My Painful Journey from CRM to Social CRM

I was dragged kicking and screaming into the Social CRM fray — so, I apologize for the crudeness of this post, but I just have to let it flow.

A number of years ago, I began a personal journey to discover where the real value of CRM was hiding. I was tired of installing software that my customers believed would rock their world — when it clearly didn’t (maybe a little :) ). I began my website, Effective CRM, as a place for me to begin writing about all of the things I was piecing together about how a business could get value out of their CRM initiative. While I was doing this, I heard about Twitter through a blog — and the title of it was something like “Twitter is the new CRM.”

This story may be important to those of you old time CRM’ers out there because I have succeeded in reaching my destination. It was a rocky road, but I’ll try to show you the way. Social CRM is not as scary as you may think. Don’t listen to the social media and PR people. They don’t understand CRM — they simply t…