Best of ECT News

Social media is clearly becoming the next-gen customer engagement channel of choice for industry. The banking industry is likely to be the frontier in adopting next-gen technologies, including social-networking-enabled business processes. The banking industry has two important classifications based ...

Trends have always come and gone, but when it comes to all-things-tech, the speed of change is faster than an Internet minute. It isn't that tech users are all that fickle; it's that the environment around them is constantly changing. Take the "smartphones vs. laptops war" for example. It isn't that...

In the rush to Facebook, marketers are discovering that different kinds of content drive different kinds of results -- and different social networks respond in different ways. It was not that long ago that the experts warned that brands could not "sell" in social media, that the audience would rebel...

Companies spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their websites. Reactive live chat implementations, while highly beneficial, are similar to search engine optimization -- "the more impressions, the better." However, placing a live chat button on your website will not generate more traffic to your...

With a much-anticipated NASA announcement Thursday, "The Devil in the Dark" is no longer the name of actor William Shatner's favorite original "Star Trek" episode, about a man-eating subterranean monster made ofcells based on silicon rather than carbon. Rather, it's a newly discovered bacteria that ...

Government information technology procurement has been largely conducted on an independent basis, with each federal agency determining its own needs and acquiring the infrastructure -- both hardware and software -- to meet those needs. However, the procurement landscape may change significantly with...

When it comes to the broad topic of "CRM failure," you often hear the same tales: a too-complicated integration, an incompetent integrator or inflexible technology. The reality is that technology is usually not the problem, nor is it integration or integrators. If you push, you'll find that the most...

I feel like social CRM has become a burger joint. "You want fries with that?" is the traditional up-sell question made famous in skits and jokes, but now I feel like we need to ask something akin in social CRM. The revised question: "You got any data to go with that?" To date, the lion's share of ...

Many a techie is looking at the cloud and seeing the shape of the future -- but that shape is often starkly defined by the data center, leaving little room for visions of mobile. Yet the cloud will undoubtedly shape-shift mobile devices in fascinating and often unexpected ways. "The cloud is the per...

Last week in New York, I began some field research in social CRM that will result in a longer paper later this fall. One of the things that interested me was the level of frustration and, well, anger that some customers have for some of their vendors. It's a mixed bag, really -- some people take gr...