last.fm - The Big Biological Model gets a cold

last.fm is a service I have used and admired for a long while now and I became a paid subscriber for £3 a month (or thereabouts) a few months back which is something notable in a sea of free music services.

Their service really does manage to play music 'like the music I like' while deftly avoiding the stuff I don't like. I've trained it over the past few years like a puppy to respond to my commands of love and hate and now it does a great job in creating my personal radio station.

Their simple delta of being able to mark something as 'not liked' provided them with the extra dimension of customer modeling that the other recommendation and fuzzy logic engines sorely missed. Recommendation models without an 'unlike' are akin to physics environments where there is no 'reaction' to the 'action' - the map is too one dimensional.

I remember reading a list of the jobs that last.fm had available in 2009 and you would have been hard pressed to discern between their job descriptions for marketing and technical staff and job listings for a biotech scientist. The guys at last.fm understand nodal modelling and that the real social graph looks more like something you see in a petri dish in a microscope - constantly changing, fault tolerant, nodal, duplicated, overloaded and alive.

Some howcome last.fm are making some cardinal sins with their customer relationships at the moment?

1. Introducing subscriptions that can only be paid for by PayPal. This was moderately annoying when I was in Latin America recently and my PayPal was suspended after one too many transactions in Brazil making their fraud algorithm jumpy.

2. Removing the two key features that most subscribers pony up their cash for - streaming personal playlists and 'loved tracks'.

The on-demand streaming isn't something I use last.fm for as I use it as my personal auto-pilot radio station and secondly as my database of music likes in the cloud. The truth is I use Spotify for on-demand '' listening. The changes in service however do bother the legions that had moved from their iPods to iPhones and Android devices to have on-demand on the move.

What bothers me is the way that they are making the changes.

No push of email to subscribers to alert them of the situation and a terse statement on the site inevitably sees a raft of users angrily hitting the forums and web. The path for resolution is simply to cancel your subscription if you are unhappy about it.

Problems with licensing seems to be the battle cry with most upheavals in music services but did they really try an explore all the options they could have taken?

• Two tier subscriptions with a higher delta for on-demand streaming.
• Aborting the free model and charging a nominal fee for all users.
• Offer different services/rights to different countries

.....or even less radical - cancel the services that they were going to but run an 'ease the shock' campaign pre-warning users of the reasons why they need to do this.

We're listening to last.fm but they aren't listening back.

Touchpoints (manual and automated) between sCRM and CRM

Dear Readers,

I'd be grateful for insights and comments on this topic.

There seem to be two phases to harmonising sCRM and CRM domains.

1. Don't integrate using software - use people initially.

Use the CRM tools in the cloud (FB comments, Twitter, Get Satisfaction etc) where the customer/prospect is operating and backfill insights and information manually into your CRM system.

This is low risk with no internal technology investment. The cost is mostly around people/staff. It's good education all round and a reminder that a companies systems are no longer the ones sitting on their premises.

2. Automated integration of sCRM data/insights into the 'master' back end CRM and related systems.

This of course is much more difficult. Some outlines of touchpoints and suggested automation are below :

Identity : At it's most simplest you can integrate web2.0 Id's of customers into your back end CRM profile and perhaps use your Campaign Management in your CRM app to deliver/chat with the web2.0 channels. Automated campaign management tools spamming customers web2.0 spaces is clearly dangerous as the personal touch may be lost so simply using your CRM tool as a front end to web2.0 activity might retain the personal touch and allow your CSA's to remain in a single workspace.

Profiling : A unified view of web2.0 profiles with internal CRM profiles. Very useful but prone to legal restrictions. Again the CRM system can pull in public preferences/likes/dislikes for customers and use them for customer support and behavioural targetting solutions.

Analytics : merge analytics observations on your own web/IP properties with those in the cloud. This area is nascent at the present time but the integration between Salesforce and Radian6 certainly looks interesting in examining click throughs from the cloud.

Metadata, Taxonomy and KMS: This is a tough nut to crack and the sharp end of the semantic web. Ideally the taxonomy that your customers develop online should inform your southbound knowledge management and product descriptions. Behavioural Targetting ,SEO/SEM and Customer Support will be more successful if you can develop a commonality between how you describe your domain vs how it's actually being talked about in the real world.

Connect Listening with the Raising of Work/Suggestion Tickets distributed to the rest of the business : Use the listening platform data to directly feed into how you raise suggestions, complaints or issues into the business. This avoids some retype and paraphrasing but still requires staff to manage.

Run Listening Platforms Across internal channels such as Wikis and Forums : this could be automated to filter hot topics and prioritise work and many forum providers are moving into the semantic space to enable just that.

Involvement in Design : beyond providing a Wiki or a Facebook group and harvesting opinions on features via Listening Platforms how do we get customers deeply involved in the creation of the products and services we design?

The big question...
Is deep automated integration an expensiveand proprietary folly between sCRM and CRM at the present time?

Do we end raising projects titled 'Integrate with the Internet'?