

Twitter on the other hand is a rich exchange for  information commerce, where links become a form of digital currency. For example, 45% share an opinion about a product or brand more than once per day. Another 34% of Twitter users also share a link about a product or brand more than once per day.

When asked what consumers want from brands, knowledge and entertainment soared to the top of the list. Additionally, The GlobalWebIndex Wave 5 Trends report tells us that online consumers want brands to provide services that fit with their lifestyle. They also want brands to listen to them.

What can we learn of this?

1) Businesses must first realize that there’s more to social media than just managing an active presence, driven by an active editorial calendar. Listening is key and within each conversation lies a clue to earn relevance and ultimately establish leadership.

2) Consumers want to be heard. Social media will have to break free form the grips of marketing in order to truly socialize the enterprise to listen, engage, learn, and adapt. You can’t create a social business if the business is not designed to be customer-centric from the outside-in and the inside-out.

3) Social media becomes an extension of active listening and engagement. Strategies, programs, and content are derivative of insights, catalysts for innovation, and messengers of value. More importantly, social media becomes a platform for the brand and the functions that consumers deem mandatory. From marketing to HR to service to R&D, brands will expand the role they play in social networking to make the acts of following and sharing an investment in a more meaningful relationship.

The end of Social Media 1.0 is the beginning of a new era of business, consumer engagement, and relevance.

#AdaptOrDie

Long-term brands and relationships are built on alignment. Here are a few examples (“I” is the royal I, not me in particular):

A perfect relationship: I want your company to help me, and your company wants to help me. We’re both focused on helping the same person.

The Walmart relationship: I want the cheapest possible prices and Walmart wants to (actually works hard to) give me the cheapest possible prices. That’s why there’s little pushback about customer service or employee respect… the goals are aligned.

The Apple relationship: I want Apple to be cool. Apple wants to be cool. That’s why there’s little pushback on pricing or obsolence or disappointing developers.

The demagogue politician relationship: I will feel more powerful if you get elected and get your way. You will feel more powerful if you get elected and get your way.

The search engine relationship (when it’s working): I want to find what I’m looking for. You want me to find what I’m looking for, regardless of the short-term income possibilities.

The Mercedes (formerly Cadillac) relationship: I want a prestige product that reliably delivers an expensive label that’s unattainable to many. They want to reliably and consistently charge a lot for a car that sends a message to everyone else.

The farmer’s market relationship: I want to eat sustainable foods that make me feel good. You want to grow sustainable foods that make me feel good.

Compare these to the ultimately doomed relationships (if not doomed, then tense) in which goals don’t align, relationships where the brand took advantage of an opening but then grows out of the initial deal and wants to change it:

The Dell relationship: I want a cheap, boring, reliable computer. You want to make more profit.

The hip designer relationship: I want the new thing no one else has yet. You want to be around for years.

The search engine relationship (when it doesn’t work): I want to find what I’m looking for. You want to distract me and take money to send me places I actually don’t want to go.

The reluctant purchaser relationship: I don’t want to waste money on something I didn’t know I wanted. You want to make a commission.

The troll relationship: I want to laugh at a buffoon who doesn’t realize he’s making a fool of himself. You want to be respected by the mainstream.

The young actor relationship: I want the fresh-faced young movie star. You want a career that lasts more than a year.

The typical media relationship: I want to see the shows, you want to interrupt with ads.

Alignment isn’t something you say. It’s something you do. Alignment is demonstrated when you make the tough calls, when you see if the thing that matters the most to you is also the thing that matters the most to the other person.

The tension that comes from misalignment can work for a while, but it’s when alignment kicks in that the enterprise really scales.

The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference & Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what’s next for the interactive industry.

Semantics, the study of meaning, is playing an increasingly important role in the development of knowledge management tools across a variety of industries, and some of the most interesting developments are coming from the media world.

Semantic search is one broad area within the higher realm of semantic technologies, which also includes knowledge storage, information extraction and reasoning, among other topics. The goal of semantic search is to improve search result accuracy by understanding the searcher’s intent and the contextual relationships between the terms used in the search.

We spoke with Evan Sandhaus, lead architect of semantic platforms at The New York Times Company, and Jeff Catlin, CEO of text analytics company Lexalytics, to better understand how semantic search is affecting news and social media.

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News Media

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The New York Times morgue, a collection of topical and biographical clippings and photographs from The Times and other publications, once existed in the old Times headquarters on West 43rd Street, but has since been relocated.

“All websites are in the business of capturing people’s attention,” said Sandhaus, recalling a recent presentation he had attended. This is especially true for news organizations and blogs, which push out piles upon piles of online articles each day. In the end, the news isn’t exactly useful if no one reads it. So, the goal is to make content as findable as possible.

The fundamentally challenging structure of the web, Sandhaus says, isn’t exactly helping the cause, though. The web is predominantly written in HTML, a markup language that focuses on expressing how information on a webpage should look, not what it means. As a result, important pieces of information within webpages, such as headlines, bylines and publish dates in news articles, are formatted within HTML, but aren’t explicitly labeled as “headline, “byline” and “publish date.” “As a consequence,” Sandhaus explains, “it makes it difficult for a wider web ecosystem to have an idea of the structured nature of content.” That is, while webpages are formatted for humans to easily read them, machines can’t easily determine the underlying meaning of content on a page if it doesn’t follow a consistent structure. Thus, devaluing the utility of data.

So, what is being done to combat web content from falling into the great abyss that is the web? Many communities are working on this problem, with the concept Linked Data being a central part of the conversation. Linked Data is a best practice for exposing, sharing and connecting pieces of data, information and knowledge on the Semantic Web.

Since its inception, The New York Times has set itself up nicely to participate in the Semantic Web. Since the late 1800s, it has maintained an authoritative and controlled news vocabulary to archive clippings from its and others’ publications, which were then stored in “the morgue” at its old New York City headquarters on 43rd Street. These archives were originally created so that reporters could easily research historical documentation on a certain topic in the reporting process. Little did anyone know, this organized structure would set The Times up for having an amazing amount of useful data once semantic technologies would evolve more than a century later.

In 2009, The Times began publishing its indexing vocabulary, which includes people, organizations, locations and descriptors, as linked open data, enabling other datasets to interact with it, opening up a world of possibilities for useful applications, based on Times data. As of September 2010, there are 203 datasets — including data from The Times — published in Linked Data format. These datasets combined are more powerful together than any one dataset could ever be alone.

Creating standards is the next step in the process towards building a more connected web. Working to further connect information on the web, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), among other communities, continues to develop standards for the Semantic Web, explained Sandhaus, including RDFa, which enables users to embed rich metadata, such as title, author and date information, within web documents. This allows users to call out meanings for specific portions of a webpage, making the information more usable on the greater web.

The problem with RDFa, though, is that different organizations can use it to develop different naming systems for the same pieces of data, says Sandhaus. In the media world, for example, a “headline” could also be called a “title,” or even “Schlagzeile” (in German) or “intestazione” (in Italian).

The New York Times is hoping to alleviate this problem. As of October 2010, The Times, in collaboration with the International Press Telecommunications Council, is working on creating a standard within the publishing industry to express structural metadata within HTML — this framework is called rNews. With this standard, search engines, aggregators and social sites, for example, will have access to the data, making it more useful to the web at large. The project has only just begun, but Sandhaus expects to have more details about its direction in coming months.

Leading innovation in the publishing industry, The New York Times continues to reimagine what is possible within the world of semantic technologies, making its data (and the data that interacts with it), more useful as more technological developments surface.

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Social Media

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Social media is another area of the web where data seems infinitely powerful — Twitter for example, logs more than 110 million tweets per day, and 50% of Facebook‘s 500 million active users log in daily.

As users continue to spend more time on social networks, brands are finding it more important to maintain presences on social platforms. Analytics haven’t been a huge focus for early adopter brands, but as companies try to measure the ROI of being active on social networks, analytic tools are taking a prominent position in the discussion.

Over the course of the past year, brands have begun to add sentiment analysis to the list of must-have features in their social media monitoring tools, says Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin.

There are two sides to brand-oriented communication on social platforms — while brands are sending out marketing messages via their social channels, consumers are chatting about brands and products. As a result, there are two main ways that brands are currently using semantics:

• Consumer sentiment analysis: Brands want to know what consumers are saying about them. Using text analytics, an increasing number of services are able to analyze a user’s grammar usage and determine the meaning behind his or her mention of a brand or product. In some cases, this may simply mean determining if a user is using a positive or negative tone when discussing a product or service. In other more advanced cases, this could mean determining a user’s specific intent behind a statement. Viralheat, for example, aims to pinpoint social media users on the cusp of making purchasing decisions. This type of service enables brands to weed out irrelevant social updates and access those with the most potential return.
• Messaging consistency: Monitoring customer sentiment is a bit obvious, but another use for text analytics in the social realm is for monitoring a brand’s messaging consistency. Catlin notes that it’s important for a brand to “sound like it has a common voice and a consensus of opinion in how it communicates to the world.” Historically, it’s always been a priority for brands to make sure their messaging was consistent and clean — social media is another channel where this is important. Using semantic technologies, brands are now able to analyze what they’ve said and whether those messages were consistent. That information can then be used to determine future messaging strategies.

While semantics is having a clear affect on social media monitoring, Catlin feels that it will also soon play a role in social search from a user’s perspective. Search engines and search features within social sites will have to integrate semantic technologies to stay relevant, says Catlin.

He posed an example: if a user is searching for “Indian food,” a keyword search isn’t as useful as a semantics-driven search could be. “Let’s say you have an interest in Indian food,” explained Catlin. “Imagine that a tweet came out that happened to say, ‘This was the best chicken tikka I’ve ever had.’ The search tool would in fact lump that into your interest in Indian food. Even though the tweet never mentioned the term ‘Indian food’ anywhere, it can semantically understand that ‘chicken tikka’ belongs in ‘Indian food.’”

Lexalytics is developing semantic technologies that do just that, and Catlin expects to unleash them later this year. “Imagine digesting all of Wikipedia, if you will,” Catlin supposed, explaining the technology, “If you digested all of the knowledge out there, you would start to see relationships. You would start to see things like ‘chicken tikka’ referenced in things about ‘Indian food.’ We hold onto that knowledge historically, so that we can use it later on.”

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Conclusion

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As semantic technologies continue to evolve, data on the web will become more meaningful and useful. Traditional media outlets, like The New York Times, are already seeing the benefits of participating in the Semantic Web, as they are able to use other people’s data to reason about their own archives. Likewise, social search stands to gain much from incorporating semantic understanding in order to create better user experiences and enhance analytics for brands.

Which industries are you most interested in seeing adopt semantic technologies? Let us know in the comments below.

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Series Supported by SES New York Conference & Expo

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The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference & Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what’s next for the interactive industry. Learn why more than 5,000 brands and agencies from the enterprise level to brick and motor businesses choose SES for their online marketing education.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, thesuperph & Flickr, Jennifer Brook, KEXINO