Let’s finish up our conversation on putting the practice of Technology R&D into your organization. Just a reminder, the need for this has arisen because technology has crossed the tipping point to the place where it is having a huge impact on the prosperity (or not) of organizations. Couple that with the fact that we have new technologies of every breed coming at a faster rate, and you have this new requirement of putting in some form of tR&D into the organization. Without further ado, the steps we suggest… Continue reading →

In decades past, the concept of Research and Development was strictly the purview of companies with a reason to invent new products or raw materials. Today, every company over ten employees better take a page from that history and come up with a system for Technology R&D (tR&D.) Whereas raw materials for R&D used to be new chemical combinations, the raw materials of today are new software combinations.   Continue reading →

This is actually a quote my friend Ross Shaffer uses on stage when he speaks, and it is aimed at leaders…

I normally get up on stage and berate the leaders in the audience to wake up and get the picture that technology strategy is now a critical piece of their organization, and an element they cannot just outsource to others. Continue reading →

It seems that cash rich companies in the tech space are forever gobbling up younger and smaller organizations. There is actually an eco system of tech startups that are built specifically to be consumed by one of the behemoths (hopefully.) In many cases, there is a lot that can be learned by whom is buying whom. Let’s take a look at some recent examples, and my take on the strategy behind the buy… Continue reading →

Robot Twendy One (c) PA Pics, via Ananova

For decades many organizations and professionals have done business with nameless customers. I was just struck by this fact while working with a new client that “sells” to millions of customers a year – including me – and they have no database of these constituents. When two ideas collide in your brain, insights can happen. I have been doing a lot of work around the concept of social CRM, and the capability of an organization to harvest large amounts of information on customers by mining their social profiles. Continue reading →

I have been looking at examples of companies building social technologies into their Web properties, and software applications the last couple of weeks and I am really impressed. For those that use Salesforce.com, the addition of Chatter was the first sign of things to come. Now Salesforce has purchased Radian6 so they can provide a listening system for people to monitor any mention of their company, competitors, or customers. This makes a lot of sense as the concept of SocialCRM blossoms. Continue reading →

When I work with people in the education space, the conversation invariably gets around to the subject of kids in school and the devices they now carry. Some years back there was a lucky handful of K thru 12 students who would bring their laptops to school. They were not really allowed to use them in class, but they could be helpful during study hall or the times in between classes when no one could dictate their use.   Continue reading →

Time was, you made your reputation over many years, and only people that came in contact with you, or those close to you, would have any idea what that reputation might be. We first got indoctrinated into the reputation culture in high school where both young men and women could “get” a reputation by doing something bad. As screwed up as high school years were, it was hard to tell if it was better to have a reputation, or to be invisible. Continue reading →

So do you believe yet? In the space of a few weeks, the Huffington Post – which is a blog – sold for over $300 million, a few countries in the Middle East have revolted using Facebook and Twitter as new weapons, and Charlie Sheen started a Twitter account and promptly set a Guinness Book record for adding over 1 million followers in 24 hours. Continue reading →

When I talk about online reputation management with audiences, I continue to get the questions about how to handle the unfair, unwarranted, or untrue statements that a customer makes against an organization. My first thought is always to say, “you haven’t seen anything yet.” We are just in the very earliest days of consumers starting to learn that they can take out their frustrations on a brand. The deadly cycle we are about to fall into will be that companies will work harder to reach out to consumers that say negative things online in a desperate attempt to minimize damage to their reputation and the more consumers see this, the more they will say bad things – in order to get attention. Continue reading →