By Oliver Marks, founder, Oliver Marks & Associates

[EDITORS' NOTE: This is part of a series of posts that began here, dissecting a two-page chart that appeared in CRM magazine's June 2009 issue on social media. The digital edition of that issue can be found here, and a standalone image of the chart itself can be seen here. (Click on the “View Full Size” button at the top right of that page.) To view all posts in the series, please add this RSS feed to your RSS reader.]

JUNE 8, 2009 — I’m a huge fan of taking a few steps back and looking at the big picture, and this chart works well on a number of levels for me. More on this in a moment, but first some big-picture stuff on the topic of “the social customer.”

June is CRM’s so-called social media issue …but I have an issue with “social media” itself. What is it exactly?

For people inside the industry bubble whose antennae are tuned to find and consume information on this topic, the answer seems apparent. Wikipedia, that king of the crowdsourced encyclopedias, offers up this overview on the phrase:

At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business.

Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

The same source, meanwhile, says that “CRM” comprises the “processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective customers.”

Social media is one of these catch-all phrases that seems to mutate — much as Web 2.0 did over time — and diffuse, and there’s a danger in that.

Now, I know a lot of people could jump in and concisely define where we are in June 2009; that’s not my point. Most people on the planet are informed from a consumer perspective about Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and texting, and have some hazy ideas about how these new channels are being used to reach them. Facebook today, in my opinion, is very similar to what AOL was in the ’90s: training wheels for Web 2.0.

The advertising and public relations industries love the idea of social media because it appears to be the way to nirvana: word-of-mouth marketing. Think back to the early days — the early promises — of email marketing. Have you checked the contents of your spam filter recently?

There are plenty of talented, principled, and well-meaning marketers out there using the new media channels creatively and beneficially, but the low barriers to entry of being a so-called “social media expert” mean there are an awful lot of folks out there who see online infomercials and social media conversational spam in your future. It’s not going to be pretty.

CRM is all about keeping the lines of communication open with customers. In the future, as trusted voices become harder to pick out from the crowd, CRM’s role for customers may come to resemble the role played by a bouncer in a rowdy bar — policing (or even removing) the loud guy who keeps hitting on the girls and won’t take no for an answer.

An example: My wife’s Volkswagen New Beetle blew a hose and lost its coolant in downtown San Francisco a while back. The AAA towed it to a shop that, after getting quotes, I subsequently had do the repair work. The repairs got done, we got a six-month guarantee — and then the same problem recurred last week.

This time, I went on Yelp.com to check the garage out, and found a bunch of whiny, negative comments.

I took the car back in with a prepared-to-be-negative attitude and all set to take my business elsewhere…

…but the staff at the garage surprised me (and, not incidentally, contradicted the whinging complainers on Yelp): They behaved very honorably and fixed the problem — which was an overheated plastic-part issue they missed last time — at no cost to me.

Unless I post my experience to Yelp, the opinions and prevailing perspective there will continue to be skewed. (As an aside, there has been a spate of accusations flying around online recently about Yelp being a borderline blackmail site.)

My point: The “conversation,” like the ones in a crowded bar, depends totally on the quality and active participation of a representative cross-section of engaged people.

Now, some thoughts on CRM’s Social Media Maturity chart with the above in mind.

There is a world of difference between consumer conversations — branding, below the line — and business-to-business. I’m not going to get into the world of internal collaboration — my specialization — but you can be sure that this is in a different universe.

I think Marketing and Public Relations should be moved to the left-hand side of the chart, with Sales and Service on the right — that seems to be the way engagement flows: Sales and Service should be tightly intertwined and not differentiated or siloed as technology enables this.

Marketing and Public Relations conversations should ramp up to Sales action coupled tightly to Service, there’s a natural progression there that continues the conversation after the sales transaction, supporting the customer and reinforcing the relationship. We have “blended marketing & support” on the chart — see detail, right — this, for me, is foundational to the future.

More subtly, I believe we will see much more structured fragmentation going forward, particularly for huge companies. Collaborative networks of interlinked business communities, whether outward-facing (Marketing and PR) or supporting existing customers (Service and Sales), will be smaller and more agile, while having greater connectivity between parts. This breaks down the “blind giant” syndrome that is currently killing multiheaded companies such as Sony.

Three years out, I think we will really start to really see the effects of linked data: contextual ribbons of information associated with every digital artifact, as a result of semantic technologies starting to harness the siloed and unconnected information we currently (and only haphazardly) find through search engines. In addition, we’ll see interoperability with other xRM components, such as human capital management systems for internal employees.

With my crystal ball, I also predict unified communications blurring, with telephony, digital video/telepresence, microblogging, and texting forming a relatively seamless communication spectrum. We may also see the demise of the QWERTY keyboard I’m typing this on, to be replaced by a less-percussive way of communicating.

I’ll not hazard any guesses on five years out: So much change is under way in the business world, on so many levels, that today’s circumstances may well be wholly unrecognizable in 2014.

Five years is tough enough, but when “Where is Everybody?” — an interesting post by Thomas Baekdal — has a go at the grand sweep of history, the effort gets dangerously fuzzy as Baekdal predicts the future. (The image at left is from that post.)

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Oliver Marks is the founder of Oliver Marks & Associates, which provides seasoned independent consulting guidance to companies on the effective planning of collaboration strategy, tactics, Enterprise 2.0 technology decisions, and roll-out. He writes the popular Collaboration blog at ZDnet, and also blogs at his own site. He can be reached on Twitter at @olivermarks.