The Kids Are All Right

It might be easy for some people to dismiss social networking, blogging and other web 2.0 technologies as slightly tired buzzwords. It may also be tempting to think of this “2.0″ stuff as innately technological in nature. That is certainly one way to look at it, particularly if you view the customer landscape through the lens of yesterday’s social norms and demographics. Since we’ll probably see a backlash against web 2.0 investments later this year, there are some significant underlying demographic trends that are worth considering as we inevitably respond by rushing to condemn everything “2.0″ as a “madness of crowds” phenomenon. Let’s explore…

The WSJ reported earlier this week that “young people’s openness on the web stirs the biggest generation gap since Rock ‘n’ Roll”. In a world of constant surveillance and easily traceable ‘digital footprints’, kids just don’t get embarrassed as easily as their parents do. They know that the intimate details of their lives are just a few mouse clicks away for anyone who is interested enough to look. As such, they’ve come to the conclusion that privacy is an “illusion” and have learned from celebrities and politicians to generate their own publicity before someone else does it for them — the proverbial childhood diary has shed the easily broken locks and has gone online for the world to see (and comment upon). Whereas their parents sat and watched TV, listened to radio and later learned to use the web, the “net generation” (born between 1977 and 1996) grew up as “digital natives”. As a society, we are no longer passive recipients of messages pushed out by advertisers, but instead actively participate in the collaborative development of content exchanges (i.e social networks, blogs, P2P, etc). At two billion strong, the net generation is bigger and more influential than the baby-boomers who helped shape the fading social norms and attitudes of the Rock ‘n’ Roll era. Like it or not, the genie is out of the bottle — the net generation is already beginning to change the way that we interact with each other and, consequently, is forcing us to rethink the way we communicate with our customers. As a result, we’ve all become more discerning consumers and we’re beginning to demand more of a collaborative experience in return for our loyalty.

Many organizational business processes and supporting information systems were designed with the old ‘push’ methods in mind. Invented as a category over 15 years ago, CRM “1.0″ dealt with the inputs and outputs of linear functional processes (i.e. sales, marketing and support). Today, these processes are no longer as linear as they once were. If anyone bothered to draw one, the data flow diagram of the modern customer system would be a squiggly mess of circles and loops — is an angry blogger a customer care issue, a marketing problem or a sales opportunity? All of the above if you understand the problem and are equipped to handle it properly. Forward looking companies understand that the “2.0″ principles are here to stay and are looking at ways that they can harness the power of networks in their customer initiatives. Once example cited by Paul Greenberg in a recent article is P&G’s VocalPoint, whereby:

600,000 moms are given product samples for distribution among their social networks. The lead moms then give the samples out in their informal environment to the identified groupings. They are responsible for gathering feedback on the good and the bad about those products and getting that feedback to P&G. The best of them are called into meetings with P&G to discuss how to modify, add, subtract, etc. from the product that they distributed.

Each of the moms has to have at least 25 people in their network; this equates to a potential focus group of 15 million people! Although the definition is still in the works, the next generation of customer relationship management is going look vastly different than the CRM we know today and I suspect that the “R” part of the acronym will be held in a lot higher regard than it is today.