The Difference Between Personal CRM and Social CRM

Two new terms are literally “exploding” in the on-line chatter about how we can make more use of the social sites we’re engaged in – Personal CRM and Social CRM.

This isn’t because somebody has spent millions on marketing, or even that anybody has come up with a definitive description.

We now have so many opportunities to be “who we are” “where we want to be” and get together with people “we want to meet”. Very quickly even a modest level of involvement in social space overloads us with stuff we want to remember.

Managing whats becoming an essential tool for business – social engagement – is a real challenge for everybody.

New services are being announced everyday to help us with this problem and it seems people are associating these services with terms such as Personal CRM and Social CRM.

Consolidation of activity across Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Plaxo, blogging (and a bunch of other sites) is the objective of such sites as Friendfeed and such tools as Twittelator, Tweetstack and Zensify. And they all work – to an extent.

Google‘s announcement of Wave promises to raise the game to a whole new level – consolidating email, Instant Messenger, content sharing etc. in “conversations”. It looks really exciting, but there aren’t any services using it, yet. There will be soon!

Meantime there’s a new service – Gist – currently in private Beta which promises to consolidate relationships across social sites and integrate those conversations with email, Instant Messenger, Twitter and probably others such as Friendfeed and Tumblr.

Gist has a lot of traction, having recently received VC funding ( a special event in today’s climate) so obviously the chatter about Social CRM has moved out of the social space and captured the interest of the money men.

We’re really excited about this new momentum, because it suggests we’re moving in the right direction with FOB3.

Months ago we decided we needed to change Front Office Box – adding to the People view with social connections. This enhancement is being built into FOB 3 right now, and will be available to our users soon.

In terms of the difference between Personal CRM and Social CRM, we don’t think there is one. Social is about being Personal, so any difference is only in the words.

What is different, between Front Office Box and the rest is the CRM part.

Being connected to our social relationships is only a part of the equation.

The other part is managing what we “do” with those connections.

For this to make sense in our businesses we need to bring together “who we know” with “what we know about them”, “what we want to do with them”, “how we plan to do it” and “who will do it, when”.

That’s what we’re doing with FOB3 – managing social relationships in a business context.