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Just received one of the most unbelievable email form-letter responses I’ve ever encountered. Had filled out a web form to find out more information about a product we were considering integrating into a solution for a client. Here was the response (details changed to protect the guilty):

“Dear Mr. Carfi,

Thank you for your email and your interest in viewing (company/product name) Demo. My name is Chuck [redacted] and I’m Director of Sales.

As you can well imagine, we get more then 50 contacts a week from folks like yourself who are interested in our software and we normally reject more then 80% of those folks we speak with because we do not feel we have a business fit or we do not feel they will be succesful [sic]. In this regard, I would need to speak with you first, to see what you are looking to do and to see if we do in fact have a business fit before we could discuss our demo.

I’m available to speak with you tomorrow (Friday) or next week.

Please let me know of your availability and we can take it from there.

Thanks again for your interest–

Chuck”

The hubris of “we’re doing you a favor, and if you’re worthy we’ll talk to you” blows me away. Why make it harder for your prospect to learn more about your company, your people or your product?

What are you hiding?

Up in Boise speaking at KickStart, along with Leif, Ben McConnell, Tac Anderson and a host of others. Outstanding event, and looking forward to the lunch conversation with Caleb Chung, inventor of Pleo.

(p.s. Props and a fabulous gift to the first commenter who can identify the classic rock source of the title of this post.)

David Cushman asks: Does a straightforward transaction site need a social element? He then answers, eloquently. Cushman:

“[A] shop which ignores the attributes of 2.0 is a shop with a limited shelf life.

Why?

1. Consumers want to co-create. If your shop site doesn’t allow the community of users to share their ideas about what it should sell, rate what is on sale, come together to propose improvements to what is on sale etc etc – you’re locking out all the value of the network. Let members of your community pitch next year’s ideas, rate them and shape them – and big up the things they love. If they score down some items – don’t sell them.
The community has spoken.

2. Two-way flow of communication beats the market: How do you know what your users want NEXT. The market shows you what they want now, and also what they don’t want – but it can never tell you what next year’s hit or miss is. Your community can – if you’re engaged in a two-way flow. This is genuine ‘consumer insight’ based on real conversations with real people – not on generalised assumptions that “we know our market”.

3. Convergence of buyer/seller/product developer/user/employee: If the employee and the user is converging in the concept of user generated content – the same can be said of communities of people trading together. eBay writes this large: The buyer and the seller converge. The buyer is also converging with the developer/designer (think BMW cars for a solid example happening now – the customer customises). This is a 3-dimensional version of a person – not a one dimensional “treat me as the customer… and only the customer” approach. In a ‘shop’ community environment one person can be a buyer/seller/developer/user/employee

4. Trust is communal: Trust is now created in a wiki-way. The social tools of 2.0 (eg diigo) make it ever easier for people to share what they think of a product or a supplier with their community, rapidly and in a way that is much more readily trusted by most consumers than old-style marketing messages. Sony tells you its PlayStation 3 is the dog’s. The community tells them its made a heap of mistakes (1.1m views on YouTube of How to Kill a Brand 1.1m of PS3 vs Wii – apple style). How does your shop help the community decide what to trust?”

(image credit: yewenyi)

Had a great conversation on Friday with CEO Paul McNamara and Sarah Franklin from Coghead as a run-up to Web 2.0 Expo this week. (Disclosure: Coghead is a customer.) Some key bits they shared:

• Their web-based application development platform is going live this week
• They currently have about 17,000 registered developers
• Coghead recently closed an $8MM Series B financing round
• Paul really doesn’t like the term “Software as a Service” 🙂

The point that Paul kept returning to during our conversation was that of “empowerment;” that is, what they’re trying to do is to enable a new class of customer to create his or her own web-based apps, both simply and rapidly, and provide a tool to fill the gap between “management by spreadsheet” and ERP-type apps. The demo that Sarah showed me illustrated the point nicely, showing that a snazzy, data-driven web-based app could be created in short order through the Coghead interface while taking a list of ERP System features and integrating a few that could be fully customizable.

A particularly interesting bit was the illustration of “mashouts,” enabling information from Coghead apps to be embedded into arbitrary web-based apps outside of the system. Pretty nifty.

Additionally, it appears some Coghead developers are building their own apps for resale on top of the platform. The primary example that was talked through was for a company called allRounds that is building a “system that facilitates interactions among investors, companies, and exchanges in the private capital markets” using Coghead’s tools. Worth checking out, if for no other reason than it illustrates an interesting “long tail” case, where an app is created for a very specific purpose that previously would have previously been infeasible due to either the cost or effort required.

Bonus bit: The Coghead video is kinda cheesy-funny. Heh.

Paul Ward was one of the participants in the Social Media and CRM 2.0 workshop that Paul Greenberg and I hosted this week in DC. A snippet:

“Just finished sitting in on a morning session of BPT Partners’ CRM 2.0 Certification program, and I have to say, they’re doing a really good thing with this offering.

OK, so the topic of the day was social networks, about which I’ve done a lot of writing, speaking and — above all — thinking. Chris Carfi of Cerado gave that part of the presentation, and did a fabulous job — a great balance of describing the big sociological and technology shifts businesses should know about as well as specific examples of how social networks are expressed through current technology.”

Full review here.

Thanks, Paul! Was great to meet you in person.

(BTW, we’re doing our next session in May 2007 in Naples, FL…c’mon down!)

Nick Douglas: “Tag clouds are to Web 2.0 what lasers are to rock concerts. OLD.”

Mei Lin Fung postulates on The Seven Levels of Customer Relationships: “I was surprised about how much there is in common between personal relationships and business relationships…Basically, the story about relationships is that relationships are about stories about people. Over time, our stories might change as our perspectives and priorities change. But our relationships with people who knew us in the past mean that they know the stories of our past, and as we evolve, the people we knew, help to keep us honest, keep our stories straight even for ourselves.”

Lee Lefever: “Yes, successful communities thrive on trust. But, what comes before that? How does trust develop? It happens through consistent interactions. It happens through exchange.”

Wow. I was simultaneously howling with laughter and cringing for Sony when Paul Greenberg showed me this video last week. It is, to date, perhaps the best example of the cold, hard fact that a company no longer can have a hope of “controlling” its message. Three minutes of scathing commentary from the customer’s perspective on the mis-steps that were made in the go-to-market strategy, the design and the positioning of the PlayStation3.

Click here to view the video. (Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, watch it. It is brilliant.)

Spike has some more thoughts on it here.

Our customer Paul McNamara, CEO of Coghead, writes:

“Jeez. What’s up with the term ‘SaaS’? (‘Software as a Service’, for the uninitiated). Seems like everyone’s using it. I hate it. And it’s not just the psycho UPPERlowerlowerUPPER case – it’s the whole concept of the acronym that bothers me…the best term we can come up with is ‘SaaS’? Come on people, we can do better than that.

We don’t call radio ‘Phonograph as a Service’ (PhaaS) – although if today’s “visionaries” were alive in the ‘20s maybe we would have. It’s true that radio lets you listen to phonograph records over the air. But that’s where the similarity ends. Radio is a whole lot more.

I imagine that to the horse and buggy manufacturers, the automobile was nothing more than the ‘Horse and Buggy as a Self Propelled Vehicle’ (HaBaaSPV).

And to the manuscript producers of the middle ages, the printing press (which in the early days was operated by Scribes) was simply the ‘Scribe as an Operator of a Repeatable and Automated System for Increased Productivity and Broad-based Distribution’ (SaaOoaRaASfIPaBbD).

When technology changes the patterns of consumption in a fundamental way, then something very important is happening. A new era is dawning and new terminology is needed. Words matter.”

Paul prefers the term “webware,” by the way. Your thoughts?