• 13.7 million Macs sold in FY 2010
• That’s 3 times the number of Macs Apple sold just five years ago
• The Mac’s installed base is 50 million
• Mac sales accounted for $22 billion in revenue in FY 2010
• That’s 33 percent of Apple’s revenue
• And it’s enough to make the company’s Mac business No. 110 on the Fortune 500–if it were a standalone business
• Quarterly Mac sales grew 2.5 times faster than the rest of the industry (according to IDC)
• The Mac has outgrown the PC market for 18 straight quarters
• The Mac claims 20.7 percent of the U.S. retail market (according to NPD)
• There are 600,000 Mac developers
• The above number is growing by 30,000 per month
• Mac customer satisfaction is the highest in the industry
• It’s No. 1 in customer satisfaction (according to ACSI)
• It’s No. 1 in tech support for the last seven years (according to Consumer Reports)
• It’s No. 1 in customer support (according to PC World)
• There are 318 Apple retail stores in 11 countries
• Apple retail stores sold 2.8 million Macs last year
• 50 percent of them were sold to first-time Mac buyers
• Apple sold 2 million iPhoto photo books in the past year
• There are 5 million GarageBand users

For RIM’s (RIMM) sake, let’s hope so, because the company’s current OS certainly isn’t doing that now. According to a new survey by ChangeWave Research, consumer interest in the BlackBerry is declining at a time when demand for smartphones is on the rise. Just six percent of survey respondents planning to purchase a smartphone in the next 90 days intend to buy a BlackBerry. That’s fewer than half the number that were planning to do so during ChangeWave’s last survey, taken in March. And it is dwarfed by the 52 percent of respondents planning to buy an iPhone (up from 31 percent) and the 19 percent planning to buy an HTC handset (up from 12 percent).

Grim news, and it only gets worse. Customer satisfaction with the BlackBerry is on the decline as well. Just 30 percent of respondents who own the device say they’re satisfied with it. That’s a record low for RIM after a seventh consecutive quarter of decline, and something of an embarrassment when 73 percent of iPhone owners rate themselves very satisfied.

Clearly, RIM has fallen. The question now is, can it get back up?

“In recent quarters RIM models appear to have lost their ‘cool factor,’ and the onus is now squarely on RIM to regain consumers’ confidence in their products,” ChangeWave says. “To do so they need new, highly compelling offerings that can compete on an equal footing with the best that Apple and Android have to offer. Otherwise, RIM’s future growth may increasingly be limited to the success or failure of its lower cost models on the international market.”

Industry analysts, at least in the case of the Altimeter Group, are ultimately becoming market catalysts.

With today’s news, this is of course, only fortified.

The Altimeter Group released a new report on social customer relationship management, and while analysts release reports all the time, this is different. The report is free to read and share under creative commons, and this is a big disruptor, one that reflects the socialization of information and the spirit of social media. By giving away insight, Altimeter ignites change and thus brings its report to life.

As such, the Altimeter Group is demonstrating how new models are needed to thrive in the social economy and concurrently putting into practice the ingredients of an effective social CRM framework.

The New Rules of Relationship Management

The essence of the new report by Altimeter’s R “Ray” Wang and Jeremiah Owyang is putting the customer first. While that seems like a simple principle, it’s easier said then done. The case the duo make is rooted, of course, in social media and the self-actualization of personal influence.

As the report notes in the beginning:

“Rapid adoption of social networking enables users to connect with individuals and communities who share mutual interests, increasingly leaving organizations out of the conversation.

Simply hiring more people to keep up with social marketing, sales, and support will not be sufficient, as consumers and their new channels will always outnumber employees. As a result, companies need an organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web–giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.”

And indeed, they’re right.

Social media didn’t invent conversations, it simply amplified and connected them to audiences and the actions that are triggered as a result. With the right tools, and more important, mindset and resolve, we can now uncover these incredibly valuable, insightful and prominent conversations where and when they happen. Listening is only the beginning however. As in anything, we need a little less conversation and a little more action.

As the report notes, social CRM does not replace existing CRM efforts, it complements them with an outbound extension to connect with the very social beacons that shape and steer perception–those previously untouched with inbound-only infrastructures. Essentially the “s” in sCRM should be viewed as a verb…as in socialize. Actions speak louder than words and thus, sCRM transforms words and intent into action.

As the “godfather of CRM,” Paul Greenberg, notes, “We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction–or the data associated with it….Social CRM focuses on engaging the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. Social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

The Socialization of an Entire Organization

The social customer is only one part of the equation. As any listening program will reveal, conversations map specifically to departments within an organization and as such, all units affected by outside activity will socialize over time. This is why I believe that over time, we should focus less on the “C” of sCRM and focus our attention, energy and ingenuity on the aspects of SRM–social relationship management.

The social Web is distributing influence beyond the customer landscape, allocating authority among stakeholders, prospects, advocates, decision-makers, and peers. SRM recognizes that whether someone recommended a product, purchased a product, or simply recognized it publicly, in the end, each makes an impact on behavior at varying levels. Therefore customers are now merely part of a larger equation that also balances vendors, experts, partners, and other authorities. In the realm of SRM, influence is distributed and it is recognizes wherever and however it takes shape.

“SRM is a doctrine aligned with a humanized business strategy and supporting technology infrastructure and platform. SRM recognizes that all people, no matter what system they use, are equal. It represents a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence mapped to specific department representatives within the organization using various lenses for which to identify individuals where and how they interact.”

But we must begin somewhere and for many businesses, the evolution from CRM to sCRM is in fact, revolutionary.

After months of study and interviews with over 100 organizations, Altimeter Group identified 18 use cases for Social CRM to help businesses assess, adapt, and create new programs and processes to socialize their brands.

As the report notes, social CRM programs start at the departmental level, but require corporate support to transform fiefdoms into united efforts. The challenge lies in mobilizing and organizing resources around distributed conversations and building the connectors that link CRM systems to social networks. And, organizations must set priorities based on market demand and technology maturity.

Customers have already migrated toward new channels and in the process, companies that are not in pursuit are quickly falling behind. Relationships between organizations and customers might be better defined simply as “relations” as the existing framework was traditionally optimized around the organization and not the customer.

“Traditional CRM projects have failed to grasp the complexities of the customer-company relationship. Though these CRM programs started out with the goal of providing a single customer view and 1:1 relationship management, early efforts quickly refocused on automation of front-office tasks and improving management visibility across marketing, sales, service and support. Because these programs have often failed to support the front-office worker’s needs to manage relationships, internal adoption halted as users grew to resent, and in some cases revolt, against CRM.”

To begin at the beginning, businesses must deploy social CRM for business value and not get caught up in the hype of Twitter and Facebook. We have to go where our customers seek, discover, and share information. Alitimeter suggests focusing on bite-sized entry points as today’s tight budgets, limited resources, and little time will ensure that companies get the most bang for the buck initially. (Click graph below to enlarge.)

In the report, each one of the 18 use cases brings definable metrics that should be incorporated in each Social CRM program.

- Begin with the end in mind

- Metrics should be aligned with an organization’s entry points

- Quantify the baseline and determine the effort

- Adjust ROI targets to align resources with efforts to move the needle

- The goal–drive business value

The 18 recommended use cases are organized in seven categories and in order of operations. As observed, most organizations start their initiatives by building out the “5 M’s” and deploying a customer insight program that matures with experience and earned intelligence. I previously discussed the maturation of social media infrastructure in business usually evolves in at least 10 stages. (Click table below to enlarge.)

Social Customer Insights form the Foundation for All Social CRM Use Cases–Everything begins with listening

1. Social Customers Insights

Social Marketing Seeks to Achieve Customer Advocacy

2. Social Marketing Insights

3. Rapid Social Marketing Response

4. Social Campaign Tracking

5. Social Event Management

Social Sales Enables Seamless Lead Opportunities

6. Social Sales Insights

7. Rapid Social Sales Response

8. Proactive Social Lead Generation

Social Support and Service Drives Sustainable Customer Satisfaction

9. Social Support Insights

10. Rapid Social Responses

11. Peer-2-Peer (P2P) Unpaid Armies

Social Innovation Streamlines Complex Ideation

12. Innovation Insights

13. Crowd-sourced R&D

Collaboration Reduced Organizational Friction and Stimulates Ecosystem

14. Collaboration Insights

15. Enterprise Collaboration

16. Extended Collaboration

Seamless Customer Experience Sustains Advocacy Programs

17. Seamless Customer Experience

18. VIP Experience

The Customer (R)evolution
The methodologies, systems, and people that entwine CRM are unquestionably forcing a historical (r)evolution from the outside in. As customers earn prominence online and ultimately in the marketplaces they define, CRM is far more consequential to the prosperity and relevance of businesses, than perhaps ever before.

This is about earning a prestigious position in the hearts, minds, and ultimately, decisions of customers, prospects and those who affect their actions, today and tomorrow. Essentially, with the socialization of media and the redistribution of authority and influence, we are competing for the future simply by listening, responding, learning and adapting.

Social customers are disrupting the balance of power and actively exerting their new found eminence within every social network and community that thrives off of shared experiences. The socialization of CRM is effectively measured by the dedication of resources and resolution the organization commits not just to social media, but to all existing channels where customers, influencers and prospects seek help.

Divided we share…united we change.

Welcome news for long-suffering AT&T (T) subscribers, who recently ranked the carrier dead last in the annual Consumer Reports survey of wireless customer satisfaction. But the carrier’s improvements only apply to cities where additional back-haul connections have been added to support those higher speeds.

Sadly, for New York City and Bay Area residents, neither region qualifies. As AT&T head of operations John Stankey told attendees of a Citigroup (C) conference Tuesday, those cities present particularly challenging density and zoning issues.

“I thought by the time we’d closed 2009 we would be in a better place in New York City than we were,” Stankey said. “But New York City is a little bit of a different animal and it’s a good example of having to scale in this data environment, where not only do we have a lot of capacity issues to deal with but physically there is network equipment and network elements that are needed to be changed out.”

Elaborating, Stankey added, “They just flat-out have hit their capacity levels and we have to replace them with new ones. And as a result of that, those transitions and that work has taken us a little bit longer and it’s been a little dicier than what we had hoped it would be.”

And evidently, the situation is equally dicey in San Francisco.

“Our challenges [in San Francisco] are largely zoning-oriented,” Stankey explained. “It’s a little bit tougher in places in San Francisco to do adjustments to antennas that we need to do in areas like the Financial District, where we had antenna structures that worked really well in a 2G environment. They need to be replaced to support 3G services and it’s just taking time to get the zoning ordinances square to replace those antennas and clean up the portions of the city that we are dealing with.”

Okay. So New York City and San Francisco upgrades are tough going–that’s understandable. They’re both big, tech-savvy markets with high data demands. Still, it’s a travesty that a carrier like AT&T still can’t reliably connect calls in either of them when the company is raking in 80 percent more wireless data revenue than it did in 2007.

With usage levels like these and the network degradation and customer satisfaction issues that go along with them, is it reasonable to think that iPhone carriers like AT&T (T) will swap their all-you-can-eat data plans for usage-based pricing? Sacconaghi thinks so.

“iPhone users consume web, email and video data on the mobile network at levels that many believe are adversely affecting other subscribers on those mobile networks. Network congestion in turn is triggering higher capital spending requirements for carriers. Unchecked, the iPhone’s very high usage levels could severely undermine the economic returns of offering the iPhone,” Sacconaghi explains.

“We believe carriers will increasingly have to manage the usage side of the equation as well,” the Bernstein analyst asserts. “Carriers that have not already done so are increasingly likely to adopt usage-based pricing schemes that more fairly match price to usage but which will also inevitably discourage the most profligate kinds of applications.”

Sacconaghi adds: “Today’s combination of a subsidized iPhone with an all-you-can eat data plan can be likened to a carnival where there is a relatively high price of entry, but where all the rides are free. The adoption of usage-based pricing plans is akin to also charging for the Ferris wheel. When the rides are no longer ‘free,’ the value of the entry ticket could decline.”

That’s unfortunate. But in this case, the carnival’s wireless data traffic has increased 50-fold since the introduction of the Ferris wheel and there has not been a commensurate increase in revenue. In other words, AT&T is not getting paid for the level of data traffic it supports. Says Sacconaghi: “Over the…3-year period over which AT&T’s data bandwidth consumption has grown by 50-fold, its data revenues have grown by only 250 percent, resulting in a severe drop in revenue generation per megabyte of data.”

As more adopt unlimited data plans, they become unsustainable from a carrier profitability perspective. So what’s to be done?

Spend even more capital improving your network.

And raise the price of data by adopting usage-based pricing.

That might seem disadvantageous to Apple (AAPL), but as Sacconaghi notes, Apple could use the switch to usage-based pricing to its advantage. It could, for example, introduce a “non-data plan” iPhone that expands the device’s addressable market.

“A non-data plan iPhone might be something like an ‘iPhone Touch,’ a lower cost-of-ownership device (requires voice plan only; utilizes wifi for Internet connectivity) with which to attack the more traditional handset market…while exploiting Apple’s twin unique competitive differentiators: (1) A vibrant App Store with 100,000+ Apps and (2) a large and global iPod community that remains fiercely loyal to the iPod,” the analyst writes. “Such a product would have a price (to customers) that would be similar to a stand-alone iPod Touch today, and have a cost of ownership equal to standard voice-only phones.”