A Few Words From Eric Swayne

Call me the SMC Lurker: I’ve admired this group for quite some time. I’ve known some of the gang longer than oth­ers, but all have impressed me entirely. I hope you all under­stand what this group means to all of us prac­tic­ing in this space in the Metro­plex — a forum like this ele­vates the work every­one is doing, and opens doors for all of us.

“Ele­vat­ing the work” is prob­a­bly a good phrase to describe our jour­ney at RAPP, and why we’re proud to spon­sor this month’s meet­ing. RAPP is one of the world’s largest direct mar­ket­ing net­works in the world with 40+ years in Direct Mar­ket­ing and CRM expe­ri­ence.  We’ve been named to AdAge’s A-List in 2009, and we’ve won our fair share of hot dig­i­tal awards (includ­ing SAMMY’s, MIXX’s, and OMMA’s). But if you come visit our Dal­las office (and please do!), you’ll see the moral of our story in big let­ters plas­tered across our lobby: “When You’re Through Chang­ing, You’re Through.” We want to bring our best to you, and help this group get even better.

So all this talk about change is really just to set you up for some­thing a lit­tle bit Old School (but we won’t be singing “Dust in the Wind”, unless things get really fun).  One of the new social media buzz­words rock­et­ing its way up the trend­ing top­ics is this con­cept of Social + CRM; whether you call it Social CRM or SRM or CRM 2.o.  And some very respected voices are start­ing to dis­cuss this topic — from Jere­miah Owyang, to Ora­cle, to Radian6.

But along the way, we seem to have lost some of the things that made CRM a suc­cess in the first place.  Many of these new strate­gies have embraced the right brain of rela­tion­ships and con­ver­sa­tions and col­lab­o­ra­tions (and rightly so), but for­got the left brain: tar­get­ing, mea­sure­ment, report­ing and above all, accountability.

We’re going to start with the fun­da­men­tals and unpack what CRM really is, so we can see how it suc­ceeds in the Social space.  We’ll talk about what this new hybrid can become, and what we’re going to do smarter back at the desk on Fri­day.  Come join us, come meet some folks from RAPP, and let’s fig­ure this thing out together.

See you there!

–E