CloudForce. San Jose, Get Ready
Tomorrow kicks off CloudForce in San Jose. As you can see from the photo it is not a small event. I was in the Convention Center earlier today and saw a large show floor and auditorium being made ready for the event.
CloudForce sounds a lot like DreamForce and Salesforce’s decision to use the Convention Center instead of a hotel in downtown San Francisco sends a message, I think, that the company intends to drive the platform and Chatter as fully equal parts of the enterprise down to how they bring people together to promote the products. That’s a big difference from having a Force.com or Chatter breakout session at DreamForce.
It’s also not a surprise. About the only surprising thing is that Salesforce is acting now as opposed to a year from now when Chatter might be better positioned in the market and making the cash to pay for the venue. I guess when you’re Salesforce you want to keep the momentum going. Tomorrow should be interesting.
By: Denis Pombriant
Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 came to Boston this week and that made me happy because it is one of a very small number of events that I don’t fly to. Being a native it’s nice to take the train into the city and to be able to sleep at home. Despite this convenience I was only able to attend on Tuesday and I concentrated on the vendor show floor at the expense of missing some very good keynotes and sessions.
The single session I attended focused on the emerging importance of video as a content medium in the enterprise and it was good. Video as a content medium encapsulates what’s good and interesting about the offerings in a space that is still in its early days, still looking for its voice. That voice gets clearer and stronger each year and many people, myself included, thought that this year’s edition of the show had more vigor and was more interesting than last. Given the recession hanging over everything in 2009 perhaps that is not surprising.
Many, if not most, of the business processes that vendors offered support for involved some form of crowdsourcing to capture information from the broad market as well as for capturing ideas from employees. Some capture customer data, others employee data and still others focused on the channel. The result is some form of insight into the target population and collaboration that can be used to advance a company’s mission either internally or by way of servicing and selling to customers.
All that is good and an advance over simply using social media as a tool to indiscriminately blast a sales pitch to the world but I also think there is more that we can do. I think a new paradigm that Enterprise 2.0 and social CRM are an ideal fit for is a world that demands greater sustainability in its business processes and that day is just dawning. Sustainability can take many forms and they are not necessarily what you might think. For instance, customers are a sustainable resource, ever think of that? You do when your market is saturated. In that context social technology is a no brainer but we need to find even better ways to use it.
There’s a more conventional definition of sustainability that we should all remain aware of too. At the same time that the show attendees were cruising Boston Harbor, the president was addressing the nation regarding the geyser in the gulf. In part he said,
“Drilling for oil these days entails greater risk. After all, oil is a finite resource. We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves. And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean — because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water. For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered.
There, he said it. Finite. Demand isn’t finite though, it grows and in such situations limited supply always leads to higher prices. What does this mean to your business processes that use travel?
The most obvious is the green angle is one in which companies use new technologies that help reduce travel overhead while still being able to interact with customers to do business. In that definition of sustainability many of the companies and products straining to get your attention at events like Enterprise 2.0 gain significance. One of my favorites is new video technology. Condensing ideas from a document or slide presentation into short, snappy video that customers can access from their desktops may be the most important growth area in the front office. Altus, Saba and several other companies had booths at the conference and their offerings are impressive.
Another growth area is on-line meetings and conferences. We’re all old hands at this point at using Web meeting applications. I use the various products several times each week to take briefings for instance. Web meetings are a great way to foster collaboration within an organization and with customers. But these one off meetings can only take you so far which is why I am so interested in the next level, the Web conference.
Relatively few people have experienced the power of a Web conference in which thousands of customers use through their desktops to attend sessions, network and interact in ways similar to the live thing. The difference is that everyone saves big bucks on travel and entertainment not to mention wear and tear on the travelers. Already companies like Oracle and Salesforce.com are using Web meetings for internal activities and I have seen Oracle and others attempt these forums for customers. Companies in the space include ON24, Unisfair and Social27 and there are more.
If I had to say what the theme of Enterprise 2.0 — the movement not the conference — it would be this idea of a new paradigm, of sustainability in business. More than simply doing more with less, sustainability is about doing better and different. I can’t wait to see how this plays out.
By: Denis Pombriant
More women use Facebook (and Twitter, and LinkedIn and …)
In addition to knowing about the demographic make up of your community members and making sure they participate in your community — not just hang around reading other people’s contributions — you need to know something about the demographics of the social sites you want to work with.
I just read an article by Tom Stein about how small companies are giving up on Facebook as a marketing tool because they haven’t seen any returns on their efforts and some of the companies cited had been at it for a year or two. So is Facebook’s time in the sun ending? Maybe, but it will take more than a few anecdotes to make that call.
Consider this. According to a resent survey by Pingdom (www.pingdom.com) concluded that 16 out of 19 (84%) of the most popular social sites have more women populating them than men. The super geek sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have more men on them but the more popular sites including Facebook, Linked-in and Twitter all have more women visiting them. The average ratio of all sites surveyed according to Pingdom was 47% male, 53% female.
That’s fine as far as I am concerned because women spend the bulk of family budgets. But this neatly illustrates the flaw in the assumption that social media is a universal good. One of the companies that Stein references as being dissatisfied with Facebook happens to be Blank Label, a company specializing in custom shirts designed and bought over the web.
So, the question that leaps to mind now that we know all this is how many custom shirts does the average woman buy annually? Go ahead, think about it, I can wait. Bingo!
So at least in the case of the shirt maker, the over reliance on Facebook is an example of not understanding the delivery medium. It used to be so easy with print. Magazines publish detailed statistics on readership, subscriptions, demographics and more so that potential advertisers can make educated decisions on their marketing spend. The same kind of information is available from other sources on the web but you’ll need to do some work to find it and maybe collate it.
The point is that social media is just a tool. There are many kinds of social media — some tools are great at blasting out messages to friends but other tools focus on collecting information from your community. The focus on inbound data often gets lost with the result that we continue to “spray and pray” using social media as if it were direct mail or email marketing. Social media is powerful and easy to use but we still need to pay attention to how we use it.
The shirt maker might have a friend list of only men but — and here’s the difficult part — men might not go to Facebook looking for information specific to shirts. The fact that so many women use it suggests to me that men who go there have other things on their minds. So we see that just as in print advertising, lead generation is a fine art partly made up of the offer but much consideration should also go to placement.
By: Denis Pombriant
Social media backlash
It had to happen sooner or later, the only question in my mind is why it has taken so long. It appears that the backlash against social media is beginning. All I can say is yippee!
With trends like social media — or almost any trend — we tend to over imbue the idea or offering with our own expectations of what’s possible and inevitably we are disappointed when we learn that nothing could do all that. I think the old Saturday Night Live line “It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!” nicely illustrates the point and social media has traveled a very typical path.
When I started writing about social media in CRM in 2002, few people saw its potential and it took several years before the concept gained critical mass. Then for a period of a couple years it was all that anyone wanted to talk about. People wrote books about it and gave speeches and many out of work PR and marketing pros became experts overnight talking about it from their blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts.
The other day I ran across an article by Tom Stein titled “The ugly truth about Facebook for business” in which he documented multiple small business owners who said that Facebook had been a total waste of time and these owners had stayed with the technology, in some cases, for two years. The article goes on to talk about how much effort and time these businesses put into developing content for their accounts daily and how frustrated the owners were.
The only answer I can give to all this is, duh! It might be painful to hear this and hard to swallow but the reason for the lack of success can be boiled down to operator error. A year an a half ago Clara Shih wrote “The Facebook Era” (a good book, by the way) in which she plainly showed that Facebook and other forms of social media are good at keeping tabs on acquaintances, people we know casually or through a mutual association — just the kind of people who could be called customers. Our best friends might interact with us through social media but they also email, pick up the phone or eat and drink with us.
The difference is huge because the sum of all those interactions is bi-lateral communication in which we give information but we also get information too. The problem with using Facebook or any other outbound social media exclusively is that when used this way it is no more revolutionary than a dumb direct mail blast and we all know how well that works.
As I have written before, to be effective at using social media you need a social media strategy that incorporates both the outbound messaging that we love as well as ways that prompt user or customer input. It is the input that makes social media valuable and it is seeking input that we seem to have trouble with.
I don’t know why this is. Perhaps it has to do with the incessant need marketers have to justify their existence to the CFO. The usual approach is to heap up some statistics like the size of the base you market to, the number of impressions and similar things. We consider that real work but when it comes to asking open-ended questions to come up with a good idea that had been hidden and that we can use to refine products and messaging we don’t see the same value.
On other occasions I’ve suggested that the ratio of inbound social media use to outbound should approximate the 80/20 rule. I might go 70/30 but the point is that the preponderance of effort should be on listening and understanding or as Stephen Covey said in Rule 5 of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, “Seek first to understand then to be understood.” Your messaging should be so chock full of knowledge and information that the recipient is compelled to act and that doesn’t happen if you’re spending a couple of hours a day just trying to dream up something relevant to say.
Now that we are getting over the phase in the social media bubble when we think it’s the answer to every affliction known to humankind, perhaps we can begin the process of understanding its uses better as well as the nuances between different types. Social media is a rich toolbox with many interesting and effective gadgets and knowing which ones to use and when is more than half the battle. We’re at least over the idea that all we need is a hammer and that’s progress.
By: Denis Pombriant
On basketball
Basketball, now there’s a sport. And the Celtics and Lakers are treating us to another gem of a Finals to remind us of how good America’s game can be. You have to be impressed with Los Lakers. they have size, quickness and youth on their side. The celtics have youth (Rajon Rondo is 24) talent (Ray Allen hit 8 treys last night setting a playoff record) and hustle. I am not concerned that Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnet contributed so little to the cause last night. The Lakers forced the Celtics out of their comfy spot and the team responded. Whether this can last five more games for either side is a good question but I look forward to the contests. This game can be beautiful when played well and right now it’s about as good as it gets.
By: Denis Pombriant
← Older Entries Newer Entries →
Page 2 / 3
