CRM Evolution: A Conference For New Digital Business Strategies

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Parent Category: Expos and Conventions

Category: Previews

Published on Thursday, 09 August 2012 05:00

Written by John Matthews

This year’s 2012 CRM is not your 2011 CRM. The seeds were being sown last year with the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce.com but as it turned out this was a mere foretaste of what was to occur in the first half of 2012 as CRM became SocialCRM in the wake of Salesforce.com’s purchase of social marketing platform BuddyMedia and a string of acquisitions by Oracle to catch up and perhaps get ahead in the SocialCRM market.

The CRM Evolution 2012 Conference and Trade Expo taking place at the Marriott Marquis New York (1535 Broadway) August 13th - 15th, 2012 is perhaps the first major opportunity to hear the industry, practitioners and experts, and thought leaders take in the past few months flurry of acquisition activity by two of the leaders in CRM to take stock of what this means for the industry and CRM users going forward.

However, one thing that we can be certain of is that the acquisition spree has not finished yet and as well as further social and big data acquisitions the CRM giants can be expected to make acquisitions going forward to do with mobile and advertising technology. And then there are those CRM vendors who, so far, have yet to even begin their spending spree to refresh their product offerings and value propositions to enable businesses to address their increasingly mobile and social customers.

One trend both sides of the marketing industry are failing to fully appreciate is convergence and integration of marketing silos particularly CRM, Direct Marketing, and Advertising Technology, underpinned by convergence of technology platforms for CRM and marketing and the increasing technological and data driven sophistication of marketing.

This trend will increasingly guide the industry and its participants bringing together a number of currently large disparate parts. It is a fine distinction between cultivating customer loyalty and relationships and cultivating brand engagement and loyalty. With the aid of technology the distinction is melting away only sustained by the outdated and outmoded mindsets of those their fiefdoms in the industry and market departments.

A world class line up of CRM speakers led by Paul Greenberg, also Brent Leary, Salesforce.com’s Peter Coffee, Constellation Research’s R “Ray” Wang, and Forrester’s William Band will plot the future course of CRM and marketing from the stage at the Marriott Marquis discussing through industry data, user stories, and thought leadership how CRM best practice and the supporting technology platforms will evolve over the next 12 months. 

The main topics that will be covered at this year’s CRM Evolution conference include:

• Streamline business processes
• Increase profitability
• Create great customer experiences
• Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
• How to generate high returns on CRM investments
• Prepare for customer trends that are reshaping the marketplace
• Leverage technologies that will change customer relationships
• Benefit from Web 2.0 and Social CRM

CRM Evolution 2012 is an essential conference for anyone who in the following roles. After all; no customers, no business. CRM is everyone’s’ business evermore so in an emerging connected social world.

Social media will be very much front and center at this year’s CRM Evolution conference as CRM in the past 12 months has rapidly evolved to SocialCRM or at least in terms of vendor technology platforms and value propositions. Social is becoming the way organizations communicate direct with the online customer replacing direct mail and email. Social offers both an effective interactive marketing communications channel but also a great customer services channel.

Additionally today's social listening platforms offer a great market research tool with which to track sentiment, opinion, user experience, wishes, desires, frustrations, information on rivals etc. The coming together of social and CRM however has been most evident in the M&A market following the large acquisitions by Oracle of social marketing platform Vitrue followed quickly by Oracle's CRM rival buying social marketing ascending start BuddyMedia. Both acquired companies specialize in using social networking platform Facebook as their social marketing media platforms to connect with and engage brands' audiences.

Oracle has also made other recent social acquisitions including Involver and Collective Intellect. While a pitch battle for SocialCRM is clearly taking place between Oracle and Salesforce.com, what about other CRM players like SAP and Microsoft who have also started to dip their toes into social but so far not in a big way related to SocialCRM.

At the same time that CRM and Social are coming together there is also other points of convergence that are becoming part of the CRM world including mobile and new developments in targeted online advertising which are re-imagining direct marketing and direct brand marketing for an online and mobile audience and customer base. Perhaps next year the conference will not only be discussing the impact of further Social CRM related acquisitions but also key acquisitions by CRM technology vendors of advertising technology and mobile CRM and mobile advertising technology providers.

CRM is no-longer a software suite you buy from a software vendor, it is becoming an overarching marketing and customer communications strategy driving interaction through many channels and focused on being data and interaction driven, producing business outcomes aligned with business more than marketing and media key performance indicators. This represents a era or even paradigm for CRM that has only begun to take shape in the past 12 to 18 months. 

Whether going forward when we refer to CRM we will still mean Customer Relationship Management or some other variant such as Collaborative Relationship Marketing or Continuous Relationship Marketing or whatever there can be no doubt that CRM is changing. It is no-longer just about sales automation, In fact we have a new term for this in Sales Enablement. Today CRM is much more focused on marketing, marketing automation, digital marketing, and social marketing changing how we think about and do CRM at organizations large and small, business to consumer and business to business.

The CRM Evolution 2012 conference August 13th to 15th at the Marriott Marquis in New York City will be the place to discover or get a current and state of the art update on the new CRM from a start studded cast of CRM practitioners and thought leaders as well as those from technologies and disciplines newly embraced by the CRM ecosystem

To learn more, go to http://www.destinationcrm.com/conferences/2012/

CRM Evolution
August 13 - 15, 2012 

New York Marriott Marquis
1535 Broadway
New York, NY 10036

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