During the course of my foray’s into the world of social media, I have developed an interest in Social CRM (#scrm on Twitter) and a thought has occurred to me: what if everyone didn’t actually want to be social with you?

Let me explain. There are certain people and certain times when you “just want the job done”. You don’t want your bank to reach out to you and ask you how you are feeling today because you seem to have eaten a lot of chocolate; yet you might want them to let you know that a transaction has been delivered into a foreign contractors account, and that the contractor has been notified by SMS.

As when email is free the true costs of social media may be buried in the fact that they consume time and there does not seem to be any clear “value exchange” in terms of this investment of time. The metaphor might be that although we all need the filtering that FriendFeed provided, very few of us would go to the bother of actually setting those filers up. Facebook enables you to set up “Friend Groups” and filter the stream of your contacts. Filters that are “pushed” also tend not to work too well either. Google Reader “knows” what I spend my time reading and presents a list of “interesting or frequently read” RSS feeds on my home screen. I never use it. I always go to my Folders.

The problem is that I have not been allowed or helped to build a filtering process that is meaningful to me.

So “What is the job of CRM”?. At base, what “work does it do for the customer”? IMHO it helps the company “group” the customers / users into “like groups” according to criteria correlated with different facets (Buying behaviour/ Psychological profile/ etc) and then “matches these groups” to the organisational assets (people+processes+ objects+data) that can best deliver to those needs. So “the work” of the CRM is to “match” the “external customer pattern” with the “internal resources pattern”. Social CRM adds another facet to these matchings by bringing more data about “who you are”, “who you know”, “what you know about what you know” which is also called “meta data” about your relationships”. This grouping then gets down to the layer of 121 relationships.

But what does it help the customer do? and I don’t mean in some kind of lame “you qualify for a phone upgrade kind of way”. How does your current version of CRM help the customer live their life?

Now with all this meta-data floating about, the question becomes “how do I as a customer-person-interactor” build filters for all the modes of interaction, including my social networks at work and at play, that are meaningful and productive to me”? If someone calls me and they are a second order connection on linkedin, surely that has to be treated as more important than someone with no connection to me?. If I have an appointment this week with someone related to this second order connection, the meeting and this call request may be related. It makes sense right? Yet I would bet you that all but the very best companies you know, would have no way of ever making such connections from the customer perspective, would they?

So the final question I have is “How would approaches to social enterprise actually make another persons life easier to live, more enjoyable, in ways that would not be possible without this relationship?”

This isn’t the end of the topic discussion by the way, I want to use this space to think aloud about it. I have some ideas and Twitter stream is proving to be an excellent source of leads in this regard. Hatips in the next few posts !