Online shared intelligence

Reason No. 2 why Social CRM is an oxymoron

Let’s say that every large company out there (you only care about CRM when you are large) all of the sudden changes their hearts; starting today, they will care about customers, they will want to establish meaningful relationships with them (meaningful Relationships require trust, trust requires caring, and vice-versa). Even if that happened today, tomorrow, and a hundred years after, Social CRM would still be an oxymoron, a catch phrase invented by the enterprise-1.1 vendors like SalesForce.com.

The 1.1 in “enterprise 1.1″ is actually quite important. It’s not just an artifact of communication. I use it to reflect a very simple fact, it goes like this:

• First came Enterprise 1.0 – You know what it was about: control, secrecy (even amongst peers), need-to-know-basis, access-control, “business rules”, “process”, all that junk that business leaders learnt at all those very prestigious institutions where “business is war”, there is a thing called “guerrilla marketing”, social solidarity is abbreviated as “socialism”, where even selling you unneeded junk is called “market penetration” (guess why? ). Want to know what it feels like in Enterprise 1.0? Perhaps you do… Hypothetically, let’s say you worked at Ford Motors about ten years ago, when the Explorer was about to be released to great forecasts. While the car is being designed, a quick calculation in your Cad/Cam system shows that the vehicle will flip over under lateral pressures on its tires (e.g., turning a curve while breaking slightly). now, let’s say that, hypothetically always, you go to your boss with your findings. Here comes the test: what do you get?
  • If the answer is something like “A reprimand, severe admonitions, threats to shut the hell up… followed by a surprise promotion to a position far away organizationally from your last one, for which you need to sign a non-disclosure about your previous job that basically hands over your gonads and children to the company if you ever mention the incident again”, you already know what Enterprise 1.0 feels like. E1.0 is another term for “glacial, absolute and indisputable lack of movement and change”; what is, will be.
• Then, of course, Enterprise 1.1 showed up – What was it? Same crap, just marketing angles on top. A great example: SAS, cloud-based software, you may be old enough to even remember ASP. Whatever the case, this is the same old: same old control, same old secrecy, same old ideology, same old… but now you don’t even need to own the hardware. Why do I choose SAS, instead of many other categories? Well, because I consider SalesForce.com a perfect example of 1.1: “Change something that makes exercising control cheaper and you will create the illusion of movement”. What the software does is exactly what it did before; it’s just slightly cheaper (arguably) to operate. Slight of hand. E 1.1
• Enterprise 2.0 is now emergent – The pervasive Internet has made it possible for all of us to be heard (take this obscure blog as an example), but also to excite our network (something E1.0 and E1.1 would never let you do) around us, and in the process create conditions for many emergent phenomena: the same way that you can easily bring a freeway to its knees by synchronizing traffic across three lanes (usually right in front of me), you can now create a PR disaster for Ford (always hypothetically, of course), for killing hundreds of people in Explorers that turn over, over, and over, as soon as people turn corners and touch the brakes. Yes, you are that empowered, you just need to learn other rules of engagement (social networking 1.0.1), but you can do it, and Ford would have a very hard time sweeping you under the rug. You see, even as all those large companies have all this control-driven infrastructure, you, and your network, are not part of it: they can control their infrastructure, but it’s becoming too hard to control you: too many possible outlets for your voice… at least until this oxymoron called “social CRM” gets to “embrace you, the customer”. But that is another story, let’s go back to Reason #2.

The center of reason #2 is that E1.0, as well as E1.1, are paradigms driven by control, secrecy and exclusion; you “don’t need to know that the damn cars will turn over, that’s ‘proprietary’ information”, “you don’t need to know that your Internet 6 browser is exposing everything you do in the Internet to others –for the same reason”– and so on. We even have software and infrastructure to make sure  you don’t know. We call those pieces of software Content Management, Intranets, ERP, Back Office Apps, and oh, yes, CRM.

You see, CRM doesn’t let YOU the customer, see what the sales person knows about product defects. Nope. Neither does it empower to talk to many other customers on your terms, controlling the conversation yourself. What it does, is to make sure that the vendor controls the conversation, that no “proprietary information” is exchanged, that “business rules” are enforced. It’s role is to preserve the status quo, not to impact it. What is, will be.

Social business services, on the other hand, are all about you controlling conversation, relationships and interactions. It works because it lets you choose how to deposit your trust into individuals and companies, and it does so precisely by letting you control the terms of the conversation. As a result, “customer-managed relationships (CMR)” emerges. CMR is social, by definition and by its own merits; CRM, on the other hand, is the negation of social: it’s the total loss of control of the conversation by the customer.

So, why do these companies (mostly SalesForce.com) and pundits (too many to list) create the oxymoron?

• Good intentions by some pundits – If you believe customers should be empowered, or if you believe that they will be empowered regardless of what you say, “social CRM” is a good way to bring out the good in every one. That is cool, but it’s a contortion of an argument:
  • “Customers are increasingly empowered, they have too many channels, the channels are auto-emergent, and thus customers will take control of the conversation”. OK, I agree with that.
  • “Companies will need to adapt in order to sell to the new customer”. OK, I agree with that as well. As a matter of fact, when you look at the way the really big companies are selling these days, how they are creating “influencers” out of “soccer moms”, how there is a networked way of doing everything, even buying Clorox, how you can fart on Tweeter and have twenty companies who make perfume immediately pinging you, and all that, they are already doing that. Their answer is to deploy massive troops whose job is to sneak into your conversations. They adapted the same way China adapted to the Internet: growing their ability to sneak into the dialog.
  • “The software that will let them adapt is Social CRM”. Oops, fallacy alert! Yes, I know, Benioff needs something to energize his 1.1 company, and he is a brilliant marketer, and he can command the pundits and experts alike (who indirectly leave out of his crumbs), with a snap of the finger… but that’s just not what CRM does. CRM does not empower conversation… unless you are the salesperson; social CRM doesn’t change the nature of CRM, it’s just an attempt by the company to control your conversation… even as what “your conversation” mutates into a social discussion.
• Follow the leader intentions by the rest – Yeah, you already know all about this one
• Stale enterprise categories – Want boring? Want old? Want dinosaurs? Just look at ERP, CRM, CMS, all those enterprise software categories. Not only the tools are boring: the categories themselves are. How boring? Well, let me use an example from the CMS side: so boring that even a monolithic piece of architecture like SharePoint is called innovative… that at a time when everyone is moving to light weight ones. How boring? Have you ever used SalesForce.com, or Siebel, or …? If you have, I don’t need to tell you more. Where these vendors have already reached everyone that can be reached, Social Business Services vendors are just emerging, and are recognized as the best big thing. Wouldn’t you do the same? What, if I was in the business of selling horse-powered carriages, I would have changed my marketing too: I would be selling “SOCIAL carriages”. You bet!
• The failure of a model to evolve – You sell things that are all about control, manipulation, need-to-know, secrecy, walls and silos, “corporate controls”, and all of that. In other words, you sell CRM, or you sell CMS’s. You have a good business selling to the very old. The guy who buys from you wears suits and has trouble using even his Blackberry (yes, HIS). He is worried to see the conversation moving away… but you need to keep selling him. The irresolvable conflict between these two modalities is worth a separate post (where I will tell you, as an example, why “Social SharePoint” is another oxymoron, and yet for the same reasons), but its essence remains: CRM, ERP, CMS’s, they all excel at supporting all those structures of control and secrecy (I really mean it, they are EXCELLENT at it). I made a lot of money through my career supporting those mechanisms as well. It’s just that they are outdated: there is no slight coat of paint that will save them. Dinosaurs.

When you look at Chatter, for example, all there is there is a thin layer of social artifacts (the usual, discussions, posts, small groups of people, avatars, profiles) coming to the sales person rescue, helping him CONTROL the conversation a little longer; somewhere in there are you. You are now surrounded by other “influential customers” who are “just like you” (in prisons, they would call them snitches: you see, this “others like me” is not only a new type of social filter for information, it’s old enough to be built into your genes, it’s just that now even “they” know that); you are still the prisoner of the conversation (as determined by the asymmetry between the information YOU gain and control and the information THEY own and control). Does that sound like a new type of relationship to you?

What is that you just said? That it doesn’t matter because you, the user, don’t buy the software?

Yep, you are right… But notice that I didn’t say Benioff isn’t brilliant: on the contrary, he knows he will sell to ignorants as long as he steals a few concepts from that “other thing” called Social. Further, that reality is even OK with me: ignorance is its own narcissistic dictator, and, at the end of the game, everyone playing with it will succumb to it.

I just don’t think that Social CRM will buy SFC (and the ignorants) too much time, because in the meanwhile you are setting up your own social filters, your own BS traps, your own lie detectors, your own social smarts, much, much faster than SFC can spin this crap around. When that oxymoron  called “social CRM” shows up in your business transaction, you will recognize it for what it is: just another trap.

When you do, you will go back to the place where customers manage their relationships. It’s called social networks, and if companies are involved, it will be called Social Business Services. No need to contaminate it with the old dinosaur genes.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 at 8:59 am and is filed under enterprise collaboration, monopolies, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.