Research firm Gartner has issued a new report noting that it expects IT budgets to increase significantly in 2013 and 2014, led by both cloud computing and CRM initiatives. The reasons given are pretty simple: cloud will provide for cost savings and other long-term efficiencies. Gartner posits that CRM investments will increase due to an … Continue reading »
Filed under social CRM …
Applebee’s: if you’re in a social media hole, put down your shovel
Will Rogers once said, “when you’re in a hole stop digging.” He certainly did not have social media in mind, which is a pity when you think about it: he would have killed on Twitter, and he could have checked Yelp! for customer reviews of Wiley Post’s flying abilities. However, it is a saying that … Continue reading »
Listening to your customer via social is good for service, but listening to competitors’ customers is great for sales
Here’s a scenario for you: a company gets a social analytics tool and starts messing around with it. Initially, as is the case with most businesses, early applications are akin to “ego surfing,” where the company looks for mentions of itself (a handy exercise if you want to find issues to direct to your support … Continue reading »
Gibson Guitars makes social media music out of Delta’s sour note
There was a great post this week on 1to1 media’s blog about an airline wrecking a guy’s guitar. Yes, again – this time it was not United, but Delta Airlines, and they managed to squish Dave Schneider’s 1965 Gibson ES-335 guitar between a service elevator door and a rail on a loading dock. They squished … Continue reading »
The Top 20 CRM Blogs of 2012
You want to learn about CRM, or you want to refine and expand your understanding, but you don’t know where to start? Well, the blogosphere’s one good place to start learning, but it’s become a crowded, confusing place, clogged with blogs of disparate quality and written by people with motives that are less than mostly … Continue reading »
6 ways to screw up with social CRM
By Chris Bucholtz Some things are more digestible in numbered groups: the five stages of grief, the 12 days of Christmas, the seven habits of highly effective people, the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Here’s one for you: the six ways people screw up social CRM. That’s not just a random grouping I came up … Continue reading »
How to Kill Your Business by Merely Pretending You’re Customer-Centric
By Chris Bucholtz Every company in the world is customer-centric – just ask them! They’ll all tell you that’s the case (except maybe Ryanair – but their CEO is so full of it, he’d probably say they were customer-centric, too). Sadly, we as consumers all know that customer-centricity is actually fairly rare. No matter what … Continue reading »
The blog: the often-forgotten but awfully useful first step toward becoming social
By Chris Bucholtz We talk a lot about Social CRM (SCRM) and the potentially complex ways of using it. Sure, there’s value in collecting customer data from social, and from listening to sentiment. It’s very helpful to discover the right conversations and engage with your customers (or customers of competitors). It’s the right thing to … Continue reading »
The new ROI of social: Risk of Irrelevancy
By Chris Bucholtz Social CRM, or at least the business use of social media, is by now accepted by virtually every organization – even by those who aren’t yet actively engaging in social activities. Social is a given by now, if only because it’s a crucial tool that’s being used by the vast majority of … Continue reading »
The Top 20 CRM Blogs of 2011
By Chris Bucholtz This is the fifth year that I’ve compiled a list of the best CRM blogs, and the trend is clear: more and better blogs on the topic of CRM are out there than ever before. In 2008, it was a struggle to find 20 good blogs on CRM; now, there are so … Continue reading »
