The social customer manifesto

On November 6,  Azadeh Ensha wrote in the New York Times:

"Web telemarketers don’t take aim at just your e-mail account. In order to block pop-up and banner ads when surfing the Internet, download the Firefox browser from http://firefox.com, then download (mozillaaddons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865). Also be sure to enable Firefox’s built-in pop-up blocker (also available on Apple’s Safari browser and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8) to take care of sneakier ads.

And if all of the above fails, turn off your TV, shut down your desktop and pick up a book. Advertisers haven’t cornered that market — yet."

Today, Randall Rothenberg, President of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, responded in the Times in kind:

"To the Editor:

Re “Tactics That Tame Intrusive Advertising” (Business Day, Nov. 6):

Those online banner ads that you recommend blocking with browser add-ons pay for the free content on the Web — the e-mail accounts, video shorts, interactive election maps and myriad other new forms that entertain and inform our citizenry.

Moreover, these ads help companies grow, something everyone ought to be concerned about as we head into a recession.

Randall Rothenberg
President and Chief Executive
Interactive Advertising Bureau
New York, Nov. 6, 2008"

Randall, time to start either (a) working on your business model; or (b) make the things that you put in the "ad" spaces on the web engaging, not intrusive.

This would be even funnier if it didn't read like so many industry press releases.

Continuing further in the direction shown at OpenWorld last month, Oracle has released a number of "gadgets" that allow customers of their CRM products to access information from a multitude of locations.  Currently, five gadgets are available:

• Top accounts
• Prospects
• Top deals
• My quota / My forecast
• Custom Search

Check out a few of the gadgets here:

According to Mark Woollen (Oracle's VP of Social CRM Applications) and Dipock Das (their Sr. Director of CRM Innovation), the gadgets will work with multiple versions of Siebel and OnDemand, and are built on a common code set with REST-style integration.  The gadgets must be installed locally on the user's machine, and are only available for desktop-deployment (Windows, Mac, Linux) at the current time.

About 20 of Oracle's customers (e.g. Nokia and Motorola) are beta-testing these gadgets.

While another good step forward, what I'm chomping at the bit to see is connection and convergence with other innovative things that Oracle has been doing like the Body Shop proof-of-concept that was shown at OpenWorld.  Continuance down that path will continue to evolve CRM into something that is much more VRM-like.  That's where the great stuff lies.

Our friends over at the EcSell Institute are putting together a very interesting summit for individuals on the business side of the customer relationship, focused entirely on the issues and challenges faced by the executive and management level of sales.  The 2009 EcSell Institute Summit will be in Phoenix on February 2-4, 2009.

Here's the agenda.

Here are the speaker bios.

Here's the registration link.

We've arranged a $500 discount for friends of Cerado; use PROMO CODE EC01 when registering to get the Cerado discount.

Was great to meet Jim McGee at the Social Media Strategies conference last week.  One great thing that came out of Jim's presentation was a discussion of the Virgina Satir Change Model for organizational change.  The theory in a nutshell:

• Things are plodding along within an organization or community
• There is a "foreign object" (e.g. a new thought, or participant, or strategy) introduced into the organization
• Things get chaotic while the community figures out how to deal with the new
• There is a transformational thought, a "transforming idea," and a point at which the group "gets it" and starts to gel in the new world
• Chaos declines, and performance then trends to a new, improved level

A couple of different visual representations:

From Satir Workshops

From Jim's presentation

Check out the whole thing here on Jim's blog.

A great presentation on design patterns in communities can be found in the presentation attached below. NOTE: This presentation focuses primarily on the technical patterns (ie. "features") that can be used in creating online communities. It does NOT address the more important issue of the interpersonal and social patterns that emerge.  More on those in a future post.

The Night of the Living Map

Ok, one small politically-oriented post.  Check out this hot mashup of Lee Dorsey v. Obama by Tano Sokolow..."Yes We Can"...brilliant.

Just re-found an article from Fortune Small Business featuring some really solid advice on putting an organization's people forward, in this case using online video.  Key line:

"People want to do business with a company that has a personality."

Here's the article.

Related:  And, just because, here's an iPhone in a blender.

We just used Cerado Ventana to create an iPhone, mobile and widget application to support #votereport.  Twitter VoteReport is a non-partisan initiative to call out voting issues, and is urging those with Twitter accounts to report voting issues by adding #votereport to their tweets.  The resulting tweets flow to the site's home page, and will also be plotted on a Google map.

Here's where to get it.

As a blog widget
Get the <a href="http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/votereport-cerado-ventana">Votereport - Cerado Ventana</a> widget and many other <a href="http://www.widgetbox.com/">great free widgets</a> at <a href="http://www.widgetbox.com">Widgetbox</a>!

You can put it on your iGoogle page.

It's also available as an iPhone app.

A very interesting ethnographic study from our friends over at CreateWithContext.  Key findings include learnings on:

• Browsing behavior
• GPS/Map usage
• Gestures and navigation
• UI Best Practices
  
• App store pricing do's and don'ts

View the whole presentation

RSS readers:  Click here.

Great people make all the difference.

Sweet.  If you have an iPhone, you now have free wifi at Starbucks and other AT&T hotspots.

Related:  Even if you don't have the iPhone, it's easy to get free wifi there with their "loyalty" card thing.  Use the card once a month, and you get free access.

Also Related:  If you have an iPhone, these look great, by the way.

Nice liveblog here of Day 1 of the Social Media Strategies conference in San Francisco.  Rajiv, Darius and I had a blast on the "Thinking Vertically" panel, which starts at 1525.

From BrandWeek:

"Don't be surprised if a comment left on Twitter gets a faster response than a call to customer service. Companies are increasingly monitoring social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and blogs for negative customer comments and then responding directly, even publicly, to those comments within minutes.

Companies including Southwest Airlines, Boingo wireless and Edmunds.com have developed speedy, informal response teams to deal with the fact that consumers are happy to air brands' (often entertaining) dirty laundry in public."

I just voted!  If your state allows you to do so, you can, too.

For San Mateo County, CA, the early voting locations are here.

Heh.  Looks like Dave voted today, too.

We all get tied into the the things that we "know" are right.  Those are the safe options.  (Back in the day, these were the things like "no one ever got fired for buying IBM.")  We may tweak things a little bit, here or there, but we never venture far afield from our comfort zone.

Had a great exchange with Nicole Lazzaro, a couple of weeks back, that really brought out the fallacy of that logic.  Our exchange:

nicolelazarro: Sounds like this conversation is a step backwards from efficient vending machine purchase to a shared cup of tea before buying a rug in the bazaar.
ccarfi: is that really a step "backward?" it's transaction v. relationship. Relationship is more valuable.
nicolelazzaro: Exactly. A step forward is actually back to our roots. Fond memories of Istanbul, where merchants and customers have not yet forgotten the art of conversation.

The key here is that things that look like a "step backward" may be exactly the things you need to do in order to get out of a rut.  You may be near the top of the hill, but the next feature over might be a much higher mountain.  You need to go down the hill in the short term (away from what locally looks like the "best" answer), in order to get to the real best answer.

Related: Tabu Search