The Social Customer — Complete Control or A Level of Control?

[widget id=”ad_unit-3"]ad_unit-3[/widget]I’m not going to quote it directly, because even 140 characters seems long-winded these days, but I believe Paul Greenberg’s tweetable definition of Social CRM has been blown way out of proportion. So much so, that I actually feel that I need to build a bridge. Can you believe it? The iconoclast is building a bridge!

I’ve read and heard many people since the time this came out talk about the customer controls the conversation. And then this morning, I read a Tweet by Graham Hill, I’m sure completely out of context — but I read it anyway, who said the customer doesn’t control the conversion. I realize he wrote “conversion” and not “conversation”, but it’s the control thing I zeroed in on. Let’s talk about this for a minute.

Did Paul G. suggest that the customer completely controls the conversation? Or did he imply that the level of response by the company is relative to the level of control of the conversation by the customer. I think we can all a…