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There was a lot of talk at this week’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference about creating unified customer experiences. Questions being bantered around included who should own the unified customer experience and what technology should be deployed to ensure a unified customer experience.

Of course, and as Tom Asacker (@tomasacker) rightfully pointed out in a tweet, you can never create a unified customer experience, as the customer experience gets formed in the mind of the customer – not in the actual transaction. That experience will be based on a customer’s context that  is totally outside of the company’s control.

But assuming that what is meant is to attempt to offer a consistent customer experience, as it would be witnessed by a neutral observer – it is interesting to see how most people focus on the company’s hardware, people and infrastructure, and don’t talk much about the company’s software, its culture.

As you (hopefully) allow more and more people within your organization to interact with your customers, prospects and detractors, you will dramatically increase the number of touch-points between your company and the marketplace. If it also your goal to humanize the experience with your company by allowing employees to be themselves and not to sound like corporate automatons, you will also increase the chances of inconsistent user experiences.

So how do you manage that customer experience across those multiple and diverse touch-points?

Technology and organizational responsibility may play a role, but the fundamental thing you have to have in place for any of this to work is the right corporate software – the right culture. And you can influence culture by adopting, and by living by, a simple set of values. Do like Dell, where the simple values are “be open, be transparent, be simple, and be caring,” or Jetblue, where the values are “safety, caring, integrity, fun and passion.” At Jetblue it allows them to predict how frontline employees with react to a customer problem within 97% accuracy – there is no software or organizational structure that would do that for you. There are of course other examples of companies doing that right, including the Ritz and Best Buy.

But how are those values different from your vision, mission, values, beliefs and other corporate documents that are often useless?

At those companies where they work, everyone lives by their values. It forms the DNA of their culture. If you cannot live by those values the organization will eventually repel you.

In those companies where it does not work, nobody, including the executives who spent fortunes on creating them, could recite their values, let alone live by them. They are a useless set of words that gets used in the annual report once a year.

Culture will trump anything in this large-scale social age, as it always has.

While attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference and hosting a great dinner with 28 thinkers in the space on Monday night (the dinner was sponsored by Clearvale, which is our client), I got a chance to reflect on what social CRM actually means, and how many people are thinking about it in a way that is too narrow.

Let’s start off by one of my favorite quotes from Peter Drucker: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” Ok, so creating a customer and managing the relationships with those customers should be the heartbeat of a company – we can all agree on that. That is also why Customer Relationship Management should be one of the most important processes within a company.

In the research leading to the writing of our (award winning – sorry couldn’t resist the chest thumping) book, the Hyper-Social Organization, we found that those companies that are successful in leveraging the social as part of their business, turn their business processes into social processes. So turning your CRM process into a social process makes a lot of sense.

The question is – How Do You Turn CRM Into a Social Process?

In order to answer that question, let’s peel back the various layers of the onion that make up the CRM process. And to do that it may be useful to categorize the parts of the overall process into the following elements – the actors, the processes that make up the CRM process, the places, and the data.

The actors are the people that should play a role in your overall CRM process – they don’t just  include your customers and prospects, which most companies will consider as part of their CRM process. They also include your detractors, your employees (those that interact, and those that should interact with the customers – e.g., those that share a passion with your customers), your suppliers (if you run on tight inventories and a supplier has an delivery issue, that will impact customer relationships), and your partners.

The processes that make up CRM include not just sales, marketing, and customer support, but also the buying process (most products are now being bought, not sold), the recommendation process, and the relationship management process – processes that have already gone social and been fundamentally transformed in the past decade.

The places refer to those places where you interact with your customers, or where they interact with one another while making buying decisions and sharing recommendations. They include face-to-face encounters, email, telephone, and social media environments.

The data refers too data that typically will reside in systems of record like CRM systems and financial applications. The data you keep about your customer relationship process should include customer data, transactional data, legal data, financial data, and increasingly social data.

Some people say that a CRM system that contains social data is social CRM – but when you look at all the parts of the social customer relationship process, you realize how myopic this view of social CRM is. Some consider the act of managing customer relationships in social media social CRM – an equally myopic viewpoint.

Social CRM needs to encompass all the different parts of the Customer Relationship Management Process – the Actors, the Processes, the Places and the Data.

That of course is not an easy task, and will not happen by deploying technology applications alone. Social CRM is about culture, people, and processes supported by technology.

What do you think?

I would also like to thank the people with whom I had good conversations on the topic: @elsua, @pgillin, @billives,@dankeldsen, @scratchmm, @mkrigsman, @mingk, @marklazen, @sameerpatel, @denispombriant, @absolutezero, @pitosalas, @rawn, @crmstrategies, @jyarmis, @_richardhughes, @skwilder, @debyang, @mjayliebs.

Having known and admired Grant McCracken for a few years, I knew I was in for a intellectual treat with this CMO 2.0 Influencer Conversation. Grant is an academic with a background in anthropology, economics and complexity theory, a blogger and also the author of multiple books, his latest being The Chief Culture Officer, how to create a living, breathing corporation.

Grant has always focused on contemporary American Culture, making his knowledge a real treasure trove for marketers who are trying to understand people’s buying behavior rather than shoving products down people’s throat. His interest in economics comes from the fact that when you study American Culture, you quickly see that it comes from the interaction of culture and commerce.

Having so many definitions of culture out there, we started the discussion by defining what culture means for Grant. Forgive the technical nature of this part of the conversation (and also the fact that Grant was cut out for a bit – we my rerecord that part in the future), but being a new student of Culture, it was important to me. Grant does accept the classic definition of culture as presented by Geertz – which says that culture if a transmitted pattern of meaning embodied in symbols by which people communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and they attitudes towards life.

Grant then took us through the evolution of culture over time. In hunter gatherer societies, culture was very egalitarian, like language – everyone shared it and nobody had a disproportionate influence over it. In more developed and structurally more complicated societies with hierarchies, we saw the creation of elites who decide what meanings should be and what shape culture should take. In Western societies and all the way into the 20th century we had magazine editors, the keepers of mass media, marketers, and agencies that shaped public opinion and cultural meaning making. In the last 10 years, we have entered a new era, one in which the production of meaning and culture became more egalitarian once again. A kid with $2,000 worth of computer equipment in his parents’ basement can now influence public opinion as much as the elites do. A question in Grant’s mind is whether, with the democratization of culture and the emergence of the long tail, we may lose the centricity and shared-ness that Geertz was talking about and end up with a solipsistic world when everyone is their own universe. We both agreed that while it is structurally a possibility to end up there, we probably will never see that happen.

Next we talked about the importance of culture in business – and started with the example of Coca Cola, which without culture would be nothing more than sugared fizzy water. In the early days Coca Cola had the world to itself, with Pepsi not showing up for another 30-40 years. At the time, Coca Cola’s advertising shaped America’s concept of itself and even influenced how we think about Santa Claus. But then came the competitive phase , and a market crowded with alternatives. Brands now had to keep up with contemporary culture rather than shape it – you would pick a trend and ride that wave into mainstream acceptance. Now that world has completely gone as well. With culture coming from so many places, in so many forms, and lasting such a brief time. It’s like a perfect storm out there, you pick a trend and it’s gone before you know it. And so many companies end up engaging in a desperate game of catch-up, which means that they don’t really have any strategy at their disposal.

That is why Grant makes the case that every company should have a Chief Culture Officer (CCO).

We then talked about the role of agencies in the marketing and meaning making mix and how Grant believes  that  30 seconds spots are still powerful tools in shaping meaning. Contrasting a Volvo ad with the Ford Fiesta Movement program in social media, he argues that the Volvo ad did great things for the brand that could not be achieved in social media. In fact, and while the Ford Fiesta Movement was a brilliant program, it did not sell any cars.

Next we talked about slow culture vs. fast culture, and how most companies forget slow culture. Fast culture comes from the cool hunters who know only the hippest things. What they don’t understand is that 80% of all the meanings in our culture are relatively ancient – they come to us from the 19th or 16th century, or even beyond that. Focusing on the 20% cool hunting or fast meanings is what causes everyone to play the desperate game of catch-up he talked and to constantly repudiate their own brand.

I could have written a book with all the information that flowed during this conversation. You will have to listen to the recording to hear Grant talk about some of the other things we discussed, which include:

• How many companies have lots of CCO kinds of people on staff, but no-one in the C-Suite
• How agencies will have to adapt moving forward and how cultural intelligence is so important that you cannot outsource it to them
• How successful brands are a set of meanings that are exquisitely responsive to the consumer and delicately and brilliantly crafted by the tactician, the brander, the marketer or the ad agency.
• How brands are bundles of meaning that need to be manufactured and can be a conduit for sociality
• The lack of culture training in business education
• Whether co-creation of meaning making with consumers can work
• How the older generation had multiple group memberships while teenagers have multiple selves
• How social status no longer plays a role in American culture and how it was replaced by celebrity culture
• How Gen Yers get their security from their networks where we got it from the workplace

As usual, you can listen to the complete interview at the CMO 2.0 Site

Understanding your tribes and the Human 1.0 characteristics (reciprocity, fairness, etc.) that have been driving humans for the last 10,000 years are critical to help you make sense of employee, customer and prospect behavior. But you cannot develop a truly comprehensive understanding of the people you interact with without having a clear understanding of their culture.

You see, culture is actually another Human 1.0 characteristic (at least according to biological anthropologists) that we as humans developed as a way to accelerate our evolution without having to wait for evolutionary biology to make the changes required for us to do things. We developed boats and paddles to travel over water rather than wait for evolution to equip us with those capabilities as part of our bodies.

Culture is influenced by genetic evolution and vice versa, as Boyd and Richerson argue in one of their great books “Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.”

While the definition of culture is hotly debated between social/cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologists and others, the term generally refers to a body of knowledge, rituals, language and beliefs that gets passed around to help us make sense of our surroundings and drive parts of  our behavior. Culture is not something that is fixed, it is something that we constantly change and modify depending on our environment. And sometimes culture can change extremely rapidly. Take Twitter, mobile phones and Facebook as examples. The language used in all three environments are different, the do’s and don’ts are different – and all that happened within the last few years/decades, which is nothing more than an eye-blink in the context of genetic evolution.

If you truly want to understand the behavior of your employees, customers, prospects and detractors, you not only need to understand them from a tribal perspective, with modern tribes forming around shared passion, shared pain or common interests, you need to understand them from a cultural perspective. In some cases you will need to shape or change parts of your corporate culture in order to get things done, and in rare instances you will be able to shape or create a culture around what you do – which totally changes the game by creating competitive barriers that are hard to overcome.