I have been covering and reporting and analyzing the business technology scene for more than 25 years now.

And every couple of years or so, a new technology “revolution” would spring up. Not the stale, overhyped prior revolution that had just passed — but a new, exciting revolution.This time, things would be different. This new revolution would change the way we thought about technology. This revolution would change the business. This revolution would bring the power of information technology to the masses. A revolution unlike any other revolution that ever came before it.  The most incredible, unbelievable, paradigm-shifting revolution ever.  Yada, yada.  Promises, promises.  Here are a few revolutions:

• In the late 1980s, it was client/server computing — sticking a PC in front of a larger computer.
• In the late 1990s. it was Web computing — sticking a browser in front of a network.
• In the late 1990s, it was dot-coms — sticking a browser in front of a store.
• In the early 2000s decade, it was Web services and XML — sticking standardized code in front of an application.
• In the late 2000s decade, it was cloud — sticking a cloud in front of everything.
• And lots of revolutions in between — usually sticking something in front of something else.

Note on the above list: some would call these techniques “putting lipstick on a pig.”

And when I would come home for dinner at night, or saw friends over the weekend, nobody would ask me what I was up to, and eyes would glaze over if I attempted to tell them. I wouldn’t even attempt to begin to explain to people what I had been writing about all day long. What’s so revolutionary about speeding up a purchase order process or building a rules engine that reduced exception reporting?  What’s revolutionary about displaying 3270 “green-screen” code within a terminal emulation window? (Good stuff every business should pursue — but not something that will make you the life of the party.)

Then, one day a couple of years ago, I came home — and found my daughters (tween and teen) actively participating in the revolution.  The social networking revolution.  An information-technology revolution had finally hit home, and in a big way.  Unlike the decades of vendor pronouncements about revolution, this one was real.  The old order was being driven out — by employees and children of employees.

I knew this time, it was different. So, my daughters may someday ask me: “What did you do in the Social Networking Revolution, Daddy”*? I will tell them about the writings my colleagues and I did here at the FastForward site. And where the revolution took us.

Social media was more than a platform or a new mode of computing — it was a new way of connecting, of doing business, of leading nations, of working, of making friends and renewing friendships.  But, for purposes of this site, first commissioned in December 2006, the theme was to explore to unfolding new world of Enterprise 2.0 in work and business settings.  Consider where the social revolution has taken us in just a few short years:

Personal outsourcing: For the first time, employees all up and down the line have access to information they need to do their jobs better, advance companies, and advance their careers.  John Schmidt so accurately described it as “personal outsourcing.” Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.” IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

Economic revitalization and opportunity: Social networking and E2.0 provides a vast new array of tools for seeking out new markets, as well as managing through the tough times. Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business. Employees have tools to ride through tough times, by staying well-connected with their professional networks and potential employers — even after they have been laid off. They no longer have to be powerless victims of recessions. (I called it the LIFT phenomenon — LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.) Employers have a resource to identify key talent to build their organizations.

Improving the quality — and joy — and therefore productivity — of work: The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management.  Productivity is not something that occurs in a cubicle between 9 and 5, it’s something that comes in “bursts.” Social networks and E2.0 give everyone the flexibility and connectivity to respond to those bursts. In the process, the lines between work and personal life have not only just blurred — they’ve disappeared completely. Some Gloomy Guses say that’s not a good thing, and that employers will exploit it. I say it’s a real good thing.  People should be proud of their work, and have the passion raging within them to want to pursue it, think about it, and embed it into their lives.  Good riddance, 9 to 5.

Return on investment: A hotly debated topic. But the ROI is there. McKinsey & Company, for one, did countless studies the past few years that proved it. A couple of years back for example, they published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executives from around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from E2.0 deployments. Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”

It’s been close to five years that we have been covering the revolution — a real revolution — at this site. And it’s only just begun.

(*By the way, the title of this post is a paraphrase of the 1966 movie “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” in which a bunch of soldiers in World War II hosted a street festival in an Italian town.  One could say social networking is a global festival of sorts.)

In many aspects o technology business innovation, maturity models have served to define stages of development, serving as benchmarks for companies to see how far along they have progressed. The model serves as a guideline for process improvement. For example, the Capability Maturity Model Integration Framework (CMMI), first published at Carnegie-Mellon University, has served as a set of guidelines for software development.

Now. IDC has proposed a similar approach for social enterprise development, called the Social Business Maturity Model, which is intended to help companies that are growing in their adoption of social business and want to optimize their use of social tools.

IDC’s Social Business Maturity Model consists of 5 stages:

1. Experimentation
2. Compartmentalization
3. Integration
4. Operationalization
5. Optimization

Do these identified stages make sense for identifying where organizations stand on the social enterprise spectrum?  The final stage, optimization, suggests that it isn’t until this point that significant benefits are being delivered to the business.

We’ve been talking at this blogsite about the potential of Social customer relationship management (CRM), in which typical CRM – an internally generated and maintained collection of knowledge about customers and their interactions with a company – is enhanced with information streaming in from the virtual communities that now are part of many customers’ experiences.

As part of my work with Insurance Networking News, I had the opportunity to talk with insurance executives and analysts about the viability of Social CRM within this industry, which relies intensely on trust and the goodwill of customers. Frankly, it was difficult to identify insurance companies that had Social CRM programs that they were willing to talk about at this early stage.

I spoke with Craig Beattie, analyst with Celent, who observes that much of the push toward Social CRM is currently coming from the vendor side: “Insurers aren’t really thinking about this yet. The kinds of offerings you get from vendors tend to focus on views of the customer, with all their emails, phone calls and policies, and alongside that, Facebook entries or tweets that might be relevant – a blending with public data, to get some idea of the kind of conversations people might be having. We haven’t seen insurers employ it yet for underwriting purposes, pricing purposes, or getting along better with clients.”

Current survey data shows Social CRM to still be in its infancy – though its likely uptake may be fast and furious over the next few years. A  recent survey of 3,342 marketing directors by MarketingSherpa found that six percent of companies already had functioning Social CRM efforts underway, but a whopping 56 percent were planning such initiatives in the near future. Gartner, in the meantime, predicts 30 percent of companies will extend their social networking efforts to Social CRM processes within the next two years.

One company that is leading the way on this front is Farmers Insurance, which began its Social CRM effort in earnest last fall. I spoke with Marc Zeitlin, vice president of eBusiness at Farmers Insurance, about the effort, which involves the sharing of information, via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn among its network of 15,000 agents, enables the company to better compete against direct-to-consumer insurers. And the effort is delivering along many fronts, according to Zeitlin: “We’re driving growth and new business, as well as customer retention. We also gain product knowledge and service. We’re able to determine whether there’s a need in the market that we’re not meeting.”

Ultimately, Social CRM will lose its cachet, simply becoming a part of normal CRM.  But until then, the industry has just begun to explore the possibilities this new dimension of data provides.

Here is an interesting report I received from Forrester, Plan your ECM Strategy For Business, Persuasive, Transactional, And Foundational Needs by Stephen Powers and Alan Weintraub with Matthew Brown and Anjali Yakkundi. They note that enterprises are now struggling under increasing volumes of varying types of content (aka multi-channel information overload).

In the past firms have taken a product-specific approach to their enterprise content management (ECM) strategies: “document management for office docs, web content management for online content, records management for corporate records, and so on.” Now the reports argues when “developing a content strategy, they should consider persuasive, transactional, and foundational content functionality to support specific business use cases.”  They suggest taking a content centric approach rather than a tool centric approach to handle this complexity. This makes sense to me.

They discuss three types of content: transactional, business, and persuasive. Transactional content often originates outside the enterprise from customers and partners. It often relies on complex workflows or business process management to drive processes. Formats include scanned e-forms, faxes, print streams from back-office applications, and electronic records.

Business content starts within the enterprise and is part of workers daily tasks. Business content includes office documents, presentations, spreadsheets, e-forms, web content, and mobile content. Persuasive content may originate from many sources. There are many use cases including: “multichannel marketing, lead generation, eCommerce, customer self-service, in-store kiosks, and partner extranets.” Here tools such as web content management come into play.

The authors provide a useful framework that shows how foundational issues go across these three content types. They the look at how the different tool types fit into this matrix.  They conclude that you need to remain flexible as you handle the increasing complexity of content types today. I found it a useful way to think beyond traditional approaches to content management that were operating when I helped implement these systems a few years back.

In a previous post, we pondered the lack of social CRM in evidence, asking whether all CRM should be social anyway. In a new post, Umberto Milletti talks about the issues getting in the way of social CRM.

Milletti says marketing and customer service have actually been effectively engaging in social media, but sales has been missing the boat. Kind of ironic, since sales is the most social activity there is in the business.

• Salespeople are not techno-geeks: They see technology as a tool, nothing more, nothing less.
• Salespeople need to understand what’s in it for them: They know time is money, and don’t want to invest valuable time to learn technologies they don’t fully see a return on.
• Social media tools have not been integrated into the sales workflow.
• Salespeople rely on their employer for training on new sales processes and tools to support them.

A recent article in Knowledge@Wharton asks if business-centric social networking is a “revolution” or a “ruse.”  Since we’re inclined here at this site to pick the revolutionary option, it’s worth examining why some experts at UPenn’s Wharton School may be skeptical about its power to transform business.

First, there’s the still-uncertain ROI aspect. As Shawndra Hill, a Wharton operations and information management professor, put it: “Social networking in the enterprise sector is relatively new, and better tools can enable people to communicate across an organization. But before this really takes off, there needs to be some proof that these things are useful.”  Kartik Hosanagar, Wharton professor of operations and information management, echos this sentiment: “I’m a little skeptical about usage, but I’m even more skeptical about benefits to corporations. Companies may use it, but I don’t think it will provide the productivity benefits vendors claim they will provide.”

Ultimately, the success of social networking in enterprises will not be employees and managers adopting sites such as Facebook and Twitter as a separate activity. Kendall Whitehouse, director of new media at Wharton, predicts that ultimately, social networking will simply be pervasive within enterprise software and processes. “Today, social networking is being thought of as a separate thing,” he says. “We’ll see that fade over time, and it will become just part of the way we interact.”

I’m often skeptical of the multi-billion-dollar market predictions made by analyst firms. But social customer relationship management (CRM) is definitely an emerging portion of the enterprise 2.0 space, and it’s helpful to see what kind of growth it may generate.

Gartner, for one, just issued a prediction that the CRM market will enter a “three-year shake up” in 2011, as a number of key trends take hold. Sales, marketing and customer service technologies, projects and implementations will all see rapid changes over the next
few years, the consultancy predicts. As Gartner analyst Ed Thompson puts it:

“Over the next three years, social CRM will continue its exponential rise, software as a service (SaaS) will become routine, salesforce.com will reshuffle the market order, and consultants and system integrators will sell their own CRM software.”

By 2015, one-third of spending on new CRM software will be SaaS, Gartner predicts. In 2009, 24 percent of the CRM software market was delivered by SaaS, and this rose to more than 26 percent in 2010, up from virtually zero in 1999.

Gartner also says by 2013, spending on social software to support sales, marketing and customer service processes will exceed $1 billion worldwide. This compares with Gartner’s forecast of more than $12 billion for overall spending on CRM software in 2012, means that social CRM will encompass approximately eight percent of all CRM spending in 2012, up from approximately four percent in 2010.

Gartner issued recommendations for companies interested in social CRM solutions:

• “Determine if there are any social CRM projects already under way; look in the marketing or customer service departments first.”
• “Calculate the likelihood that you will be forced to start something in 2011 ? your industry and culture are the best indicators.”
• “Find case studies specific to your industry that can provide examples of what is possible, and share them with other decision makers in your organization.”
• Don’t try to bypass the IT organization in moving to social CRM solutions, Gartner advises. “Instead, involve IT in purchase decisions early on to avoid the most-frequently cited downstream issue of data integration, and to address potential concerns about inadequate security, scalability and privacy.

Is ‘Social CRM’ (customer relationship management) too good to be true?

Houston Neal, who runs an advisory service for software buyers, has been watching the growing hype around “Social CRM,” and asks: is it for real?

The answer is, he opines, not yet, but organizations sure could use it.  The problem is, he says, nobody has a good definition for Social CRM yet, and this is creating confusion in the market.

As I mentioned in a previous post here at FastForward, “Social CRM” has a redundant ring to it. Think of the phrases “round circle” or “free gift” or “digital computer.”  The bottom line is that if a company has a non-social, closed-off CRM system, it really isn’t doing CRM at all, is it?

Any CRM implementation worth its salt these days need to blend social media data into the system. Otherwise, it’s a system that is completely missing an important and growing channel that involves many highly engaged customers. The key is to make all your CRM efforts “Social” CRM efforts.

Houston points to another issue that may hamper putting more social into CRM — a highly fragmented market. “The debate over Social CRM has been drawn out over the past couple of years and analysts are still at odds over how to define it. Depending on who you ask, social CRM will mean something different.”

For example, he points out, the social CRM landscape is comprised of several evolving software categories — including the following:

• CRM packages
• Social media monitoring
• Social platforms
• Social analytics

Each category has about 20 to 150 vendors, Houston says. The challenge is deciding which category of software to pursue. He offers the following advice for sorting out a Social CRM strategy:

Don’t look to buy ‘Social CRM’ solutions: “Instead, you need to decide what you are trying to accomplish and which categories [mentioned above]  are most likely to make a meaningful contribution to your strategy.”

Define your goals for a Social CRM strategy: “If you just want to track what customers are saying about your brand on the Web, then a social media monitoring application will suffice. But if you want to analyze that data, identify influencers, or spot trends, you should explore social analytics. Finally, if owning the community is strategically important, you will need a platform to build out that environment for your constituents.”

Look to traditional CRM vendors for enhanced enterprise functionality: “Social CRM vendors don’t offer the same level of sales, service and marketing functionality that traditional CRM vendors offer. So if you need capabilities like sales lead management, lead nurturing and a few social features on the side, then you should really be looking at CRM software.

What exactly is the difference between “Social Business” and “Enterprise 2.0,” if there is one?

The question came up at in a Quora discussion, and asked again by Ross Dawson in one of his latest posts.

It’s semantics, but important semantics. Many articles and papers are using the terms interchangeably.  You may recall it was Andrew MacAfee who first surfaced the term “Enterprise 2.0″ back in 2007 as a way to describe the application of Web 2.0 approaches and thinking to enterprise settings, but separate it from the consumerist fanfare.

For his part, Ross sees Social Business as an emerging way to describe the transformation that organizations are undertaking as part of their Enterprise 2.0 activities. Enterprise 2.0 as a term may have a more technical cast to it.

In the Quora discussion, our colleague Jevon McDonald also saw Enterprise 2.0 in terms of the tools and Social Business as the outcome:

“Enterprise 2.0 represents a set of technologies and methodologies for IT implementation inside the enterprise. A Social Business uses Enterprise 2.0 software to implement internal social process but also accounts for things such as: external social presence, supporting process, HR issues, policy development and governance.”

Stowe Boyd echoed similar sentiments:

“A social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web, including social media, social networks, and a long list of other advances. Enterprise 2.0 is generally used to represent the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies — like cloud computing, social media, wikis, and the like — and is, as such, principally a technology adoption issue, and not a reconceptualization of business operations.”

John Tropea, on the other hand, sees Social Business as the journey to reach Enterprise 2.0. E 2.0, he says, is more the idealized end state — Enterprise 2.0 is a concept and strategy to do business a different way…  a more transparent workplace, two-way communication, networked/activity centric overlayed on the present process-centric and blended with hierarchy.” As he puts it:

“With social business design we may reach a state of enterprise 2.0 eventually.”

So which comes first — Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business?

More proof that it really does pay — in a bottom-line kind of way — to be Web/Enterprise 2.0 savvy.

New research out of McKinsey & Company shows that companies embracing Web 2.0 approaches are likely to be reaping more gains and market leadership than their less Web 2.0-savvy counterparts. McKinsey spoke to 3,249 companies as part of its annual Web 2.0 survey, and concluded that these “networked enterprises” are more likely to be market leaders and gaining market share, “but also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.”

The study’s authors, Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui, report that 27% of companies overall reported having both market share gains against their competitors and higher profit margins. However, “highly networked enterprises” — those using Web 2.0 inside and outside their organizations in innovative ways — “were 50 percent more likely to fall in this high-performance group than other organizations were,” they report.

The authors predict that in many industries, “new competitive battle lines may form between companies that use the Web in sophisticated ways and companies that feel uncomfortable with new Web-inspired management styles or simply can’t execute at a sufficiently high level.”

Bughin and Chui also report that the majority of companies that have embraced Web 2.0 continue to report that they are receiving measurable business benefits—with nearly nine out of ten reporting at least one benefit. These benefits include increasing speed of access to knowledge (cited by 77% of respodents with internal Web 2.0 efforts and 57% using Web 2.0 to engage external partners); reduced communication costs (60% internal users, 53% external);  and decreased travel costs (44% internal users, 38% external).