I read a post today from Seth Godin, Faux familiarity is worse than none at all, about how often marketers today overuse and abuse personalization when communicating electronically with prospects and customers.  I have been an avid fan and promoter of CRM (customer relationship management and customer relationship marketing) principles and practices for more than a decade and have seen many of these techniques successfully implemented as well as terribly abused over the years.

Over the past twenty years I’ve been fortunate to have worked with a number of great companies and helped develop and manage their various CRM and loyalty programs. Many of these include National City Bank, Makers Mark, Valvoline Instant Oil Change, Canadian Mist, Kentucky Lottery and Purina to name a few. With any loyalty program and marketing campaign, it is imperative from the beginning to establish goals and develop measurements against those to identify success as well as areas of improvement.

Here’s a radical thought, social networking, social influence and social media are not new, only their vehicles and tools of engagement have evolved. 

I recently saw a question on LinkedIn inquiring about the difference between CRM (customer relationship management) and BCM (business contact management). Often these are considered software packages for managing information about your contacts however the purpose and usage between them within an organization can be quite different.