Jacob Morgan, Principal of Chess Media Group who taught me to eat with chop sticks and introduced me to Sushi, has a personal rant about social CRM gurus & guidance out there on CMS Wire. I tried posting a comment but it went into moderation. Don’t know when & if it will be approved. Either ways I wanted to share my thoughts and troubles here too.
Every time someone uses the term Guru I am sure a billion people die a bit.
FWIW:
Guru comes from two words in Sanskrit – Gu & Ru … quoting from Advayataraka Upanishad 14—18, verse 5
The syllable gu means shadows
The syllable ru, he who disperses them,
Because of the power to disperse darkness
the guru is thus named.
Generally speaking, it is used to refer to a person who guides you, a teacher.
A Pundit OTOH means a learned man, a scholar.
HTH.
As for your points about lofty phrases like “well you can’t be social externally until you are social internally,” or “you have to change your corporate culture first,” or “we need to spend a few months researching and developing a long term strategy before we can do anything”, these are phrases taken out of context. Mere chants of sound bites without understanding the meaning of the ‘mantra’.
BTW, ‘mantra’ comes from Sanskrit root words Man & Tra which loosely translates to ‘mind tool’. Though a heavy emphasis is laid on the sounds (vibrations), the meaning is equally important. But again, as with the word Guru, the meaning is lost in translation and people just concentrate on the mindless (& mind numbing) chanting.
The phrases you quote are very god examples of sound bites which have been chanted endlessly without understanding their true meaning/worth.
Go not to the person who merely uses the right sound bites, go to the person who explains you the meaning behind them, paints the complete picture, who can take from the ‘here’ to the ‘there’.
Here’s additional reading that will further educate you on the current CRM hot topics including SocialCRM and many others http://www.intelestream.net/en/whitepapers/whitepapers.html