Innovation and Social Engagement. The connection between innovation and social engagement is directly applicable to social business and its attendant processes, including Social CRM. This relationship spans the stages of learning, applying the ideas gained to design, and then iterating to steadily improve (sometimes in radical steps) what is offered to customers or causerelated constituents in the marketplace. This is what makes Social CRM different from traditional sales-cycle-oriented CRM: It’s the addition of customer-powered collaborative participation that powers Social CRM and the realization of a social business. Without collaborative processes, Social CRM quickly devolves to a more standard company-driven marketing and business development effort. It is important to understand the requirement for collaboration in creating a social business: Otherwise, it’s easy to fall into the trap of “this (Social CRM) is the same as what we’ve been doing…only now our customers are a formal part of it.” The problem with this kind of thinking is not that there aren’t analogies to existing processes—there are, just as there would be in any business process evolution. Rather, it’s because the “same as...” is exactly the excuse used to avoid substantive change inside your firm or organization, an excuse that inertial forces within will desperately seek. Does this sound like an overstatement? It’s not. As with any other aspect of business transformation, moving toward a social business mindset involves fundamental process change and recognition of the need for collaboration across many fronts. This is different, and it is important to set these expectations early on. Getting Social CRM right—and successfully applying it to your business to create a genuinely collaborative relationship that leverages customer insight- depends more on creating an internal culture around change, around collaborative workflow, and around processes like ideation than on the implementation of any particular toolset. In my social media marketing workshops, for example, the workshops and exercises do not begin with social media tools: they end with them. The workshops begin with an explanation of business objectives and customers and the dynamics of the Social Web. With such an understanding in place, it’s easy to choose the particular tools that are most likely to produce the desired results. Starting instead from the point of view of tools, the result would be an endless chasing of me-too ideas. Sometimes this approach work...
