Social CRM

Listed below are sessions on Social CRM and Sales Productivity during Oracle Open World 2009.  We hope to see you there! 

S311891: CRM Innovations for Sales Productivity
Presenters: Mandeep Bhullar, Brian Kelly, Tarak Patel, Oracle
Learn more about how Oracle Sales Prospector mines your past sales data and intelligently identifies quality leads, enabling Sales to sell more effectively and efficiently; Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps enables you to build CRM gadgets without any programming knowledge; and the new integration with IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook enable you to manage your CRM data in the desktop applications your users already use.
Monday 10/12/2009 16:00 - 17:00 Moscone West Room 2010

S310763: Social CRM Applications: Strategy Overview and Road Map
Presenter: Mark Woollen, Oracle
Learn how organizations can use Oracle's social CRM applications to improve business results and build engaging customer relationships.
Tuesday 10/13/2009 11:30 - 12:30 Moscone West Room 2009

S310771: Harness the Intelligence in Your Social Networks with Social Applications
Presenter: Tara Roberts, Oracle
Oracle's social CRM applications are the tools sales professionals need in order to boost their productivity and results through the productivity social networks of their peers.
Tuesday 10/13/2009 13:00 - 14:00 Moscone West Room 2009

S310746: Optimizing Sales with Oracle CRM On Demand
Presenters: Chris Haven, Oracle; Matthieu Jusserand, Carlson Wagonlit Travel
Come to this session to learn how customers are using new capabilities in Oracle CRM On Demand to increase revenue, reduce costs, and make more members of the sales team peak performers.
Wednesday 10/14/2009 10:15 - 11:15 Moscone West Room 2001

S311006: Improve Margins with Oracle CRM On Demand or Siebel Deal Management
Speakers: Tarak Patel,Billy Turchin, Oracle
In this session, learn how to strategically manage price to increase margins throughout the deal lifecycle with Oracle CRM On Demand Deal Management and Siebel Deal Management.
Wednesday 10/14/2009 10:15 - 11:15 Moscone West Room 3016

S310782: Mobility Solutions and Road Map for Siebel CRM and Oracle CRM On Demand
Presenters: Raj Aggarwal, Hody Crouch, Oracle
See how Siebel Mobile solutions, Siebel Handheld, Siebel Wireless, and Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant can be used to improve efficiency and effectiveness within your organization.
Wednesday 10/14/2009 11:45 - 12:45 Moscone West Room 2009

S310773: Sharing Content through Social Networks to Boost Productivity
Presenters: Eric Ho, Alicia Wu, Oracle
This session highlights key capabilities of Oracle Sales Library and Oracle Sales Campaigns to empower your sales and marketing professionals with the collective knowledge of their social networks.
Thursday 10/15/2009 09:00 - 10:00 Moscone West Room 2009

S311019: Siebel Sales: Strategy and Overview
Presenter: Rajit Joseph, Oracle
The presentation focuses on Siebel Sales and provides information on the latest product releases, updated road maps, and customer successes across industries.
Thursday 10/15/2009 10:30 - 11:30 Moscone West Room 2009

Registered attendees can pre-enroll in these sessions. If you haven't registered yet, it's not too late!

Oracle social CRM applications release 3 is now available and includes the release of Oracle CRM Sales Campaigns On Demand and enhancements to Oracle CRM Sales Library On Demand and Oracle CRM Sales Prospector On Demand. The newest release of Oracle social CRM applications enables increased collaboration and sales effectiveness, resulting in higher productivity, shorter sales cycle and increased sales. Oracle social CRM applications take advantage of each user's social relationships to build a larger collective community with which to share, learn, and interact. Sales users are able to get a quick view of activities in their social networks such as recently published content and posting from other members.

With Oracle CRM Sales Campaigns On Demand, users can determine the best email templates and images to adopt based on user ratings, reviews and historical response rates. Sales users can create and send professional quality HTML campaigns and track the success of individual campaigns. Sales users can manage their contacts and groups for targeted campaigns. They can also honor customers' preferences to opt-out of receiving emails and comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and other privacy and marketing laws. Sales users can harness the collective experience of their networks to create effective sales campaigns with Oracle Sales Campaigns On Demand.

Oracle CRM Sales Library On Demand allows users to easily share, search, preview, and select content from a collection of sales assets to build more successful, targeted presentations and messages. In Oracle social CRM release 3, Oracle CRM Sales Library On Demand introduces many exciting capabilities, including integration with Oracle CRM On Demand Release 16. Oracle CRM Sales Library On Demand also extends its support for different document types. This release makes available a powerful new feature that enforces compliance with crucial access policies. Enhancements to tags, filters and upload have also been introduced in this release. Sales users can spend more time in front of their customers and less time looking for content by leveraging winning sales assets that exist in their social networks.

Oracle CRM Sales Campaign On Demand, Oracle CRM Sales Library On Demand and Oracle CRM Sales Prospector On Demand can be accessed at www.sales.com.

The rise of social networks like Twitter and Facebook has given customers new channels to express their opinions. Customers are increasingly using these channels to vent their anger or deliver glory to a product/service. A significant growth in unique visitors to these social networks when compared to mainstream news site like cnn.com has prompted businesses to take notice and start to use these channels.

Incorrect information that persists on net can be perceived as the truth. The information gets replicated and if businesses do not actively address the issue, the perception can start to feel like the truth. Take the case of the Irish student who as part of a social experiment added a fake quote to Wikipedia about a composer that then got published in various newspapers around the world. Everybody believed it to be the truth, until the student emailed the newspapers about the fake quote.

In a recent article about using Twitter for Business, the author lays out five use cases.

1. Voice of the Customer – Listen to what customers are talking about a product or a service. Companies can use the Twitter search or more sophisticated tools like monitter.com to listen when customers talk.

2. Proactive Customer Service – The next step is to act when customers complain or experience bad customer service. Pro-actively addressing the concerns raised can help restore some of the negativity in the marketplace the tweets generate.

3. Recruitment – The author makes a case that Twitter can be used as a recruitment tool by companies for future employees. I am not too sure that this can actually work but as per him some companies are doing this.

4. Customer feedback – Once you create a following on Twitter, you can use this channel to gather feedback on your products. You can direct customers to use web based tools like SurveyMonkey and gather the feedback.

5. Viral Marketing – The social nature of Twitter can be used as a channel in a campaign. The idea is not to run your campaign on Twitter but to integrate into the campaign as a channel.

Lots of companies have started using Twitter for business including British Airways and American Honda. A list of them can be found at the socialbrandindex. It’s become vitally important to listen to the customer and to gather feedback. Whether Twitter or Facebook were a medium to satisfy that requirement was a question in many people’s mind. To twit or not to twit. That was the question. Not anymore.

I watched a talk given by Seth Godin over the weekend. Seth described the inadequacies of broadcast marketing, specifically as it relates to television. The volume of information that is available and pushed on people everyday means that people have less time per topic to deal with the incoming flood of information. The average person has become very good at ignoring the average subject.

In the end, whether a business or personal conversation, I don’t want to broadcast to the average person and risk being ignored. I want to have a discussion with people who share the same interests and passions: friends, innovators, early adopters, hyper-influencers; people who want information and want to participate in the conversation. If I can succeed in establishing a rapport with this group, they will in turn influence their friends, co-workers and their social media followers.

Near the end of Seth’s talk, I finally noticed one of the footnotes next to the video: Filmed in 2003. I was shocked – he seems to be describing the role of social media today, yet this was long before Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other players shaped how I get information. The influence of social technologies is not a solution looking for a problem, but they are addressing a real problem with communication today.

Social media has done several things to make it easier to communicate:
• Enabled individuals to participate in the conversation, not just the marketing machines of television, print, website owners
• Enabled individuals to subscribe or follow people, groups and topics they are interested in. Contrast this with email where you are deciding what the audience is interested in. With email you can deliver the message to specific people, but there’s a good chance it will be ignored.
• Simplified the means of conversation. The free form nature of blog posts means we don’t need to conform to a preset communication format. The 140 character limit on twitter or other micro-blogging forums may seem like a constraint, but it makes it focus in the message and not the format.

“When you give people easier ways to share information, more good things will happen. This quote, and the title of this post, is from Evan Williams, CEO and Founder of Twitter. Social media enables a conversation with an engaged audience; this is a good thing for your business.

Long time, no write. Last time I wrote, in "Following the Footsteps of the Top Sales Reps" I wrote about the use of social input in prospecting leads in sales. That use case involved analyzing structured data for socially-tuned sales recommendations. Outside the sales domain, social applications are making increasingly significant impact in how we live, connect with one another, make decisions, and solve problems. People, or at least my peers, have become much more trusting and reliant on social input available on the internet.

For example, I am listening to Pandora on my Blackberry as I write. Pandora on Blackberry rocks. It is an innovation that clearly disrupts iTunes and iPod. With Pandora, I am letting people like me to refine and play the songs that I might like. Does this mean I trust my peers more than myself? Perhaps. By partaking in the voting process, I can also give back to the community as well as to myself. It is a good thing Apple has added a recommendation feature.

In another example, in the customer support arena, when getting answers to everyday issues, Yahoo Answers is a great way to zero in on the best solutions. Yahoo Answers is a fantastic site that motivates community members to
provide answers to one another by awarding points and reputation levels for activities.

Companies are starting to take note and have introduced similar capabilities to engage their customers. In the customer support arena, Samsung has such an example. I have actually "enjoyed" debugging issues with Samsung technicians and other Samsung owners on CNET's Samsung forum. I enjoyed being in the virtual company of the people who have run into similar issues. More often a lurker than an active poster, I benefited from referencing solutions eventually arrived at by the original posters.

In addition to purpose-built web 2.0-inspired enterprise sites, micro-blogging sites like Twitter also provide opportunities for companies can listen to, and possibly, have conversations with, their current and target customer segments.

Speaking of listening to the crowd, I found this New York Times piece on Twitter words used during this year's Super Bowl very interesting. As people use their favorite channels to express themselves and converse with others, companies can set up listening posts to discern changes in sentiments, and shifts in perceptions and preferences in their target demographic segments.

It is almost dinner time. I wonder where that Kogi truck is headed. Ah, 4100 in Silverlake. Too bad I am more than 300 miles away. I will plant some key words in my tweets. Maybe the Kogi truck guys will hear me. My geotag should say NorCal.

I started work as part of the Oracle Social CRM applications PM team immediately after OOW 2008. Prior to joining, I discussed the opportunity with a few non-Oracle folks:

Here are a few snippets:
- "Sounds innovative…this doesn't sound like Oracle..." - a friend who founded a B-B start-up (that failed)
- "Social apps...like Facebook for Oracle?!...crazy..." - my niece who is an IT consultant for one of those Firms
- "Invite me when you get the application going...I’ll be your friend…MySpace-like, right?" - an ex-consultant co-worker

Anyway, I further described the applications’ intention of leveraging social information (e.g. blogs, wikis, ratings) to create more engaging and meaningful relationships between customers and a companies/products. I mentioned that the applications are envisioned to: require no training, be innovative and functional, and be sexy in appearance. I left out "sexy" when I was discussing this with my niece though. In the end, the folks above, as well as others, seemed genuinely excited about the idea/opportunity and for me!

From an application vision perspective, believe Oracle’s Social CRM vision epitomizes hockey legend, Wayne Gretzy’s quote: "Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is."

A coworker also asked, "Do you really believe in this Social CRM thing?”. I said, "I do...". I didn't tell my wife I said that though...

I've always like the quote from Mark Twain "I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead". At first it didn't seem to make sense. Then I realised it's an observation that the better you understand something, the more succinctly you can express it. So unless you take the time to think about the contents before you write a letter it's liable to be a long meandering letter. It also implies that the short letter is superior to the long one. Except of course he said it much more concisely than I have.

This applies to software too, possibly even more so, there's a great article by Andriy Solovey applying it to software development. I believe it applies just as much to software's functionality.

I've spent years working on traditional Enterprise CRM & ERP packages, huge, immensely powerful software suites with a staggering range of functionality. But their very size and complexity is also their biggest hurdle to adoption in that they're difficult to implement and maintain, and their flexibility makes it hard to realise their potential benefits. This syndrome doesn't only apply to big business software, I've recently given rein to my inner geek and replaced my PVR, DVD, CD et al with an HTPC where I run some wonderful software called Media Portal to drive all my TV and audio. This should be digital nirvana, and to me it is as it keeps me entertained for hours. But this is because I'm busy tweaking it, installing plugins, and otherwise trying to get it to work as I think it should, and for some reason the rest of my family don't find this entertaining at all, they don't want all the bells and whistles they just want to watch the telly.

What's this got to do with Social CRM? Well I think it offers an interesting perspective when applied to sucessful social networking sites. The sucessful ones aren't normally the biggest most feature-rich web sites around, they're more focussed on doing a smaller number of things but doing them well. When they do seem to offer wide functionality it's normally though some form of add-in such as the plethora of facebook apps rather then core functionality (and it's interesting to see how facebook's recent redesign put the core social functions to the fore at the expense of those other apps). The most extreme example must be Twitter which does nothing more than allow users to post 140 character updates to anyone interested, yet seems to be taking over the world.

Socialising is part of our everyday existance. Social networking software needs to make it easier for us to do this if it's to have any value. Complex processes don't help this they hinder it. It's always tempting to add new functionality, and techies always like more options to play with. But with software, and perhaps especiallty with Web 2.0 software,we always need to keep focussed on making the core functionality just right. For me this means not being afraid to stop doing and spend more time thinking.

But this blog's probably far too long already, so there's just room to mention a delicious update to Mark Twain's message you can find at XKCD which says it better than I ever could - and with much fewer words ;)

As many of you have no doubt realised by now, we moderate any comments we receive on the Social CRM blog. After my last blog entry I received a number of comments, some genuine and some not. One of those false comments did however make me think, so I reproduce it below. I have to say that the following is a fake, it is not a genuine comment attributable to the claimed source, which I have removed:

"We have a managerial retention problem and low customer satisfaction. I can see Social CRM playing a big part in my organisation to turn things. How would you start deploying Social CRM in a large, disillusioned and potentially dangerous organisation? Thanks, Mike"

Simply knowing that your customers (or, supporters) are unhappy does not address the reason why. The attitude of the company (or club) and its officials must be oriented toward dealing with the feedback, both positive and negative. This of course is not a new problem, but the increasing take-up of social networking actually means that these issues can be made far more public than before. An advantage of the social network in the above case would have been to bring the knowledge to the organisation faster. This is only an advantage if the organisation is prepared to deal with the information, of course.

I am currently in the market for a new bathroom after a weekend of serious demolition (I can wholeheartedly recommend Makita power tools & the Red Hot Chili Peppers for your demolition needs). Many of those that know me will understand I just can’t help myself – if it’s there, then it’s there to be knocked down and reduced to so much dust and rubble. Anyway, prior to the destruction phase, I was doing a little research into the sort of bathroom I wanted and found a range I thought would suit.

Now, this may be old-fashioned, but I like to see what I’m buying, so I found this manufacturer has a web site upon which was a link for stockists; but it was “coming soon”. The warning should have been there, any company who ultimately sells products to the public and has a web site, needs to get the basics right. Frankly, being able to see and touch the product is pretty basic, hence a principle requirement should be to have a working stockist list, integrated preferably to be kept up to date.

Not to be deterred, I pinged off an email to the “contact us” link and carried on thinking about important things like pipe sizes, software and integration technologies. After a few days, I realised there had not been a reply to my enquiry – another one of the basics that really does need to work. At this stage, my thinking was more along the lines of “this manufacturer really should not have a web site at all”, rather than “where can I buy this stuff”. Anyway, I called the phone number on the same “contact us” page and actually got to speak to a real person and very nice she was too. So I came away from the phone with a list of local places that I could go to and see the product. It wasn’t even that hard for her, there was a list of postal codes and associated resellers. I should have taken the opportunity to see why it was I had to phone for this basic information, but at the time there were too many other distractions to get into a protracted conversation about email and web sites. At this point, we are still talking Web 1.0 and have not even gotten into social and other Web 2.0 aspects.

So, the important thing here is that the company needs to service the communication channels on offer. The thing with email is that it is easily ignored, it’s not like the customer or prospect is stood there in the shop after all. By introducing social networking into this means a public discussion can be had and that in itself means there should be more motivation on the part of the supplier. Of course, without the will to address it, where is the point?

Implementing socially orientated software is a strategy and not software alone. Like pretty much any other software tool, the hearts and minds of its users must be on-board with the idea. But in the case of “social” software, even the hearts and minds of those that do not use the software can be necessary for success:
- whose job is it to “monitor” the conversations
- what action should be taken, if any and by whom (they may not be a user)
- how should the social metadata be interpreted

The list could go on and on. The point is, don’t ignore the non-software aspect because ultimately the software is a tool and the people do the business.

As a footnote to this, I actually prefer dealing directly with people as opposed to email, forums, etc. I appear to be one of the few that laments the passing of the human travel agent to be replaced with a travel portal. But then that’s me and at this point I really should say that these are my opinions and not necessarily those of Oracle Corporation.

There are different schools of thought on what makes a true SaaS provider. Some believe that the first level of multi-tenancy where all the customers reside on a single instance down to the database schema level is the real SaaS provider. Others believe in a more hybrid approach that allows the customer to choose whether they want to reside in the same instance as other customers or prefer to have their own instance. At the end of the day, if I am a customer do I really care which SaaS model is implemented by the provider as long as the provider secures my data and ensures system uptime and performance that my business demands. Of course, there might be exceptions where for privacy reasons a customer might want his own instance.

This leads to the other point, which is if I am starting a SaaS company, what would be my strategy. Should I take a top down approach and build the applications to SaaS standards or should I take a bottoms-up approach and design my SaaS foundation/infrastructure first and then design my apps to run on this foundation. I would think the latter would be more beneficial since once you lay your foundation, it’s more difficult to change. The level of abstraction as one move up the stack to the applications makes it easier to change.

So, then the real debate about who is a true SaaS provider should not be about the level of multi-tenancy but more about which provider can give me the uptime, performance, security and application functionality . Not that the multi-tenancy debate is less interesting or compelling but all it does is make for a good discussion.

That brings us to the core of SaaS which is the foundation as I call it. The foundation constitutes not just the infrastructure but also the shared components that are built on top of the infrastructure which the applications can consume. I will delve on the layers of SaaS foundation in my next blog. Until then, be safe, be SaaS-y.

This is my first blog, and I had a hard time thinking of what I should write about. I have never blogged before because I am not sure what is there I can bring value to. At the same time, I’m looking at the social networking sites that I participate in, and what value do I get out of it. I do not have time to search for what I need or read a lot of information. So what value does social networks bring?

Obviously, social networking have different values to different people. So how can a social network bring value to the masses so that more people will join and participate.

I look at how I use social networks. I think the key is to not target the masses but to target only those that brings value to them. I look at how I use LinkedIn. It is a great network but what do I do after adding these contacts to my contact list and joining social groups. For me, I didn’t find much use for it as an engineer. After awhile, I have stopped checking it or updating it. But for another friend who’s business is in consulting and trying to grow his business, it became a valuable tool for him to try to network his way into a company. He has gotten some business from networking with different people.

For me, a social network will bring value when it can aggregate all the information to me and forecast what I will like to know based upon my interests. Bringing attention to news or information that I would be interested in learning. Show me all the topics, blogs and etc that most interest me daily and refresh it based upon my participation during the previous week. In other words, push the data to me so I don’t have to mine it in the networks. I would like a social network that will help me find connections, interests, information that is relevant for me instead of me having to mine that data.

The value of social networking is to help find data that interest me the most and constantly keep me up to date on the latest changes that is of value to me. Social networks should be able to adopt to different ways that the users uses the network. It should provide multi-dimensional interaction instead of a contact list. I want to be able to network with people outside of my network, outside the country that I live in and speaking a language that I can’t understand.

What else do I look for in a social network? I look for the one that is easy to use. That provide good search capability so I can easily find information that I need. I am not interested in contact networking, but more of mining data from the network. I look for the ones with cool interface that keeps me intrigued and a mobile application is a plus.

So how does it keep me in and not lose me? Continuous innovation with new capabilities, more topics, integration to other networks. Find it all in one place so I keep coming back to it as a starting point.

At the end of the day, it is the people and content that makes a social network successful. So an innovative network that provides tools to help bring knowledgeable experts to the network and retain them to actively participate in the network.