Cezanne’s Apple
Cezanne wrote once “With an Apple, I will astonish Paris.” Cezanne at the time was a notoriously sophisticated and gifted walking set of contradictions. He loved everything he hated and hated everything he loved. He approached painting with scalpel-like precision but with a scalpel to canvas nonetheless. He wanted the world to bleed – and […]
SAP @ CeBIT and Sales OnDemand
With the introduction of Sales OnDemand at CeBIT today, SAP has made plain its strategy for moving its customers to the cloud or whatever you want to call it. SAP is fundamentally offering a hybrid strategy that enables its customers to dip a toe in the water and migrate over time. Most major vendors with […]
Focusing on Adoption (exclusively) is a Dead-End
For an early adopter market, adoption in this space always seems to get a bad rap. Why is that? Because adoption is not the end-game. It’s the beginning. In the Council, the members are focused on changing hearts and minds and promoting the use of social tools in order to drive acceptance for a new […]
Shrinking Balls
In my last post, I wrote about the sentiment analysis of the Super Bowl and how brands are impacted by the real-time stream. That stream stimulates a Mean Girls phenomenon that causes people to be more passionate and start to bully as they become more popular. I know some analysts…
The Future of Advertising the Salesforce Way
Many good things were spawned by Salesforce’s Super Bowl ads. The ads themselves left us curious and wanting to know more, and that was their job. Salesforce placed some compelling videos on YouTube, one at five minutes and another at two. Find them here. For me, the longer video, “Chatter.com: The Making of Do Impossible Things […]
The Real-Time Brand
As I write this, it is kickoff time for the Super Bowl, an event that galvanizes people as much as Bill O’Reilly does on a day to day basis. The Super Bowl is a brand, and while millions watch it, millions refuse to watch it, and hundreds of thousands are forced to watch it because […]
Salesforce’s Halftime Extravaganza
Last week Salesforce.com representatives briefed me on the Chatter.com roll out strategy. They’ve bought a couple of Super Bowl ads and they are working with the Black Eyed Peas’ Will.I.Am to produce the ad. The whole process is managed by Chatter, naturally. In the ads Salesforce will provide a real-life demonstration of Chatter being used […]
How Salesforce Missed their Golden Opportunity with Free Chatter
Today, January 31 2011, Salesforce made their Chatter product available for free to any company in the world. There are certain limitations to the offer: there is no access to the reporting dashboards, no access to the AppExchange marketplace, and all user accounts must be in the same domain name. Under this model, the first […]
Designing User Experience
It’s 2011 in case you’ve already forgotten and the world is changing; okay, I guess it’s always changing, just now though, the pace of change has rapidly accelerated. You can see it in your personal life and the change cycle is impacting businesses in ever increasing numbers. The transition to an information economy in a […]
Avoiding Social Stovepipes in the Enterprise
One of my first thoughts about the pricing announced a year ago for Salesforce.com’s Chatter collaboration tool was that it should be free to casual users: “Salesforce.com will be wise to make its as-yet unpriced ‘Chatter Lite’ license — which provides Chatter without Force.com or Content — free-of-charge. This should become the Chatter equivalent of […]
