Is Social CRM for Real? September 22, 2009

The buzz and hype surrounding Social CRM is deafening. Most every vendor today claims to have a solution for SCRM and consultants and integrators are running to create methodologies and “proven methods” to implement it. Managers and Sr Executives who lived through CRM 1.0 don’t buy it. How is this different from what we did before? How can I be sure that this is not another waste or resources?

In this panel we will attempt to break away from using CRM as a four-letter word and start analyzing the real-life scenarios and products that can make SCRM work. We will discuss how this is not a technology or a strategy, but an organizational imperative to adapt to the changing society identified by Charlene Li on her book “Groundswell”. We will leverage thought leadership and vendor’s examples to provide information based on market and customer realities, not hype, to help you make the decisions to move towards it and determine the best way for our organization to tackle SCRM. Some of the questions we will answer:

· Is SCRM real?

· Are there any case studies to help me understand it better?

· What about ROI and financial and considerations?

· How can me move forward with this?

Esteban Kolsky, Founder and Principal ThinkJar LLC (Moderator)

Esteban Kolsky is the Founder and Principal of ThinkJar LLC, a research and consulting organization focused on multi-channel Experience Management. He currently helps clients determine how to design, implement, and manage better experiences for communities and customers across all channels, including the new media and social channels. He also conducts research on SCRM and Communiities, which is distributed through his blog “CRM Intelligence and Strategies”.

Esteban has over 22 years of experience in the Customer Service and CRM space, spending more than ten of those years working as a consultant and advisor to some of the largest global organizations on their strategies for Customer Service, CRM and Experience Management. He also spent eight years at Gartner as an analyst writing about the future of CRM and CEM, including coining the concepts for Enterprise Feedback Management and Collaborative Customer Service, two of the hottest trends in social media.

Lyle Fong, CEO and Co-Founder Lithium

Lyle Fong is the CEO & Co-Founder of Lithium Technologies, the leading provider of Social CRM solutions to power the customer network. Working with market leaders such as Best Buy, Sony, AT&T, Research In Motion Limited (RIM), Univision, and PayPal, Lithium is delivering the next generation of customer relationships, combining the power of online customer communities with the broader social web and traditional CRM business processes to inspire customers to innovate, promote, and support on the company's behalf.

Prior to starting Lithium Technologies, Lyle co-founded GX Media, where he was the CTO. He drove the development of Gamers.com, which was rated the #1 independent gaming portal by Nielsen NetRatings. Lyle was instrumental in raising a total of $15M in funding led by CMGI, negotiating multi-million dollar technology licensing deals with Dell, Sony, AltaVista, and Ziff-Davis, and spearheading the spin-off of Lithium Technologies. Lyle was also the driving force behind the creation of technologies for professional gaming, including a global rankings system, tournament engine, and a real-time match reporting and spectating system. These technologies were the key success factors behind the AMD PGL, the most successful and highly acclaimed professional gaming league to date with over 100 million media impressions, and also numerous tournaments for Sega.

Anthony Lye, SVP Products, Oracle

Anthony Lye is the senior vice president of CRM, responsible for the Oracle CRM and Siebel CRM On Demand businesses worldwide at Oracle. Previously Mr. Lye was the group vice president of CRM Products at Oracle, responsible for Oracle's CRM product strategy and product management for CRM in the applications development organization.

Prior to joining Oracle in 2006, Mr. Lye was the group vice president and GM of CRM products at Siebel Systems. Anthony was responsible for Siebel's vertical and horizontal CRM application technologies. Mr. Lye managed and directed all of Siebel's enterprise application strategy, product marketing and product management.

Prior to Siebel, Mr. Lye spent six years as president and CEO of ePeople, a company he ran with help and investment from David Stamm, founder of Clarify and Steve Goldsworthy, founder of Vantive. Prior to ePeople, Mr. Lye was the vice president of marketing at Categoric Software in the enterprise event management business, was senior director and general manager at Remedy Corporation for five years for global major accounts, strategic alliances and Remedy's international business operations. Mr. Lye also worked in product marketing at Tivoli Systems and was a management consultant focused on distributed systems at Arthur Anderson, now Accenture, in the financial services vertical in London and New York.

Anthony Nemelka, Social CRM Pioneer and former CEO of Helpstream

Tony Nemelka is the co-founder and former CEO of Helpstream, Inc., a venture-backed Software-as-a-Service company located in Mountain View, California. Tony was the visionary behind Helpstream when he and co-founder Dan Hardy set out to design and develop a radically new software application for customer service and customer relationship management – now referred to as Social CRM.
Tony’s vision of infusing business processes with social technologies made available via the Web, and leveraging online communities to drive more effective interaction and engagement between companies and their customers, resulted in one of the first commercially available and highly acclaimed Social CRM products in the market – Helpstream. Tony served as Helpstream’s CEO from January 2006 through July 2009.

Prior to Helpstream, Tony was Vice President of the Asia Pacific region at Adobe Systems, responsible for sales and services across a region that includes both the fastest growing and most technologically sophisticated markets in the world -- China, India, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Australia. He lived in Japan for several years where he was Founder and CEO of Epiphany Japan and General Manager and President of PeopleSoft Japan. He speaks fluent Japanese and some Chinese. Tony started his career at IBM, spending 13 years marketing a wide variety of hardware, software, and services across multiple industries from 1986 through 1998.

Christopher Carfi, Author of The Social Customer Manifesto and Thought Leader in SCRM

Currently, I'm a co-founder of Cerado, Inc.
We work with companies to help them to understand what their customers are thinking (by doing crazy things like going out and having conversations with those customers). We also help our clients understand what their competitors are doing, so they can thwart them at every turn. Most of our customers turn to us for services such as Win/Loss Analysis and Competitive Intelligence*.
I've spent the last six or so years working with organizations to help them better connect with their customers at a real, non-synthetic level. Hence the interests in things like blogs, wikis, and social networks.

$20 in advance; $30 at the door

Gourmet dinner and wine are included!

Official Website: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=145427690843