Ombud is still in beta form, but registered users can already submit reviews, statistics and more about anything and everything in the social CRM field.

Ombud intends to eventually cover other fields in the IT industry. But for now, it hopes its user-driven offering will become the go-to venue for advice and observations, supplanting the thoughts of paid analysts like those at Gartner.

The product review section at Ombud already features 366 products, with most of them related to social CRM, including software suites and services such as Salesforce’s Radian6. Most of the products haven’t been reviewed yet, but web pages already illustrate how users can provide details on a product’s strengths and weaknesses.

Ombud takes a poke at research companies by remarking on its site how its industry research is “transparent.” Computerworld is even wondering if Ombud could one day take down Gartner.

Users of Ombud must use real names and their accounts can be tied to their LinkedIn profiles. The site promises to vet its user community with the hope of keeping commentary pure.

But it’s going to have to wait a couple of releases before it shows up in the business application giant’s CRM product.

While Microsoft released Activity Feeds, a Facebook-like social networking program, with Dynamics CRM last year, but that is used primarily for internal collaboration. Meanwhile, the forthcoming release, which is scheduled for availability in the second quarter, focuses on multi-device and multi-browser support.

The fall release, however, will feature integration into public-facing social networks like Facebook and Twitter for customer service processes as well as LinkedIn and InsideView integrations into sales, CRM executives said.

While there were few details on the Twitter and Facebook integration with customer service — and those are areas Salesforce.com, SAP and RightNow already provide — executives were happy to show off the LinkedIn and InsideView features, something we haven’t seen much of from other enterprise CRM vendors.

InsideView feeds social media information, news and other data about leads and opportunities into the CRM system and is available as an add-on by most major CRM providers. However, with the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the fall, it will come free and integrated out of the box.

The LinkedIn integration essentially serves up LinkedIn Premium from within the CRM application. Sales reps will be able to click on a lead or opportunity and, through the LinkedIn network and the TeamLink feature, determine if someone else in the organization knows that person to help with an introduction. LinkedIn could also potentially be used to hunt for prospects, without leaving Dynamics CRM.

“This is basically taking premium LinkedIn and wiring it directly into CRM,” Craig Dewar, director of Microsoft Dynamics CRM said. “[Sales reps are] probably doing it in LinkedIn premium today but they’re not tracking all that information in CRM.”

Microsoft Windows 8 Samsung tablet wins out over iPad?

Microsoft was also eager to show off a customized CRM application for Windows 8 on the Samsung tablet at the event.

New Belgium Brewery's Microsoft CRM Beer Ranger app

The New Belgium Brewery, makers of Fat Tire Ale, among other brews, recently began piloting a program with its “Beer Rangers.” The Beer Rangers act not only as salespeople, calling on bars, restaurants and liquor stores in their territory, but also act as quality control, testing taps, lines and generally making sure the beer is prepared and served correctly. They need to sample it to ensure it tastes the same in all locations.

If that job wasn’t hard enough already, now they have shiny new tablets to access the CRM system. Designed in conjunction with a pilot of 10 Beer Rangers and Sonoma Partners, a Microsoft partner, the application is stripped down to show only what the employees need. That includes custom images for the type of business that they call on (bottles for liquor stores, glasses for bars and restaurants), pictures of key decision makers at client locations and a fairly standard Google Maps mashup directing them to nearby clients when they’re out on the road.

Additionally, the app lets them access quality assurance documentation and the Samsung tablet lets them take and share pictures of the places they visit. Rangers capture things like creative marketing displays within the CRM application or post pictures from events to the brewery’s Facebook page. The mapping, GPS and camera capabilities of smartphones and tablets is something sales organizations are beginning to take advantage of.

Perhaps the biggest draw for Microsoft: The Beer Rangers chose to build out its application on the Windows 8 tablet instead of Apple’s iOS and iPad.

CRM practitioners are serious people with stressful jobs. So, to depart from the everyday challenges as a way to wrap up 2011, SearchCRM posed a light-hearted question to several marketing, IT and social media folks.  We discovered our share of hopefuls and humorists.  When asked what they would wish for if they were given a magic wand and could make just one CRM wish, here’s what they conjured up:

Chris James, director of social media at General Nutrition Centers

A loyalty program with automated rewards for online referrals, positive mentions and content sharing, tied to a data warehouse of customer interactions, shopping behavior and transactions. That’s not asking too much, right?

Bill Hicks, senior vice president and CIO at Ultimate Software

I would have seamless integration amongst SaaS platforms that was secure and simple to implement.  This integration would provide the user community a powerful platform to be productive, while not be tied to suite platforms.

Michael English, vice president of customer contact centers for Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc.

With over 1,100 Starwood hotels across more than 100 countries, our associates engage with guests across an endless range of languages.  My ‘magic wand’ wish would be for a single global universal language so that we can immediately offer all guests that reach out to us easy access to a full array of services no matter when or where they reach out to us.

Gloria Huang, social media expert at the American Red Cross

I would add a robust internal collaboration platform that allows for conversation threads, file and link sharing, and individual profiles with contact info so that anyone in the organization who is doing social engagement as part of their job is able to find each other, ask questions, and manage workflow internally. This would also ideally be integrated with any existing enterprise-wide intranet.

Carlos Navarro, chief marketing officer at Elavon, a payment processing company

Assembling the wealth of internal information into a single, accessible resource has been an ongoing challenge of CRM tools, but the newest challenge poses the greatest opportunity for exponential success. If we could channel Harry Potter’s wand, the spell would be Integratiato: the integration of existing internal data with the overwhelming amount of information available through social media. Through integrated efforts we could detect emerging trends and hot issues among our customers before they completely evolve and better capitalize on opportunities that positively impact attrition, customer loyalty and profit.

Jonathan Maher, director of systems analysis, Fresno Pacific University 

I had to think about this for a while, as I’m quite happy with our CRM – “missing” features are simply projects that I haven’t had time to complete, not limitations of the platform. However, it would be nice to have an integrated duplicate record alert system. There are quite a few Salesforce partners that integrate with the platform and warn users when they are about to insert a duplicate record, but I’d prefer that something this is core to the user experience was simply part of the standard feature set.

Time for a reality check. A big problem for companies using social or mobile technologies for marketing is they forget that the social piece needs to square with reality, said Georgy Cohen, a consultant and the former web content and strategy manager at Tufts University.

Too often companies will make noise on a social channel but don’t have the goods to back it up.

For example, a company can pitch their product to customers using Foursquare, a mobile application that lets people “check-in” with their location. But if they aren’t offering some kind of value, like a coupon, customers will probably not be impressed. Or, a company may display a QR code on a product or collateral material, but the code leads to a boring Web page with no added value. The end result: no compelling reason to buy the product. What’s worse, the customer may feel they just wasted their time.

So, make sure the social piece extends a real marketing plan, otherwise customers will discover what author Gertrude Stein once said: “There is no there there.”

Or as Cohen put it, “Don’t bother being awesome on Twitter if you are not awesome in real life.”

Pass the butter.“Content marketing is like butter,” said, Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute. “It makes everything you eat taste better but you wouldn’t necessarily eat it by itself.”

In a presentation, Pulizzi said marketers are often stumped to come up with a content strategy to support marketing efforts. “Stop with the [technology] tools,” he said, “Tools come and go.” To create a content strategy, focus on “what’s interesting about you.”

Recent research by the Content Marketing Institute showed that 65% of companies it surveyed had some kind of blog, up from 28% three years ago. However, “that doesn’t mean it’s all good content,” Pulizzi added.

Phases of mobile marketing adoption: Tom Wentworth, chief marketing officer at Ektron, a content management software company, said many companies still haven’t figured out how to best use mobile devices to reach customers. Some have moved on to a “mobile focus” where they’ve mobile-enabled some pages to be optimized for hand-held devices. When making this shift, companies should make careful, objective content decisions and not try to port the whole web site to smartphones and tablets. He likens many home pages to an episode of “Hoarders” a cable television show about people who cannot throw away anything and jam their homes with stuff, much of it useless. Many home pages will display an overload of content – often clearly the result of content decisions by committee – as well as generic ads that are not targeted and therefore irrelevant to many customers, Wentworth said. He has great hopes that “smart phones will force clarity.”

There is more to it than just your own content. Marissa Peacock, a social media consultant and reporter for CMSwire, a website focused on content management, said organizations can boost their credibility by sharing other people’s content as part of their own content marketing efforts.

“It’s not just about you,” Peacock said, when advocating the sharing of content at a panel discussion.  If companies give the nod to other content producers,  ”that’s how [customers] will look to you to find out what’s important,” she added.

The webinar, produced by ThoughtLead and sponsored by ClickFox , a maker of customer data analytics software,  had the curious effect of over-stimulating my brain and making me want to take a nap at the same time. The sheer volume of information put me on high-alert, but some of the content was so fuzzy and warm that I could have nodded off in the comfort of such phrases as “creating a memory” and “self-actualized customers.”

I bet this is how people in the trenches — with  terms like “customer care” or “customer experience” in their titles – must feel at times. There is such an onslaught of information on how to do their jobs, but much of the expert advice is so conceptual in nature that it is difficult to get a few concrete tips that can actually be deployed and measured for results.

Even Clickfox’s CEO, Marco Pacelli, agreed that the language of customer experience management can be so soft as to dilute the meaning of the message. In a follow-up interview, Pacelli said that conversations with clients can be challenging because, at its core, customer experience management “is a humanity thing.”

“It comes down to ‘how do we change the way we care?’,” Pacelli said. “Technologies can expose the issues, but at the end of the day, it is fixed by human intervention.”

True, but how do CEM practitioners turn that into successful projects, or better yet, pitch that to the CEO?

“You might not be able to go tell your CEO to create memories, but you can tell him to go experience what a customer experiences and determine on their own if it is working right,” Pacelli said.

Well said, and good luck with that. But, in the meantime, here are few nuggets from the The New Experience Economy webinar about providing a good customer experience:

Focus on creating the single-customer view. Most people already know the big CEM challenge is creating customer files with histories and links to pertinent information, but here are some numbers that show just how imperative this is:

CustomerThink, an online community, recently completed a survey of U.S. consumers and found that 80% had experienced what it calls “touchpoint amnesia,” a clunky term that refers to that experience when a returning customer calls a company with a problem and is treated like they’ve never been heard of before.

Of that 80% from the survey, 50% said they were less likely to recommend the company and between 24% and 35% were less likely to actually make a purchase because of it.

Push social media across the organization. Companies are at risk of not getting true benefit from social media-a key piece to CEM strategies — because it is controlled by marketing or communications groups. “You talk to any CEO and they’ll tell you that our focus of 2012 and 2013 is to get closer to the customer, ” said Brian Solis, principal analyst at The Altimeter Group of San Mateo, Calif. “Yet social media is already a silo within the organization.”

Solis said that while marketing and communication groups own social media, “service is at the bottom [and] CEOs and the C-suite don’t actually use any of these tools.”

Put some meaning into the term “engage.” Don’t just say you are “engaging” with customers by responding to their social media comments. Let them really talk and start using their ideas to show that you really are listening. Many companies are having success with online idea exchanges, or communities where customers can offer their ideas on improving products and services. Becky Carroll, a founder of Petra Consulting Group, is working as a contractor with Verizon, and said the new Verizon Idea Exchange is getting good results. Not only can customers submit ideas about products and services, but other customers can support those or add their own ideas to the original one.

Train contact center agents to have conversations with customers. More and more, we are hearing that scripted contact center agents are bad news. Kate Nasser, a consultant with The People-Skills Coach in New York City, related her own experience of receiving a brochure in the mail for a new cell phone. She considered switching carriers, called the one promoting the new phone and, when she attempted to ask the agent a question, was instead given a scripted sales pitch. She didn’t make the switch.

“It wasn’t as if she was being a rogue rep,” Nasser said. “There are companies where they are driven purely by metrics and scripts because they think that the way to make customer service successful is to constantly measure the cost of it. I am not against metrics, but that’s not how you succeed.”

Understand when your customer might feel vulnerable because those are the precise moments when they can turn on you. Jeanne Bliss, founder of Customer Bliss and co-founder of the Customer Experience Management Association, said it is important to get ahead of those vulnerable moments when a customer is nervous or second-guessing their buying decision. One example: Following up on the sale of an insurance policy to make sure the customer understands what they purchased before they get the bill in the mail. She offered another example that had nothing to do with technology at all. She said a hospital in a small Connecticut town recognized that most people’s stress level increases as they approach a hospital. So, it pipes in soothing music to the parking lot to help people settle down before entering the hospital building.

A new Forrester Research Inc. report shows that the majority of the 100 companies it recently surveyed are using social tools for social monitoring, tracking their brand and performing occasional research. All the companies are using enterprise-class social software, not free Internet tools.

“They are ready to be proactive, but they are trapped because there is so much volume and always more to monitor,” said Zach Hofer-Shall, a Forrester analyst.

In the survey, 79% reported using social software for brand tracking, while 77% use it for market research and 73% for competitive tracking. Conversely, in the category Forrester designated as “proactive,” which includes activities such as marketing messaging and product innovation, less than half of the respondents indicated using social data in those efforts. Less than 20% of those surveyed reported using social data in sales or lead generation efforts. Respondents were able to make multiple selections to show their social activity.

These results beg a few questions, such as: Why is it taking companies so long to really start using social tools to change their businesses? And, is there a possibility that interest is social is waning?

Hofer-Shall and other industry analysts said there’s no evidence that interest is slowing down. Instead, they attribute the slow adoption to the significance of the changes social tools bring to both systems and organizations.

“You don’t just start using social tools the way you might start using another form of software,” said Denis Pombriant, president of Beagle Research Inc. in Stoughton, Mass. “You have to become a social company.”

Paul Greenberg, CRM industry expert and author of CRM at the Speed of Light, says the adoption rate is certainly slow, but no more so than the adoption of other major technologies that usher in truly big change. Greenberg said a good example is the adoption of CRM itself, which took years because “its value wasn’t obviously and measurably apparent and its [initial] failure rate was pretty well known.”

Hofer-Shall said CRM groups need to focus more on integrating social data with existing customer data to truly benefit from social channels. This will give companies more complete customer profiles, enabling them to better target sales and marketing efforts.

But other industry analysts have indicated that many companies still find keeping accurate customer records with just basic information a challenge, much less expand them with new data sources.

For example, when Salesforce.com recently announced Social Contacts, a function to associate social data with existing customer profiles, analysts dubbed it a good move, but one not quite ready for prime time.

Beyond the Salesforce.com platform, companies can create their own integration between social and internal customer data, but this task isn’t easy and requires database expertise.

Hofer-Shall noted yet another option comes from vendors such as Fliptop, Full Contact and Rapleaf, that provide social identifiers for customers, but also require customers to export their data to them. The Forrester analyst cautioned this could create privacy issues.

Instead, companies should consider the old-fashioned way of acquiring the data by simply asking customers to include Twitter handles and other social identifiers when they are registering for a product or service.

“The safest way is to just ask for it,” Hofer-Shall said. “Set up social fields in the registration pages.”

In addition, the companies can take other steps to link social and internal data up front.

Hofer-Shall suggested filtering social data into existing marketing dashboards to create “combined scorecards” to assess marketing efforts.

This can be low-tech and still effective, the analyst noted. In fact, he has seen marketing groups manually input social numbers, such as the number of Facebook “likes,” into an Excel spreadsheet and comparing it with other marketing data, such as web site visits.

Additionally, once companies have this fuller view of customer feedback, they can better determine what metrics they want to use to rate marketing initiatives. In essence, companies can create their own “customized metrics,” that demonstrate what is meaningful or unique to a particular company.

The meeting, called the Social Media Measurement Standards Conclave, will take place in Durham, N.H. and include representatives from Procter & Gamble, SAS, Thomson Reuters, the Web Analytics Association, Public Relations Society of America, Word of Mouth Marketing and the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communications.

Any results could be a huge boost for social CRM practitioners, many of whom are struggling to figure out how to track and quantify social activity. With a set of agreed upon measurements, marketing, sales, and customer service groups could speak a similar language and communicate the value of what they are doing. They could stop wasting time on dead-end social efforts and shift to practices that advance a company’s marketing goals. (Not to mention show top management the payback so they can get more funding).

Then again, this group could be just another voice in an already noisy marketplace.

It is precisely all that noise that drove Katie Paine to start a standards effort. Paine runs KDPaine & Partners, LLC, a consulting firm that has been measuring marketing and communications results since long before the social media. KDPaine & Partners is hosting the first conclave.

“Social media measurement standards are the marketing equivalent of ‘family values’ and ‘homeland security,’ ‘’ Paine said in an email. “The words are being tacked onto every other press release and they mean totally different things depending on your perspective.”

Paine said she thinks the best shot at progress next week will come in the area of setting definitions. For example, even the term “click through” can be interpreted in different ways. Another possibility with be clarifying the differences between web site terms such as unique and repeat visitor as well as unique browser.

“Everyone wins if we can make the terminology clearer,” Paine said. “Right now people say they want standards, but they don’t know what standards they want.”

Paine said it would be a success if the group could simply agree that there aren’t exact social media measurement equivalents to traditional marketing measurements, such as Ad Value Equivalency or Gross Ratings Points. Then the group could identify emerging best practices and help the market “get rid of overblown claims, fraud and [marketing that is] misleading the customer.”

 ”Many people are focusing on content,” said Gary Vaynerchuk, author, consultant and entrepreneur. “I focus on context. That’s the battle.”

Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It and The Thank You Economy, was a featured speaker at Dreamforce, the Salesforce.com annual user conference held in San Francisco this week. He asserts that social media tools should be used to help companies make connections with customers and establish “context,” so customers relate to and continue to respond to a company on an emotional level.

“Context is the modern day autograph,” Vaynerchuk added, referring to the emotional link many people feel when connecting with a celebrity or sports hero.

Content, on the other hand, is so plentiful on the Web that it is increasingly difficult to stand out. “What breaks through?,” Vaynerchuk asked. “People’s eyeballs are spread in ways we couldn’t have imagined. The emotional equity is what it’s all about.”

The key, however, is to find techniques to create context that will not break the bank. With tools such as Salesforce.com’s Radian 6 social monitoring tools, companies can gather information from public channels and create profiles of individual customer’s interests. At Dreamforce, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines was featured in a keynote address for its use of social tools to pinpoint individual customer’s interests and then delivering small gifts to these customers as they waited in airports to board KLM flights.

But should companies need to do this?

Plus, I wonder how a company can sustain such a strategy.  

Vaynerchuk, who first made a name for himself producing videos to promote his wine business online in the late 1990s, said the trick is to figure out what will work with individual customers. Some customers will be won over by freebies, while others will be more interested in information to help them do their jobs better, he said.

“It is not necessarily about giving away stuff, it’s giving something that’s truly helpful,” Vaynerchuk said.

He also warned that companies need to be careful not to jump on the giveaway bandwagon. “What if 10 brands did the KLM thing -that would be annoying,” Vaynerchuk added.

The consultant said creating context for business-to-business companies is a challenge. Often they do not know where their customers are online and, once they find them, they promote their brand instead of first engaging the customer.

Vaynerchuk said when he began promoting his wine business online, “no one knew who I was.” Instead of promoting his company, “I started talking about wine, not me,” and found other companies starting to engage with him because they wanted to talk about wine.  

But it is difficult to define or determine ROI for creating context. One example from this past summer makes me wonder how a company can assess the gains or losses from connecting. This case involved Peter Shankman, a popular blogger and author of Customer Service: New Rules for a Social Media World with more than 100,000 Twitter followers.

Shankman tweeted that he would love a steak from the renowned Morton’s The Steakhouse in New York City when he arrived from a flight to Newark Airport.

As Shankman tells it, he was got off the airplane and a Morton’s employee presented him with the steak. Shankman then tweeted about this experience and received a mix of responses, with many followers praising Morton’s great customer service and others giving a negative spin, claiming Morton’s would not give the same service to lesser known customers.

So, what’s the net result? Shankman was already a fan of Morton’s. Did the steakhouse endear itself to a whole new crop of customers? Or was the maneuver perceived as too much of a publicity stunt  – the kind that generates ill will. 

If you have thoughts on emotional connections, let me know. But don’t send steak. I prefer cheeseburgers.

Ah, the digital record. That’s what can get executives so freaked out about social media – the permanency of those records, warts and all.

Schwartzman, who co-authored Social Marketing to the Business Customer  with social media expert Paul Gillin, understands that getting executive buy-in on social marketing projects is no easy task.

He recently offered up a list of tips to help get that buy-in during a Social Media Today webinar. Here are just a few of his suggestions:

1-Present real evidence to executives, not just technology promises. That means collecting data about your customers and market from multiple social channels. Don’t think that social channels mean Facebook and Twitter only. Go to other online communities (and don’t forget YouTube.) This can seem like an overwhelming task because of the sheer volume of information. Schwartzman said the issue for many people is they haven’t figured out how to filter all that data. Often, people will search only their company’s name or brand.  Schwartzman suggests initially working with Google Analytics to help determine the best keywords for searches on your customers and market. Once you have the data, you can demonstrate to executives that their customers (and competitors) are engaging online and your company needs to be there.

2-Position a social project as an extension of existing operations, like marketing or customer service, rather than some newfangled approach that instantly gets an executive’s hackles up because he or she doesn’t know what you are talking about. A company is already invested in marketing and customer service, so show “how you can do these things more effectively and efficiently,” Schwartzman said.

3-Understand you could have a problem with “digital illiteracy.” This is a touchy subject. Many executives do not have time to stay current with social media tools and you need to carefully navigate through this problem. Internal training programs or industry workshops could work, depending on the corporate culture.
At an IBM marketing conference earlier this year, Matthew Smith, vice president of CRM at Best Buy Co. Inc., recommended that executives bring social tools into their personal lives so they can keep abreast of the social arena. This could mean taking the most simple of steps, like maintaining a Facebook page or posting photos on ww.flickr.com.

This week, Versace, a world-renowned fashion company, was dubbed “dumb’’ and “just plain stupid,’’ by social CRM analysts when it was reported that it scrubbed its Facebook page of negative customer comments concerning a production process and blocked any new comments from the page.

“They are inflaming a crisis, rather than containing a negative buzz’’ said Paul Greenberg, president of The 56 Group LLC in Manassas, Va. “I’m continually amazed by the lack of intelligence that is shown by some of these extraordinarily well established brands.’’

Versace was not available for comment.

According to reports, Versace customers were protesting because of its use of a particular sandblasting process on a line of jeans. The process can be dangerous to workers doing the sandblasting because they may inhale the tiny particles it releases into the air.

Instead of providing a direct response to customer concerns, Versace reportedly shut-down its critics, which analysts said was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Denis Pombriant, president of Beagle Research in Stoughton, Ma., said trying to exert that kind of control over customers will not work anymore because of the transparency social media creates. “Consequently the news of the cover up will be worse and have a more profound effect than the act itself,’’ Pombriant added.

To be fair, Versace isn’t the first company to create a preventable social media storm and it will not be the last. United Airline’s mishandling of disgruntled customer Dave Carroll led to what is now the legendary “United Breaks Guitars’’ song on You Tube. It continues to be watched and has had more than 10 million views. Or, take a look at Nestle. How does a chocolate maker get into trouble? When it is unexpectedly faced with environmentalists on Facebook urging boycotts because of a certain palm oil it used.

Analysts said this week’s Versace incident is yet another lesson in social CRM and how critical it is for companies to change how they interact with customers. As Greenberg pointed out, Versace may have blocked customers from posting nasty remarks on its site, but it can’t stop them – or others – from putting up even angrier comments on other channels. A quick glance at #versace on Twitter clearly illustrates that.

What the Versace incident underscores is the changing definition of a brand, analysts added. Many companies are still struggling to grasp that they don’t exclusively own their own brand anymore.

As Marcel LeBrun, chief executive of social media company Radian6, said at a Salesforce.com conference earlier this year: “Our customers have a much bigger voice and trust each other more than companies. Brand now means the sum of conversations about you.”

Analysts point out that smart companies are getting this shared-ownership concept of a brand.

“Social media gives consumers more power than ever before to connect with others and share their opinions, all in the public domain,’’ said Zach Hofer-Shall, an analyst with Forrester Research in Boston.

“Adaptive companies will embrace this shift and transparently connect with customers,” he added. “Other companies may resist this evolution and will struggle to maintain their image.’’

Perhaps Versace could take a tip from the Red Cross, which recently demonstrated how it is adapting. When an employee accidentally tweeted about getting drunk, the company owned up to it, responded and encouraged feedback. The incident turned out as a positive and actually caused a spike in donations for the organization.