From gr8 to Awesomeness – after the #SCRMSummit –

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Today is exactly one week after my return from Paul Greenberg’s first Social CRM Strategies for Business Seminar in Washington. I needed some time to let the experience sink in and to straighten out my thoughts. I’ve read all of the wonderful posts written by what I can genuinely now refer to as my peers. I regard them as my peers because I trust them, value their thoughts, experience and ideas and because we together now share a truly great experience, which we will all long remember and reference to. I owe all of them, with Paul Greenberg as Primus Inter Pares, a huge thank you, for their part in this event.

Enough said about that. My main thoughts over the past week have not been on Social CRM but one how to bring this experience from great to awesomeness:

For Social CRM I see a bright future.
Regardless what we all try to name it and regardless the numerous debates that we will continue to have, I know that Social CRM is not going away. The journey started seriously, and we now have at least 68 advocates and practitioners of the mindset, the philosophy and the strategic direction that Social CRM provides us.

We also know it is not carved out in stone.
Personally I believe Social CRM will never be carved out in stone. There will be continuous debate on how to and what (not) to. And that is a good thing. Companies need to be adaptive to changing Customer needs and a changing competitive landscape, more than ever before, these days. And so does Social CRM. It’s a journey that 68 of us have been taking and will continue to embark upon. And the debate is what keeps us moving, as will research conducted, practices shared and lessons learned

And there is still much to learn.
More than ever I’m convinced that we have awesome opportunity to do that. I still have all these questions around the Social Customer, her needs, behavior, peer trust, influencers and promotors, collaboration & co-creation, knowledge-flows and last but not least: how does all this improve value for the Customer, Customer loyalty for the company and the company’s bottom line?

The Conversation & Intelligence is just around the corner.
Talking to this wide variety of experts, from consultant to vendor, from Customer Officer to widely recognized analysts, from B2B to B2C, from Enterprise 2.0 and Customer Services to Marketing practitioners, made me realize that literally any question I have can be answered by reaching out. Maybe not directly, but I know for a fact that all present (and some not present) are looking for the answers as much as I do. And knowing now how much we all want the answers, I’ll bet that soon some will be boiling up.

There is a risk too.
A risk that we will not be leveraging the collective knowledge to the potential it has. A thought that keeps bugging me is that we need to find a way to collectively share and learn, just like we have been doing in DC, to bring not only something really great out of this conference, but to turn it into awesomeness.

What is awesomeness?
This is The definition by Umair Haque, which I think could apply here:

Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That’s a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.

Unless you join us in the conversation!
What, imho, would certainly help in going from great to awesomeness as an outcome of this event is that more people, with more backgrounds and more thoughts, with a genuine interest and time vested in trying to understand the Social Customer and the best possible answer to the Social Customer’s ownership of the conversation, join us in the conversation!

Reach out! We’ll listen and talk back..
By reaching out to the ones that have participated in this first Social CRM Masterclass, by asking (tough) questions, by showing what you think and have learned, and last but not least, by approaching Paul Greenberg that you want in on his next Seminar.. If you can not, for whatever reason, read his book, some you may know, some you will not, but it’s a hell of a good starting point for the conversation we are now having, and increasingly so with our Customers and their Customers.

And share
I’d love to hear your voices, experiences and ideas on how to answer to the Social Customer. I’d love to share mine and know we can learn and grow together from doing that. Most of all I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can tune in the collective intelligence I think we all experienced at the #SCRMSummit and get the knowledge flowing faster and wider, so that we would collectively move from great to awesomeness..

It’s your turn now..

Republished with author's permission from original post.

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