Nowadays each of us is working with countless advanced WEB 2.0 and social applications for the management of personal blogs, shopping, photo sharing, product ranking and many more topics that may be done in the internet through the use of friendly, advanced applications. This is good and fine until we get to the software used by our organization –  do we really have to give up the ease of use and networking capabilities we’re so used to?

It seems that the traditional attitude, according to which the duty of CRM is to collect large amounts of information, frequently through crowded CRM screens, loaded with obligatory data elements in innumerable fields, is fading out of our professional world. This in light of the fact that the world of WEB 2.0 applications is turning into the standard rather than rare innovation, proving that the users of today are getting used to the better solutions... 
This approach, i.e. data and processes oriented, may be considered as the early marker necessary for the process which might lead to the next development stage of the customer management technology, especially whereas today we have the opportunity to use so many new ways for collecting and disseminating of intelligence and customer details. In our modern world as we know it, the development of internet platforms driven by customers, has become a an accomplished fact , and this following the success gained by many web sites like Linked-in, Facebook, eBAY and Wikipedia. Not only that the new experiences and models provided by these and similar sites are to remain with us for a long time, but they’re turning into de-facto standards, used as reference criteria for the evaluation of other applications, be it inside or outside the organization.

The exceptional buildup in the extent of use of social networks and media - be it blogs, Wiki’s, or any other type of bilateral, user driven communal tool – demonstrates the change in the expectations of human beings from the technology. The key to their success is rooted in the fact that human beings are both contributing and controlling the databases, so that information propagates freely and verbally, thus converting the social network platforms into the most powerful environment of data trapping ever created. In an exciting research made by the Harvard School of Medicine, it had been discovered that when a person located in a node or a cluster of a social network stops to smoke – he ‘infects’ other persons in his vicinity and makes them stop smoking. The researchers concluded that a virtual ‘carrier’ exists in such networks, much like a carrier of epidemic germs, which conveys social influence between people that may have never met in their life! This fact creates new venues for software providers in which to boost their WEB 2.0 technologies, their models and the experiences they’re providing, and apply them practically to the business environment.

One of the examples is the use of combined technology for gathering data from internal and external sources for the decision makers, which enable reaching knowledge based decisions and recommendations which support sales priority policies. This can be achieved while enforcing visibility rules which control the access to the database and guard the data security. Another examples is the participation in blogs, Wiki’s, while using tag clouds and social ranking for the classification and ranking of the information. In my opinion, the advantage embodied in these new technologies, from the viewpoint of the information manager and the users of the organizational applications, is its usefulness. The interest and the excitement which characterize WEB 2.0 applications bring to an unprecedented levels of adoption of the new applications in business organizations, and not only among personal users. As an example, the WIKI platform are thriving in many businesses’ and its ability to promote new levels of information sharing and user satisfaction has already been fully understood and accepted by the business community. Relying on these primary capabilities inside the organization provides the information manager with a wide spectrum of advantages, which outnumber the merits of the presently existing business applications.  

The tremendous growth in the rate of acceptance by the users, viral dissemination of knowledge and information, improved insights about the business and the ability to combine internal and external data are only a few examples about the way in which this new technological wave may aid businesses to improve their performance. To sum it all up, I ran this week across a citation out of the ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’, which immediately attracted my attention:
"We are not seats or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp … Deal with it"

It sure made me think! What about you?...