Transforming Data Into Action – Part Two
In part one of this series we looked at big data and transforming it into smart data, or data that is contextual, relevant and delivered to the right people / person at the right time. One of the other interesting and growing use cases in the business use of data is something called small data. […]
Event Report: Glassdoor Employer Branding Summit
Employer Branding Comes of Age On September 12th, Glassdoor kicked off its Employer Branding Summit in San Francisco at the Hotel Nikko. Social recruiting, employer branding, and talent acquisition pros gathered to hear how branding impacts the recruiting landscape. Robert Hohman, CEO of Glassdoor welcomed the audience to set the stage (see Figure 1). […]
A Missive to Human Resources (HR)
I built a very successful marketing career based on a three-word mission statement that I picked up from Chris Greendale, back when I was a product marketer at Ingres. Chris always said that marketing exists to make sales easier. I loved those three words. I embraced that simple concept. I made it my reductionist mission statement. I taught […]
Most Marketing Advice Tells Us How to Market to Marketers
Think about it–the experts out there writing marketing advice as part of their content marketing strategies are all selling something. They’re either selling software, consulting, or some other product. And the audience they’re selling to are marketers. Sure, many of them have practices or history that involved marketing to non-marketers, but right now what they’re […]
Best Way to Succeed as a Solopreneur: Go For Fewer Customers
I’m reading with interest some posts that are hot on Techmeme at the moment from Jared Sinclair and Marco Arment about succeeding with iOS apps and as a Solopreneur. Jared’s blog post is a cautionary tale for those who would like to bootstrap a small venture well enough to quit their day jobs. Many weigh in […]
Microsoft: World’s Worst Customer Service? (Walmart, Amazon, GE, BestBuy, MacMall, and Paypal Not Far Behind)
I recently tried and failed for the fifth time to buy a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. It’s been a real comedy of errors, but the latest attempt has been by far the most spectacular failure. Let me start out by saying I really like the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. I am a perfect candidate for […]
Ten Classic Business Books for Entrepreneurs / Startup Founders
I often get asked by technical founders what business / marketing / strategy books they should read. While there are many excellent relatively new books (e.g., The Lean Startup), the primary purpose of this post is to list a set of classic business books that most (older) business people have read — and that I think […]
Product is Not a Four-Letter Word
“Customers buy 1/4″ holes, not 1/4″ bits.” – Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School At some point in every marketer’s career they produce a data sheet that looks like this: Our product uses state-of-the-art technology including a MapReduce distributed backend processing engine with predictive analytics including multivariate adaptive regression splines, support vector machine classification, and naive Bayesean machine […]
Let’s Try Another Verse of Your SaaS Company Does Not Need a Sales Force
It’s time for another installment of what some of the Enterprise Irregulars have called the Jason and Bob show. Jason and I have disagreed on a fair number of issues over time, though we have also agreed on a lot. Jason’s had a great run and is now in the rarefied atmosphere of VC’s. All […]
Random Thoughts on Customer Engagement, CRM, and Social CRM
Can Enterprises learn to talk WITH Customers rather than AT them? I read with interest Paul Greenberg’s, “Random Thoughts on CRM.” They don’t call Paul the “Godfather of CRM” for nothing, and this post got some old neural circuits firing again just like it was yesterday. The gist of the article was about how a […]
