Capgemini Immediate Blog

Mark Zukerberg, CEO of Facebook first talked about Social Graph at the Facebook f8 conference in May 2007. Since then Facebook has quietly extended across the web, in the first instance, embedding Facebook Connect and the Facebook “Like” button into consumer web sites.

I logged onto Amazon.com the other day with Facebook Connect and it’s hard not to be impressed with the depth of Amazon’s integration into Facebook. When I logged onto the site, I gave Amazon access to my Facebook profile, from which Amazon picked up my favourite books, CDs and movies (supplementing their knowledge of my previous purchases to improve the recommendations they presented to me). I could also see what my friends had liked on the site and see recommendations from them. In addition, Amazon picked up the dates of my friend’s birthdays and gave me ideas for birthday presents to buy for them. Scary? Big brother? Maybe… However, Amazon.com is certainly one of the early examples of social commerce in action.

Similarly, on holiday last month I noticed that Tripadvisor had caught the Facebook Connect-bug. By logging in with Facebook connect I could see which cities my Facebook friends had visited, post questions to my friends, asking them to recommend a hotel or restaurant and update my own traveller profile to give back to the community. In effect I could leverage 2 networks – my direct friends and the wider, unknown peer community.

The consumer world, unsurprisingly, is currently leading the way in Social Commerce. Here are just a few other examples of social commerce in action:

Dominos Pizza offer each “Major of Foursqure” in their local branches with a free pizza each week when they spend over £10.

Futureshop.ca, the Canadian arm of Best Buy, use a video avatar called Aaron to answer questions based on knowledge summated by other customers on their Lithium customer forum.

Seesaw.com allows users to post status updates of TV content they have downloaded to Twitter and Facebook (e.g. Laurence has just downloaded “Top Gear” and rated it 8/10). They also crowd-source recommendations using Baynote e.g. “people who liked Top Gear also liked Fifth Gear”).

Levis launched a Facebook friends store on their US site, allowing users to view what jeans were popular amongst their friends.

Sephora set up a Beautytalk forum for their customers to exchange beauty tips. Customers can watch YouTube videos of how to best use their products, rate advice, vote on their favourite products and post questions to the community.

Of course this space is emerging at great speed. The examples above are accurate today, but most likely out of date tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how they evolve and how the two worlds of social collaboration and privacy collide.

If you’re interested in this space, Altimeter Group are hosting a conference on The Rise of Social Commerce on October 6-7^th.

Laurence Buchanan leads CRM within Capgemini’s Technology Services business in the UK. Follow him on Twitter or connect onLinkedin. This post was first published on www.thecustomerevolution.com

A few months ago I travelled to Atlanta to attend a seminar run by Paul Greenberg entitled “Social CRM Strategies for Business”. This was the second time the event had been run; the first was held in the middle of a snow storm in Washington earlier this year (see Michael Fauscette’s review).

The event was well worth attending. The content was excellent (delivered with Paul’s usual passion) and from a networking point of view many of the leading thinkers in the Social CRM space attended, along with marketing, sales and customer service business leaders who were starting their social CRM journeys. I wrote a summary of my three key take-aways from the Atlanta event here.

At the end of the event I suggested to Paul that he hold the third seminar in Europe and he kindly agreed. I’m therefore very pleased to announce that Capgemini will host the third “Social CRM Strategies for Business” seminar, in our new London offices in Holborn on November 4^th and 5^th 2010.

Paul Greenberg, the “godfather of Social CRM”, will again be running the event with his colleagues Esteban Kolsky (ex-Gartner CRM analyst) and Bruce Culbert. The format of the 2 days is a training and workshop style-event with a dinner on the evening of day one. For more information please download the programme brochure or take a look at the early press coverage from mycustomer.com , the leading CRM online news site.

The seminar is designed for executives, managers and professionals in:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Customer Support
• CRM Industry, Technology and Services
• CRM Consulting and Professional Services

At the seminar attendees will learn:

• How to Build Successful Social CRM Strategies
• How to Market to the New Socially Empowered Customer
• The Best Tools to Map the Social Customer’s Experience
• How to Create the Right Social CRM Framework for Your Business.

If you would like to register for the event and purchase an early-bird ticket please visit this link.

Little more than a decade ago most organisations’ eBusiness activities simply amounted to getting a web site up i.e. a presence online. Today most have, or are finally closing in on fully integrated portals and direct channels. To the extent that they are often now genuine peers of the traditional channels – such as store/branch networks, call centres, sales forces, resellers etc.

Over the past few years as these integrated online and mobile channels have been more and more mature, and more commonplace, the world has changed the way it uses online quite dramatically (as I wrote about here). In other words, the world of eBusiness now is very different to the world of eBusiness that inspired the online channels we have today. One of the key questions for those of us working in eBusiness has been – what lies beyond this current generation of ‘online-as-a-channel’ that we see today? What comes next?

Read more »

Regular readers of my blog might gasp in horror at the notion of putting software before vision and strategy. I’ve written a number of posts advocating the definition of a vision and strategy before enabling that with people, processes, technology… See “The Emperor’s new Social CRM clothes” or “How can we prevent a Social CRM bubble”. Both posts focus on the mistakes of the first generation of CRM – technology-centric, inside out, monolithic, lack of CRM vision or strategy… So why on earth did I recently recommend a client look at software before building their vision for Social CRM? Read more »

No area of IT that most organisations are involved in moves as fast as eBusiness. It is the one influenced directly by the huge pace of development of online and mobile technologies, and the dramatic changes in how people use the web and mobile technologies in their day-to-day lives.

Both these influences have been accelerating in their rate of change now for a little over a decade since the Enterprise world started getting online, to the point that now the dynamics are just fundamentally different to many of the internal facing operational and transactional areas that make up much of an enterprise’s IT. Read more »

So its been 6 weeks since I was in a (very sunny and not in the least bit windy) Chicago for Capgemini’s quarterly analyst briefing which focussed on SaaS and ‘cloud’ developments. Although slightly wary that the very clued up analysts might turn their noses up at ‘cloud’ references as merely buzz words or worse marketing spin, I gave my sci-fi based presentation on our new Immediate solution. My colleagues had looked aghast when I proposed using spaceships in front of the Worlds top IT specialists but I persevered as they  best describe the ability of an organisation to plug their applications into a ready to use docking station of software tools to deliver business services to the their customers. And (unless I get some terse responses to this blog) the basic messages went down well and here we are 6 weeks later launching Immediate and announcing a very exciting deal with the Royal Mail. Read more »

It’s been nearly four years since I was introduced by a good friend to IT delivered as a service. The solution was NetSuite.com and he had implemened the ERP service in a matter of weeks. Read more »

The growth of Facebook and Twitter has been breathtaking. Both have transformed themselves from start-ups to virtual continents in just a few years. Just months ago, for example, Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site in the US. One thing this demonstrates is that new social channels can reach critical mass extremely fast. Read more »