Customer Success Blog - March 2007

• Social Media & CRM 2.0 Seminar

  Jamie Grenney Mar 30, 2007

  

  If you are interested in developing an online community for your business, I highly recommend attending Paul Greenberg and Chris Carfi two day seminar on "Social Media & CRM 2.0." The next two dates are April 10-11 in Washington DC and May 10-11 in Naples Florida. I'm sure they'll be adding additional dates in other cities. It's a great 101 on how to effectively use of blogs, podcasts, wiki's, and social networks as part of your customer strategy.

  2 Comments | Bookmark

• More Web Apps than Operating Systems than Desktop Applications

  Kingsley Joseph Mar 20, 2007

  It's true - I'm a geek. I currently use about a dozen web applications on a regular basis, a few operating systems (Win XP SP2, Fedora Core and Ubuntu) and just 2-3 desktop applications (Firefox, jEdit and occasionally, MS Powerpoint or VMWare). For users like me, Firefox has made the operating system a commodity.

  0 Comments | Bookmark

• A New Twist on Reinventing The Wheel

  Kingsley Joseph Mar 8, 2007

  On the O'Reilly Radar, Marc Hedlund talks about why Jedi build their own light sabers:

  Joel Spolsky has a great article on this called, "In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome."  He talks about the Excel team making their own compiler and the benefits they got from that.  He proposes a great test for making decisions like this:

  If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what.

  I've always referred to this idea, geekily, as, "Jedi build their own lightsabers."  If you're going to depend on your lightsaber as your principal tool and weapon, you'd better know that it works.

       I'm sure Marc means well, but I fail to see the point in his argument. Transportation is a core business function at UPS, but does that mean they should be building trucks? I agree that businesses should retain a degree of control over revenue sources and channels, but substitutable vendors are a good enough source of control. In my opinion, there are only 3 good reasons to reinvent the wheel:

  1. It is what differentiates you from your competitors in your customers' eyes.
  2. There are too few proven third-party vendors to offer true choice.
  3. Your really, really, really want to do it.

  If you think it takes too much work to make an array of disparate services work together, then think of how much more work it would take to build them and keep them running in your own backyard.

  0 Comments | Bookmark

• Coming Soon: More Social Networks Than People

  Kingsley Joseph Mar 3, 2007

  With Cisco's aquisition of Five Across and Tribe, Ning's idea that 1, 5 or even a 100 social networks is not enough seems to be taking off. The next thing you know, there will be more social networks than there are people on the planet. It happened with web pages, then web sites, it's happening with blogs now, and soon it will be social networks. Don't believe me? That's what they said about web pages - and now there are already more web pages (~200B) than all the people who ever lived(~106B)!

  Anything that becomes stupid simple to create will proliferate on the internet. A blogger friend of mine once said that he started blogging because "he realized he could." Most people didn't think they needed a blog till they realized that they could indeed have one if they wanted to. Similarly, a lot of people will soon be realizing that they could start a social network. Such fun!

  3 Comments | Bookmark