Embracing The Cloud
public String CloudThoughts{ get; set;}

Facebook has nearly 500 million users (at the time of this writing) and are poised to transform how customer relationships are acquired, cultivated, and supported.

Consider the evolution of Contact management over the past 50 years:

• Paper: Write names, addresses, birthdays, and other notes down on paper
• Rolodex: Everyone trades business cards and keeps a local paper copy
• PC Software: Rolodex moved to PC (Spreadsheets, Goldmine, Act!)
• Client / Server Software: Many people in same office share common contact database (Siebel, MS CRM)
• Software as a Service: Contacts moved to Internet hosted server. Accessible from anywhere (Salesforce.com)
• Crowd sourced: 3rd parties pooling contact information to improve data quality, keep lists up to date (Plaxo, Jigsaw)
• Social Networking: Contact maintains singular identity. Always up to date. Control of privacy and disclosure (LinkedIn, Facebook)
  

The consumer now has more power than ever. Consumers now generate more information about themselves than can be generated by 3rd parties.

Buying a list of leads that may be interested in buying camping gear will have no where near the effectiveness of publishing an ad on Facebook targeted at consumers with a self-identified interest in camping (See The Role of Advertising at Facebook).

Consumers will increasingly defer to their friends recommendations on which restaurants to visit, which shoes to buy, and which cars to drive.

CRM systems no longer contain the master records for Contact information.

Businesses must evolve past collecting and cleansing Contacts and instead collect meta-information that refers to customer-managed online profiles, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, for these resources are now truly authoritative. When there is a conflict between CRM Contact information and an online social network profile, the social profile will be master record.

Websites must evolve to become applications. Web forms soliciting contact information will become a thing of the past. Consumers will not have the patience to do anything more than a single click to identify interest in a product or service.

The video embedded in this blog post (and available here) demonstrates a Cool Sites application integrated with Facebook Connect and Salesforce CRM.