So many cocktail parties, so little time to keep up on the buzzwords thrown your way. Print out, staple to forehead:

 

The Cluetrain Manifesto. CRM guru Paul Greenberg has called 1999's The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual "perhaps the best book (if a bit dramatic) on the thinking of the new customer that has been written to date."

 

The manifesto itself can be read online for free. It's a cute if bit grandiose commingling of imagery from the Communist Manifesto and the Protestant Reformation, given its name and format as "95 Theses," i.e. "Markets are conversations," "Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors," "Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice," "The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media," "People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products."

 

Christopher Locke wrote the first chapter, "Internet Apocalypso," also available gratis online. After a U2 epigram he notes " We die. You will never hear those words spoken in a television ad. Yet this central fact of human existence colors our world and how we perceive ourselves within it."

 

Much of what it says is forehead-slappingly obvious — " We are alternately the workers who create products and services, and the customers who purchase them." But it needed to be said nine years ago and is still true today.

 

Much remains as sadly true today as it did in 1999: "Right now these fear-driven corporations are spending millions on market research, the whole point of which is to find out who their customers are. They don't know anymore. They've barricaded themselves in their executive suites, and now they've erected firewalls on top of that."

 

Customer Loyalty. Frederick Reichheld is the high priest of customer loyalty, and count this reporter a humble acolyte. Amidst hand-wringing that due to the Internet's speed and powers of comparison all transactions would reduce to simple price considerations, that customer loyalty was dead, in 1996 Reichheld wrote The Loyalty Effect, showing that in fact customer loyalty to brand names still matters in the Internet age — perhaps even more than it did before.

 

In the first part of his 2001 follow-up, Loyalty Rules!, available for free online, Reichheld notes that "… along with the enormous potential of the new economy have come increased risk and volatility. In this environment, it's become clear that loyalty is an even more vital asset for success in the age of the Internet." His emphasis is that loyalty is not managed, it is earned.

 

One of Reichheld's great contributions is the understanding that employee loyalty is a, if not the, key to customer loyalty. Draw up a list of companies with the greatest employee loyalty, and you've drawn up a list of companies with high customer loyalty. "Companies cannot succeed or grow unless they can serve their customers with a better value proposition that the competition. Measuring customer and employee loyalty can accurately gauge the weaknesses in a company's value proposition and help to prescribe a cure," he wrote in The Loyalty Effect.

 

In 2005 Lauren Keller Johnson underscored the importance of employee loyalty with an essay, "Rethinking Company Loyalty," stating that, among other benefits, a loyal workforce "saves money in the form of lower recruiting costs, fewer stranded clients, and less downtime. It also encourages knowledge acquisition and sharing."

 

Indeed: "The longer employees stay with a company," says Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill, "the more opportunity they have to develop the tacit knowledge needed to fulfill their responsibilities and the more they exchange it with others."

 

CRM 2.0. There you go, you finally read enough magazine and online articles to get a grasp on CRM, then they go and throw "CRM 2.0" at you. Another day, another buzzword?

 

CRM Guru Paul Greenberg (CRM at The Speed of Light, fourth edition anxiously awaited) is cornering the market on this term, which he more or less equates with "Social CRM." (Disclaimer: Paul's the one who introduced this reporter to Facebook (News - Alert).). He moderates a good discussion on CRM 2.0, collecting definitions from those in the field.

 

His own definition is "CRM 2.0 is a philosophy and strategy for collaboration with customers through the provision of tools, technology, processes, culture, products and services, with an eye to providing experiences that will create appropriate value for all parties involved."

 

Basically, given what customers can do with the Internet, and social networking, companies, whether they like it or not, are much more accountable to their customers in all phases of business, from production to sales to marketing to feedback.

 

Peter Hascher also submits a good definition: "CRM 2.0 is a unique customer experience that enables customers and companies to develop new products and use existing ones in close collaboration. The barrier-free flow of information allows the community to identify the respective needs immediately and deliver the right solutions in an Agile (News - Alert) fashion. Overall, CRM 2.0 is inspired by postmodernism rather than modernism."

 

Indeed — the fact that there are multiple versions of the "truth" of CRM 2.0 just shows how postmodernist it really is. Meet me at the pub after hours and we can have a great time waxing speculative about how given the postmodernist notion that truth is relative and individual, the fact that in the Internet age customer interactions can be as relatively unique and individualized as you want, leads to a confluence of theory and praxis to the point where… where… we need another beer.

 

Frank Diana noted that as "collaboration technologies evolve (e.g. social computing) customer dialog becomes more intimate and frequent. I see a convergence of social computing and business intelligence that enables access to customer information on a different scale."

 

Greenberg makes a good point about one of the key differentiating factors of 2.0, the customer ecosystem: "The customer sits at the hub of multiple business ecosystems and is fully engaged as a member of the corporate ecosystems of the companies they are doing business with. They are no longer the objects of the business ecosystem, but its subject."