People have always talked about their customer experiences.   But the speed of the Web and the reach of social media tools have exponentially changed the timing and impact of this sharing.  Traditional CRM strategies and tools have not kept pace with business’ need to respond to the customer’s control of the conversation.  It was this need - to engage with and respond to customers within the context of this real-time dialogue - that gave birth to the concept and practice of Social CRM (or SCRM).  Which means what, exactly?

As with any emerging term, SCRM has been defined in a number of ways by a number of “experts”.  I personally like the definition provided by author and blogger, Paul Greenberg.  I’ll post his short definition here, but I encourage you to check out his full definition and description here.

To quote Mr. Greenberg:

“SCRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

As for how this relates to Reside and our clients, allow me to reference another quote by Mr. Greenberg, from the same post, as he summarizes what the “Big Idea” is behind SCRM:

[Through SCRM] the customer is afforded the ability to co-create by the company. What that means is not all that pat. It can mean anything from customers and the company collaborating on product development, to customer suggestions on how to improve a company process, to customers helping other customers solve customer service issues… . Co-creation is the ability of the company and customer to create additional value for each other - what form it takes is not always THE BIG THING.  But co-creation, mutually derived value, is at the core of SCRM (emphasis mine).

Reside is helping our clients apply the principles and tools of SCRM every day as we work with them to implement Idea Portals, Customer Service Portals and Online Communities.  These solutions give the customer a voice and a “spot at the table” in terms of influencing the business brand.  And smart businesses know that happy customers share those experiences.  And that’s how you grow a business - at the speed of the Social Web.

Reside received great news from Salesforce last week; we were announced as one of the Force.com Forty Innovation Showcase finalists. In October, Mario Fantauzzi and I traveled to San Francisco to present Reside’s work on FICO’s first-of-its-kind B2B online community in front of a panel of Force.com experts. Reside’s ability to think of innovative cloud solutions to meet FICO’s needs won not only FICO’s business, but the judges respect as well. With the help of the expert team at Reside, we integrated five different cloud services (SaaS applications) into one website, while keeping the look and feel of the brand consistent, making FICO’s Decision Management Community one of the most innovative cloud solutions of the time. This solution enables clients and prospects to effectively collaborate, while capturing and managing the ideas of members. The community also acts as a discussion forum and research center for the users. We are thrilled to be among this elite group of innovators, and are excited to be at Dreamforce this year when the winner is announced! Visit www.reside.biz/dreamforce09 to learn more about the event and where to find us.

Learn more about the innovative solution – Read the FICO Case Study or view a screencast of FICO’s Decision Management Community.

Congratulations to the 2009 Tekne Award recipients and scholarship winners! Last Thursday, Reside was a proud platinum sponsor of the Minnesota High Tech Association’s (MHTA) Tekne Awards. Don Mink, Reside’s Practice Director of Technical Services, did a great job presenting an award category, while the ceremony’s MC, John Sweeney of Brave New Workshop, provided comic relief throughout the night. The awards show brought Minnesota’s business, technology and political leaders together on this special evening to celebrate technology innovation in Minnesota. It was amazing to see the innovative solutions these deserving finalists have established within their companies. Among the companies at the ceremony, a few of the winners include:

VAST Enterprises, based in Minneapolis, won the cleantech award, Ecolab won the green category award, and Starkey Laboratories Inc. won a medical technology award for their new S2 line of hearing aids.

For more Tekne Award winners, read the article from Minneapolis-St.Paul Business Journal. Thanks to everyone at MHTA that made this night possible. Stay tuned for more information regarding the 2010 Tekne Awards.

Monopoly City Streets was released last week, with the tag line of “Property Empire Building on an Unimaginable Scale”.  Unimaginable was probably more accurate than they wanted it to be…

The first three days after launch were incredible rocky: outages, sluggishness and bug reports coming in from blog comments, twitter posts and more.  The first response from the developers was their cryptic, “It is working… but” blog post.

I can’t help but wonder if following in Google’s footsteps of beta releases and invites would’ve uncovered some of these issues before they got out of hand.  And since they partnered with Google Maps for the application itself, makes me question even more why they didn’t??

1. Release in BETA. User expectations are lower when they see something in BETA.  They see an issue, and don’t get near as upset as they would if they expected the application to be perfect and fully released.
2. Release with invites. Google did this with their gmail release: only users who are invited by other users can register and use the application.  With this model, your user base grows somewhat steadily - instead of everyone accessing on the 1st day.

Game restart is set for tomorrow: Thursday, September 17th.  Follow the progress of the game at http://blog.monopolycitystreets.com

I did have another blog topic in mind for today, but when I stumbled across this article I decided to switch things up.

Quality Oriented Teaching of Programming

Although the author talks specifically about teaching programming, I believe his points apply to any subject with a hierarchical learning pattern.  Mathematics is the first subject that comes to mind: If you fail to understand how variables work in equations, you will continue to struggle as you progress through the subject.

Having initially started my college education with the intent of becoming a mathematics teacher, this idea of hierarchical learning was like a huge light bulb going off! (I moved to programming when 2 students I was tutoring in algebra, still failed…)

As a parent, these are the quick things I pulled out for when my kids start struggling with math, etc.

1. Spend time on the “easy”/”early” things before moving on.  Make sure they “get” the basics!
2. The methods pointed out do create more work for teachers, so take an active part in your child’s education.
3. Know the testing schedule, help your child to not be caught off-guard or unprepared when their test day comes.

Along the same lines, check this out if your child IS ready to be a programmer! 

Salesforce.com unveiled today its new Force.com value-added reseller (VAR) program – an expansion of the enterprise cloud computing leader’s business model that will serve to grow sales of its cloud platform (Force.com) via a select portion of its existing partner network. 

Reside is pleased to announce our participation as one of the fist VARs in the program.  To learn more, view our press release.