Customer Service, the New Marketing in the Era of the Social Customer
Okay, I’m not the first person to write about this idea, but it has been on my mind lately, so I wanted to share my perspective on what I think is a very important change that is starting to occur for businesses and customers. The social customer is a term that is used quite a [...]
The Social Web as a Customer Support Channel
I just had an experience that to me, typifies what I expect out of companies these days for product support. I returned to my desk and noticed that my Evernote app on my Mac Mini had not synced (had an…
The Three C’s of Social Business
Einstein said "everything must be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler". That concept, often tied to Occam’s Razor, is very powerful when looking at new theories and models. I decided to apply this process to social…
Enterprise software’s wrong focus
Let me start by refining my earlier “who’s you customer” post: Primary customer/user: This is where your value delivered is appreciated. It’s the daily users and the real reason why you have a business at all. But alas, they often do not want to pay, still this is where your focus must be! Social media: [...]
Conversations
Businesses operate because of conversations, this is not some great new revelation. We like to talk about how social is about enabling conversations like it’s something revolutionary and new but that’s just not true. I was preparing to give a…
Those Special Customers Developers Love (Well They Should Love Them!)
Do you have any special customers that your developers hate? These are the customers that can mysteriously break your products over and over again, even though perhaps thousands of others report no problems. How does this work? First, understand the psychology of bugs. Developers don’t consciously create bugs, they come about as errors of omission, [...]
Social Business 2011, An Update
It’s been a while since I’ve written a post that updated our current understanding of social business and in a concept that is evolving very rapidly, it’s important to frequently share what we’ve learned. Lately I’ve worked on an infographic…
The New Agenda: Enterprise IT Spending, Scarcity and Post Recession, People-Centric Necessity
We’re in a world of stark economic realities driven by a variety of colliding business and technology factors. The unemployment rate in Jan 2011 was 9% and several experts have predicted that that number could stay consistent for the whole…
IBM Lotusphere 2011: Social Business
I attended Lotusphere 2011 this week in Orlando and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by many of the conversations that I had with IBM execs about the focus of their social business initiative. I had seen the Lotus Connections product before, and was basically familiar with some of the other Lotus products [...]
Raising the Bar
The dynamics of community are changing expectations. Exposure to higher community standards has always tended to raise individual standards, offline or on. Today though, with the widespread use of social networks and proliferation of social media outlets the collective voice…
