Just stumbled upon this YouTube video – essential viewing for when your preparing your strategy … enjoy!
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Archive for January, 2010
In a rather superficial Q&A in Computer Business Review (CBR), late last year, Parker Harris (executive VP of Technology, and co-founder of salesforce.com) identifies what salesforce.com will be concentrating on in 2010.
The majority of the article focuses on Cloud Computing gaining acceptance, salesforce.com competitors, and [Cloud] Security. Then, in the final paragraph, Parker not surprisingly states that the Service Cloud, to which he is actually referring to salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2, “will be the next billion dollar business”, but, then there’s no surprise there. Similarly, and maybe more significantly, he acknowledges that Collaboration (Wikipedia: “a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals”) is not fully understood by business. Here Parker is referring to salesforce.com’s pending collaborative layer/tool Chatter. Parker, or Janine Milne the author of the Q&A, then slip into verbal melt down and end the Q&A with “instead of being data-driven your data will come alive … the whole concept of viral communication will take off.” Now, I’m familiar with the phrase Viral Marketing, and one of my favourites (below) is the Cadbury’s (should that now be Kraft?) Gorilla Advert of 2007, but viral communication? With definition’s like “is the dissemination of information (either true facts or plain rumours) between individuals by self replication” (Behavioral Finance Group) – Oh, come on!
As a stark comparison in the same edition of CBR there’s another related Q&A. Rob Howard, founder and CTO of enterprise collaboration firm Telligent (“a pioneer of social media platforms”) explains how social media is becoming the established way for businesses to communicate – Rob also has a blog Enterprise 2.0 and social computing. Rob’s reply to “will 2010 be year of social media?“, is that he doesn’t think we are there yet, and that we have some 12 to 18 months for the market to mature. More pertinently he warns against the misguided belief that Social media replaces the way business work – and that it’s all about “integration”.
As an act of due diligence I searched for the phrase “viral communication”. For your amusement here are some of the references I found: from the MIT Media Lab of 2005 a disturbing claim that “Viral Communications focuses on constructing agile, scalable, collaborative systems that permit uncontrolled growth, minimal power use, and maximum ability to intercommunicate, with viral architectures moving the intelligence from the trunk to the leaves.” [Aargh!] And, in Changeworksblog, written by Sue Tupling, you’ll find several posts listed against the keyword/s “viral communication” – but only one post, from 2008, includes the phrase. And, finally in an Abstract of the IIW Institute of Information Management, “The paradigm of viral communication” (published in 2002!), which apparently identifies “… viral messages as a new paradigm of communication …” So, now you know.
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The Google Trends site, at http://www.google.com/trends for “worldwide traffic”, is an invaluable research tool. For example a search on the trends in Google searches of the phrase “Social CRM” (include the quotes) produces the following chart
Notes: this in excess of 25 search volume index means that the “traffic” is 25 times the average for the 12 months. Similarly, this isn’t absolute search traffic numbers – instead, Trends has scaled the results for “social CRM” so that the average search traffic in the 12 months is 1.0.
Curiously, the results claim that “No [related] news articles were found”, and that the regional breakdown of the search phrase “social crm” has India (adjusted to 1.00) as the main source of the query, followed by the United States at 19% and the United Kingdom at 17%? So there’s more than five times the interest in Social CRM in India than there is in either the US, or the UK. I wonder what this chart will look like in twelve months time?
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This week in GOOGLE #23, “What Should Google Do?“
This week in GOOGLE, or TWig, is a podcast covering Google and all thing cloud computing. Hosted by Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, and Jeff Jarvis. Jeff Jarvis, in particular, is the author of What Would Google Do?
This being the first TWig episode of 2010 the discussion is about the future and “what should Google do?”
The team agree that Google doesn’t yet feel professional enough, yet it must expand into the Enterprise area in 2010 as there’s nothing left for it to do but create an Enterprise revenue stream. But is Google ready for the Enterprise? The team compare Google with Amazon, and salesforce.com, and decide Google is not as trustworthy (Marc Benioff, CEO salesforce.com, will be absolutely delighted to know he’s being compared with Amazon – Amazon being Marc’s inspiration when formulating salesforce.com …) Jeff then celebrates salesforce.com, “salesforce really knows how to serve business … ,” and “knows what a business needs.” So, Google is going to have to prove that it’s more than merely search and advertising in 2010.
Another programme on worth tracking down is CNBCs “Inside The Mind of Google”
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Dell launched Storm Sessions in December 2009.
Background: Dell’s IdeaStorm was launched in early 2007 “as a way to talk directly to our customers“, and “to have on-line brainstorm sessions to allow you the customer to share ideas and collaborate with one another and Dell.”
The model is a simple one: users of the Direct2Dell site post suggestions and requests. As these posts are promoted, by other users of the site, their score is increased. Dell then uses this ranking to identify which ideas are the most important. It has proven to be a very successful model with some “2,000 ideas submitted within the first few weeks,“ and, over the three intervening years of use, Dell claim to have “implemented almost 400 ideas.”
IdeaStorm is therefore an extremely successful example of crowdsourcing (and what a horrendous term that is!) – which Wikipedia (another model of crowdsourcing!) insightfully defines as “the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community.”
So why has Dell changed this successful formula? What does Storm Sessions bringing to the equation?
Vida Killian‘s (VidaK: Twitter Bio “Idea girl at Dell“) in her Direct2Dell blog post “Storm Sessions Launch on IdeaStorm” suggests that Storm Sessions is the “next level“. Essentially, Dell will now be choosing the topics! Driven by Dell’s current business needs Dell will post “targeted, relevant, and time bound ideas” and seek the users comments. Dell even offer to provide, when the “time bound” is up, feedback on “how and when the idea will be put into action.”
Now this sounds like something worth monitoring …
IdeaStorm and Storm Sessions are powered by salesforce.com 
See salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange. On the IdeaExchange site salesforce.com users can “suggest new products, promote favorite enhancements, interact with product managers and customers.” Similarly, all editions of salesforce.com CRM come with an in-house “on-line suggestion box” called Ideas – where “a community of users [can] post, vote for, and comment on ideas.“
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