Altimeter Group published yesterday an extremely interesting and brilliant report, by R "Ray" Wang and Jeremiah Owyang. The paper, titled "Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management" presents 18 cases that rely on possibilities that come from the social web.
Jeremiah and Ray match each single possibility with a "category" of social CRM.

While I was reading the paper I thought there was something else these case studies could be tied to. Something more general and universal than the "categories". And I tried to match each single one of the case studies with another set of elements that serve a higher purpose than simply "categorizing": the objectives.

In the book "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technology", the authors Charlene Li (Currently at Altimeter Group) and Josh Bernoff (at Forrester Research) highlighted that the social web could serve five main objectives:

• Listening
• Talking
• Energizing
• Embracing
• Supporting

I tried to use this system, which is more general and refers to a specific strategical need besides the will to organize the case studies, to rearrange them. And here's the result. I hope it can help clarify the job my Altimeter Group which is already brilliant.



What do you think about it? Does this simplify and make the case studies more practical?
Do you feel case studies can be adapted better to your strategies easily through these objectives?
Do you feel more comfortable matching case studies with objectives?

Here you can download the paper "Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management"