Bantam Live

Analogy: Hunter-Gatherer societies have mostly faded from the scene of food sustenance with the advent of the agricultural revolution, but the hunter-gatherers in business teams who forage for prospects, seek partners, and hunt for deals working in entrepreneurial ventures, small businesses, and nimble business units of larger companies are alive and well in the jungle of the market economy. The hunter-gather social structure remains intact for business teams. These hunter-gatherer types - sales/biz dev people, startup entrepreneurs, small business managers - are the prototypical customers of Bantam Live, and they're distinct from the social CRM "farmers" of big advertising and public relations departments in larger companies who cultivate a brand and tend to the existing customers by monitoring and responding to chatter in the Twittersphere. Bantam Live is for hunter-gatherers and the social CRM applications from a range of other vendors pursuing brand monitoring and customer service functionality are for the farmers. Both of these types of social CRM apps have great value in the increasingly broad spectrum of social CRM.

The construct of this analogy is set against the backdrop of the emergent term of "social CRM" and a blog post on TechCrunch by PR/social media whiz, Brian Solis. I replied to his excellent post he contributed to TechCrunch yesterday about Virgin America's use of Twitter - and Brian responded in kind to my reply. The community of vendors, analysts, writers, and pundits are all trying to define this market, but what we find fascinating is that the truly "social" element of CRM exists more with the hunter-gatherers engaging in personal business relationships than it does with the farmers fleetingly engaging in transactional ones. Read Brian's post on TechCrunch and scroll down to see my reply; here are some teaser nuggets in my reply:

"...I dare say that deeper social "relationships" (in the human bonding sense of the term) between two people will increasingly flourish in small businesses (without the restrictions of the large enterprise) in the sales and biz-dev end of the social CRM spectrum, more so than in the ephemeral and transactional nature of a customer service relationship with a brand and its on-duty rep...."

"...I believe it will turn out that the sales and biz-dev end of the social CRM spectrum is the most richly social of all. Thar's gold in them thar tweets..."