Author: Christopher Carfi

Marinel Mones reviews Cerado Ventana, and says "Cerado Ventana is an excellent investment that brands should consider using."

Humbling, and a high bar.  We’ll keep working hard to live up to that standard.

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.