Social CRM

Welcome to our blog! We are the Social CRM team. We are responsible for delivering user-focused productivity applications that leverage the collective intelligence of the broader user community. These loosely coupled, SaaS enabled, social applications are designed to work the way people naturally do their work.

Through this blog we’ll discuss things that we know and feel passionately about like sales, end user experience, social networking, technology, web 2.0/enterprise 2.0, and CRM. The mission for our blog is to share information that will help make everyone (especially our target users like sales people) more productive. We hope to get your thoughts on what is important to you, what you like about our blog and products, and where we need to improve. And through our discussions, we hope to deliver with you products that meet your needs.

Let me tell you a little bit about how we got started. It was March 22, 2007 when I sat down with Anthony Lye for lunch to discuss his vision for a new kind of enterprise application. I had just returned to work from maternity leave and heard that Anthony had rejoined Oracle only a couple of days earlier. Immediately after we sat down in the Oracle 300 cafeteria, Anthony began to describe his vision to develop and deliver consumable social applications. Anthony explained that these applications will be driven by users, chosen by users, collaborative and social by design, built on standards, enable collaboration of relevant services, and promote user driven innovation. His vision was to deliver loosely coupled applications that do not require expensive upgrades and serve a specific need to help increase user productivity. What he said made so much sense. So when he asked if I wanted to build these applications at the end of our lunch conversation, little did I know what a wonderful and demanding ride this would be.

I have the good fortune of working with people who are committed to our mission – developing applications that really matter to the users and that help them be more productive. Here is a brief introduction to our product management team:

Tara Roberts leads the product management team for Social CRM
John Kim manages Oracle Sales Prospector
Arnie Espos manages Oracle Sales Campaigns
Alicia Wu manages Oracle Sales Library
Francisco Casas leads cross application functions like social networking, integrations, etc.
Richard Sands manages Sales.com development and other cross application functions
Bob Taylor is responsible for end user experience
Ching Lee assists with critical areas and facilitates cross team communications

We hope that this blog will introduce us to many of you…and give us a chance to meet via this blog and in person. This blog will serve as a way to share what we find interesting that hopefully you will find relevant. The opinions that are expressed on this blog are of the individuals expressing them and not necessarily of the broader Oracle community.

We are a small team dedicated to making a difference by developing applications that really matter to the users who are using them. Let us know what matters to you.

Hi, my name is John Kim. I am the product manager for Oracle Sales Prospector. I have been working very hard here in Redwood City to ship my product. Yes, I am almost at the finish line now. I am pleased to announce that we shipped Oracle Sales Prospector on June 30th.

In my spare(?) time between reviewing test results, and finalizing the training materials, time to time, I browse the web and look at press and blog articles on Oracle Sales Prospector that turn up on Google Alert. One article that caught my eyes was an article titled, “Problem with ‘Social’ CRM: Salespeople Want Commissions, not ‘Community' It suggests that the competitive nature of salespersons may hinder the adoption of social networks in the enterprise setting, making it difficult to sustain themselves in the long run. Having read the article, I hoed and hummed, came to understand why this issue was raised, and want to share some of my thoughts on that.

Even if some sales reps keep information close to their vest, a lot of information does get entered, either by them or by others, as a result of normal course of business in the enterprise. Sales reps do want to get paid and customers want to receive what they bought from those reps, so orders get created on the enterprise system for fulfillment. In addition, most companies keep information on their customers, and products. Furthermore, the company can set up the initial layer of enterprise social networks, based on the company formal work groups. They can be something like North American Sales, Oil and Gas Accounts Reps, etc. By knitting order, customer, and product information within these groups, the enterprise can assemble a large amount of information as a starting point for collaboration for its reps.

Yes, I see that salespersons may not actively seek out or offer help with one another. They may be the life of the party in real life, but the perfect wall flowers online. This is where the power of data mining by Oracle Data Mining comes in. The top salespersons leave their fingerprints all over the enterprise system in the form of closed orders. Similar to how Amazon.com makes recommends shoppers what they might like based on what products customers like them have purchased, Oracle Sales Prospector makes prospecting recommendations based on what the salesperson’s peers sold to customers similar to the ones he/she is going after. Here, as the similar shoppers would stay anonymous, so would the peer salespersons. By mimicking targeting moves by the top salespersons, an average salesperson can increase his/her own effectiveness. This enterprise-sponsored social learning network can accelerate the diffusion of best sales targeting practices within the enterprise.

If you can mimic dance on Dance Dance Revolution, play Aerosmith on Guitar Hero or follow Tiger’s moves on Golf Channel, you will see how an average sales rep can increase his/her win rate by mimicking the targeting techniques of the top salespersons. For an average person, this is much better than creating his own dance moves, would-be hit songs, and a first-tried golf stance. You can unleash your inner salesperson with Oracle Sales Prospector.

Oh, one more thing. Happy Canada Day to my friends up north, and Happy Fourth of July for us in the States! Later.

Hello everyone, I am Arnie Espos and I am the product manager for Oracle Sales Campaigns. Thank you for taking the time to visit this blog and I will endeavor to bring insightful commentary that is worth your valuable time.

Now most of us understand the benefits of email marketing. A good email marketing campaign can help you:

- Generate Repeat Sales
- Up-sell and Cross-sell Products and Services
- Drive Users to Make Purchases
- Increase Sales Velocity

I am not going to bore you with the benefits of email marketing since this has been discussed countless times over many years that email marketing has been with us. In fact email marketing is so ubiquitous that it has penetrated our pop culture. Who can forget Homer Simpson's line,

"mmmmm spaaam." - Homer Simpson

Yes, this gives you an indication of my television viewing habits. I like animation. But that is another subject.....Of course he was referrring to the the pork by-product, but SPAM is also email. So how do you elevate your email campaign above the other spam and noise?

An email campaign with a social network can enhance the benefits of email marketing by:

- Connecting people and building relationships across boundaries
- Provide an ongoing venue for knowledge exchange

Connecting people and building relationships across boundaries
For many organizations establishing ways to collaborate is an essential strategy. There are many tools we can use to collaborate or build a social business network, such as online/web meetings, phone calls, face-to-face meetings, conference calls. However these tools have boundaries that are not that obvious. Using email marketing in a social context allows users and their community to connect not necessarily in traditional ways at a meeting, conference call, etc. but in an unbounded manner. For example, I often find that someone who is shy in face-to-face meetings often comes out or is more expressive through asynchronous communications like email. The shy person, who normally would not connect in a real-time meeting is comes up with insight now expressed in a real-time meeting. The shy person is now a vibrant contributor and contributor to your network. Why? When people can connect asynchronously this gives them time to digest material and form a well thought out response.

Providing an ongoing venue for knowledge exchange
This benefit is obvious to many marketers. Email marketers have many tools to manage the effectiveness of their campaigns. However, what many lack are tools for continuous improvement. Yes, you receive feedback from recipients, but what about peers? A peer often gives feedback and insight that in a vacuum you would not have considered. A peer can review your campaign, rate it, comment on it, offer suggestions, and potentially offer or share their version of the same campaign. Now multiply this exchange over many users within your network, over many campaigns, and you have an ongoing venue to share knowledge, experience, insight, to evolve the effectiveness of your campaigns.

So consider what an email marketing campaign along with a social network can do for you. This much we know, that within a company a well-tuned online social network can enhance a company's collective knowledge and sharpen its ability to act on what people know in time to be effective. We have long recognized that that networking is critical to an organization. How many problems have been resolved, products designed, status reports were done in a meeting around the proverbial water cooler? Creating these opportunities to connect is often the stated or unstated purpose of facilitated off-site meetings, and other communication initiatives. However, the half-life of connections made at these off-site or water-cooler meetings is often very short until social applications provided us with a means to support the network over time and make us more effective.

There must be more benefits and insights than what I have offered here. Let this be a start to evolving our conversation.

The first generation CRM applications suffer from three fundamental flaws, which have resulted in much lower user acceptance of CRM than projected by their vendors.

First, the consideration that sales reps are elective users of CRM applications is generally completely missing. Sales reps made their quotas before the CRM term even existed and have continued to make their numbers while CRM applications continue to provide little “personal value” to the sales rep.

Second, the assumption that reps would be willing to enter volumes of data without penalties from their management and get little in return from the system is mostly off the mark.

Third, dealmakers, like sales reps, are the most social of people. Yet, although some CRM implementations acknowledge that sales reps work in teams, the vendors completely missed implementing extensive social, collaborative mechanisms that allow for the best skilled people and most useful content to emerge.

Some CRM applications tack on business intelligence (BI) to show pretty dashboards of how things are. This is very valuable for sales managers, but typical BI implementations do not add value to the individual sales rep trying to make their quota.

Social Intelligence (SI) is the notion of analyzing data collected from a group of people allowing visibility into past and future behaviors in a social group, but adjusted with the anecdotal knowledge of the individual sales reps. This allows the social network to adjust the behavior of the application itself while users of the social network benefit from the members. To sales reps, this means that they benefit from the collective intelligence of their peers, while at the same time reducing the burden of heavy data entry by high value people like sales reps. This has the significant potential to personal value to the next generation of CRM consumers.

How can social networks help sales reps? Social networks do not have a rigid form of any kind. So, social networks can be created to mimic sales territories, or sales reps can choose to form their own social networks of the top sales reps, or their peers that sell similar products. The social groupings can be endless. Reps can belong to any number of social networks and should be able to leverage multiple social networks to achieve their objectives.

Social intelligence can help individual sales reps identify prospects. How can this be? Social intelligence allows predictive analytics to propose new prospects to the sales reps. These techniques can be as simple as what shopping sites do when they propose items to purchase or as sophisticated as understanding the customer well. Social intelligence then takes things further by allowing the predictive engine to adapt to the behavior of the social network by capturing the anecdotal knowledge and behavior of the sales reps to improve the proposed products. Moreover, social intelligence should be able to account for current events such as social movements within a company like when a sponsor leaves the company or catastrophic events such as Katrina occur.

The promise of social intelligence is significant. It allows sales reps to leverage each other to achieve their numbers. It treats sales reps as elective users by providing them personal value. It allows the most successful sales reps to identify hidden prospects quicker. It allows less successful sales reps the ability to leverage the expertise of overachievers.

The timing for Social Intelligence is almost at the perfect storm pitch: Business Intelligence is well developed, social networking is taking off for enterprise use, Web 2.0 techniques are getting more advanced, and companies are realizing that sales reps are indeed, social and elective users of computing.

In future posts, I’ll drill down on other use cases for social intelligence.

Regards,

Francisco

How many times did we hear in the late 1990’s and the early part of this decade the term “content is king?” Back then, it was about content for portals. Today, it is about the Social Web.

There are many sites managing different types of content: YouTube for video, Slideshare.net for presentations, and several hundreds, if not thousands more.

In the enterprise some of those sites matter. YouTube allows people to post useful materials like training videos, marketing videos for external viral consumption. Slideshare.net allows people to virally distribute presentations from conferences, other events, and even ideas.

In the enterprise, there is a plethora of content management systems. However, what is missing from the web and content management tools is the marrying of content assembly that leverages the collective intelligence of social networks.

Enterprise Social Network vendors are starting to crop up. A number of them focus on Web 2.0 characteristics of content as the key element of their Enterprise Social Network strategy. This is important, but surely not the sole driver of social networks for the enterprise. Content in the Social Web isn’t just about collecting content with Web 2.0 characteristics; it’s about adding social intelligence to that content. The market as a whole is not there yet.

Corporate workers, like sales reps, want to be able to leverage the best content to assemble that winning presentation or proposal. By leveraging the collective intelligence of your peers you can infer their knowledge into your winning presentations. We all do that today, but looking for the high quality material is a time consuming manual task.

Tools for corporate users must allow them to find the best and most frequently content like slides, and then to assemble those slides into that winning presentation with minimal effort on their part. Searches for the slides need to result in content that is time bound for relevance, of high quality, contextual for the situation and highly focused for the targeted customer. For example, I may want to find presentations on Green Tech that where published in the last 6 months, has a rating of 4 out of 5 stars or better and that my target audience has expressed interest in.

Once those winning presentations are put together people will want to share them with their corporate colleagues, partners and best of all, their customers.

Content is indeed king, but it has to be easy for high value users to leverage that content, not just find it and sift through it for hours on end.

Alicia

Hi,
I’m Richard, I’m the Product Owner for the infrastructure behind the Social CRM products. Working in IT I’m used to people’s faces glazing over after they ask what I do, but I hoped working on social networking products might change this. It did, just not as I expected, the reaction I get most now is “isn’t that for kids?”.

I suppose I should have expected this, the biggest user of social networking in my household is my young daughter. For her these sites are just a natural part of her daily life. My generation's more used to performing it’s social networking without the aid of computers. I’ve been using social networking sites of some form or another since 2001 when I joined friendsreunited. However I don’t use them to anything like the extent my daughter does. Of my friends that have tried out social networking sites most seem to have followed the same experience:
1. Initial interest as they register and explore the site’s capabilities.
2. Find a few friends and link up with them.
3. Don't find enough friends for the site to work as a social hub, so the account becomes dormant.

This is confirmed by some research by Ofcom in the UK which showed that 78% of adults interviewed didn’t use Social Network sites.

So if the majority your friends aren't active users of social networks this raises the question: How can I get my friends active in my social network? And this often changes to whether there’s any point to social network sites if can’t?

One approach to getting your friends active in your social network is discussed by Ed Yourdon in his blog. Ed suggests that in the future social networks will be as ubiquitous as mobile phones are today. Although I agree with Ed that we should be evangelising social networks and encouraging their use, I'm not agreed with Ed's conclusion that right now there’s no hope for persistent non-adopters or his suggestion of leaving them out of his social circle. This is too extreme for me, I’d prefer my social life to be driven by my personal bonds rather than software adoption.

Despite my best attempts I still can’t get all my techno-phobe friends to jump on the social networking bandwagon, but I want to keep then part of my life, so what can social networking sites offer me. Well I’ve found three options that have helped, admittedly with varying degrees of success.

Social Aggregators
One problem is that there’s multiple separate social networking sites, and you’ll probably have different friends on different sites. Right now different social networking sites are largely run as separate islands. So if you have some friends hooked on Facebook, and others addicted to MySpace then what can you do? Well, until the walls between the sites come down aggregators such as spokeo and friendfeed can let you track friends across multiple social networking sites, and also to update multiple sites in one action.
If you're interested Stan Schroder has published a list of aggregators, but it is a bit out of date now.

Specialist Groups
Although I can’t run my social life on the web, I have been running aspects of it on the web for a while now. I’m a keen mountain biker and I go online to keep in touch with an open group of like-minded souls in my local area. This way I can always find someone to go out for a ride with. It’s much easier to get a small group of friends with a shared interest to link up online. And I’ve found that this can lead on to wider things, the small mountain biking site I use now has some facebook integration so I can link it into wider social networks.

So if you have a pastime you share with friends encourage them to join a social networking site. It will only take a few to get that critical mass. If you're really keen then Ning is an amazing site that will let you easily create you own social networking site dedicated to whatever you want, but that's worth a post of it's own.

Business
Like many these days my business contacts are global. Most of them are also very computer literate. My business network is also more extended than my immediate friends and family. All of which are factors which encourage social networking.

I’ve found business networks like LinkedIn and Plaxo to be more than just job-hunting tools (although they can be very good for this). I use them for finding ex-colleagues I've lost touch with, and for keeping track of what ex-colleagues are doing. It gives me an easy way to link up with people when I find I'm in their area. It also gives me an extensive network of resources to draw upon when I need help. I don't need a social network site to do all of these things, but it makes it much easier.

If you're unconvinced then LinkedIntelligence maintains a list of 100+ Smart Ways to Use LinkedIn.

So even if your friends view their cellphones as new-fangled, and computers as a fad, there is still hope. The social networking sites available today have enough to offer to provide real benefit for most of us. And if you're still not convinced then the social networking sites of tomorrow look set to convince you.