The Gartner Hype Cycle is a useful graph for analyzing technology hype. Looking at the Gartner graph, I’ll posit we’re somewhere near the “Slope of Enlightenment” and the “Plateau of Productivity” with respect to social media. Over the past couple of years, business leaders have stepped up to the plate and faced some serious pitches while trying to figure out a sound business strategy that leverages social/emerging media. Indeed figuring out how to intelligently deploy emerging media can be like facing pitcher Stephen Strasburg.

Are augmented reality concepts a curve ball to your mobile strategy? Are emerging legal issues surrounding privacy, intellectual property ownership, open source and cloud computing licensing, etc, a change-up to your business game plan? Is the iPad a fastball?

It’s clear the pace of emerging media will continue unabated. Business leaders will continue to face a tsunami of innovation. Thus, it’s great to have a working archetype, or mantra to fall back on when analyzing whether to adopt an emerging media in your business plan. To this regard, Steve Harney has some excellent tips.

During a recent interview I had with Steve, he articulated a process he calls the “5C’s”. Harney’s list of 5C’s is a useful checklist to run through when you’re thinking about how to leverage emerging media—particularly social media—to achieve a business objective. Steve’s successful blog, Facebook page, and KCM Quick Report represent a choreographed social presence that he’s used to build a community that supports his business objectives.

Steve Harney’s 5C’s:

1. Concept: Understand the concept of what you’re trying to do. What is your brand? What do you want to be seen as? What are your core values?
2. Conviction: Have conviction to your brand. Once you have established your concept, how much conviction do you have to that brand concept? Ensure that your brand concept is translated into everything you do. The allure of emerging media—particularly social media—is that it’s omnipresent and relatively easy to deploy…and easy to get side-tracked. For example, when Steve launched his Facebook page, he decided that he did not want to dabble in Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc, because those social media activities—although fun, engaging, and playful—were not aligned with the core concepts of his brand.
3. Consistency: Let your community know that you’re there for them on a consistent basis. For Steve’s brand it’s important to blog every day and update Facebook every day. His community has come to expect this. He therefore must maintain consistency to meet this expectation.
4. Content: Focus on getting and supplying great content. Ensure that your content is strong and relevant to the community you’ve developed. Act like a curator.
5. Collaboration: Allow your community to come up with the answers. Provide an environment that promotes sharing of ideas. Bringing minds together so they can learn from themselves is the key driver to getting the community passionate about you and your brand. Actively facilitate discussions that align with the Concept of your brand.

Photo credit: david.nikonvscanon

The notion of collaborative CRM is still in discussion and has two interpretations that are often mixed…The first is closely connected with communicative CRM and focuses on interaction channels (e.g. phone, fax, e-mail, self service portals) between a company and its direct customers. The second extends the CRM concept on the level of value chains and business networks. This approach consolidates concepts of networked organizations and marketing to enable the creation of customer relations and value at a network level by sharing or pooling of network resources and capabilities…It enables producers, distributors and service providers to extend their customer acquisition, retention and development beyond their company borders and even to involve the customer directly.

Fundamental concepts of Web 2.0 and the social web such as transparency, authenticity, trust, engagement, and listening underpin collaborative CRM concepts. Similarly, customers’ demands for immediacy and relevancy in communications further support collaborative CRM. And mobile technologies have the potential to be the catalyst to firms’ implementation of collaborative CRM practices. But as pointed out in the research paper mobile technologies are not a panacea for collaborative CRM. The researchers point out that to facilitate collaborative CRM goals, existing business processes must be redesigned so as to take advantage of the unique characteristics of mobile technologies while delivering additional value to customers. Many companies are simply using mobile technologies to deliver information in a one-dimensional manner (i.e., a messaging service) as opposed to a multi-dimensional manner.

The authors conclude with several recommendations to consider when setting up a collaborative CRM strategy:

1. Set up appropriate customer segments, which allows firms to deliver individualized services
2. The CRM system must integrate mobile data (mobile sales, mobile content usage, location based services, etc)
3. Ensure customers understand that a firm’s mobile services offer enhanced value so they will make use of these services
4. Firms should consider specialized mobile CRM data analytics platforms that integrate with core CRM systems because current core CRM platforms lack sufficient sophistication to account for mobile CRM data needs

Photo credit: The Lightworks

Information Week covered text analytics, describing how JetBlue uses text analytics to understand customer sentiment from email messages, which informed the airline how to draft its customer bill of rights. And KMWorld discusses how the burgeoning field of “customer experience analysis” uses text analytics to increase customer engagement and loyalty.

Customers today aren’t just customers–they’re influencers and social networkers. Across the Web at any hour, they’re sharing observations about your company’s products and services, and those of your competitors…These new modes of customer behavior make it essential for companies to move beyond traditional ways of gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer information - Information Week

For a long time, text analytics was a technology in search of a business need. Now, thanks to social media, the need is there; the question is whether the technology can ramp up fast enough to be commercial – KMWorld

Where social media in real estate sometimes has the floor manners of a dog’s breakfast, it’ll become increasingly important for real estate firms to engage in text-sentiment analysis as part of their overall CRM and customer experience efforts. Here’s a list of companies that offer text-sentiment analysis services:

• Ata Plana
• Jodange
• Radian6
• Attensity
• Clarabridge

Photo credit: mnapoleon