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. 

Social networks have their foundations in the space-time continuum—you know, the funky coordinate system  that Einstein was so keen about.

Social network analysis is all about looking for patterns of “proximity” among people, considered in their cultural capacities as influencers and followers, innovators and imitators, first-movers and late adopters. Down deep, I consider social network analysis an important new branch of decision support systems as a discipline. The core question is: What unique situational chemistry causes various people, individually or collectively, to make various decisions at various places and times?

That’s where space and time enter the social network analysis equation. It’s not enough that I look up to your shining example and take my lead from what you say and do. It’s just as important that we be in the same city, neighborhood, or room. More than that, it’s important that you and I actually cross paths in order for you to actively influence me to buy that latte, or for you to calm me down and thereby stop me from storming out the door and severing my relationship with a retailer who has ignored my complaints one time too many.

By James Kobielus

As we bid adieu to one decade and move into the next, it’s important to catch our collective breath and to take a quick look ahead. Here are some quick thoughts on the trends that will shape advanced analytics in the year to come. These trends will set the stage for thoroughgoing transformation of business intelligence (BI), data warehousing (DW), predictive analytics (PA), data mining (DM), business activity monitoring (BAM), complex event processing (CEP), and other key analytics technologies in the Teens:

• Self-service operational BI puts information workers in driver’s seat: Enterprises have begun to adopt self-service BI to cut costs, unclog the analytics development backlog, and improve the velocity of practical insights. Users are demanding tools to do interactive, deeply dimensional exploration of information pulled from enterprise data warehouses, data marts, transactional applications, and other systems.
  

By James Kobielus

Social networks are the future of online life, whether we like it or not. Before the end of the coming decade, relationships with everyone –including family, friends, colleagues, employers, merchants, suppliers, and government agencies—will hinge on your access to these parties, and theirs to you, through online communities of all shapes and sizes.

Social networks are becoming much more pervasive than today’s mass-market communities—such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn—would lead you to believe. Before long, many will be embedded in the full range of business and personal applications. In ten years’ time, today’s social networks will have evolved into a powerful, seamless worldwide infrastructure for collaboration, sharing, interaction, and transactions. Many will be integral features of the mobile, broadband, and streaming media services that shape business and consumer life.