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

Monday, February 15, 2010

I was in the U.S. last week. The journey from Bangalore to Washington, D.C., in itself was quite interesting: A three-hop journey (BLR-DBX-ATL-IAD) that took away ~32 hours of my life, but since I traveled west (& I gained time) I really lost only about 21 hours.

(Yeah, I know, convoluted. This is similar to that guy Louis Wu in the Ringworld series who kept traveling west to extend his 200th-birthday celebrations!)

The reason I was in the U.S. was to “evangelize” social CRM. But before I got to tell parables of The Customer Gospels to the flock, I went for my baptism by the Pope of Social CRM — Paul Greenberg. :)

OK, enough with clichés and cryptic ranting.

I came to the U.S. to attend what became known as the #SCRMSummit and follow it up with meetings with my peers, clients & partners to discuss & get things done around social CRM.

I got more than I bargained for. Caught in Washington, D.C.’s worst blizzard in more than a century, I spent the days cooped up with other thought leaders, analysts, consultants, systems integrators, vendors & practitioners of social CRM. There were 68 of us and, if you hated social CRM, this was the place to obliterate it. (Sorry, you missed the chance — though we’ve been talking about it for weeks now.)

The story of what ended up happening continues after the jump.

The blizzard was ultimately for the good (barring some set backs, such as the absence of Esteban Kolsky). The original venue was closed. At the last minute, however, the venue shifted to the hotel itself where most of us were put up. That gave us all a LOT of time to catch up after the classroom sessions. Breakfast, lunch, dinner … all were in the company of these brilliant brains & great friends.

I will only say that it was AWESOME to finally get to meet all the folks with whom I had been conversing all these months within the social space & it was really really great to meet Paul Greenberg in real space! We were all acting like a bunch of school kids meeting after the summer break. The only regret? We didn’t have a group photo & I didn’t get autographs of all these folks! :(

Read more about the event, our learnings & our feelings from Brian Vellmure, Brent Leary & Kathy Herrmann.

From this highly intellectual dosage of futuristic concepts around social CRM, I had to shift my focus to the realities of life and actually think about getting a few wins around social CRM. Social media is relatively easy, but maturing that to social CRM is tougher. When you look at the whole “social” thing through an SCRM lens, you need to consider organizational vision, mission, goals, objectives, etc.:

• Align the organizational structure (which may require extensive restructuring), and change the organizational culture.
• Develop new metrics/key performance indicators based on the goals (not the other way ’round, please — always have the goals in mind first).
• Figure out the channels (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube, etc.) where one needs to concentrate on.
• Figure out what to do in those channels: Listen? Engage? Influence? Get newer systems set up, get things integrated (multichannel, cross-channel, closed-loop, etc.).
• Set governance in place.
• Build policies for the employees.
• Educate them.
• Synergize with the ecosystem. To produce the best benefit, you need the process of becoming social to extend beyond the business, encompassing partners, vendors, distributors, etc.

But how to put the above in a structured way, so that enterprises can lap it up easily?

That’s my next challenge.

As Mike Boysen says — and Esteban, too — I need to dumb them down, make them simpler. (I still get asked if it’s OK to integrate the tweets & other user-generated content from the social Web into the enterprise, considering the privacy issues, etc.)

If this were Graham Hill, I’d have to learn Cognitive Fluency. ;)

[Editors' Note: This blogpost first appeared on Prem Kumar Aparanji's own blog. The editors appreciate his generosity in allowing us to mirror it here. Aparanji can be found on Twitter as @prem_k.]