Prologe

I learned a lot from this group and in part the inputs, questions and discussions shaped a development that we are undergoing in the past 9 month.

On November 16 we will introduce the first SRM system. But I feel I owe it to all of you to share the major vision in advance and ask for some initial feedback

Thanks

Axel

http://xeesm.com/AxelS

Social Relationship Management
We are humans and are social by nature. But we are also pretty good in lifting things, running around and swim in waters - still we created tools to lift more, cars to go farther and boats to swim faster and easier.

A Social Relationship Manager is to enhance our social powers like we always worked to enhance our physical powers in the past. Social Relationship Management is a new business discipline. It is NOT replacing or changing CRM but may become part of the SCRM vision - definitely part of what CEM is having in mind.

Vision
A social relationship manager is meant to help a person focus on the socializing part and reduce the administrative overhead to do so.

Challenge
The social web is vast, constantly changing and growing. Our natural ability to manage all those changes and dynamics and also our abilities to network with a larger audience is limited. We try to overcome those limitations. In accordance to Dunbar (the dunbar number) humans have a hard time to maintain more than 150 social relationships. Many have a hard time to keep in touch with more than 20. But our rapidly growing needs in connecting with more and more people forces us to create - again - new tools.

Objective
The objective of a Social Relationship Manager tool is to help increase the number of social relationships without loosing the quality of such a relationship. It is furthermore the objective to help reduce the mechanical work to actually get to a conversation like searching the people, grouping the contacts and so forth. At the same time a Social Relationship Manager needs to be versatile so it can be used in many business scenarios as well as easy to use so that more people can benefit from its support.

Who may benefit from SRM?
Unlike a CRM system that is internally focused on the sales organization or PRM that is focused on partner relationships, ERP that helps internal operations, SRM is an externally facing solution that deals with information (data) outside a company's firewall as well as with the inherited processes outside a company's four walls. As such, the beneficiaries of a SRM system are across all functional aspects: like sales people, channel managers, product managers, service people, support organizations, Human Resource Departments and all other groups facing and touching the respective business ecosystem, community or government organizations.

What will be different with SRM?
While almost all defined business processes are organization related and internally focused (with a few exceptions like parts of a sales process), SRM processes are almost exclusively outside focused. Today, an employee in sales, support, marketing, HR is basically limited to a phone number or email address and manually maintaining all the corelating data. Using a SRM tool, the same employee is focusing on relationship relevant activities, not data collection and administration, is focusing on conversation not scripts to leave a message etc. Unlike today where a social media active person would visit the relevant networks and then go from person to person a SRM tools suggests the right people and supports the socializing process. Best practices and methods help SRM users to stay in touch and use the SRM system to a mutual benefit of the participating parties. One of the core benefits is helping the team to focus on the relevant people not on the interesting places.

Background
We, the Xeequa team, are working in and with the social web since its inception in 2003. In the past years the work with a growing number of connections and the ever growing requirement to strengthen the relationships motivated the team to formulate requirements and actually built a first prototype for a social relationship management tool.

Beta Group
If you are interested to join the beta group please first create your XeeSM (http://xeesm.com) as you use it you will be automatically invited to the preview presentation of SRM which will happen October 6. Please accept that the closed Beta offer is only for this group and individually selected people.