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Anyone who has reviewed their 401(k) statements lately has received a very personal and immediate measure of just how the last four weeks of financial turmoil have affected them. Take that urgency you may have felt about wanting to catch up as quickly as possible, multiply it by the number of compan...

Despite how quickly social networking is becoming integrated in enterprises, it still isn't scaling to meet the most complex problems faced today. The well-known success stories of customer service being made more accountable and responsive are emanating out of how @ComCastCares, @JetBlue, @Southwes...

Marketing is going through a revolution online, thanks to the continual adoption of the Web 2.0 concepts originally defined by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty. If you want to see some excellent graphics and analysis explaining Web 2.0, subscribe to Ross Dawson's blog, Trends in the Living Networks.

With so many companies tightening their budgets in the midst of the tough, uncertain economic climate, there's a tendency to look at social networking as the new, free panacea. I've seen a few financial services and insurance companies start social networking strategies, promising to be open and rea...

Get beyond the fascination and addictive tendency of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking apps, and underscoring all of these new approaches to connecting, communicating and collaborating with others is a revolutionary new way of communicating with your channel partners as well. Social netw...

When you're talking with your best and most trusted friends, there is no need to defend yourself with disclaimers, overly defined examples, or defensible arguments. The conversation just happens. When two friends know each other well, they finish each other's sentences. Wouldn't it be great to commu...

It's not a question of whether social networking will influence your company, customers, employees, suppliers and others, it's a matter of when. If you haven't committed to learn more about this area, it's time. Deciding if social networking is going to be an asset or liability is dependent on how y...

Lead generation, like outsourcing, is a lot like golf. No one wants to admit they had a mulligan or two out on the course playing a round of golf, or for that matter spending on lead generation or outsourcing and not getting their money's worth. But it's happening with increasing frequency for compa...

Integrating systems pays when it comes to serving customers, yet it took a project one of my students is working on to show how dramatically it saves lives as well. Mention the concept of processes and systems integrated together having the potential to deliver a greater clarity of insight regarding...

There are those partnerships where the companies swap logos and do joint press releases and that's about it, and then there are partnerships where true integration happens. This latter type of partnership is starting to emerge between Salesforce.com and Google, and that's a very good thing for the C...

After reading the book Mindset: The Psychology of Success by Dr. Carol S. Dweck, I began to wonder if her concepts of fixed versus growth mindsets were either accentuated or diminished when it came to customer relationship strategies enabled with SaaS-based applications. The many benefits of the Saa...

Scanning the RSS feeds from the blogs -- many of which are all about the benefits of Web 2.0 providing greater customer intimacy and building trust with customers -- one begins to wonder if telemarketing is on its way to becoming obsolete. I asked a group of marketing vice presidents and directors a...

Competing for customers has never been more challenging, intensely focused or costly for manufacturers globally. Instead of relying on plunging prices or continually adding in product line extensions to marginally increase a given product's market size and potential sales, manufacturers must get bac...

Corresponding with the rise in all forms of social media has been a growing fascination -- to the point of obsession on the part of some marketing VPs -- to find their markets' key influencers. I got to thinking about this after watching the movie "Elf" over the holidays. The character of Miles Finc...

Instead of just jotting down the top trends that have a high probability of success and therefore are safe as predictions, I thought it would be interesting to first look at what the best bloggers have to say and see what the implications are for manufacturing, then go out on a limb and make some pr...

It's about that time of year when we see all the predictions and forecasts of how much online sales will increase, by product, for this holiday season. From cautiously to wildly optimistic, these forecasts are things that e-commerce managers' dreams are made of. There's something missing in this yea...

Let's face it, SaaS is sexy these days. Nearly everybody is either starting entirely new companies to capitalize on the benefits of SaaS or madly rushing to get their applications ported to it. At a recent conference I presented at in the Bay Area, this became abundantly clear. Every session hosted ...

Given the many tools that comprise Web 2.0, many business to customer companies are experimenting with each, aiming to synchronize content through a content management system. Based on projects underway at several large consumer goods product manufacturers, this is working out very well, and is in f...

Cost reduction, chasing talent globally, aligning product life cycles to critical natural resources -- all form the mantra that has made outsourcing the silver bullet so many manufacturers and service companies reach for when the challenges of achieving financial objectives hit. What is troubling is...

If you want to see who's winning at retaining and attaining higher-than-ever customer loyalty, look no further than what is really happening inside sales reps, call center reps, their managers, and for that matter, their CEO. What is it? It's nothing on the outside -- while a new CRM system on a ho...