I caught a status update of a ex-colleague of mine on LinkedIn regarding InterAction today.
“wondering if LinkedIn will be the death of InterAction for CRM”
Now I don’t know if this was just a sound bite as a result of a bad experience of InterAction he had today or a genuine question of the possibilities on Linked In?
But either way it is an interesting question. Have walled off contact and CRM systems reached end of life? LinkedIn certainly has gained popularity to the point where it is the de facto standard professional social network and with that comes a wealth of information on “who knows who” that an in house system couldn’t hope to capture.
Then like most social networking platforms it has an API. Now I’m not sure how open the LinkedIn API is but would it take too much work on say Tikit’s part to integrate their eMarketing suite?
As almost every Legal IT or Legal Marketing person that has used InterAction will know the benefit comes from the data and therefore won’t it just take a small shift in LinkedIn technology to leverage the wealth of data it has in it for use in house?
So, in a week that has seen the demise of Ning as a free service, has fighting the de facto standard (in Nings case facebook) just become impossible in the long run? All it will take now is for facebook to shift it’s Fan page infrastructure slightly and introduce a private network facility and it’s bye bye Ning.
What do you think?
Well… I think it’s more complicated than that (as Ben Goldacre might say).
Fundamentally they’re doing very different, but complementary, things. Of course a key strength of LinkedIn is that your contacts create and maintain their own data and relationships. But that has some significant downsides too – in many cases data is missing or incomplete, and in those cases you have no way to complete or supplement it. And what about people who aren’t on LinkedIn at all, or who are but you can’t get a connection to? The benefits of not “owning” the data you want to use don’t come without their own costs.
The LinkedIn API has some nice features, but some significant limitations that principally derive from LinkedIn’s fundamental commitment to protect its users’ privacy. For example, email addresses aren’t accessible through the API at all, and the terms of use specifically prohibit storing or even showing any information obtained from LinkedIn to anyone other than the user on whose behalf you obtained it.
For an individual user LinkedIn offers some unique benefits, but it’s certainly no replacement for a firm-wide shared database.
I posted the ‘will LinkedIn be the death of InterAction?’ status update to which Jason refers. A quick confession: I work for a law firm where InterAction has challenges. But I didn’t write the query in frustration of InterAction, for I am a fan of CRM as a strategy and InterAction in particular. The question arose after thinking about how many fee earners are happily using LinkedIn without any push by the firm to encourage them to do so.
The idea of LinkedIn as becoming an organisation’s CRM database is not a today thing, but perhaps in the next two or so years it really could. This is what I was thinking…
1. LinkedIn now lets you store details again the contact that the contact him or herself hasn’t put there. Please consider that: it’s the critical point from which the rest of my thoughts followed. For example against Jason Plant’s contact details in InterAction I can add email addresses, phone numbers, birthday and contact notes against Jason that even he cannot see. In other words, you’ve got the same sort of private vs public distinction that you’ve got in InterAction. This new private & public approach hints, I think, at a new future for LinkedIn. For sole traders, this already makes LinkedIn a fairly well rounded CRM system (I met this bloke at… He’s interested in…) given the rest of the LinkedIn functionality as an address book (with amazing ‘who knows whom’ functionality).
2. LinkedIn now lets you organise your contacts by ‘profile’, meaning you can now sort you contacts into categories such as hot prospects, good clients, decaying clients and so forth
3. Given LinkedIn’s steps towards allowing you to store private information against a public contact, it’s not unimaginable that they’ll let you store contact details for people who aren’t even on LinkedIn yet. Why not? Thus LinkedIn can now serve as my sole repository of contact information.
4. When people connect with me I will always be able to see their latest contact details that they give out, of course, but suppose that also, if they disconnect me, that I can still see the contact details I was given when we were connected (the idea being that by connecting, you’re allowing me to keep those contact details even if we later disconnect). That way I could choose to use LinkedIn even to hold client details, safe in the knowledge that my client ‘database’ won’t disappear if people disconnect because they no longer want me to share marketing information with them.
And then, given all of this, look at the other benefits of LinkedIn. Not just the killer who-knows-whom abilities by company, industry and location (through advanced search), but also – quite simply – the BlackBerry integration and the Outlook integration, which put InterAction’s integration to shame. Outlook 2010 has LinkedIn functionality out-of-the-box, and it’s cool.
Thus for me, the question is whether LinkedIn will choose to create an organisation-view of contacts, such that people can choose to connect with individuals as they do now, but they could also choose to connect with organisations, thus sharing contact details without having to fill in additional contact detail forms, and knowing that if they need to update contact details in future, they only have to do so once. *Indeed I foresee that in future you’re more likely to get correct contact details from LinkedIn or future Web 2.x replacement than you are from your own constantly decaying firm database). The organisation-LinkedIn tool would need to allow profiling by organisation, but why not?
It might be hard to imagine converting from InterAction to a LinkedIn model, but suppose you’d never had InterAction: would you invest in the metal if LinkedIn provided a cloud-based organisation model? (Of course, Salesforce does that, but whether LinkedIn could compete with Salesforce is a different discussion)
Perhaps an ‘organisation view’ goes against the LinkedIn ethos, but I don’t think so: I think that ‘Groups’ already provides a way for organisations to connect with individuals, it just needs a little more work (and ideally, a sync with AD or such company directories so that it knows who’s an employee). I suspect the ‘privacy’ issue is really about permissions, not about maintaining 1:1 relationships. If LinkedIn provide an organisation model, and I’d bet a tenner that they will, then I suspect they’ve killed the current form of InterAction.
Personally, I think if Lexis get their thinking caps on the two systems could be complimentary of each other.
Though certainly as a new customer to CRM, LinkedIn must already be a very tempting solution (in part). However John, there’s a lot more that InterAction currently does that LinkedIn can’t do – particularly from a Business Development/Marketing administration perspective.
I am very much of the opinion that Lexis have rested on their laurels for far too long though – and should have seen this coming.
InterAction as it stands may look pretty but it’s really not changed much in years now and to avoid losing what is quite a loyal client base, you’d hope they have plans afoot to do a complete overhaul.
You’re absolutely right James that InterAction can do a lot more, however I suspect that it’s a relatively small percentage of InterAction (or other CRM) law firm customers who go further than using it as a firm-wide address book with marketing lists. As such, if the majority of customers have their needs fulfilled with a simpler and cheaper solution, where does that leave InterAction one wonders?
Can’t disagree with that John. The next year or two will be very interesting in terms of CRM and LinkedIn…
I commented the following on Jason’s question on the linkedin Legal IT Network (perhaps there is a clue there as to one of the points I cover below)…
I think if you look at the need that internal CRM systems fulfill, there is still a role for retaining them for areas such as managing new business pipeline and tracking internal contact with clients and prospects. Whether that be on-premise or “in the cloud”, there is still a need that linkedin currently doesn’t service.
On the flip side of this, the selling tactic of getting an ROI of a CRM system by bigging up the “find out who knows who to create new business” line has gone completely with the growth of linkedin. I think the time has gone where any vendor can seriously attempt to sell only on this line to justify a price.
The one thing I do 100% agree with, walled off CRM systems are close to end of life as we currently know “life” is at the moment. Unless the vendors of CRM systems trully harnass the likes of linkedin (and/or how that develops or successsors take it to the next stage) and make it a compelling reason to retain their place within law firms, then invariably organisations will question the value and become more open to radical thoughts of change.
One interesting conclusion I’ve come to in recent times and a question I may post separately. Has the onset of linkedin destroyed any lingering thoughts of precious protection of client/prospect contact lists such as names, telephone numbers and email addresses? Has the mystery gone as to who is the key contact at X Company plc and who knows him/her?
In addition to this, I will also add the following three thoughts…
1) The concept of groups on Linkedin offers a further marketing opportunity to build relationships with contacts. Primarily, internal facing systems such as Interaction can monitor and track CRM activities, but can it really be classed as an external facing marketing platform to actually develop business ???
2) Has any law firm really got to grips with Interaction so that they can say, with confidence, they “have it right”? It has always struck me as being a fantastic application, but perhaps it is just a little too clever for its own good and that is a barrier in itself? Is simplicity the key going forward in the Web 2.0 world?
3)The combination of my points 1) and 2)lead me to think that perhaps the competition for the CRM market within Legal is starting to hot up. If you look at alternate CRM offerings, are these not now viable contenders in this space, since the two that spring to mind have, dare I say it, in my opinion, a more welcoming strategy to Web 2.0 platforms and environments? Is the Legal industry really different when it comes to CRM and if so, why is that? Perhaps its not the CRM tool that needs to change in Legal, but the industry’s attitude and expectations of CRM tools.
Social CRM certainly seems to be buzzword of the year so far. Many vendors seeing threat/opportunity and falling over themselves to add social features. Obviously not Interaction.
FWIW I think CRM tools will evolve to be the portal through which you reach out to customers wherever they happen to hang out online – whether that be LinkedIn, Facebook, or some industry specific watering hole.
For thoughtful insight see @jowyang’s whitepaper on Social CRM http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/social-crm-the-new-rules-of-relationship-management
Mark.
Thanks for all the comments on this post, they’ve really expanded on the question posed in the post and added some real food for thought!
If you’re interested there are some other thoughts over in a LinkedIn discussion here: http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=43630&discussionID=17935379&sik=1271875847577&trk=ug_qa_q&goback=.hom.ana_43630_1271875847577_3_1
There is a running thread through the above though that makes me think that if InterAction kept all it’s positive points (of which to be fair there are many), shifted into a simplified web2.0 user interface (removing the complexity that hides some of its features), moved into the cloud and introduced great LinkedIn integration then they could really be onto a winner!
There are some really interesting points here that are worthy of more in-depth discussion but I’ll try to keep this brief.
I think it’s undeniable that the rise of LinkedIn means that centralised CRM systems like InterAction have to take notice and move up a gear. But LinkedIn is not a real alternative to InterAction today, and realistically is unlikely to ever be. And as Jeremiah Owyang says: “Social CRM does not replace existing CRM efforts instead it adds more value”.
The fundamental challenge is still the same as it was when InterAction first appeared – to balance the needs of the individual fee-earner and the wider needs of the firm. 10 or 15 years ago a fee-earner would have a Rolodex with their contacts in it and see it as a valuable – and personal – asset (even if much of the information in it was hopelessly out of date). Now they have a LinkedIn account that has much better information, is much more powerful, and potentially much more valuable. But who really owns that information, and how can the firm as a whole benefit from it?
I completely agree that the best way forward is better integration to deliver the best of both approaches. But speaking as someone who has tried to venture a little way down that path with LinkedIn and InterAction, I have to say that the challenges I found were all from the LinkedIn end.
I wouldn’t normally post something that may be taken as a sales pitch on a blog but as you asked a specific question; the next release of Tikit’s eMarketing suite (version 4.7) has support for LinkedIn as well as Twitter and Facebook. This has been a key enhancement required for many of our US clients but is beginning to find interest in the UK as well as firms increasingly consider their approach to social networking.
This is a small step but it will allow you to post details of your newsletters and other appropriate mailouts onto your preferred social networking sites using the appropriate APIs.
We previewed the functionality at the recent eMarketing User Group meeting where it was well received. If you haven’t seen the full roadmap it is available here: http://customersupport.tikit.com/forum/documents/Roadmap1209.pdf.
Aha! Further to the idea that LinkedIn will become increasingly organisation based, I see that LinkedIn has now added a ‘Follow Company’ function.