Bantam Live

Tech researchers, analysts, journalists, bloggers and vendors agree that "Social CRM" is a hot sector, and validation of this is that companies are increasingly adopting it to engage and include their customers in business. But few people agree on a precise definition of what social CRM is and the #scrm hashtag on Twitter has frequent links to offerings as this market takes shape. The "Godfather" (or should we say General) of the social-CRM-definition-wars is CRM expert Paul Greenberg whose oft-referenced definition includes the position that social CRM strategies are a "company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation" out there in social media land. In this many seem to agree.

Social CRM as it applies to Bantam Live refers to both internal collaboration among a business team and external engagement with the voices of customers, prospects, and partners across the social web. Outside is in, inside is out. We explain...

Let's first start out with the internal social CRM aspects of Bantam Live. At the core of Bantam Live, in the dashboard, is the real-time activity stream, which fuses business data objects and communication among a team, so it can stay in the loop and collaborate. In Bantam Live, everything from status updates and team commenting to workflow activity updates (eg. progress on projects, completed tasks, and modifications to deals that a team is collaborating on) cascade in the stream.

This design is similar to the Facebook news feed and it's becoming all the rage in web-based business software. As Marc Benioff of Salesforce wrote on TechCrunch, it's "The Facebook Imperative" for software companies. As ReadWriteWeb said at our private-beta debut last summer, "Bantam Live is part CRM, part Twitter, and part Facebook for business teams." Even content from the web can be imported by users and displayed in the activity stream of Bantam Live, which leads us to the external part of social CRM.

While team members collaborate internally within the activity stream, they can also search from within their Bantam Live workspace out on social networks like Twitter. For example, if you're selling industrial solar panel technology to commercial office parks, you can search for keywords - say "solar panel recommendations" - and upon discovery import a new contact's full profile and the relevant tweet with one click into Bantam Live. From here, you can initiate workflows with team members to engage this new contact, and converse with the new contact for various CRM purposes, while maintaining all annotations and live feeds of this person from a single contact page in Bantam Live. All of this activity cascades in the real-time stream of the Bantam Live dashboard, where team members can comment and interact. For lead-generation (and soon other CRM features), Bantam Live makes the filtered and captured spontaneous content of Twitter transformative and valuable for sales and biz-dev people. As we've said, Thar's gold in them thar tweets!

Altimeter Group's Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang recently issued a report  that provides a framework and successful use cases of social CRM. In its broad spectrum, we'd say Bantam Live initially falls into the Sales and Collaboration categories of their Social CRM construct, specifically in the SMB space, for now. Interestingly, as we've suggested (see Hunter-Gatherer and Farmer in Social CRM), it's possible that the deeper social "relationships" (in the human bonding sense of the term) between two people will increasingly flourish in small and midsize businesses (without the restrictions of the large enterprise) and, moreover, 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. It may turn out that the sales and biz-dev end of the social CRM spectrum is the most richly authentic and social of all. Who knows? As we continue to build Bantam Live in the triad of CRM's domain in sales, marketing, and customer support, we'll find out.

Internal CRM collaboration among the team, external CRM engagement with prospects, partners, and customers, all managed in a social workspace with complimentary productivity and collaboration tools for business teams. That's the social CRM you'll find in Bantam Live. Stay tuned as we broaden our social CRM offerings.

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 and midsize 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..."