A chat with MyCRMcareer.com’s CEO

March 10, 2008

Ted Hartley is CEO of social network MyCRMcareer.com

An interview with Ted Hartley, CEO of social network MyCRMcareer.com, on the new CRM: customers managing relationships instead of it being the other way round and mobile’s role.

Mobile Marketer’s Lauren Mooney interviews Mr. Hartley, who is based in Atlanta. Excerpts:

What's MyCRMcareer.com doing in mobile?
You can access it like any other site. You know by searching the URL and going to the site itself and signing in if you already have a profile. So currently what you would be able to do from a mobile standpoint is what I just said. However, that is probably going to limit a user to just reviewing their RSS feeds.

What's MyCRMcareer.com about? Target audience?
MyCRMcareer is founded by CRM professionals and thought-leaders in this space. Paul Greenberg is a name you might recognize. Paul wrote a best-selling book on CRM, it sold 250,000 copies. He’s writing his fourth book now.

Bruce Culbert is another founder with me. We both worked at KPMG Consulting [and] Salesforce.com and so what we wanted to do was bring something that is contemporary in nature as a social media platform and also as a career type service offering to CRM professionals.

And what we mean by CRM professionals is marketing sales support consultants and IT professionals. Because it’s a very big community – millions of professionals.

And so what MyCRMcareer does is a business social network not to be confused with MySpace, Facebook, other types of white label applications. It’s really a business social media platform where business professionals can go and experience service – what we call the 4C’s – community and networking types of features, producing content and receiving content.

Producing content – they create a personal page where you can establish and receive our RSS feeds. Basically you personalize your own news feeds. That’s what I mentioned before, that from a mobile standpoint that people can do that.

When you sign into your personal page, you basically go to one landing spot, where everything you can do on the site exists. The content RSS feeds, and you can also create content/blogs and syndicate those blogs, upload podcasts, upload videos, share stories, articles, really anything in terms of media. Or comment on others posts.

That’s the whole content aspect of it. And then you can also have an education experience on the site. We think the 4 C’s – community, content, competency, career – are all things that lend itself to basically a lifestyle approach to assisting and developing the careers of CRM professionals.

So the competency standpoint is we’ll be enhancing that education and learning platform with gender-specific sort of education and certification offerings in the first quarter of this year.

And then we have the career aspect, which is a job board but you’re also able to network with other career professionals, very similar to LinkedIn. Developing your own network and communicating with that network to find your next career opportunity if that’s what you choose to do so.

So our site is really organized around those 4 C’s and that’s kind of our service offering package and you know it’s focused on industry CRM.

And like I mentioned before, you may have a profile on MySpace or Facebook or Linked In or Monster.com but there’s no place to go and have that type of consolidated experience that I mentioned.

We’ve certainly done our research on accessing CRM applications for vendors and the functionality and features that are supported by those vendors. And what you may want to do is search for Paul Greenberg CRM, Google on that. Because Paul wrote an interesting blog on the iPhone in terms of access for those vendors – what can you do, what types of experience, how is that supported from a mobile application standpoint.

The other piece of it is interesting, because while mobile strategies differ from whomever you’re talking to, companies being able to try to have their customers experience different types of things. There are situations where there’s like, obviously, text.

One thing that I recently saw in texting, the NBC All-Star game last year, there’s a company called Neighborhood America. I think they teamed with Reebok if I’m not mistaken. And they had a texting strategy where billboards would say go to this site and text this link and you’ll automatically be signed up for a Reebok promotion. You’ll get a coupon for shoes 50 percent off and then once you got that texted back they stood in line for three hours to get their shoes.

How would you personally define mobile CRM?
Well, we’re defining CRM now, because CRM historically has been customer relationship management, whereas you manage the relationship with your customer. And now it’s being turned on its head – it’s more about engaging your customer.

So providing your customer with the tools and experience, where they can be engaged, so they’ve kind of taken over the relationship and they are managing you as a company and so because they want to do that, and they can, because there are so many choices in today’s economy and there’s a lot of companies and products that aren’t that much different and, by the way, the price is not that much different.

It’s very easy to switch allegiances from one diaper to another, or from one soap to another, but how do you engage with those customers? And so there’s a couple things. Mobile commuting: I want my info now phenomenon. And the customer is in charge.

And so if you do an equation, the customer is in charge, plus mobile computing/commuting? Strategy, ease of use, personalized touch, feedback loop in the product development, you know, kind of equals customer loyalty.

To me, in the most basic terms, that there is the beginning of mobile CRM. And it’s going to be much different. What I just talked about with that equation, it’s kind of business-to-consumer, but there’s a whole business-to-business strategy as well.