Monthly Archives: March 2008

Starbucks and its idea pond

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Starbucks has gone the Dell route – and is now soliciting ideas from the latte-drinking crowd.

Says Ben McConnell:

If Starbucks really follows through with its promise, this suggestion box-on-steroids idea is meritocracy via social network. The congregation is smarter than the preacher, so this could develop into a valuable, and tangible, asset for Starbucks

Cool. I was initially doubtful – Starbucks being stretched all over the place just like McDonalds and having as much uniqueness to it, how many enthusiasts it still has? – but the authenticity of posted ideas have converted me. Let’s wait for some action to follow, some ideas to materialize, before making any further judgements.

Question to ponder: is it time for McDonald’s to launch its own BurgerStorm?

PS And it runs on Force.com, which is a major win for Salesforce and its platform-as-a-service world domination plans: a global brand gone SaaS-y.

PS2 via Adriana -  Jeff Jarvis comments on some of the ideas in the pond and poses a provocative question: “Why does listening to your customers sound like a web 2.0 idea? It should be a business 1.0 necessity.”

Maybe. But it would be fair to say it takes a giant leap of faith to move from the producer-knows-best mentality to that of “come on board and tell us what we can do better”. And yes, everybody should be doing that by now. In an ideal world.

“Me, Inc.” revisited

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What if all cubicles had a security camera streaming a live feed to YouTube? What if they do? What if the cubicle-dwellers are playing theatre as if they were, in fact, being broadcasted to unknown masses?

Via Johnnie Moore – “64 per cent [of Brits] said they in effect became somebody else as they reached their desk.” (Financial Times) As opposed to a third of the straight-talking Dutch, and I suppose the number doesn’t get any lower than that.

And come performance review time, there is no actual person in the room: only avatars.

I have just finished the Free Agent Nation, so count me biased. As much as I’d like to blame The Man, I can’t: we do it to ourselves voluntarily. Accepting the caste system (Junior Widget Cranker, Senior Widget Cranker, Vice President Of Widget Cranking), feeding on the corporate new-speak (team-player, goal-oriented, place-your-dash-separated-slogan-here), separating work (as in creating value to be exchanged for another value) from life itself; such is the unfortunate legacy of the Industrial Age. So yes, it’s only natural to play Kabuki theater while being “at work”. An actual human being wouldn’t survive there.

It will take a generation of free agents to change that.

Oracle, Hot or Not?

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Does Oracle “get” CRM 2.0? Depends on who you ask, apparently. I waited until the hotshots have spoken and can now stand atop their shoulders and look at the bigger picture. Which one, you might ask? The one composed of both clear victories and dangerous misconceptions.

Let’s get down to business.

Oracle has peppered its Release 15 of CRM On Demand with Web 2.0… thingies. The gist of which I can summarize by quoting Larry Dignan of ZDNet’s BTL blog:

  • Oracle CRM On Demand can be customized via widgets, gadgets and personal portals.
  • Can incorporate information such as contacts from iGoogle or MyYahoo. Other sites can be added via RSS.

Widgets, gadgets, thingies. Thinkies? Not really. If all there was to Web 2.0 was widgets, then yes, it would seem that Oracle has it covered. The one part of Web 2.0 ecosystem, the driving part that has gone largely unnoticed by traditional vendors, is the behavioral shift from consumption to co-creation, from listening – however passively – to conversing. Which has led some, for instance Christopher Carfi, to comment:

While an interesting technical step forward, the fundamental embrace of true, big-R customer Relationships is still missing. The product, the presentation, the glossy online video demo — it’s not about the Customer — it’s all about how the two fictional sales reps are closing the next deal

Indeed. It’s still a tool sold to empower businesses to “take on” their customers, to get to know as much as they can about them, so that they can sell to them, better.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course.

But it’s not just a technical step forward. Look, CRM 1.0 was all about building silos. Actually, about connecting multiple company siloes and merging them into a single one. An intra-company bible of everything the company knows about the customer.

Which isn’t much, really, but you would wait a long time before a CRM vendor would admit that. Or the company itself, for that matter.

That businesses now realize there is a world around them, full of information and interactions that are relevant to their business, is huge. No dancing around that. Opening up that big CRM silo and mashing it with outside bits and bytes amounts to a small revolution. Let me re-play the second bullet from Larry Dignan’s post:

  • Can incorporate information such as contacts from iGoogle or MyYahoo. Other sites can be added via RSS.

Yes, it’s the on-demand version of Oracle CRM, and the on-site users might wait a bit before Oracle hits them with Web 2.0 goodness. On-Demand is supposed to be sexy, after all. It has to. But still: this is no small feat. The hierarchies, the business rules, the workflows written in stone; all that is getting disrupted by this innocuously looking feature.

Once you let the devil in, there is no going back.

I believe Oracle will not lead the CRM 2.0 wave. Not because of their product legacy, not because of their customer legacy. And primarily not because CRM 2.0 won’t be a shrink-wrapped product but rather a loose collection of rather cheap yet very effective tools: company blogs that promote actual human contact between the organization and its customers, wikis that let the company innovate with, not only for, its customers, etc. You know the drill.

Still, it’s heart-warming (yes, about time we sing Kumbaya) to see actual progress done by the software behemoth. And it provides some clues about acceptance of Web 2.0 mindset by large organizations. May that be a sign of good things to come.

Are Web 2.0 Companies Getting Serious?

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Perhaps there wasn’t much to twitter about at SXSW08, but this is certainly a healthy development:

These days, many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest are working hard to turn their visions into sustainable businesses, or they’re toiling away within the larger companies like Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) that bought them out early on.

“Serious people” don’t take Web 2.0 seriously. And many times they are right to laugh at it. Nobody wants to ride into another Bubble.

What makes it different this time, though, is that big players are getting onboard. Web 2.0 might have started as an insurgency but it’s being co-opted by the establishment. Company-wide “Twitters” will be as common as company-wide IM.

Selling out to the enterprises is only one way to monetize but it sure could be a good way, given how enterprises like to throw money bags at buzzwords that have gained momentum.

(via Alan Patrick)

Presentation Zen, not only for making presentations

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I am reading devouring Garr Reynolds‘s Presentation Zen, in that nostalgic way that comes with having read his blog for a long time and also seeing it having a definite impact on how people present. Yes, it’s that kind of book that is best enjoyed after you’ve joined the author’s camp.

Which is also why I won’t elaborate over the book’s contents. If you are unfamiliar with Garr’s approach, and perhaps keep spend too much time wondering whether six bullets is enough or not, you will be well advised to read Garr’s blog first. It will open your mind.

I believe you can use the book in different ways. Its main use case is, of course, to teach you a thing or two about presenting. The other, implicit use case, is to get you thinking about how you are presenting yourself in general.

That goes for individuals and organizations alike. In the world of Serious Business(TM), only facts are allowed. If the right brain is used at all, it produces clichés and stillborn imagery. Hence why clip art is included in office suites and everybody’s mission statement is full of crap-words like “strategic”, “customer-oriented” and “shareholder value”.

Garr’s approach recognizes that the audience, though a terrified speaker can see it only as a mass, is still composed of individual humans – who need to see, hear, touch and smell to understand. And I am looking forward to the day when organizations people inside organizations get that, too. And employ such communication strategies start talking like they want to get the attention of, well, humans.

“The Road To CRM 2.0″ wiki

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Interested in merging of social media and CRM? I’ve uploaded my “CRM 101″ talk that I gave at the IIR event in Amsterdam this week, plus supporting materials, on a wiki that I am making public – in the spirit of open source, etc. If you’ve been at this for some time, it will be familiar to you; I am not shattering the Earth here, yet.

Comments & ideas welcome.

Make your own handset

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This might be taking mass-customization a bit too far: OpenMoko is releasing CAD files of their phone case to anybody interested in … manufacturing their own cell phone. The home-use (?) 3-D printers are supposed to be $2500 or so but I suppose this won’t be a big thing until we collectively move to the Diamond Age.

Still, I totally adore this radical move, being a radical evangelist and all, and am holding my breath a bit. Up until very recently, the phone industry (and telco in general) has been fragmented and controlling & backward-facing as if it didn’t really want to live in the 21st century. Then came OpenMoko, missed a couple of deadlines, and Android came with its promise of an open platform, and now OpenMoko is taking the lead again and opening up what’s left of the phone (except perhaps the bits of proprietary hardware that might still be waiting for the right moment).

It might not be *the* thing mobile customer have been waiting for (until those 3d printers, nano-based, sit next to your espresso machine). But it’s one of those things that get you thinking: what’s next? What are these guys thinking? They sure as hell got my attention now.

Live from Amsterdam

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Thinking out-of-the-box when you are asked to think out-of-the-box isn’t easy. In fact, you are almost guaranteed to stay in that box – I think the same fear comes into play as in those “brainstorming” sessions where the facilitator asks, Who’s got an original idea? Damn hard to be original / out-of-boxish on command.

Which was the task we got this morning for the roundtables. Not many new ideas left for CRM, I suppose. At least not for CRM 1.0; if you’ve got all the data you need about your customers, know more about their behavior than even they are aware of, launch all the right campaigns, etc.; the next step really is to move into the 2.0 world of giving your customers that 360 degree view of you, your company, to take that relationship to the next level. Or some such.

That said, I have been very pleased with the conversations I’ve been hearing here in Amsterdam on IIR’s CRM & Retention conference. Many smart people here; the reason we’re not seeing more telco involvement in the 2.0-ish way of engaging customers has got more to do with process (organization, rules, etc.) than people.

My presentation went reasonably well, though I’ve got many lessons to learn ahead of me, that much I can tell you. Spoke about what I preach here: opening up companies from within to give their customers a reason to care, to pay attention, to go beyond pragmatic and towards establishing a meaning. And forgot to warn them about blogging consultants; but they don’t seem to need that. I’ll post my materials in some form, probably as a wiki, later for you to get a better picture.

PS the weather wasn’t that bad in the end – fortunately :-)