By Prem Kumar Aparanji, principal consultant, CRM, Cognizant Technology Solutions

[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 9, 2009 — In CRM magazine’s Social Media Maturty Model, contemporary CRM is depicted in conjunction with social media and has been put in the era of social functionality. It is shown in conjunction with VRM, too. [See detail, below right.]

What this means is that the customer has become empowered and is challenging businesses with a communication channel that, for a change, the customer is capable of wielding more effectively than businesses are.

To date, businesses have used letters/correspondence, telephone, fax, email, chat/IM, etc., very effectively, much to the chagrin of the customer, to push their messages. Businesses strive to control these media to derive the utmost out of them for the benefit of, hold your breath, themselves.

Social media, however, changes the whole equation. (After all, it’s called “media” for a reason.)

Social media is a channel where the customer controls the conversation. Today’s social media messages predominantly flow from the customers to the business. And, oh horrors! Messages are also flowing from customer to customer! And the business has little or no control over the direction of the conversation.

Wait, did I say “conversation”? Wasn’t that supposed to be “a scripted response”? Or at best “a dialogue”?

Yeah, I know what this sounds like: “What will these youngsters come up with next!” But you must have read by now the various reports and surveys indicating that social media is no longer the prerogative of youngsters. These same reports suggest that the older demographic is active in social media — in fact, that its members are the ones conducting the most transactions online.

Now certainly social media or networks or apps or whatever-you-call-it poses no real threat to CRM. After all, we’ve been able to properly integrate and control the electronic channels with CRM before, haven’t we? It should be no different for us to break this social media horse and saddle it. It should be simple, right?

Wrong. It’s not simple at all. We’re talking about the mother of all conversations here — social conversations, in existence since the primordial days, when man became first became a social animal.

We cannot saddle this horse of a conversation any more than J.R.R. Tolkein’s Rohirrim or Gandalf The White could have saddled Shadowfax — the Great Lord of the Horses, descendent of Felarof, of the race of the Mearas, the greatest of all horses of Tolkein’s Middle-Earth.

As it happens, Gandalf did ride Shadowfax — but not by dominating or saddling it. In the parlance of contemporary social media, he had to friend Shadowfax first, showing the respect due to a majestic beast capable of comprehending human speech. He spoke with the Great Lord of Horses — not to it. He gained Shadowfax’s trust, built a relationship of mutual respect (maybe even friendship), and cared for it as it did him.

Think of the Rohirrim as the traditional approach of businesses to media, the Mearas as the human tendency to converse, and Shadowfax as social media itself — the current descendant of the primordial need of man to converse in a social setting. Just as the Rohirrim could not control Shadowfax, the traditional CRM approach cannot control the conversations on social media. But Gandalf friended Shadowfax without trying to control it — and, as a result, each of them delivered value to the other. By the same token, a business may try to embrace the conversations on social media and add value to its customers.

So who does Gandalf represent in that scenario?

Gandalf is this new entity grown out of CRM that is able to integrate traditional CRM with the social media. Call it a strategy, a mindset, a philosophy, a technology — the reality is that this new entity may be some combination of all of those. This new way of building social relationships with each customer — relationships that go beyond the mere transactional level — is something we can call “Social CRM,” and it’s all about respecting the customer, having conversations, building trust, and contributing to value.

The value that Gandalf and Shadowfax created for each other and derived from their friendship is, in our terms, customer cocreation. Better men than me could guide you through that — I am only now beginning to get a glimpse of this new promised land of Undying Lands.

What does this mean from a technical point of view? It means integrating social media (and social networks) with the traditional CRM systems as a new channel. I have attempted to construct an explanation of this emerging Social CRM architecture in this presentation:

Without doubt, my framework for this architecture — like CRM’s Social Media Maturity Model — can be improved upon. I need your input for that, and look forward to it. :)

With extensive experience in CRM, business process management, quality assurance, and solutions & innovations management, Prem Kumar Aparanji leads the Social CRM/CRM 2.0 initiatives at Cognizant Technology Solutions. In addition to his deep interests in the social web and the free/libre and open-source technology movement, Aparanji also writes frequently on rice. On Twitter, where he appears as @prem_k, he’s commonly engaged in — and often leading — conversations using the #scrm hashtag for “social CRM.”