What is your definition of social CRM?

There is not enough storage space in Focus.com to answer that thoroughly... so here are my short snippets.

1) Social CRM is an extension to CRM that addresses the new social channels and brings social data into the CRM system to be analyzed together with operational and transactional data to derive better insights. Before you ignore this, consider that over 95% of customer behavioral and attitudinal data (also known as feedback) is in free, unstructured form and live in the social web.

2) this is not a a paradigm shift, rather a generational shift. business does not change the fundamental way they work, they just adapt to new generations. that makes it definitely not paradigm since the generation Y and generation C people are demanding and expecting the change, but they will continue to use the old business model .

the rest of my thoughts, and the ones supporting the above, can be found in my blog and in other articles in focus by Paul Greenberg.

People communicate in many ways. They meet face to face. They talk on the phone. They correspond via email. In these traditional scenarios, whether 1 on 1, or 1 on many, YOU are always an active part of the conversation.

People have "always" talked about you when you weren't around, for good or bad. Now they can do it on the Internet. Actually, they've been able to do this for a long time, but as adoption has grown, the empowerment has grown with it. While people still discuss you "offline" some will discuss you online as well.

You have the ability to listen and engage in these conversations.

So, in a business sense, social CRM extends traditional CRM platforms to incorporates the "channels" you correspond on directly into the platform in the same context an email would have. That's in the context of "you and" your customer regarding your business. Social CRM as a platform must also incorporate, in a useful way, any conversation your customer has about you "without" you (the person) in the context.

It really is simply CRM with some new channels of communication and intelligence. These new channels give us some new capabilities. But, they are not ubiquitous, so ignore the hype (it will not make you customer centric). It's just another layer to consider for your business on a case by case basis.

Nothing has really changed. Your customers still expect great experiences. Focus on that first, and you will set yourself apart from the crowd - even the ones with a Twitter team.

Social CRM is a strategy and programme that aims to help the company understand the customer context beyond what is available through transactional and demographic data, so as to better better shape its response to the customer job-to-be-done and meet the desired outcomes. This can take the shape of better customer experience, collaborative innovation (or co-evolution as some say), customer advocacy, and even returns through higher employee satisfaction!

The paradigm shift is only in moving from a product-centric business model to a customer-centric one. This is higher up in the food chain than sCRM but sCRM can be a change agent in this sense.

CRM evolved from sales force automation which emphasized lead and prospect management as much as customer management. Though leads and prospects are not part of the term CRM, they are part of every CRM system. Connections, friends and followers are tools for networking, perhaps the most basic means of getting business. LinkedIn specifically provides a process for asking people in your network to refer you to people outside your network. (We used to do this by telephone, but now we can use tools like iPad which have no voice capability to communicate.)

Barton J. Goldenberg, "CRM in Real Time" (2008) defines Customer Relationship Management as “a business approach that integrates people, process, and technology to maximize relationships with customers. CRM increasingly leverages the Internet to provide seamless coordination among all customer facing functions.”

I see social media as another technology "to maximize relationships with customers."

In my humble opinion, it's only a new buzzword and concept the industry has coined. And I think CRM and social networks are a bit contradictory. CRM is about MANAGING customer relations, one to one, but managing means you have CONTROL of the customer to a certain point (even if it is only visibility over how your customer interacts with your company). The social network is more like a structured chaos, in which the users manage themselves and nobody manages anything, trying to gain a one to one relation with members of a social network is not only diffuclt but truly fictious. Social marketing has a whole different phillosphy from what CRM stands for (from my perspective), and instead of a one to one approach, effective social marketing is more like one to a whole community or group with specific characteristics, which unites themselves as group not individuals (Why not Community Relationship Mgmt for a more accurate term?).