David Crow

Connector of dots. Maker of lines. Rider of slopes.

Social and Personal CRM

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Erick Schonfeld blogged about Ten Technologies that will rock 2010 on TechCrunch. Number Ten is Social CRM. It’s started me thinking about the power of personal or small team CRM. There are many incarnations of CRM including those with a focus on:

  • marketing automation,
  • sales automation,
  • and customer service & support.

There are a number of converging trends that are making both personal CRM and social CRM an interesting place:

  • Consumerization of technology
    We’re buying our own laptops, mobile devices, home services and entertainment. The combination of low-cost, easy-to-use devices and consumable content is helping to change expectations about procurement, enablement and scarcity.
  • Email and communication overload
    You can check voicemail, email, Facebook messages, IMs, tweets, Skypes, etc. But conversations often get lost or forgotten in the flow of messages.
  • VoIP
    Skype, Google Voice, Microsoft Office Communication Server. While not perfect, I can imagine making quality or reliability tradeoffs for VoIP usage, i.e., email withe every conversation I’ve had with people on social networks, over email or voice. That would be awesome. Imagine a searchable database of every conversation. Think I’m nuts, well check out Total Recall.
  • Mobility
    Let me pick the device. Netbook, laptop, slate, tablet, phone, console. Yes. Home, office, on the move. Yes. I want the open Internet on which ever device I’m using.
  • Cloud
    I hate feeling like I have better access to personal data on my PC. It’s my data, I want to access it on whatever device I’m using, laptop, mobile, gaming console, etc. Security and privacy are tantamount, but it’s my data and as credit card companies have proven, privacy is dead. So put my files, images, music in the cloud, preferably on hardware that I own so I don’t have to pay a subscription fee for everything.
  • Social media
    Next generation platforms are  where there is some very interesting change happening. Commerce, communications and consumer shifts.

Companies and products to watch in enabling both personal and social CRM.

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