CRM’s roadmap is fairly clear: in the next year to 18 months, Social CRM will become a critical tool, service will continue to grow in importance as customer acquisition continues to be difficult, and the value of mobile CRM will becoming readily apparent. So why isn’t every business acting on the trends?

Excuses abound – “We need to understand the ROI on this before we launch any projects” being among the most frequent. That’s an increasingly weak excuse, because ROI calculators are out there and ready for use, even for social CRM. But, no matter how feeble, too often the excuses win out.

CRM needs executive buy-in to succeed. If that’s true, then the opposite is also true: new trends in CRM need executive apathy and fear to fail.

Front-line sales, marketing and service workers are constantly receiving anecdotal evidence of the value of social CRM. The service team gets feedback on how deficiencies in their processes are holding them back. The people in the field are relying on mobile devices for many things — and they know that a capability to use their business software on their mobile devices could make them both more productive and more effective.

So the front-line people are ready, and the technology is ready. What’s keeping many businesses from launching a CRM revolution? I like to call it “C-level fear.”

Far too many executives operate from a position of fear when it comes to the customer. They continue to debate the idea that the customer is now in control of the relationship, because the loss of control is frightening to them.

As a result, they soft-pedal emerging technologies, kicking the can down the road to a time not when their organizations are ready for change – because that time is now – but to a time when they have come to grips with how the customer is changing, and how that changes the expectations and duties of a C-level executive.

They’re afraid of making investments that don’t pay off, and they’d rather find themselves too far behind the competition than seem too far ahead of the technology curve.

The great default is the ROI argument. If an initiative can’t produce visible ROI in a short time, it doesn’t get a go-ahead. Investments should have payoffs, but the way those payoffs are evaluated should be fair and realistic. A pilot program whose evaluation criteria doom it to failure from the start is not a good investment. An evaluation of an underfunded initiative after six months is not fair to those involved in it.

Worst of all, once a half-baked, half-hearted program based around social media, in-depth service or mobile technologies fails, the executives plagued by “C-level fear” can then use those doomed projects as evidence that all such projects will fail.

Another great dodge is the idea of waiting for best practices to develop. Best practices don’t evolve on their own – they come about when someone actually tries something and then adjusts what they’re doing.

If you’re sitting around waiting for best practices, it means that someone else – probably a competitor – is out there working to develop them. With the speed that customer relationships are evolving, can you wait to copy your competitors? Are you willing to spot them a huge lead? If you’re not willing to answer the bell now, will you really be able to catch up later?

If you want to succeed — especially as a C-level executive — you need to be audacious. You need to realize what the reality is around customer relationships, accept what you have control over, and act decisively to improve those things. What you should not do is default to excuses that merely mask the fact that you’re uncomfortable with change.

One audacious move: get out of the office and talk to the front-line people about these ideas. Find out if social CRM, mobile CRM, new service metrics, or new types of analytics would solve their problems. If the answer is yes, you need to realize that you will not be alone in any effort to improve your CRM efforts – if you’re brave enough to respond by initiating change.

Chris Bucholtz, the founding editor of both InsideCRM and Forecasting Clouds, serves as the editor in chief of CRM Outsiders and is an influencer in customer relationship management. To find out more about how to empower your sales force with Sales CRM please visit http://www.sugarcrm.com

As search engines began to realize that a lot of search is local, sites like Google started focusing on local businesses. This has helped local business owners achieve higher rankings in search engines when users are in the same area as those businesses. Now social networks are taking their cue, and are focusing on geolocation, which helps local businesses boost their online marketing even more.

Location-based networks, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, are the leaders in this new online marketing social movement. Users “check in” to a location, telling their friends where they are. Businesses are taking advantage of geolocation by offering rewards programs to first-time visitors and loyal customers. Whether it’s freebies, giveaways, or discounts, the businesses who include geolocation in their online marketing are seeing a payoff.

Geolocation apps like Foursquare use GPS technology that has been built into our smartphones — iPhone, Android, Blackberry — and will allow users to check in to a location just by clicking a button, rather than entering the entire address by hand.

The great thing about geolocation is that it works for the typical customer, on the tool they carry with them everywhere. And as silly as it may seem, customers are eating it up, and enjoying the fun of geolocation. If they think it’s fun, they’ll participate. And if they participate, they’ll participate at your restaurant, store, or location.

Foursquare and Yelp, a restaurant review site, have even upped the ante by giving titles — mayor, duke, duchess — for repeat visitors. People go back to their favorite locations to earn that title. Imagine people coming to your restaurant again and again, just to earn a title someone else created.

Most recently, Facebook got into the act, offering Facebook Places as a tool to compete with Foursquare and Gowalla. Now, the largest social network in the world makes it possible for your customers to tell all their friends where they are, doing your online marketing for you.

Now, for good or bad, your online marketing is being taken out of your hands, and put into the hands of your customers. And because your customers’ friends trust them more than they trust any marketing you could ever do, the friends will want to try the places they keep hearing about — the places your customers keep visiting over and over, in order to win titles and rewards.

The net result of this new online marketing tool is lower marketing costs and higher profits. But only if you take advantage of it. Unique ideas on how you can launch social media marketing strategy for your company can be found here.

Rostin Ventures online marketing services include social media marketing, search engine optimization, and online reputation management. Local SEO services of geolocation marketing through social media, provides for higher search engine ranking within local search of business listings. Get listed in local search and found by consumers looking for your product and services at http://www.rostinventures.com

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How online B2B marketing differs from online B2C marketing

Online B2B marketing is a lot different from online B2C marketing. For one thing, it’s more formal. In an online B2C setting, you’re going to have customers and visitors with a wide variety of interests, education levels, tastes, and even sense of propriety and appropriateness. You need to make sure your message appeals to the widest possible audience in a B2C setting. With some variable data and creative programming, you can deliver more tailored messages to your audience, but you either have to write one message as generically as possible, or write several messages tailored to each possible group.

But with an online B2B marketing audience, you can narrow your appeal. You’re writing only to the decision makers. You can reasonably assume certain levels of education, attitude, and professionalism among your customers. So your messages can be tailored to a specific group of people, without worrying too much about the non-industry crowd.

How to create the online B2B marketing message

Don’t forget that your online B2B marketing audience is someone else’s B2C audience. They don’t just stick decision makers in a closet at 5:00, and pull them out at 8:00 the next morning. Your B2B customers go home every night, watch TV, get on Facebook, and in general, still respond to the same emotional cues and language at the office that they will at home. Appealing to a person’s fears and desires in your message, showing them how to avoid pain or achieve goals, will work in online B2B marketing the same way it does in B2C marketing.

In online B2B marketing, you also want to focus on the benefits of your product or service, rather than the features. Don’t tell your customers what your service can do (“our Kick-Starter booster is made of titanium and polypropylene”), tell them what they’ll get out of it. Of course, make sure you personalize it whenever possible: “Our Kick-Starter booster will increase productivity by 20%, which can mean an additional $100,000 each year for Jones & Wells.”

Where to find your online B2B marketing customers

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of social networks and apps that will help you find your customers. But rather than trying to reach as many people on as many networks as you can manage, focus most of your energy on the best networks. We typically find our online B2B marketing audience on places like Twitter, LinkedIn, and even industry-specific networks like you’d find on Ning.com. While it’s possible to find the B2B audience on Facebook, you’re going to be spending a lot of time and money trying to reach them, while broadcasting your audience to people who don’t care. It would be like buying TV ads in a city just to reach 10 people on it.

Take a look at your online B2B marketing audiences age and technology expertise too. How do they use technology? The basic tenets of Internet marketing assume that your audience are online somehow. But where are they getting their information? Is there a niche social network for your industry? Or are the decision makers getting most of their information from email and websites? Or do they use mobile videos and texting as their primary form of communication? Your marketing campaign needs to match where your customers are, not where you want them to be.