Trust.Twitter.com

Nearly every software company, from start-ups whipping out business plans looking for any money they can get their hands on to keep their doors open, to enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) companies looking to ride the social networking wave into new sales of their existing applications (for the most part) Twitter has become king of the hype cycle.  One estimate puts the media coverage attributed to Twitter at $48M for a month.   

Let’s just stop a second and ask a really fundamental question.  Can you still trust Twitter after all these security breaches?  Would you recommend Twitter be part of any CRM system after hundreds of pages of their documents ended up on TechCrunch?  Would you trust Twitter with just one of your credit cards, stored either on their internal servers or in the cloud right now?  Be honest. 

“The cloud ate my sales forecast…and deleted my kid’s must-read book next semester”

How about your customer data stored as Tweets on your sales cycles, or your sales reporting, even in the form of confidential Tweets only behind your firewall on an Intranet-based Twitter platform, even on internal servers?  I cannot imagine any CIO taking Twitter seriously right now.  Twitter is playing a dangerous game of trust with their potential enterprise customers.  They have got to nail this problem if they are ever going to scale into an enterprise solution, presuming that area of interest to them.  From all the hype you would think it is.

As if that was not enough, Amazon choosing to go Orwellian on their customers is humorous and a cautionary tale in the making about digital content rights and DRM in general.  Jeff Nolan’s post Cloud Computing and the Morning After says it all.  George Orwell would find it incredibly ironic his is the first book in the history of digital content to be en masse deleted.  If for no other reason to avert the irony why didn’t Amazon step away from the Delete button?  I find that fascinating.

Frameworks All Assume Trust Is There – Is It?

Reading Paul Greenberg’s blog today, Put TechRadar on Your Radar Screen includes The Extended CRM Application Ecosystem, a graphic from Bill Band of Forrester. The graphic is part of Bill’s report TechRadar for BP&A Professionals: The Extended CRM Application Ecosystem, Q3, 2009.  This framework makes one consider how essential trust is for making the entire series of processes work.  Trust has to be there for the model to work. Paul’s assessment that the framework doesn’t have social media monitoring, including text analysis, attitudinal and sentiment analysis is prescient.  Why?  Because the king of cloud apps today, Twitter, has trust issues and social media monitoring companies might even consider creating “trust” templates that quantify the level they are achieving with customers as a result.  Incidentally if you are interested in CRM, subscribe to Paul’s RSS feed. Paul is the best blogger in CRM, period

Why It Matters

Presuming Twitter has the goal of going after the enterprise it’s time to think about the lessons learned by Salesforce.com on managing cloud scalability and security.  Twitter management needs to study trust.salesforce.com and come away with two long-term questions answered.  First, do they want to play in the enterprise? Second, are they willing to publish stats by server that salesforce.com shows? I’d think they’d want to nail this second issue to support the exponential growth of every company trying to grow with them too and gain back trust in their app being more than a messaging platform.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Perfect CEM

A Business Reality Check with Guy Kawasaki By Steve Kayser

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Bo Diddley

WRONG.

Bo didn’t know diddly on this one. I found a book you could judge by its cover: “Reality Check,” by bestselling author and entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki.

The back cover of this book should be required reading for authors, writers, marketers, PR professionals, and anyone that wants to understand how to draw people into your story with well-written, eloquent simplicity.

I picked “Reality Check” up, flipped to the back and was completely drawn in.

BEFORE I READ IT

How in the world can you cover 11 topics on the back page―and do it well? Topics like pitching, venture-capital aptitude, speeches, evangelizing, business plans, board meetings, PR, innovation, e-mail, customer service, and schmoozing.  Impossible!  But Guy does it impossibly well.

AFTER I READ IT

Then I read it. I soon realized why Seth Godin said, “Buy two copies of this book. One to rip pages out of, mark up, copy, and tack on the wall, and one to give away to your clueless colleague. Oh, better make that three copies. Four?”

Guy Kawasaki has long been a favorite of mine but not because of all the public accolades or business success he’s had. Not because I think he’s one of the best at using Twitter for business or because he has over 100,000 followers.  Just two reasons really. The first reason is his writing style. It’s easy-to-read, helpful, irreverent, completely devoid of corporate gobbledygook, sometimes hilariously funny, always positive, and it’s actually easy to put into action the things he suggests.  The second reason? He’s incredibly accessible and responsive. If you contact him — he will contact you back Via Twitter or e-mail.

So, since Guy is accessible and responsive, I decided to contact him to talk about “Reality Check.” He agreed.

BUT FIRST… Read More

The life I called “Marketing”

Being a marketer by choice and not force, I always wanted to be in the field of marketing, purely for a fundamental reason of the adrenaline rush of not knowing what exactly to expect.This is something for like venturing into an unknown or uncharted territory. I am sure most of the marketers would agree that in case of marketing there is no right or wrong answer(s). Well, I can say at least of in my case I can’t say decisive on the results of  my marketing activity(s). With 80 percent of consumer and 40 percent of business good failing in spite of careful market research and planning, I guess it accentuates that you cannot be “100%” sure about the elements of marketing.

What clicks and/or what not is a surprise factor for all the marketers. Of course we can debate on whether marketing is art or a science. This debate seems to be more visible in colleges all across that offer Master of Art or Master of Science in Marketing. But I really wonder that can we call marketing a science…I am still wondering.

According to one definition marketing concept is “Management philosophy according to which a firm's goals can be best achieved through identification and satisfaction of the customers' stated and unstated needs and wants.” Of course it sound simple but then I am sure it humongous task to find the customers’ “stated and unstated needs and wants”.

With enormous ways to reach or communicate with the customer available to marketers all across we still manage to fail product(s) or company(s). U.S. office of Patent commissioner Charles H Duell in 1899 said that “Everything that can be invented has been invented”, but I am sure he was not aware how much he was wrong is stating that. I am sure he did not had an opportunity to use an IPod, or play on playstation or may be call someone from middle of no where using a mobile device.

I like the approach of marketing that Jack Trout mentioned in his book “differentiate or die”. It is quiet evident what I am talking or highlighting through the title of the book. It’s all about differentiation about your product or service being offered.

The formula of marketing could be correlated to the formula of success which is “Success = Hard Work + Passion + Luck”. Of course that could be said true for many other things.

But then I believe it’s also a way of life. With plethora of options from traditional to new age marketing available, we (marketers) needs to work - what works, of course through to a lot of trial methods. Hence it’s not about what we do as marketers; however its important for us to how do we do it, through our own experiences, availabilities and intuitions.

Need to get back to work now but will work more on this. Open for any feedback or suggestion (positive and more importantly negative).

Have a good day.

Be Rational! or is it the “Convenient Rationalism”.

Be rational, think before you do, what are you doing, what was you thinking, and on and on. These are few specimen questions that we were asked or told and in turn we ask or tell others. The simplistic thing to say but hardest to thing to do. Sometimes I wonder we as human society are so very eager to come to conclusions or base judgments. But are we all correct, do we all think, are we all rational.

May be yes, but I guess to a very minute level. How & why, are the foremost things that people ask me when I argue that there is a very minual part of our brain that is rational, and I guess rest is all irrational driven by feeling, wants and something that can be called an inner desire.

I am sure this might not match with your worldview (The way you view your world around you and including you). As it does not match with a lot of people whom I interact on this subject. Ok, let’s take some example (I can assure you that this will not be long as I need to sleep) - which restaurant you go to, what brand you wear, where do you go out for coffee, which car you drive, which house you live or plan to buy, and so on. Just think about these minute things and tell me are you rational. Most of us (I am taking the liberty of generalizing) “prefer” to eat at costly places that offer ambience – but are we eating the ambience or food, are we giving the money for food that we intend to eat, or the ambience – are we rational, as the main aim is to have food. I am sure the pops’ and mom’s restaurant may serve you equal or may be better quality food, light on stomach, less rich, fresh, etc. however we will still prefer to eat with the “ambience”.

The all coffee “experience” at Starbucks is amazing. I am sure I will agree with you all as I love having coffee at Starbuck whenever I am in States. But I am sure I am not drinking coffee alone and I am not being rational to have a coffee more expensive in the store. One may even get a better brew right at the door step of the store. Just imagine, if you are sitting in the store and having the coffee then you are a bit rational but incase you are just taking it away then you are not even enjoying the experience. So are you rational?

By now you must started to guess where I am heading towards. However just for my writing curiosity let me take another example. A Car, (I know it is the easiest one to associate with) most American prefer big comfy cars, most Indian wants a luxurious car, and so on. But what is a mean of having a car – isn’t is to travel from point A to point B. But then are be rational to spend $50000 on cars, which will be expensive to maintain, not good for environment, not fuel efficient, etc. So are we “rational”.

I might be controversial here and ready to any open comment(s) but I believe that the most irrational thing that a lady can do is to a give a birth to a child. Labor pains for 9 month, life and death situation while delivery, need to nurture the kid for good number of years to come, educate him\her, and may be allow him\her to kick her (mother\father) out once he\she is old enough to handle things on their own. So are mother rational when they give a birth to a child.

Most of these things are associated with our inner wants and feelings. You know surprisingly human beings needs (even in today’s world) are very limited to food, water, air, cloth, house, (I guess). Rest is all wants. Big car to roam in (aspiration), big house to live in (aspiration), someone to love (feelings), big a member of a renowned club (desire or want of association – aspiration), and so on.

I am sure a lot of you may think that while I am articulating this I am not rational. I can tell you that I am not. But I am using this personal (my) space to articulate the facts that people may not be rational, as we are not, people may not have reasoning, as we don’t have, people may not think before doing, as we don’t.

So are we rational or are you? Or do we just expect that people other than me should be rational, and I should be blessed with the mighty power of being judgmental without even being rational. Before I end, I would like to say that most of us are rational on our convenience – “convenient rationalism”. The time we have to do any irrational thing we can, however “must” advice others to be rational at all time.

Think about it and it is also good to accept that we are irrational. I am sure that people back in post independence era must have done a lot irrational things like giving life for country, leaving families to fight the freedom movement, and so on, due to which we are in a state of rational Independence .

Rational, a word that most of us say, but most of us don’t do. So this weekend do something irrational, like helping someone you don’t know, work for free, bringing smile to anyone you might be meeting for the very first time, waiting for your love that has gone far, wishing for someone’s happiness beside…………. ;)

Well I plan to do some irrational things this weekend, do you?

Have a Happy (irrational) Week!

Be Careful Not to Automate Your Chaos

Sharing a articulation by Dave Stein (CEO, ES Research Group, Inc) at Expert Access.

Unless you're careful, you may just automate chaos

Sales vice presidents, managers and team leaders have always been on the lookout for shortcuts—streamlined ways to get to the end game and close more deals. That makes sense, after all, since closing more deals is the name of the game. And that's why, over the years, technology has seemed like such a godsend.

First, PC-based contact-management software like Outlook replaced the old Rolodex and paper tickler file. Products like Goldmine and Act added more capabilities, tracking sales leads, automating callbacks and even producing sales letters. Sales-force automation systems came along next, adding more features and enterprise-wide reporting and analysis.

About a decade ago, customer relationship management (CRM) systems emerged, to give companies the ability, as the name implies, to manage customer relationships "holistically" and more efficiently. CRM systems opened everyone's eyes to the value of a sustained relationship with a customer and helped everyone understand that it costs four times more to win a new customer than to keep a current one happy.

CRM systems weren't designed with sales in mind

The problem is that CRM systems were designed for and marketed to people not in sales. They were managers in post-sale functions, meaning customer service, customer care, marketing and especially top management.

Sales managers wanted to use a CRM system to track deals in their pipeline. But salespeople on the street had no real incentive to use the CRM system or to keep it up-to-date. Field salespeople got fuzzy answers to the question, "What's in it for me?" And of course, that's deadly for acceptance or compliance with anything, much less something that takes time away from the selling process.

Many of the advantages and benefits of the original sales automation software were actually lost as CRM took over, because salespeople were asked to use tools that had no inherent benefit for them, only for their management. Thus, CRM tools became sales prevention devices.

Although millions have been spent by sales vice presidents and others who thought CRM would be a panacea, ES Research Group estimates only around 50 percent of the CRM software seats sold in the last 10 years are still in use.

OUCH –

Read more

Your Passion Is Showing

One of my best students, a manager of one of the largest Home Depot stores in Southern California, just finished off his MBA thesis.  His research centered on how Home Depot could become more customer-centric by trimming back IT systems and processes to free up more time for associates to focus on customers.  In his thesis he shows how cutting out entire layers of management could make the entire company more efficient and customer-driven.  Clearly this student has a passion about making his store entirely focused on the customer experience.

Curious to see if he had been implementing programs he discusses in his thesis in his store, I decided to visit yesterday.  

Three Offers of Assistance in Seven Minutes

Every employee I walked past, even the ones rounding up carts just past the entrance stopped and asked if they could help me.  When was the last time anyone in a Home Depot did that?  Usually I am hunting for help.  I have to point out that I never said a word about knowing the manager or having him as a student. 

The floors of the store glistened and the grouping of products for cross-selling in the lighting area, where I went to get a replacement fluorescent bulb for my laundry room, were within reach.  I recalled in his thesis how he mentioned the studies showing that investing in better stock room management systems to coordinate cross-sells and up-sells led to 36% gains in comparable stores.  Clearly, he had pushed this to his store.

Glistening Barbeques All in a Row

Our BBQ is getting a little worn out and I went to check out what they had.  Amazed to see two dozen models, all dusted, shined, and perfectly aligned, this was unusual for a Home Depot.  Others I had been in were often covered in dust and helter-skelter in appearance.  If that was not enough a person from hardware stopped by and asked if they could answer any questions.  Now this is going on around seven offers of assistance in less than 15 minutes.  I did not let on at any time I knew the manager by the way; I was a regular guy walking through the store on a Saturday afternoon.

Self-Service Checkout – Pain or another Opportunity to show A Passion for Service?

In his thesis he had been really torn about the aspects of self-service check-out and challenges to adoption. Home Depot corporate had been telling managers they must drive a high percentage of sales through these lanes, yet he felt this would detract from the experience.  I was really interested to see if he took his own advice in the thesis and staffed this area with three associates instead of one.  As I approached these lanes, associates were coming into the aisles to help get the automated process started.  I’ve never seen this before.  The checkout process for the fluorescent bulbs went fine and at the end of the transaction the lead cashier said thank you for coming in.

As I looked up to say goodbye I saw a picture of my student, the manager of this store, in a poster-size picture with his pledge of excellent service, his name, telephone and cell phone number, clear for any customer to see.  I’ve never seen that in a Home Depot before either.  Yet his thesis had shown that accountability and associating a face with a store was critical to generating customer loyalty. 

Bottom line: Your passion for delivering excellent customer experiences is showing all the time, you can’t turn it on or off.  It’s constant; it’s visible all the time.  When leaders get passionate about change, they can revolutionize massive stores and companies with an intensity to continually improve.

Flickr attribution: http://bit.ly/23oCT

Courtesy – Louis Columbus at Perfect CEM

Marketing & the “R” word.

As the world is facing “Recession”, India and Indian economy is no different.  However it might be time for us to make the most of it by channelizing marketing in the right direction. I wish I could have said that this is not a time for worry; but I would further add that it’s a time for some strategizing.

As the US Economy slackens, Indian economy fear a danger; no matter what sector we are talking about. Can we say that It's Just a Recession, and hence we need to differentiate between the Necessity and Luxury.  

What we have learned from the banking crisis or let me rephrase have me made an attempt to learn anything out of it. The Global Economic Crisis has lead to lesser work, lesser profits and even the fear is sinking of having work taken away from organizations. However even the fact that we are going through turbulent times panic wouldn’t help us, rather we need to prepare ourselves well for what is to come. Is it the Time to get serious about strengthening your systems and work towards shaping your marketing strategy for the downturn to emerge stronger when economic growth returns.

With Fed dropping Funds Rate To Zero, is a clear indication that in Depression Economics, Normal Rules Don't Apply and hence we need to make the most of what marketing costs offer you in a slump. How to Market in a Recession is a question that seems to be on every marketers mind, or are we all waiting for the the next Great Disruption?

As the economy slows down, and in pursuit of Preparing for the Future this is the time companies can leverage to the utmost by investing in its image to find The Secret of Success in a Failing Economy and build the Brand in Difficult Economic Times

If you present your strengths at the time of a slowdown, it puts you at an edge around your client. If you show results and enthusiasm at a time when all is not well, you are bound to reap benefits in the long run.

Instead of worrying over the US economic slowdown, it is a time of cost saving for most Indian companies. However pure cost saving would not lead you nowhere; hence we need to systematically think about rerouting our marketing dollar to get closer to our customer(s). That is the only way you can recover from loosing profit margins. When you concentrate on confidence building with clients at this point, you are bound to make a stronger statement that will stay with them much after the slowdown has recovered. You can focus on some image building, find newer clients during the slump, and who knows, you might win a whole new set of friends. This is the time where we need to dive deeper into our existing clients building stronger and longer ties.

It is up to the Indian industry to make the most of the situation now. If everyone’s cutting costs in the US, which is where most of India’s business comes from, there are all the more chances that more varied work will flow into countries like India. Imagine we are thinking about the effect on outsourcing but are we realizing that the companies in US, and due to the economic slowdown that never thought about outsourcing has now been forced outsource to optimize cost.

Raman Roy in a recent interview opined that “Downturn is definitely an issue. But is it a long-term issue? I don't think so. In the short term the discretionary spend is likely to get affected but not the non-discretionary spend.” Another interesting perspective that Ibrahim Ahmad articulated - “ A very interesting reason for this boom in current mobile subscriber base came from an industry senior who said that with everything becoming unaffordable for the common man in the last few months, being able to chat and gossip with other people is one of the cheapest things people do today. Jokes apart, I know that my own maid now uses her cell phone more to talk to her sisters because the cycle rickshaw fares have gone up, and its cheaper to talk to them rather than visit them.”  He further adds that “ I believe that slowdown presents itself as a great opportunity for the mobile phone.” John Todor brought an example from spending pattern of Starbuck customers “ Unemployment is up, the stock market is down, and people are worried about their financial future", but Starbucks customers are spending 36% more than they were a year ago. What’s more, if you look at the month to month trends, there was no systematic decline associated with the deepening recession”.

Hence the examples somewhat highlight the importance of positioning your company, and how effectively you are able to comfort your existing or new customer(s).

When in peace prepare for war. And that is what we ought to do. Utilize the time to strategize and innovate new marketing techniques | resources to Weather the Storm and even reap benefits in medium to long term.

Seeing the True Nature of American Freedom

Sharing a great article by my dear friend and teacher Louis Columbus

The 4th of July's many festivities from parades, to fireworks displays, from entire blocks getting together to decorate in red, white and blue to even one story I heard of a daughters' friend painting the family beagle red, white and blue while he slept on the back porch this afternoon all make this such a genuine American experience.

Over the last several years I've taught more students in international business and strategy courses than any other time.  Like anyone, they love a good party that is nationwide, and the 4th is a reason from them to celebrate their freedoms here in America too. 

I am Learning From My Students What The Reality of Freedom Is

It is quite moving to be running a class in international business and have a young student under 30 tell you about how there were wars raging in her home nation of Bosnia and one wrong street selection on the way home from school could have gotten her killed. She is Serbian. 

There are students from China, some from Hong Kong, others from Beijing, who are remarkable in their writing abilities yet still afraid to speak.  Their tales of harmonization in Beijing and the tight lid the government has on businesses there, many of which are run by their parents and families, are moving. 

Or the students from the Middle East who faced persecution because of their religion and their families' beliefs and businesses.

I've had more than a dozen Vietnamese students, who as toddlers and even infants, escaped that nation on boats, drifting in the South China Sea waiting for the U.S. Navy to show up and rescue them.  Clearly, the Navy did a great job, they saved tens of thousands of lives in that region and I am sure they still do.

There are those students from Russia too. Some from parents who were members of the party and others barely scraping enough together to get out. Talk of how even party members must abide by rationing is fascinating.

Seeing Freedom In A New Way

Just out of curiosity, I took each significant speech in America in the last 217 years and quickly ran them through Wordle this morning.

Here's what I found out.  In the most troubling and most difficult of times in this nations' history, freedom is the catalyst so many of our leaders have turned to as our core strength, our catalyst.  It is what many have come back to as the reverberating strength of America.

From Franklin Delano Roosevelt's speech The Four Freedoms given on January 6, 1941 to the many speeches that John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave, including Ich bin ein Berliner ("I am a 'Berliner'") delivered on June 26, 1963 in West Berlin, freedom reverberates through these speeches.  Faced with an increasingly aggressive Russia who appears intent on war, President Kennedy chooses this speech to come back to America's greatest strength and contribution to the world, freedom.  Below is the Wordle of this speech.

The speech with the greatest mention of freedom in the history of the United States from this analysis isn't an elected politician, President, military leader, or a powerful cabinet member.  It is a southern minister who in 1954, became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Far from the media centers of the time, Dr. Martin Luther King showed in his life just how truly different this American brand of freedom is.  Below is Wordle from his I Have A Dream Speech. 

In the story of a minister from Montgomery, Alabama whose impact in America is still being felt today is the story of what American freedom is really all about.  Reaching out, inclusive, celebrating diversity and looking to strengthen others by building bridges out to them, this is America at its best.

Bottom line: No nation is without fault, but if you want to see the true nature of American freedom, meet eyes with someone today who had to fight to get here, or who is putting their life on hold to serve, or who has served earlier.  In that moment, you will know the true nature of American freedom.