Social’s swan song
Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn for more than $26 billion raised a lot of eyebrows for good reason. True, the acquired company is valuable and generating revenue but like most of the social networking space, it is far from healthy and one wonders if Microsoft could have gotten a better deal. According to a colleague at […]
End of an era? LinkedIn goes to Microsoft
Microsoft announced the intent to buy LinkedIn for $196 per share today or more than $26 billion. It’s a huge deal and a great payday for the social networking company specializing in making it easier for business people to connect. But why do this deal and why now? This calls for a lot of speculation […]
Sliding revenues
Fun pic, no? Apple’s earnings disappointment thudded into view in the middle of an afternoon of briefings at Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience conference in Las Vegas. In that context it gave me a lot to think about especially the difference between a one time earnings disappointment and something more serious. (1) I have a feeling […]
Microsoft’s Racist Bot is the Most Human-Like Ever
Microsoft suffered a PR disaster with the launch of Tay, the AI-powered chat bot unleashed on Twitter. Long story short, Twitter users quickly shaped Tay into a bigot that spewed some pretty vile stuff. Microsoft shut it down quickly, which is no surprise. This is a picture of things to come as autonomy intersects with […]
CEO is Not a Part-Time Job
While I’m not that close to the whole Twitter situation and although I’m a moderately heavy user (@Kellblog), I don’t study their financials or other statistics. That said, as a user, I feel a certain malaise around the service and I think it’s definitely in need of some new energy. What I don’t get it is the […]
The Silent Rise of Chat in Customer Service Adoption
Continuing on the delivery of the early insights into the third version of the customer service adoption and usage study we are conducting with our friends at KANA, A Verint Company (the summary of early findings is here, and the findings on social can be found here, mobile here, and operationalization of customer service here) […]
Channel Adoption and Usage Study in Customer Service: Third Year
As I promised earlier this year, I conducted the third run of the channel adoption and usage study (focused on customer service) that my friends at KANA, a Verint Company, continue to generously sponsor. Truth be told, it took a little longer than expected to get to the right number of answers, but we did […]
Twitter — from friendly village to noisy megalopolis
A few things struck me today about Twitter and about one aspect of a World gone social. I subscribe to a great service called Timehop, which reminds me every day about tweets and Twitter conversations for this day but 1, 2, 3 and more years ago. It’s a great way to bring back things you […]
Transforming Data into Action – Part 3
In part three of the series we will focus on sources of data beyond in-house transaction data and data collected from social listening, and the impact of the Internet and Cloud Computing on both the distribution of data and the business models that are evolving around that data. Data brokers, that is, companies that aggregate […]
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 […]
