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I've been at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara this week, and this morning I had the privilege of listening to Paul Greenberg, "godfather of CRM", talk about convergence of Enterprise 2.0 and social CRM. As a long-term advocate of social CRM, I didn't need convincing, and felt Paul summed it up best by saying "it's time to engage the customers not just the staff".

Ever since I first became involved in enterprise social networking, I have always been more interested in applications outside the company - this is what led to my paper Socializing Beyond The Enterprise. But of course, this external social networking needs to take place in the context of what is going on inside the company - they are two sides of the same coin.

It made me wonder how we ever reached a point where any sort of convergence was necessary. I am notoriously pedantic about language, and I noticed on more than one occasion, the social CRM guys referring to the Enterprise 2.0 guys as "you guys". How did it ever become "us and them?"

On one level, it doesn't matter, everyone is talking to each other now, all friends together, and there was a dedicated social CRM track within the conference. But look a little deeper, and there has been a noticeable impact on the software products being offered in these two areas. There is very little overlap between vendors of social software for the workplace and social CRM. And I find this very surprising.

BroadVision have always believed that the overlap between internal and external social collaboration is not only inevitable, but also highly desirable. So we designed Clearvale to have the concept of a social ecosystem - a set of overlapping social networks, each with a specific target audience but with the ability to share content and users between them.

And it doesn't stop there. For me, and I am sure many others, the highlight of the conference was listening to Geoffrey Moore speak at the Clearvale Second Floor event yesterday evening. He talked about the way global supply chains have become disaggregrated; while that's great when everything is working, it means that resolving problems when they occur is far more difficult. At that point, enterprise social networking becomes invaluable here as well. So a Clearvale ecosystem may include not just an employee and customer network, but also partner networks, supplier networks and maybe even dedicated networks for each of the most important customers, partners and suppliers.

Putting together this sort of an social ecosystem with a set of products that were not architected for this purpose is going to be really hard work. So before choosing a platform for your first enterprise social network, give a little bit of thought to how it will relate to your second. And your third. And your fourth.

After last month's Facebook dislike button scam, I enjoyed reading this article from The Next Web explaining why Facebook will never have real dislike button. They say "people simply can’t be trusted to use a dislike button sensibly". It's a slightly depressing observation to make, but for a consumer social network, it's probably true.

However, I would suggest that a dislike button is an essential part of a business social network. In any intelligent debate, there needs to be a way to express polite disagreement. How else can you assess how well your work was received if no one is allowed to criticise it constructively? Without this you end up with endless comment streams of "that's awesome!" and "you rock!" to a point where you only realise you've done something wrong when not enough people are telling you how awesome you are.

This is a subject we've discussed within BroadVision many times, and there's a school of thought which says that whenever you click "dislike" on something, you have to explain why in a comment. I understand this argument, but personally, I don't agree with it - if you don't have to justify why you like something, why do you have to justify why you don't like it? There are many occasions when I've read something that I don't agree with or don't like, but haven't felt strongly enough to get into a debate about it. This "casual dislike" is possible because Clearvale's like/dislike buttons are anonymous - I think this is a good thing because it leads to greater honesty and more accurate assessment of the worth of the content in question.

Although coming to terms with a culture that allows this sort of disagreement is not easy for everyone. I once clicked "dislike" on a blog post and within minutes, the author had added a comment asking "who did that?" This is one of the implications of the social web - anyone can publish, but they have to be a little more thick-skinned when they receive criticism. Clicking "dislike" doesn't mean I dislike you, it means I don't agree with one particular item you have written.

Many people talk about how the journey towards being a "social enterprise" is not just a question of installing the right technology, but a cultural shift. I believe that an essential part of this is to embrace the benefits of disagreement.

Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. But unfortunately you can't click "dislike" on this blog post. We chose to remove the dislike button from the Clearvale blog.... we just can't trust you to use it sensibly!

I couldn't help a wry smile this week when I saw that Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook was quoted as saying that:

in the next three to five years, a website that isn't tailored to a specific user's interest will be an anachronism

BroadVision, of course, have a bit of history around personalization. Back in 1997, when I first became aware of BroadVision, I was hugely inspired by the vision of Pehong Chen to help companies create personalized web sites, in exactly the way Sheryl Sandberg describes. Looking back at Pehong's presentations from this time, I came across a quote from Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester, who said:

Much of the Web's future will come from delivering individualized experiences

That was in May 1996; the future has been a long time coming. Indeed, this was the point I made in a presentation at the BroadVision user conference in November 2007, shortly after Tapan Bhat at Yahoo! had predicted:

the future of the web is about personalization. Where search was dominant, now the web is about 'me'. It's about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalized for the user

So why is it taking so long? It's certainly not because of the technology - BroadVision had a great personalization engine back in 1997, enabling all the things Sandberg talks about.

No, this has little to do with technology. To do effective personalization, you need two things. Firstly, you need enough information about the user to be able to select relevant content for them. Secondly, you need their trust to use this information in this way. And trust is a funny thing - it seems that just around the time when a company acquires enough information about you to create an effective, personalized experience, they start to lose your trust. Facebook, of course, have discovered that in a very big way this year.

For years and years, I always considered Amazon to be the best example of web personalization, because they always appeared transparent about how they used information. When they recommended a product, there was a little link saying "why is this recommended for you?". But even Amazon have fallen into the trust trap - I have had more than one conversation along the lines of "I don't like browsing around Amazon these days because I know they'll send me endless emails about the products I looked at".

So, is web personalization an unachievable utopia? No, I don't think so. Social networking has made people more relaxed about giving personal information in return for a better web experience. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google and Amazon have all advanced the cause of personalization. But none of them have cracked the trust issue yet. Once a sufficiently large amount of user data is acquired, there is always a temptation to use this to generate revenue in a way that may well be compliant with the privacy policy the user signed up to, but is not in line with what a user considers acceptable.

Arguably, once trust is lost, it is never fully regained. My favourite observation about Facebook's recent privacy troubles was from Andrew Brown who noted that we are not Facebook's customers, we are their product. Facebook's customers are the advertisers using our personal data to target their message to a very specific audience.

So it may require a completely new breed of company to build and retain the trust required for large scale personalization; one that understands where the line between acceptable and unacceptable use of personal data lies, and takes care to never cross that line. And that may take a little longer than 3-5 years.

There's an old programming joke about what "C++" actually means in the C++ language. It means "increment C, but use the original value". What makes this funny (well, as funny as a programming joke can be) is that this was exactly the way many people used C++ - just like C, ignoring most of the features C++ added.

The software industry has often been guilty of presenting old ideas with new names to try and generate excitement for them. So one of my continuing worries about the "Enterprise 2.0" movement (I hate all that putting-2.0-after everything) is that Enterprise 2.0 is actually Enterprise++ - same old intranets, same old collaboration, with a nice new shiny "social" label.

This has set me wondering, what is the difference between "1.0" collaboration software and "2.0" social software? Are they the same thing? We collaborated before social software; we communicated before social software. So what does social software add? If social software just helps us communicate and collaborate better than we did before that implies that it is simply a better mousetrap. No, there has to be more to it than that.

"It's people-centric, not content/process-centric" is an explanation I often give. But hang on a moment... why isn't e-mail classed as "social software"? E-mail is the ultimate people-centric, person-to-person (or person-to-people) communication tool. Yet e-mail is often characterized as the antithesis of social software.

I've read a lot of definitions of social software and one recurring theme is that social software "aggregates the actions of networked users". What does that mean? I believe it means the difference between old-style collaboration software and social software is not who is involved in the collaboration; it's the fact that everyone else can see that the collaboration is going on. It's not just helping groups work together better, it's also about giving the rest of the community visibility about what they're doing.

This applies equally outside an organisation as in it. What makes Social CRM social? The fact that a customer's issues are being addressed in a public forum where everyone else can see. And it also helps answer why e-mail is not social; if you're not on the to or cc list of an e-mail message, you don't know it exists.

So while it's not a definition, perhaps that's the difference between social software and collaboration. Social software is... never having to tell your the rest of the company what you're working on, because they already know (or at least could easily find out).

And that genuinely is something new and different that previous generations of collaboration software lacks.

When I first became interested in the subject in 2008, I was struck by the feeling that most of what was described as "social commerce" really wasn't very social at all. It was mostly based on product reviews, which while useful, provided little more than the "wisdom of strangers". It was like walking into a store and shouting out "who thinks I should buy this?", or worse, everyone yelling "you should buy this!" at you. You know nothing about these people, they know nothing about you. How do you know whether you can trust their opinion? Yes, it's better than no wisdom at all, but far less useful than the valued opinions of trusted friends and colleagues.

So I felt that for eCommerce to become truly social, it needed to integrate with existing social networks like Facebook and MySpace, or for storefronts to be established on these networks.

Fast forward two years, and there has definitely been a move towards this, but eCommerce is still nowhere near as social as it could (and indeed, probably will, become). On Paul Marsden's excellent blog Social Commerce Today, he defines social commerce as:

Selling with social media - the use of social media in the context of e-commerce

OK, I can live with that, but I do think it's a little simplistic. Just because a retailer is using social media to help sell, doesn't make it social commerce. Dell's use of Twitter to alert customers to offers in their Outlet store certainly uses social media, but it is primarily just a broadcast medium. 1-800-Flowers' Facebook store was one of the first examples of it's kind, but at least initially was little more than an eCommerce widget within Facebook, without taking much advantage of the user's social graph. I would argue that an eCommerce capability on a social network is not true social commerce if it fails to take advantage of the social environment it is in.

Then around a year ago, I came across a hugely thought-provoking piece of work from Jeremiah Owyang, while when he was still at Forrester, and it made me realise how narrowly most people (myself included) had been looking at the subject. He defines social commerce as being the fifth of five eras of the social web, and predicts this starting in 2011, reaching maturity in 2013. Further definition of these eras and the impact on consumers and brands is included in the graphic in this article.

So what are all these social features we see today if they're not social commerce? One commenter on Jeremiah's article observed that much of what passes for social commerce today is actually in Jeremiah's "era of social colonization". In particular it merely enables people to "lean on their peers' opinions to make decisions about products". OK, call it social commerce if you want, but it really only socializes the product selection decision, not the transaction itself.

Some of Jeremiah's predictions for the "era of social commerce" are logical extensions of using social networks for eCommerce.

"work with peers to define the next generation of products; also purchase in groups"

"lean on groups to define products"

Others far more revolutionary and disruptive, such as:

"online groups supplant brands"

"a new PR agency emerges which represents online groups - not brands"

If these happen, a lot of companies are going to have to think very hard about whether they embrace this change or fight it. Maybe we will see more experiments like giffgaff, a community-powered mobile telco, which is actually a subsidiary of O2/Telefonica.

Examples of several of the predictions for this era are already beginning to emerge. Over the last 6-9 months, group-buying companies such as Groupon and LivingSocial have expanded rapidly. LivingSocial opened in the UK for the first time this week, and Amazon acquired Woot.

Last year, Walkers Crisps ran a competition to let people invent new flavours, with the winner not only receiving a prize, but 1% of the profits (it has since been discontinued, not surprising, it was horrible - the customer is NOT always right!). Vitaminwater did a similar thing on Facebook.

Whether all of Jeremiah's predictions come true or not, it's clear that there is a lot more to come in social commerce over the next few years. This may well cause a shift in the balance of power between vendors and customers, and not all vendors will be comfortable with this. Despite what I said earlier, I do think we can count "the use of social media in the context of e-commerce" as social commerce, but we should acknowledge that it is just the beginning. And this is before we've even got on to thinking about what it might mean to B2B eCommerce.

So hang on tight... it's going to be an interesting ride.

Lots of people are talking about Social CRM, and almost everyone has their own definition. I really don't want invent yet another definition, but I do think that even the best definitions need a little explanation.

I've been using Paul Greenberg's definition, which I discovered via Jeremiah Owyang which defines Social CRM as:

a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It's the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation.

OK, that's great, but what does that mean in practice? Here's how I explain it:

Customer interaction with a company has typically been through CRM systems and customer services departments

Customer forums are often completely detached from CRM/customer service, if they exist at all:

To some companies, "Social CRM" is simply enabling better interfaction between customer service and the rest of the company, without any direct benefit to the customer:

To others, it means getting customer service to participate in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter:

But to me, Social CRM means integrating all of these to enable better communication between customers, customer service and other company employees, whatever channel is used:

I was at the HR Software Show in London for two days last week, and one of the topics I was talking about was employee misuse of social media, something that HR professionals are rightly concerned about. Research by Proofpoint last year showed that 8% of US companies had fired employees for inappropriate use of social media. While the figure in the UK is much lower, there have still been several high-profile incidents over the last year or so. Dixons staff writing on an unofficial (but open) Facebook group described their customers as "stupid" and "arseholes". Similarly, British Airways staff described their customers as "smelly" and "annoying". Virgin Atlantic's employees described their customers as "chavs" (a uniquely British insult - look it up on Wikipedia!) and complained of cockroaches on their planes.

Of course, the initial reaction most people have to all of these incidents is "how could they be so stupid?". But I've been asking myself a question about this - would they have happened if the companies in question had provided a social intranet for informal chat between employees where this sort of discussion is tolerated? Something I often say about Social CRM is that if you don't provide a forum for your customers to express their opinion, don't be surprised if they find somewhere else on the internet to do so in a far less constructive way. It occurs to me that for large companies, the same is true of employees.

But would a large company like British Airways or Dixons really tolerate a forum inside the company which insulted its customers? Very unlikely. But casual expression of frustration at work is something everyone does, and in this day and age, that's just as likely to happen online as offline. So it's really not surprising that this discussion does end up on Facebook.

It's often said that social networking is an unstoppable tidal wave. So maybe companies should accept that this sort of discussion is going to happen somewhere, and therefore it's better to have it in private, where a certain level of control can be exercised and the worst excesses can be prevented. Such an idea would have been laughable 5 years ago, and it would take a brave company to do it now. But it doesn't seem quite so ridiculous as it once might have done.

[ Footnote: no, BroadVision don't have a customer insult forum.... yet! ]

Much of the discussion of Social CRM I have seen so far is very consumer focused, with the primary concern of how discussion on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can be linked to a company's CRM systems.

So if someone writes on Twitter

Hey @Apple, why can't I print from my iPad?

...this finds its way into Apple's support processes (well, supposing Apple had a Twitter presence, which of course they don't).

Many people would argue "that's just dumb... why not go to Apple's web site and ask them?", but there is increasing expectation that vendors come to where the users are, not vice versa. Perhaps I'm showing my age by saying this, so I'll say it quietly, but yes, I find it a bit dumb too.

But does this make sense for B2B Social CRM?

Hey @Boeing, how much volcanic ash can your planes handle?

I can't quite see airline employees asking questions like that on Twitter, however young and "digital native" they are.

The reality is that B2B customer-supplier relationships are significantly more complex than B2C relationships, and therefore Social CRM for B2B needs to reflect this. So the focus should perhaps be less on Twitter integration, more on reflecting the many-to-many relationships which exist between the customer and supplier. I am not fond of inventing terminology and buzzwords, but like to think of this as "Enterprise Social CRM".

So, whereas B2C Social CRM typically has simple relationships between individuals and a customer service department:

Enterprise Social CRM may have relationships between individuals and departments throughout the two organisations:

Yesterday, I discussed this subject with one of BroadVision's major B2B eCommerce customers. They were starting to experiment with a presence on Facebook and YouTube, and I was particularly interested to understand whether their customers (who almost exclusively buy their products for business purposes) would connect with the company through Facebook (which is typically used mainly for personal social networking). Interestingly, although contributions from customers are relatively limited so far, nearly 500 people did become fans quite quickly. The theory is that they have become fans kind of as a "badge of honour" on their profile.

So perhaps much of the B2C model does also apply to B2B. But I don't believe that Facebook/Twitter alone will be sufficient to represent the complexities of B2B relationships, so these can only serve as outposts of an Enterprise Social CRM strategy.

After last week's Clearvale launch, one particularly sharp-eyed observer noticed that Clearvale is derived from Elgg, an open source social network.

At BroadVision, we're very proud of our record of embracing open source software where it makes sense for us to do so. It is something we started to do many years ago in our Portal and eCommerce applications, making use of a variety of Java frameworks from Apache and OpenSymphony. And we have continued this policy with Clearvale.

We feel that commercial software vendors making use of open source software and then adding additional capability on top benefits everyone. Vendors benefit from lower development costs; end-users benefit from vendors being able to pass these savings on to their customers. And the open source projects benefit from the wider usage and additional QA that use in a commercial product delivers.

When we were designing Clearvale, we wanted it to be a social product from the ground up. We had invested a lot of development effort into our enterprise portal product, but this, like most portal software from the last decade, was fundamentally a content- and process-centric application. Clearvale needed to be a people-centric product. So rather than trying to add a "social veneer" on top of our existing product, we looked for an existing open source framework that provided the people-centric basis we needed. And that's what led us to Elgg.

Elgg is a great product in it's own right and powers many social networks, particularly in education. It also provides an extensible architecture which enabled us to add a variety of sophisticated business-focused features, based on our 17 years of experience as an enterprise software vendor.

Some of the notable additions we have made to Elgg are:

- Network ecosystems, allowing several social networks to be linked together, with users able to selectively share content between each. 
- Document storage with version control and audit history.
- Adaptor for integration to CRM applications so that Clearvale can be used for Social CRM.

We've also made a number of changes "under the hood" to improve the information architecture and scalability.

But this is just the start. We'll continue to enhance Clearvale both by adding new features on top of the Elgg framework, and embracing new releases of Elgg itself.

One of my favourite quotes to describe the objectives of Social CRM comes from Lyndon Johnson, who famously said of J Edgar Hoover

It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in

If your don't provide a place for your customers to express their opinion, the internet provides many, many other places which they will do it anyway, probably far less constructively.

But that quote is perhaps not suitable as the title for a professional blog, so another that applies equally is:

Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer

The internet seems divided on whether this is a quote from Chinese military strategist Sun-Tzu in 400BC, or Michael Corleone in The Godfather II in 1974, but anyway, the importance of this is becoming more and more apparent in the context of the growing Facebook backlash.

It's often said that the British hate success. There's a lot of truth in that, but I would suggest that everyone hates too much success and the inevitable arrogance it brings - we Brits just have a much lower tolerance level. Google was cool until it got too big. And now Facebook is the latest target. They are approaching 500 million registered users, but recent behaviour suggests that the backlash has well and truly begun.

The root of the problem is their cavalier attitude to privacy - they are constantly changing privacy functionality, with the default to allow public access and users needing to explicitly change settings to retain privacy. There's a great graphic of this here. I feel it is best summed up by Andrew Brown who notes that we are not Facebook's customers, we are their product. This has led to at least two protests - you can either refuse to log in to Facebook on June 6th, or if you are really annoyed, delete your user id completely on May 31st.

As usual, Jeremiah Owyang has something useful to say on this subject, and has approached it from the point of view of companies/brands. Like much of his other material, this is essential reading, so I won't summarize it here, except to pick up one specific recommendation he makes:

Spread Bets, Bring Community Closer To You. With power diminishing, brands shouldn’t place all their bets in just a few social networks. Instead, conduct socialgraphics to find out where your customers are, then invest in other networks. Furthermore, start analysis on building your own community off your corporate website for customers, advocates, and lifestyle communities. Give customers a choice to interact with others on your own properties rather than relegating to Facebook alone.

This is exactly what I was advocating in the Socializing Beyond The Enterprise white paper - keep your community somewhere you can control it, but provide links to other networks where your customers are. At the time, I justified this based on limited community functionality on Facebook fan pages; now it is clear that lack of control over how this functionality evolves is equally important.