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CRM Playaz Episode 10 - We're Back!

As always the music plays and we are set free.

Music

Opening: Use Your Experience by Charles Bobus. Courtesy of The Podsafe Music Network Closing: Got My Mojo Working from the album, The Lost Tapes by Muddy Waters. Buy it at Amazon.com

 

We're back!  We've been gone so long we almost forgot who we were.  But we're glad to be back, and really glad to be in our new digs here thanks to our friends and technology partner HubSpot.com.

In this episode we cover a number of things that took place over the past month or so that we've been on hiatus.  Paul's new gadgets, United Airlines guitar problem, and my Friday night Twitter tale.  But the big topics we hit are below.

Enterprise 2.0

We both had a chance to hang out at the third annual Enterprise 2.0 conference held in Boston a few weeks ago.  Meeting great folks like Thomas Vander Wal, Zoho's Raju Vegesna, and Frost & Sullivan's Dave Boulanger were a highlight.  As were some interesting briefings from up and coming companies like Bluenog and Bantam.

Our overall impression of the event was good, but one thing seemed to be missing from the conference - Social CRM.  In fact of all the sessions we both attended, the only presenter we heard mention CRM was Blue State Digital Co-founder Jascha Franklin-Hodge, during his keynote on lessons learned from President Obama's run for the Whitehouse. The irony in that is most people focus on the campaign's social media efforts, but Franklin stated that CRM was foundational to everything they did.

Rockstars of Social CRM

While Social CRM was missing from the E2.0 conference, the folks at Radian6 (social media monitoring tools provider) more than made up for it with the event they put together as a nice complementary event - The Rockstars of Social CRM.  

The MC of the event was The Godfather of Social Media himself, Chris Brogan.  The panel included both CRM Playaz, CRM Association National Prez Michael Thomas, and Comcast's Frank Eliason - with Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun moderating the panel.

The atmosphere of the event felt closer to a rock concert than it did a CRM panel discussion, which was GREAT!!!  In fact the Guitar Hero contest that took place after the panel drew just as much interest as the panel, but check out our take of Brogan's GH performance.

Not only were a a couple hundred people in attendance, even more people were watching (and tweeting) online.  All in all Marcel, David Alston and the other fine folks at Radian6 did a great job in putting this together, and making a couple CRM guys feel like rock stars for an evening.

The 95 Theses of Social CRM

Over on the ZDNet blog  - Social CRM: The Conversation - (that's a hint folks), PG channeled the spirit of Martin Luther, and posted Time to Put A Stake in the Ground on Social CRM. As with Martin Luther, although admittedly not quite at the same magnitude, this post has really got the CRM world talking.  Paul explains why he's still the Walt Whitman of CRM and not Martin Luther, and why he felt compelled to put that stake in the ground.