Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM Converge towards the Collaborative Enterprise

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Milan where Esteban Kolsky and I presented the “The New Era of Customer Engagement with Social CRM“, I spoke with Emanuele Quintarelli of Open Knowledge who organized the event – and he did a very good job I might add!.  During our conversation Emanuele made the remark that Social CRM has now become an accepted part of the agenda in comparison with last year. Participants attending the previous edition found it strange to even mention customers when discussing E2.0 and preferred to focus on the software solutions – but this year this seems to have changed completely.
It was thus of particular interest to me to note was that the notion of the Social Customer and that we need to organise to engage is starting to gain traction from the protagonists of Enterprise 2.0 (see Bertrand Duperrin’s take on it here).  For example, Emanuele Scotti’s opening speech dealt with changing needs and behaviors of the Social Customer, followed by Sameer Patel‘s excellent Keynote who continued on by talking about how companies should organize for customers that want to interact with the company (and not only be passive buyers). And as a sidenote – on the vendor side, Jive Software for example is adding “Social CRM features” and repositioning itself as as a “Social Business” platform provider.

In my opinion the discussion around Enterprise 2.0 has been too internal-facing and focused on the tools, rather than what the objectives for collaborating actually are. The market is maturing though as we see the approach evolve from innovators to early adopters. This was especially evident when looking at the agenda of the Milan edition, in contrast to the Boston edition that is still more focused on the software “solutions” (go ahead and deploy this module and you are now a “Social Business”..NOT!). Could it be that Europe is leading the way in its understanding of what it takes (culture, organisation, customer focus, employee engagement…)?

For the rest of this post click here.