Recently, I joined a new Google Group called Social CRM Pioneers created by two Altimeter partners Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang. There have been very interesting conversations about social CRM, what it is, what it can do, and the issues to be addressed in the area. Around the same time, these same individuals released an open report on 18 use cases of social CRM, a comprehensive analysis of how social CRM can be used in an enterprise environment (see figure below for the 18 uses). In less than a week, the report has been viewed over 15,000 times, showing the amount of interest in this topic. In this blog, I would like to offer a primer on social CRM (or sCRM for short) and discuss the opportunities and currently unresolved challenges associated with implementing sCRM in practice.
Last week, yet another social media solution was announced. This time, it came from the Internet giant Google, and it is called Google Buzz. In my opinion, Google Buzz is a mixture of FriendFeed, Facebook, and Twitter. It resembles FriendFeed in the sense that it can aggregate your activities across multiple social networks and display those to your followers in one place. It resembles Facebook in the sense that it has a status update and commenting function similar to Facebook status update. And it resembles Twitter in terms of its follower structure and also its status update functionality. The one key difference with Google Buzz, however, is its integration with email, where you see all the buzzes within your Gmail account.
Frankly, I am not impressed. With so many social media solutions already out to “revolutionize” the way we communicate, I am starting to feel indifferent. Just count the sheer number of social networks out there, and we see how fragmented online social networking has become. While I am a strong believer in the value of social media, the number of competing solutions is suggesting that this market is getting to a more mature stage. Just like the hundreds of car brands in the earlier part of the last century, we are bound to see a shakeup of this marketplace, and the ones that eventually survive will be the ones that offer differentiation that appeal to a large enough network of consumers.
So with this idea of differentiation, I thought of doing an exercise. In market research, there is a technique called brand personification which is used to explore in-depth a brand’s meaning to consumers. The technique asks consumers to imagine a brand as a person and to describe what this person would be like. Here I took the liberty and brand personifies some of the best known or “buzzed” social networks we see today.
Facebook: A child prodigy who won the heart of America almost overnight. But now at a mature adult age, he has not quite found who he is and who he wants to be. As a result, he does face lift or nip/tuck every so often, and he is hopelessly addicted to Farmville, Cafe World, Happy Aquarium, and the like.
Twitter: A geek with an entrepreneurial soul. He is fun loving, quick to act, and can get really passionate about a topic. But because of interest in a large number of topics, he also shows symptoms of ADD and can have a fairly short attention span.
LinkedIn: A businessman dressed in a suit and tie. He is ready to do a sales pitch at any time, and he always carries with him a briefcase no matter where he goes. In that briefcase, he never forgets to bring with him a copy of his resume in case some better job becomes available.
foursquare: An overly social person who thrives on attention to such an extent that he literally lives in the public’s eyes. His smartphone is his prized possession that indulges his need for constant connection to the outer world.
Google Buzz: Someone in his 40’s or possibly 50’s. He has gotten onto the Internet late, after his son, daughter, and friends have enjoyed it for quite a while. Once online, he cautiously explores around and finds email as a safe haven for staying connected. He hangs out with @mashable often, who admires him for his infinite wisdom.
Not hard to see that I am a little cynical in almost all of these. Perhaps we haven’t found the winning formula yet? Or perhaps I am just an outlier in the sample. If I were to pick one from this list as my friend, I would choose the geeky Twitter, which is also the service that I find myself gravitate toward the most nowadays. What would your choice be?
Should Twitter sell out when it is still hot? My answer to this question is no. Here’s why. Twitter, just as Wikipedia and Facebook, didn’t start out as a major corporation. Rather, it is built over time through the participation and faith of its users. What makes Twitter precious in consumers’ mind is the community that it has created. The value of the Twitter brand name is not in the company itself, but in all the people who contribute fantastic and interesting content on the fly and in the way it is able to connect people with each other. Now adding a suit and tie image and a clear profit motive that is usually associated with large corporations, it will simply clash with Twitter’s current brand image and turn off the goodwill it has engendered among its users. Twitter from Microsoft (or Google or News Corp.) just doesn’t sound right.
One might argue that YouTube got bought out by Google and it is still popular. But that acquisition has yet to prove beneficial to Google money-wise. It is estimated that YouTube will lose $470 million in 2009, on sales of $240 million. Plus, it is also facing pressure from Hulu.com, another video website that has successfully struck business deals with major networks recently, including a stake taken by Discovery. Piecing these events together, the future of YouTube is quite uncertain.
Of course, Twitter is going to face the same question too in terms of how it is going to support itself financially if it were to remain independent. To answer that question, one has to look at the value and competency that Twitter possesses. At least two areas emerge. One is information. By millions of people feeding news, facts, and opinions into Twitter in real-time, Twitter has become an information network that is no less powerful than a major news network. This can be powerful knowledge to news organizations (for breaking news), marketers (for customer opinions) and the like. One way for Twitter to make money in this area is perhaps to develop as an information expert, helping these potential beneficiaries extract and analyze the useful data. For example, a platform can be established to combine tweets with Twitter traffic information to better understand what is on the collective mind. A second area that Twitter can explore is its technology expertise. Using the basic Twitter platform, it can develop customized platforms that satisfy companies’ internal messaging needs, similar to what Yammer is doing but perhaps in a more proprietary and customized fashion. Such customized platforms can facilitate efficient and secure communication within an organization (e.g., between salespeople).
Of course, the smart minds at Twitter might think of other ways of making money. But whichever way it ends up making money, I simply do not think it is a good idea for Twitter to sell to any of these large corporations. And the company seems to agree, when Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone said “We Are Not For Sale”.
Update (March 29, 2010): Recently, Twitter founder Biz Stone was interviewed by CNBC about its business model and strategy:
