Category: Uncategorized

Shel Holtz recently had some issues with his computer setup. Shel:

“I’m running Windows XP SP-2 and have been happily running the public beta for Office 2007 (which I love). A minor problem has occurred whenever Microsoft releases an update. I have to repair the Office 2007 installation in order to get it working again. After this past week’s update, though, bigger problems occurred. I cannot get into Outlook, so I started a repair but got a message telling me the Office 2007 installation was corrupt and that I should reinstall. So I tried reinstalling, but that only got about 20% through the process before it gave me an error (2711, I believe). I tried uninstalling Office 2007 but got the same corrupt installation error. And reinstalling Office 2003 did no good at all—I cannot launch Outlook 2003 because of a mismatched .dll file.

So I have no Outlook and, effectively, no Office installation.

So…any Microsofties out there with a clue what I should do?”

This triggered the thought: instead of this being a process where a customer puts a note in a bottle and throws it into the blogosphere, what if this were a pre-meditated process? Here’s how it would work:

• When an organization puts out a product, the organization defines and publishes a particular tag that they will listen for in the blogosphere when there are customer questions (for example, “office2007question” would have been a good tag the MS could promote with its Office 2007 product)
• If a customer has a question with a product, he posts the issue (just like Shel has done) with the tag(s) of the associated product(s)
• The vendor organization, which is theoretically listening for posts tagged with its “support tags” takes notice, and addresses the issue on the customer’s turf.

I believe we’ve just (re-)entered the era of the customer support “house call.”

Further reading: A Customer Support Barn-Raising

“‘Authority’ is the permission we give others to change us.” – D.Searls

Georgia Patrick: “Succeeding in business is not as hard as many try to make it. As long as you start with the customer in mind and keep that central to everything you do, you will do just fine.”

A nice series of metaphors of what connectedness really means vis-a-vis the Internet (go read the whole thing):

Craig Burton:

“I see the Net as a world we might see as a bubble. A sphere. It’s growing larger and larger, and yet inside, every point in that sphere is visible to every other one. That’s the architecture of a sphere. Nothing stands between any two points. That’s its virtue: it’s empty in the middle. The distance between any two points is functionally zero, and not just because they can see each other, but because nothing interferes with operation between any two points. There’s a word I like for what’s going on here: terraform. It’s the verb for creating a world. That’s what we’re making here: a new world. Now the question is, what are we going to do to cause planetary existence? How can we terraform this new world in a way that works for the world and not just ourselves?”

Doc riffs futher (cite):

“It’s silly to say, ‘I’m going to get in the middle of this thing and improve it.’ More importantly, [it] needs no mediation. It puts everybody, including The Media, on the outside. This doesn’t mean The Media have no advantages, or that they can’t help terraform the Net’s world. It just means that their business isn’t helping make the Net more of what it is.”

The implications:

• If the above is true, every one of your customers is a point on the sphere.
• So is every one of your employees.
• How can you get out of the way, and enable them to connect to get their respective jobs done?

Scoble on social software valuations: “Doing the technology is fairly straightforward. I’m sure that could be built for $100 million or less. Probably far less if they really are smart about how they go about it. But duplicate the community and brand (er, those eyeballs, as Ballmer calls them) is far far far more difficult. The fact that he insists on calling me a set of eyeballs tells me Ballmer doesn’t understand the trend here.”

Coghead just went live! Here’s a full review over at TechCrunch.

Guy Kawasaki pens his take here.

Having worked with Paul, Greg, Sarah, Steve, Brian and the rest of the team for many months, I can tell you that they’ve been cranking round-the-clock and have put a great app together.

Congrats to all.

(disclosure: Coghead is a customer.)

Google says:

“Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.”

More here.

Doc writes:

“We need an instrument of demand that works from the demand side, outside of any of the media’s own systems. We need something that works in a free-range way, by and for individuals. Something independent. We need something that expresses the user’s or the customer’s intentions.

Think about it as Vendor Relationship Management — and the reciprocal of Customer Relationship Management. It’s what Drummond Reed calls CoRM, for Company Relationship Management.

It’s vigin territory. And you can’t get to it from the sell side. You have to approach it from the buy side. From the customer’s, or the user’s, side of the relationship.

Obviously, this is a development project. In fact, it’s the project I’ll be working on with the Berkman Center over the next year. I was thinking in that direction during this interview, but we made a lot more progress in just the last few days. I’ll be writing more about it this week, mostly in Linux Journal and IT Garage. Naturally, I’ll be looking for help.”

In June of 2005, I wrote:

“What’s been broken with so-called ‘Customer Relationship Management’ systems so far is that, well, they don’t really focus that much on the customer, do they? Under the rubric of ‘CRM,’ there have been three primary classes of systems: sales force automation, customer service and call center automation, and marketing automation. All of these look at the world from the seller’s point of view. And all of them focus on how the vendor can crank more customers through a particular process in a given unit of time. They don’t necessarily help to truly build relationships between individuals. In fact, they are more likely to commodify it.

There has been a considerable amount of research done in this area, and there in an increasing body of data that suggests that building this kind of ‘enterprise social network’ has measurable benefit for both customers and vendors alike. Perhaps the cornerstone of recent work in this area was done by Lichtenthal and Tellefsen, and is called ‘Toward a Theory of Buyer-Seller Similarity.’ L&T write: “These findings suggest that internal similarity [perceptions, attitudes, and values] can increase a business buyer’s willingness to trust a salesperson and follow the salesperson’s guidance, and therefore, increase the industrial salesperson’s effectiveness. In contrast, the literature also indicates that, under most circumstances, observable similarity [physical attributes and behavior] will exert a negligible influence on a business buyer’s perceptions or a salesperson’s effectiveness. Thus, the key finding is that it is more important for buyers and sellers to ‘think alike’ than ‘look alike’.”

To date, there just haven’t been tools like this aimed at the enterprise, that take this idea of creating real relationships between individuals and providing a means for customers to explicitly state their case, and determine with whom they want to do business at a real, interpersonal, non-synthetic level. So, we built one.“

Of course, what we built to address this problem is now widely known as Haystack networking.

So, it’s not quite virgin territory, but we, as both customers and as an industry that connects customers to the people and things they need, certainly have many miles to go before we sleep on this. Doc, greatly looking forward to the work you’ll be doing on this at Berkman.

The unfortunately named MyWetStuff.com (tagline: “Help us get the wet stuff you want!”*) was launched last week in response to the United States government’s ban on many common items such as toothpaste in airline carry-on baggage. From the MyWetStuff.com website:

“MyWetStuff.com strives to provide the frequent traveler with the broadest possible array of single-use and travel-size personal care products. Our product catalog will continue to expand as more and more products are packaged for maximum convenience and minimum waste.

As we ramp up a brand-new company for a brand-new market need, deliveries will begin on September 29, 2006.”

Today, Forbes reports that the government has greatly reduced these restrictions.

“The government is partially lifting its ban against carrying liquids and gels onto airliners, officials said Monday.

Most liquids and gels that air travelers purchase in secure areas of airports will now be allowed on planes. That means that after passengers go through airport security checkpoints, they can purchase liquids at airport stores and take them onto their planes. The new procedures go into effect on Tuesday.

New procedures also were announced for toiletries and products like lip gloss and hand lotion that passengers bring to the airport. Previously, those liquids have been confiscated at security checkpoints. Now, these products will be limited to 3-ounce sizes and must fit in a clear, 1-quart size plastic bag. The bags will be screened and returned if they are cleared.”

Reminder to self: never base a business model on capricious policy decisions.

* – yes, seriously.

Congrats to Paul, Greg and the rest of the Coghead team! Business 2.0 just named Coghead in a list of “11 companies that are changing the world.” The key line from the article:

“Coghead could completely upend the balance of power in the software game — putting users, and not coders, in ascendancy.”

Yup.

(disclosure: Coghead is a client)