Customer relationship management (CRM) has always been a multichannel discipline. You should connect and bond with your customers through whatever mix of channels they use or prefer. That has traditionally meant that existing channels be supplemented and extended by whatever new technologies come along. Hence, any enterprise serious about multichannel CRM has begun to add social media to a strategy that includes point of sale (PoS), direct postal mail, agent-assisted telephony, interactive voice response, e-mail, portals, and text messaging—at the very least. 

Social CRM is the newest craze in this arena. It refers generally to the convergence of social media with CRM. However, in the minds of some observers it seems to imply that social media will somehow become the most important CRM channel of all, marginalizing or obsoleting others. I take issue with that perspective, which threatens to turn social media, in all their billowing multiplicity, into a big new overstuffed silo in the CRM world. 

I don’t deny that social-networking interfaces are all the rage in the CRM space. One obvious case in point is salesforce.com’s Chatter collaboration platform, which looks and feels so Facebook-y that, navigating through it, I half-expect my cousins to be posting new vacation pictures to the community. 

I stopped down to RIM's WES (5,000 enterprise mobile pros, ISVs, and carriers) conference in Orlando yesterday. The company's been taking heat lately from Wall Street analysts who seem more interested in watching iPhones rise than tracking BlackBerry units shipped. What you as an information & knowledge management professional should care about is if RIM will be a strong partner in the future. At the conference, I saw six things that give me great confidence that RIM is future-proofing companies' investments in the BlackBerry platform:

1. BES Express is basic BES for $0. And it's good enough for most employees in most industries. RIM says it's taking off, with 55,000 downloads of the server software since March. And according to RIM, it's designed to scale out to enterprise levels.
2. BlackBerry 6 is the OS that you've been waiting for. While the mobile world was going WebKit browser, RIM was still Java-only. They've fixed that in the next version of the operating system, due out in Q3 2010. See the video clip for a sneak peak: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlO8KMv7Bx4. It has a much better browser, better touchscreen features, and a cleaner interface. And with RIM's participation in Adobe's open screens initiative, I expect to see Flash support as well, something iPhone doesn't have.
3. The Pearl 3G and a new Bold prove that RIM understands fashion and usability. Frankly, these devices are gorgeous. I've always loved the Pearl, but I got tired of the Edge network. With the Pearl 3G, and its optical track pad, 3G, Wi-Fi, better screen, it's a beauty with brains. And it fits into my pocket in a way that the iPhone just doesn't.
4. RIM's carrier-focus means it will get the attention that you need in every market. 175 carriers. Enough said.

I had an interesting briefing Monday with Ashif Mawji, the CEO of Upside Software, and Dan Townsend, VP of Sales and Marketing. Upside is primarily known as a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software vendor but also offers RFx capabilities and some elements of Supplier Performance Management. Upside is built on .NET and is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner who also boasts Microsoft as a customer.

I rarely blog about vendor briefings, but this one stood out for a couple of reasons. First, it was the kind of briefing that as an IT industry analyst I’ve really grown to appreciate -- no slides, good two-way dialogue and a concise but impactful product demo. And, it was that product demo that really got my attention.

During Interop, I've been bouncing around between the tracks, going to sessions in both the data center and the virtualization tracks. I’ve learned a lot of interesting stuff that I would like to share with you all! The first data center session of day one was: Bridging the C-Suite Gap: How To Build The Business Case For Data Center Transformation with Brooks Esser, Worldwide Lead, CIO Agenda at HP.

Brooks started out by demystifying the role of today's CIO for infrastructure and operations professionals. CIOS are measured in three ways:

1. Accelerating business growth.
2. Lowering costs.
3. Mitigating risks.

As much as they are technologists, CIOs are now also business people… they need to understand the business, management, and technology priorities:

• Their goals in the business are to improve operations and process.
• In management, their objectives are to link IT and the business and to reduce ops costs.
• It's become the job of the infrastructure and operations professional to take those technology priorities and link them back to the priorities of your CIO and their business priorities.

"As soon as you can talk about management and business priorities, you can talk to the CIO about the technology projects you want to drive."

HP has a defined methodology for building any business case, which has three simple steps: