Thanks for your note. Thought-provoking as always!

Richard

The rest of us need a data hub between social networks, email marketing apps, project and collaboration sites, etc… Especially true for the service industry (clients become project partners then prospective clients again) and small business without an IT department to integrate and keep playing together nicely a bench of disparate apps.

The current paradigm is inherited from desktop apps designed for sale department silos — when there was no such thing as cloud computing and collaboration platform. On the other hand, “social” CRMs have to be social with their ecosystem. That paradigm forces developpers to keep in touch with the operational environment of their applications. But we are not there yet.

For example, I found unbelievable that none of the CRM iphone apps includes a business card scanner to automatically create new records (we all have hundreds of business cards bundled together in a drawer) or that no CRM app has the capability to self-populate a new record based on selected text (Linkedin profile, the contact info at the bottom of an email or company website). Few CRMs (Relenta), if any, are offering solid segmenting capabilities, type iTune playlists — leaving that field to redundant email marketing apps. Most CRMs rely on flat/monolytic tagging systems….

Digital stone age.

Email marketing apps, collaboration apps, project management apps, social network apps, communication apps and email clients are slowly converging or invading the CRM field. At some point, Teambox, Huddle or Google will become the data exchange backbone between CRM, Marketing, PM, KM, HR/PSA and collaboration modules — and external data entry peripherals (iPad, iPhone, laptops…).

Looking at Worketc, BantamLive, Solve360 (Norada), Batchbook, and the like it seems that Google is becoming that hub. Apple and MS are trailing — although Apple might be able to leverage the iPad and iPhone success to carve for itself a niche market, if they can bring me.com up to speed.

You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.

I know what you mean about the importance of the interactions themselves, and I can see the advantages of architecting a CRM with the interactions at the center. But I think that can be limiting, also. For example, if email marketing was the only kind of marketing you do, the email marketing apps would make great CRMs…but it isn’t and they don’t. That’s why most organizations would be better off having their customers in Dynamics CRM or Salesforce or their customer rolodex of choice. I guess you could say they’re focusing on the nouns rather than the verbs, and I don’t really see anything “wrong” about that.

But I’ll readily admit to not having experience with more social-centric apps like I take it Batchbook and Network Hippo are. I have watched a video on Lithium, however, and it looks pretty nice. I definitely need to learn more about those apps.

Relationship is about interactions, communications. Few if any CRM apps are actually built around a relationship hub (or paradigm). Email marketing apps are–they did not inherited a pre-digital age paradigm.

Batchbook, Network Hippo are showing the way…