Interview with Bill Odell, Vice President of Marketing at Helpstream
Submitted by Marketo

This next B2B Marketing Thought Leader Interview is with Bill Odell, vice president of marketing at Helpstream, a Social CRM solutions company.  Bill is responsible for the company’s overall marketing and go-to-market strategies and oversees all product marketing, partner marketing and corporate marketing activities.  Bill has 20 years of experience leading marketing for several innovative, category creating technology companies, including Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Compression Labs – the developer of DirectTV – and Interlace Systems.

What is social CRM?

There are many definitions floating around to describe Social CRM, but the one I like the best is one provided by Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light and arguably the most highly regarded expert on CRM. Paul describes Social CRM as “what we do when the customer controls the conversation.” Many companies today are realizing that the era of command and control, where companies dictate how they want to engage customers, has changed due to the rapid adoption of social software such as Facebook ,Twitter and YouTube. Just think about how one musician drew the attention of every major news network when he posted a homemade music video on YouTube – with 5 million hits in 48 hours – pointing out how United Airlines refused to compensate him for breaking his guitar. Today customers have a much larger say in how they want to engage with vendors and in fact, research has shown that they would prefer to engage socially, with a network of their peers, supported by the vendor. Social CRM enables that type of relationship.

Read the rest at: Modern B2B Marketing