My favorite scene in "The Social Network" is when Mark Zuckerberg's character has an epiphany that Facebook's screen should have a field to designate a user's status, as in relationship status or availability. Wait, I didn't give something away, did I? You've seen the movie, right? No? Go see it...
A lot went down at Oracle OpenWorld. Some very good reporting and analysis has come out of it all, and you can easily find it online if you wish. I was impressed with several things that Oracle did, including making strides in sales and marketing software and in introducing two new lines of comput...
I don't know how much Oracle spends on research and development each year. I know the biggest piece is being spent on CRM these days, something that warms my heart. The R&D number is in the billions of dollars, and though I cannot confirm it easily, the number seven seems about it. Judging by...
In a Ted Talk from 2004 that I watched a the other day, Malcolm Gladwell spoke about Howard Moskowitz. You might recall the New Yorker writer made a name for himself with the publication of The Tipping Point and several other works that focus on the unpredictable things that people do in the course...
I spent an interesting day at Harvard Law School last week at the invitation of Doc Searls for a conference on the intersection of CRM and VRM, or vendor relationship management. Doc's involved with the Berkman Center at Harvard, which sponsors research into issues of law and the Internet, among ot...
I feel like social CRM has become a burger joint. "You want fries with that?" is the traditional up-sell question made famous in skits and jokes, but now I feel like we need to ask something akin in social CRM. The revised question: "You got any data to go with that?" To date, the lion's share of ...
Last week I looked at an interesting downside of social media. Social media makes it possible for anyone with very little effort to start a blog or social group that thrashes a vendor. Generally speaking, the people behind these sites have a gripe that has a fragment of truth in it, and it would b...
Last week in New York, I began some field research in social CRM that will result in a longer paper later this fall. One of the things that interested me was the level of frustration and, well, anger that some customers have for some of their vendors. It's a mixed bag, really -- some people take gr...
Cloud computing is breaking through to the general public. Unfortunately, it's only the most watered down version that the public is hearing about. Last week I listened to a program on NPR that briefly discussed the cloud and some "expert" who worked for a general circulation magazine was happily t...
The new age of sustainability is like a three-legged stool, and over the last couple of weeks I've discussed my ideas for the first two legs, including customers and energy or transportation. The third leg involves products, and this idea takes some thinking to fully comprehend. Most of us don't th...
Last time, we explored how we can make IT more sustainable by improving data center energy use. Managing energy use is the most well-understood form of sustainability we have, but it is largely an internal form of sustainability practice. If we intend to make our businesses sustainable -- i.e., ab...
The most popular concept of sustainability revolves around energy use, and while I have no issues with energy as an issue, I think in business the idea goes further -- all the way to products and customers. I will leave the last couple of ideas for another time and concentrate on energy today. Act...
Social media can be wonderful tools for sales and marketing, but so far most companies and most anecdotal evidence that I have seen point to practices that are mired in old-think, with the result that social media is being questioned as a strategy. Here are some ideas that I give my clients when th...
They say we have big brains because we have all needed to work better together over the past 150,000 years. The more people work together, the more tools they need to make collaboration a productive art, rather than a befuddled mess. Rather than wait for human evolution to keep up the pace, Salesfor...
Tell them what you are going to say, say it, and then tell them what you told them. The rule of three, that's the Salesforce.com approach to its market outreach, and it has served them well over the last decade. Tuesday was part three of the Chatter cycle, in which the company culminated nearly a ...
Yes, communities and infrastructure can't keep up
Some projects are moving too fast
No, expansion is needed to meet demand
The pace seems about right
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