The Challenge Met: The Grandest CRM Business Blogs–Customer-Friendly, Toujours

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In my last blog entry on “The 5 Gods of CRM Blogdom” a coupla weeks ago, Graham Hill put up a comment that kind of irked me. He said, these are great technology blogs but what are the best CRM business blogs? I remember that I thought, “What the hell is he talking about?” I took umbrage within my own mental island. Though I realized of course that he was more or less right. You could make a case that three of the five – mine, Chris Carfi’s and Denis Pombriant’s cover business issues as well as technology but on the whole…he was right. Damn you, Graham. So in the interest of meeting his challenge, here are five more CRMish blogs that relate to business issues that I find very very good – though there will be technology in there – I warn you.

  1. Church of the Customer – this blog run by the authors of the The Citizen Marketer truly get the contemporary customer and how they are thinking. Skewed toward a Gen X customer, this is an insightful, creative, and on occasion, very funny blog on the different approaches to marketing that need to be taken in the 21st century and is revered by as the temple they go to when they need to find out contemporary approaches for impacting customers.
  2. Springwise – This and its sister “blog” (probably stretching it a little bit to call it that but when you go there, you’ll know what I’m sayin’), Trendwatching are two of the most astute “new business model” sites on the web. Coverage comes through the contributions of over 8000 “spring watchers” across the globe. Springwise tracks the long tail entrepreneurial businesses both as trends and specific businesses that the spring watchers report on. They get too cutesy trying to mashup words that reflect the new trends but their coverage is both unparalleled and free – except for their annual trend report which is mega-priced but worth it.
  3. Doc Searls Weblog – Doc Searls is one of the authors of what is a seminal work for what the social customer wants out of business “The Cluetrain Manifesto”. Doc continues his insights as applied to both real world business models, customer service concepts and his current pet project – Vendor Relationship Management (that means practitioners in all industries. Not just technology vendors). Searls is both quirky and amazingly smart about how to think around customers and how to organize their efforts and how businesses need to act, not just be poseurs. This man simply gets it.

Okay, that’s three that are excellent, though not traditional by any means. But all three of these AND my blog, PGreenblog AND Chris Carfi’s The Social Customer AND Denis Pombriant’s BeagleBlog are what’s out there as a starter group. There are many others to choose from but because of the changes in business models, the technology will be integrated increasingly into the model as media for realtime communications among peers and between customer and company. That integration is unavoidable.
So, Graham, I hope this starts to whet your appetite. What are some of your favorites? I happen to know that you know a LOT of the resources out there. Lets hear what you know.

Please.

Paul Greenberg
The 56 Group, LLC
Paul Greenberg, the president of the 56 Group, LLC, is the author of the best-selling CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century, 3rd edition. Greenberg is co-chairman of Rutgers University's CRM Research Center and executive vice president of the CRM Association. His blog PGreenblog won both of the only two awards ever given to CRM blogs.

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