Twitter has a problem.  Over the past week, it has been highly unavailable.  It is reaching a point where Twitter is not able to scale up to the demand that is out there.  With Twitter growing by leaps and bounds in terms of users and daily tweets, it will eventually reach a point of critical [...]

Salesforce.com has recently put an emphasis on a new paradigm, knowledge as a service, which relies heavily on social CRM, and has positioned its corporate vision towards that end.  Yet, as has become commonplace focus is on brand-related solutions that are fit for the enterprise, but does nothing to touch on sCRM for the SMB [...]

Ian Hendry, CEO of WeCanDo.biz, recently had a post over at ZDNet regarding Social CRM for small businesses.  Hendry’s thesis is that most of the discussions surrounding SCRM involve distributed brand management.  While important for medium and small sized businesses, Hendry argues, the strategy has the danger of leaving small businesses behind.  Hendry argues that [...]

Reader John Moore, in a comment on my Social CRM Must Be Social post yesterday, pointed me to Paul Greenberg’s ZDNet post from earlier this week in which he put a stake in the ground, and declared that he was no longer going to engage in the debate on what the definition of Social CRM, [...]

Social CRM envisions a company interacting with its customers, and providing what can be perceived as casual interactions between a company and its customers.  The interactivity involved is crucial in implementing an effective social media strategy, and ignoring that facet of social media misses the point entirely.  All too often, I have seen companies implement [...]

This past weekend, an event occured in our world’s history that has shaken up the way we look at news and the way we look at the world.  A little more than a week ago, elections were held in the nation of Iran, and the results were considered by many to be suspect.  People in [...]

The general consensus is that Social CRM is the future of CRM, yet there exists little consensus on what this means.  It is very easy to jump on a bandwagon such as Social CRM without any thought to a plan and analytical data.  Analysts say that engaging in Social CRM will produce huge dividends nad [...]

New CRM implementations will often focus on Sales and Support (in that order).  As an outgrowth of this (or perhaps as its cause) CRM software solutions tend to focus heavily on these two areas, often downplaying one of the most critical components of CRM, marketing.  Marketing is truly the neglected child of CRM, and marketing [...]

The modern call center has evolved from a simple answer-and-respond environment to a complex, multi-channel environment for servicing customers.  This revolution started with the advent of CRM and the Internet a decade ago, with the introduction of email and web portals.  Customer support has gone digital to the point that many “call centers” have gone [...]