Metz, The Social Concept

Who To Follow In SocialCRM

August 6, 2010

I get asked this question all the time: “Who should I follow in Social Customer Relationship Management (social CRM)?”

So, I created a Twitter list, SocialCRMMasterminds . I took the name from Napoleon Hill’s “Think And Grow Rich,” from his master-mind group.

Well, the other night, I took a moment to devise a preliminary Twitter list of my favorite consultants, analysts and vendor voices. Obviously, the first person on the list was Paul Greenberg, author of CRM At The Speed Of Light . This book is possibly the best $23 your company will ever spend.

P.S. Thanks to my wonderful girlfriend Susan for the Echo & The Bunnymen “Live In Liverpool” and Jesus & Mary Chain “7 Years on The Leading Edge” discs. What a cool, Brit-poppy way to end the week. (You can find both of them in our new MetzMusic store, here).

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From The Vault: The ROI Of The Social Customer

August 2, 2010

Here at Metz Consulting, we decided, a few weeks ago, to open the vault, giving away every presentation we’ve done in the last two years.

This week, we’re posting our second and third presentation, complete with all notes, on Slideshare. [The only reason we’re not making the entire decks available for download is because it violates copyright law because we’ve purchased and used stock images in some of the presentations. You can still enlarge them to full-screen and re-present them at your company.]

Today’s posting is a BIG one. It’s called This Ain’t No Picnic: Return On Investment and the Social Customer. I presented it at the Minnesota Chapter of the American Marketing Association, a little under two years ago. The deck contains case studies from work done by Aquafina, Jack In The Box and Carnival Cruise Lines. Note, these were not actual clients of ours; they are consumer brands that had done robust execution on the social web, at that point in time, and no one had written case studies for their work. So we did. You can watch the entire presentation here , but be sure to print out the lengthy notes below, to read along with each slide.

To download the complete 6-page notes for This Ain’t No Picnic: Return On Investment and the Social Customer, click here .

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7 reasons Why Salesforce Doesn't Really Work On The iPad

July 28, 2010

Christina and I went down to the Apple store last week. Her PC laptop is dying – she’s after the MacBook air. Me, I’m just sick of carrying a laptop, period. I picked up a great Jack Spade bag in Venice (similar to this one ), and it’s big enough to hold a tablet, but not really a laptop.

There are more than a few problems with trying out Salesforce mobile on the iPad. For brevity’s sake, I’ll just list them.

1. Apple doesn’t want you to install any apps in the Apple store, but there’s no signage telling you not to do that.

2. The Salesforce mobile app will install on an iPad, but, to use it, you must enlarge it to a blurry 2x size

3. Salesforce (web version) doesn’t work very well on the iPad (using Safari)

4. The Roambi data visualization tools (touted for CRMs on the iPad) don’t work well unless you only need top-level data visbility. Day-to-day use is a no-go.

5. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff came charging hard out of the gate extolling the virtues of the iPad (and Steve Jobs) on 1/28, and he wrote a laudatory blog post in late March on TechCrunch . 6 months later, Salesforce has no product for the platform, although the illustrations on the blog post would lead one to believe otherwise.

6. Even when you use the iPad’s keyboard on the web version of Salesforce, much of the functionality is missing.

7. Multitasking on the iPad will not work until October 2010. This means you can’t be working on something in Salesforce, send an email, and then go back to Salesforce. Kind of makes the key Sales functionality not very useful.

I find it unsettling that a brand as large as Salesforce (and my company is a former Salesforce partner – full disclosure here) would do so much high-level marketing and PR around the iPad without so much as hinting at a release date for a fully functional native version of their product on the platform. If founder Marc Benioff is so hell-bent on making sure all enterprise software walks and talks like Facebook, why didn’t he dedicate a team of 5 developers to the project (probably just like Facebook did) for 90 days? [My guess: there were security concerns.]

At this point, the only functional CRM apps for iPad that I can think of are SugarCRM , and according to a funny post that Paul Greenberg did for ZdNet back in April, MarketCircle’s Daylite product was predicted, but it too has not been released, as of yet.

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