Michael Fauscette

Attensity Acquires Biz360

Although it may have gotten a little lost in the noise created by the Salesforce.com / VMware announcement of VMForce the day before, yesterday Attensity made what I believe is an important announcement in the social business market about their acquisition of Biz360. Socialytics, as I've discussed before, is becoming a business imperative as we create more and more social data and as the social customer and social employee gains more influence over the fate of a company. The social web gives voice to the involved individual and creates network effect to magnify influence. As a company you have to look to technology for ways to collect, filter, analyze, and create actionable information from the mountains of social data generated on the social web. That social information and its intersection with existing corporate information is business critical in todays hyper-connected business environment.

So why is this an interesting acquisition? Once again the whole (combined company) is greater than the sum of the two parts. Attensity is a leader in web 3.0 semantic analysis and natural language processing (NLP) technologies applied to business problems through a set of applications that enable deep data analysis and decision making support. Biz360 has developed three socialytic applications on the Market360 Platform, Media Insights, Opinion Insights and Biz360 community, that aggregate and analyze traditional and social media channels to provide insight into customers, influencers, financial / investment community and the press / analysts community. The combination of Attensity and Biz360 provides a complete, self-service socialytic platform that "collects" data, filters, analyzes and provides output information to support actionable business decisions across multiple interaction channels. In other words, the solution supports social CRM strategies across sales (predictive selling), marketing (sentiment analysis) and customer service (multichannel customer conversations and customer knowledgebase enhancement). These same capabilities could also be applied to internal social data for use with employees, as well as applied to social programs for suppliers and partners. Social business is about changing business culture and about engaging in the conversation, socialytic technologies like the new Attensity SCRM solution can be an important enabler in this process.

Social Metrics: Measuring Success

As more and more companies start to roll out and participate in social business projects as well as start to make business cases for these projects I think it's important to take a step back and look at some business fundamentals. As a basic project management tenet, any project must clearly lay out what success looks like and how success will be measured. In Dr. Stephen Covey 7 Habits language that concept is "begin with the end in mind." Social business projects are no exception and need to have metrics applied beginning from the concept stage. As a part of the project process a business case should still be required, that discipline will help correctly focus the project and provide justification for project approval.

What kind of metrics are relevant for social business projects? The key metrics vary by type of project but in the aggregate should tie back to the business fundamentals of revenue, margin, cost, quality and innovation to be relevant for the business. In looking at individual project metrics it's useful to focus the metrics around the four basic social business objectives: customer engagement, employee empowerment, partner enablement and supplier engagement. Here are some potential metrics:

Not an exhaustive list by any means, but hopefully it provides some ideas of ways to apply business metrics to social business projects. In the end though, we have to tie the projects to the big 5: revenue, margin, costs, quality and innovation.

-- Post From My iPad

Gen "C"

For some time now I've been thinking about the whole generational categorization scheme that always gets a lot of coverage. The idea that certain age groups have some common traits has been around for a long time I guess. We have Boomers, Gen X, Y, Z, Millennials, etc. Now I suppose there are commonalities that are shared because of the external factors that exist during the time when someone grows up, but I'm starting to think that age may not be as important in the emerging connected world that we inhabit. I hear often enough that web 2.0, social networking, social (fill in the blank) is for the "kids". It most often comes from a business person that is trying to deny that business is being impacted by the social web, a defense mechanism of sorts. We get it in comments on our surveys and in person but it does seem to happen less and less.

More and more I see commonality between people who are very active on the social web and who tend to be fast adopters of technology. While my daughters are certainly digital natives (ages 14 and 11) they are no more involved in the social web or with technology in general than I or many of my friends are. I'm starting to believe that there's a cross generational trend that is creating new common traits that are shared across a broad group. At first I was calling this Gen "S" for social but I've noticed lately others talking about the same idea and applying the label of Gen "C". As I thought about this more I think that in fact the key to this new "generation" is its hyper-connected lifestyle. Certainly the social web is playing into this trend and helps create the common traits but its really the interconnected nature of the members that is causing the cross-generational nature of the movement. Here are a few recent facebook demographics that demonstrate this (from istrategylabs.com):

and for Twitter:

So what are the common traits for Gen "C"? Here are a few things I'm observing:

• Hyper-connected, always on
• Mobile
• Content creators, a strong desire to create
• A desire for more control over their work, life, etc. (less comfortable with rigid structure and hierarchy)
• Comfortable with more complex structures, environments, technologies, etc. (multitasking is normal)
• Willing to join in conversation both online and offline. Gravitate to social sites that offer the opportunity to converse. (social)
• Comfort with higher level of personal openness and transparency
• Blurring of personal and business life and boundaries
• Desire to form active communities
• Digitally inclined

This "generation" is the social customer and the social employee. They have a voice and are not afraid to use it. They understand the shifting of influence and the changing power that their voice gives them.

So what do you think, are you a part of the new "generation C"?

SugarCon 2010 (+ a bonus video)

I had the opportunity to send a day last week attending SugarCon 2010, SugarCRM's annual user conference in San Francisco. In addition to a great program which included a social CRM track led by Mitch Lieberman and keynote from Paul Greenberg I had the chance to chat with customers and SugarCRM executives about the company and it's latest product release. One of the striking differences to me in the conference this year was the shift in focus from leading with the open source message to one of focusing on the product's rich functionality, modern user interface, partner cloud initiatives, mobile and a growing interest in the social CRM movement. Not that SugarCRM is forgetting its open source roots, its just that they are stepping up the game a bit with a broader set of differentiators.  

During the conference I had the pleasure of sitting down with new CEO Larry Augustin who became interim CEO last May and subsequently took the role permanently last November. Larry, who was a member and chairman of Sugar's board for the last four+ years, is an experienced CEO, VC and was recently named the most influential business executive in open source. His strong leadership is clearly having a positive impact on the company and its partners. SugarCRM blends a unique combination of a strong open source community, progressive CRM product, good partner and cloud strategy, mobile and growing interest in social business, it will be interesting to watch their progress this year as they come off of a strong 2009.

During the morning session my friend and colleague Paul Greenberg delivered a strong keynote on social CRM and the social customer. At the end of the session SugarCRM's Mitch Lieberman conducted a short interview on some follow up questions to the keynote. I've recorded Paul's response to questions on dealing with crisis in a social environment and social for small and medium business.

Moving from the PC Era to the Mobile Era

Smart phones, mobile devices, tablets, slates...there's no question that we're flooded with an ever expanding number of options for connecting on the web. And beyond connecting the sheer number of things that can now be accomplished on these new devices is staggering. In the not so distant past you would only SMS, check email (& maybe respond if you had a Blackberry or Win mobile device), check a sports score or some other quick web task but beyond that it simply was too painful. Apple changed that almost three years ago with the introduction of the first iPhone with multitouch, a virtual keyboard and Apple and third party developed applications available on iTunes. The key reasons that the iPhone has created such a shift in mobile use, I believe is the vastly simplified and rich experience that multitouch and Apple's user interface (UI) provide, the availability of so many useful apps and the vertically integrated approach (and yes I understand that there are a lot of arguments as to why this makes Apple the evil empire but that's not the point of this post).

Now I'm at the end of week two of integrating the iPad into my workflow that was previously MacBook Pro and iPhone only (well, with the exception of that work provided email device that I'm forced to live with as well). I won't spend more time reviewing the iPad, I've already done that and my opinion hasn't changed. Instead I want to focus on the future and what I'm starting to believe is the next generation for personal and enterprise computing. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the PC is dead, long live the tablet, but change is most certainly happening because of the enlargement of the iPhone experience to include the tablet.

Mobile is certainly the lifestyle that most of us live. If you think about it, even the laptop was developed and gained popularity for that same reason. Now of course the demise of the desktop was also predicted because of the laptop and that hasn't happened either, at least not yet. There are still reasons to have a desktop, more power, gaming, graphics intensive applications (like CAD for example), calculation intensive apps (CAE for example), etc. but for the most part we can live without a desktop these days (my last desktop left the house about 3 years ago, but I don't do gaming, that's what my Wii is for, and except for photo and video editing nothing I do is very computing power intensive. My MacBook Pro has all the horsepower I need for what I do). What I'm finding interesting and compelling with the tablet is the same thing that I find interesting and compelling about the iPhone, the touch interface, clean UI and the vertically integrated experience. For a lot of tasks I'm starting to prefer the tablet over the laptop. I find that I mostly leave the laptop in my home office and take the tablet everywhere so portability is attractive. Beyond that though media consumption is just better on the tablet and a lot of my time is spent in research. I'm also finding that creating things that are mixed media, like presentations, mind maps, and drawings are easier and more fun with the touch interface. Id probably switch to the tablet for presentations completely if it wasn't for some current limitations (I'm mostly using Prezi for presentations and it's Flash based so you know that story. Also most of my colleagues use PowerPoint not Keynote, sadly, and translating files back and forth is still problematic). Even typing on a glass keyboard isn't bad, even though it does take some getting used to.

The UI paradigm for PCs is getting dated. Really the idea of mimicking offline in a virtual "desk top" with folder and files cabinets is pretty silly, even if it is very familiar and probably did aide adoption when PCs were just becoming popular. Maybe we're past that now? We're starting to see a new generation of online communications tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, 12second.tv, Google Wave, Novell Pulse, salesforce.com Chatter, Socialcast, Pana.ma...the list goes on, so why not also new UI paradigms?

For mobile to continue to evolve and gain adoption in the enterprise we need to solve a few things. For one we have to get out of our IT control model that has limited many companies to Blackberry as the only approved device, employees are simply working around that anyway. We also have to give employees access to the complete portfolio of enterprise apps, not just email or a few very simple vendor provided mobile apps. One solution that I'm pretty excited about is mobile virtualization. Citrix has a product called Receiver that is first of it's kind, and provides a very good user experience while solving enterprise security issues.

The PCs not dead yet by a long shot (probably for quite awhile yet), but things are changing. More of the workforce will start to use devices like smart phones and tablets to do real enterprise work and companies will be compelled to figure out how to enable that use. There's a great case around employee productivity if we will look beyond our current limitations. The intersection of three things, cloud computing, mobile and social are driving technology and business for the foreseeable future.

Is Freemium a Real Business Model?

I had the pleasure of joining Emergence Capital and a group of executives from some of its portfolio companies for dinner a couple of weeks ago. All of the companies are selling their products in the freemium model, and the dinner was an open discussion about the model and its many permutations. The discussion was spirited as often happens when you get a group of software executives together to talk business models, but also very engaging.

So what exactly is "freemium" anyway? I suppose it has some connection to the "free trial" model that is very common with SaaS applications, but it carries the idea of free to a different level (and as the CEO's of a freemium model company are quick to point out, is NOT like a free trial). The concept is to tier the product offerings and offer an "entry" level product with low barriers of entry (free). Besides the free product there are any number of enhanced products and/or features that the company tries to use as enticement to move to a paid edition. All of the freemium model companies had that much in common, but beyond that the details are very specific to the product, market and target customers. Noted VC (and EverNote investor) Fred Wilson talks about the model here.

The least complex freemium product offering usually involves 2 editions, free and premium. The free offering has enough of the feature set to provide customers with the genuine user experience but not enough features that some of (and hopefully a lot of) customers would not eventually feel the need for the premium product. The free version has to be as pain free as possible to encourage sign up, no long profiles to fill out and no credit card needed. Asking for more than basic customer information should wait until you have established the relationship and started to build some trust. Often the free product is ad supported as well, generating some revenue for the company, and possibly providing some additional incentive to move to the ad free premium edition. Companies using this simple version of freemium include popular note taking app EverNote, NewsGator, InsideView (an Emergence company, SaaS sales intelligence with 3 versions, free, Pro and Team), Box.net (storage / file sharing, 1 GB free, $ for more), Yammer (an Emergence Company, internal microblog, pay for administrative features) and social network LinkedIn. The model can be expanded beyond this simple 2 product tiers to include additional versions or even add ons like bandwidth, storage, etc.

The next permutation of freemium is what I'd call the viral extension model. The idea is to offer a product / service that has at its core a way to draw in new prospects as a part of its process. This method of gaining customer share was pioneered by Hotmail in the 1990's and is still used by Yahoo, gmail and others...basic is free, pay for more services like PoP access or more storage. Expansion comes from the free advertising that is on the bottom of every free email sent. A couple of the Emergence portfolio companies fall in this model, EchoSign (electronic signature and contract visibility, the contract is the viral vehicle) and Yousendit (just like the name implies, sending, receiving and tracking large files...the file is the viral vehicle of course).

The model has several benefits, most importantly lowering the cost of customer acquisition. The freemium companies are all cloud based products / services which provides an interesting benefit for the companies by making the variable cost go down as customer volume increases. This is very important in a business model where only a percentage of the total customer base is paying for the product. Conversion is of course key and the successful company is very focused on conversion metrics. They need to understand what creates the conversion event and when it generally occurs to manage the business and cash flow. Many of these companies see very high attrition rates for the free product but generally the attrition happens very early in the relationship. If a customer sticks around for very long (more than a month or so) the conversion opportunity is pretty good. Unfortunately though, at some point that conversion rate falls off. If you stay free for too long there's a much greater chance that you will not convert unless of course the conversion event is something like storage capacity or bandwidth.

There are some risks and detractors for the model as well. Conversion or more specifically lack of conversion, is the greatest risk. Finding the right balance between making the free offer compelling enough to acquire the customer but not rich enough that they never want to move up to a paid product is critical. And no bait and switch, what's free stays free, that's the quickest way to create a nasty customer backlash.

How the Social Web is Changing Business

I was working on a Prezi for a presentation next week by the same title as this post and as I worked through the flow some ideas that had been hanging around in my head sort of came together. The nature of an analyst is, I suppose to try and fit things neatly into a taxonomy, especially technology. We've tried to sort out social business in those terms over the last year but in many ways it just won't fit, mostly because the technology is secondary to the overall business cultural change that is the real focus. That said, I have started to fit things into three categories and now that I've done it visually I think it might be useful to share. The three broad categories are technology enablers, social output and social outcomes.

Let's look at tech enablers first. These fall into three categories, social platforms, social applications and embedded social features. Here is an excerpt from the Prezi that explains this in more detail:

The next focus area is social output. These fall into two categories (at least), social media and social networks.

And lastly the outcomes, customer engagement, employee empowerment, partner enablement and supplier engagement.

And lastly I've embedded the entire Prezi so you can see this in context. Some of the introductory material you might recognize from my recent Directions Prezi but I think the whole flow is useful. Also, if you haven't heard my CardScan customer service story, which is only represented by a pic in the Prezi, then the short version is that I was turned from a disgruntled customer to a brand advocate through rapid service via the channel I preferred, Twitter. Take a look and let me know what you think:

Employee Empowerment in a Social Business

A lot of the current focus on social business revolves around social CRM and customer initiatives. I guess that's not surprising since it is both a customer driven imperative as more customers adopt the social web, and also an area of quick and obvious business benefit (when done correctly anyway). I have this nagging feeling though, that approaching the transition to a social business from the outside in may not be the best approach. After all, the social customer that we hear so much about is also becoming the social employee, and I wonder if you can really successfully change your relationship with your customer when your own organization is "unsocial"? How can you, as an organization develop a meaningful and ongoing conversation with customers when your own organization is so silo'ed that marketing doesn't talk to customer service or product development doesn't talk to sales, etc.?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that you can't or shouldn't start to engage customers in new and different ways, in fact I believe it's a must do action. Social customers are creating a wave of change that will be increasingly difficult to resist. What I am suggesting is that you also need to start to deal with the overall cultural transformation that is happening and address internal issues as well. Here are some ideas:

- Build a social company policy (see this post for ideas) and train your employees on what you expect.

- Liberate the content. Get data into the hands of the people who need it to get their jobs done. Old content management (read content protection or lock up) isn't the answer. To turn content or data into useable information it has to be easily accessible. We need people centric content tools, not file centric.

- Look at incentives: do you reward individual or group efforts? Are employees incented to work together and share? Do you establish common objectives and goals?

- Where are decisions made, only at the top or throughout your organizations?

- Who owns social in your company? If your answer is marketing (or any 1 existing department for that matter), which is the most common answer by the way, I think you have significantly greater challenges succeeding with your social initiatives. I believe you need a new approach to bringing social into your company, and that the initiative needs to be led by an empowered leader on par with your CIO.

- Social tools are already being used in your company. Yes I know you may think you block them on your network, but trust me, you have not stopped your employees from using available social tools for business. Take inventory of what's being used and why. More than likely you will find that employees are working around systems that simply are not getting the job done. You can't address this by shutting things down or punishing employees for doing what they believe they must to get their jobs done. Instead use this momentum to correct issues and bring the work-a-rounds out into the light and figure out real solutions to these problems.

Technology won't change your business culture. There are a lot of tools though, that can assist in the transformation. From an internal perspective we need to focus on people as the platform and enable them to interact with each other, with content, with data and with systems in a paradigm that resembles current consumer Web 2.0 tools. There interfaces have proven efficient and effective. One of the places to start then, might be with a social collaboration tool like Salesforce.com's Chatter, Novell Pulse or SocialCast. Breaking down the walls around people, content and data are critical to the broader concept of removing silo'ed organizations and engaging with external constituents more effectively (customers, suppliers and partners). Oh, and the tools better support mobile...

Adventures with my new iPad

 Ok, so I don't really blog about hardware or gadgets, at least most of the time, but, well his time I can't help it. I'll try to mostly focus on the apps, since software is really what I do. I've now had over a day with the new device and I'm happy to say I'm very impressed and satisfied so far. Of course I'm still getting things set up and figuring out how it will figure in my workflows but so far, so good. I picked up my 64GB iPad and the Apple fold over case yesterday from the San Francisco Apple store, I had previously reserved it and only had to wait in line for about an hour and a half. I was a little surprised at the compactness of the packaging and I guess the iPad itself is a little smaller than I imagined, even though I knew the dimensions. Not that the size is an issue at all, it feels substantial and the screen is really clear and vibrant. Set up, like all Apple devices, was very easy...just connect it to my MacBook and sync. The iTunes controls are very similar to the iPhone. I synced most of my iPhone apps to start but I've since worked through them and deleted unwanted or unneeded apps. Luckily some of my favorite apps now have an iPad version, which makes a significant difference in the experience from just blowing up an iPhone app. One of the first things you'll notice is the blazing fast speed of the device. I guess the Apple designed chip really hit the mark. The keyboard is a little cramped in portrait mode for my large hands but in landscape it's fine. I think it's easier to type on than the Dell mini 9 netbook I own. 

Battery life seems like it will be quite good as well although I did do a bit of research to figure out the charging. It seems that it requires higher amperage for fast charging so the included charger is the most efficient, with the USB ports on the newer Mac's a good second choice. USB ports on older Macs and most (if not all) Windows machines will only maintain a charge if the iPad is being used but will charge (although much slower) when the iPad is asleep.

 So far here's what I'm doing with my iPad and some of the apps that I think really shine: 

- web browsing and web research is a pleasure. There's plenty of screen real-estate and the touch screen really adds to the experience. 

- reading eBooks. I like the Kindle app for iPad and I prefer it to the Kindle itself. The iBook app from Apple is also quite good and like iTunes makes eBooks easy to find and buy. 

- reading my RSS feeds. I use the free NetNewsWire by NewsGator on both my MacBook and iPhone, they work great and stay in sync through Google Reader. I decided to buy the iPad NetNewsWire app and it's well worth the $'s. The layout really uses the screen effectively and the share / Tweet function is really good. 

- news. I like the BBC app, although the tweet feature isn't perfect. The Bloomberg app, for those of you that want to keep an eye on the financial markets is a must have, great layout, easy to manage and free. I also like the AP news app and the FX news app for local news. The Yahoo entertainment app is visually beautiful and very functional. 

- streaming movies and TV content. The Netflix app is near perfect, really great experience. I loaded the ABC app and the layout looks good but I keep having a problem with it "crashing", but it is vision 1.

- social networks. I loaded Ultimate Facebook app and after I got used to the interface (it's very different from the iPhone Facebook app I am using), I love it. The app automatically puts game "stuff" from your feed in a game folder and out of the newsfeed (yay!). You can build other auto folder rules as well. The newsfeed presents unread updates and hides them as you read, very clean. I loaded Tweetdeck for iPad, which is one of my favorite clients on the Mac and iPhone. I haven't tried any others on the iPad yet, so far Tweetdeck is doing the trick although there's something funny about links, I can't seem to get them to open from the streams (maybe operator error but it's annoying). 

- productivity. I use Evernote for note taking on both my MacBook and iPhone and so of course I loaded the iPad vision as well. The client is very clean and functional. I think I like it better than the Mac client actually. I bout iWork as well. I have it on my MacBook and like it but end up using MS Office more often than not for compatibility reasons. I haven't played with Numbers or Keynote for iPad yet but I did use Pages some yesterday and the experience is fine. The one odd thing is that the menu bar goes away in landscape mode (to save space) but since I mostly use the iPad in landscape I "lost" the menus for a bit and it took me a little while to realize all I had to do was rotate the screen to get them back. I also use Google Docs for collaboration so I tried them a little from the browser and they seem to be usable. 

- Blogging. I'm writing this post on the BlogPress app for iPad. It's functional but I wish it had better editing tools. The integration to the iPad photos app is excellent. Maybe I'll try writing the post on Pages and then cut and paste into this app to post. 

- other apps. Pandora works fine but the lack of multitasking makes it not really very usable. How many times to I want to listen to the radio and do nothing else...not very often. I loaded Dragon Dictation but haven't had much chance to test the voice to text features. I like the idea of it, but we'll see how accurate it is. I love Wikipedia so I loaded the Wikipanion app and paid for the off line version (on line version is free, $5 to have it available off line, seems reasonable). I also loaded the free Adobe Ideas app but have yet to draw anything with it. 

 - wish I had: iPad versions of Skype, Tweetie 2, and OpenTable (although the iPhone version works ok). I guess that's enough for now but maybe I'll do an update after I've used it more. 

 -- Post From My iPad

What makes "CRM" social?

Social CRM is "the" hot topic these days with "experts" popping up everywhere. Last year I joined in the "let's try and define it" debate but I've moved on from that. I'm now convinced that simpler is better and I'll just agree with my friend and true social CRM expert Paul Greenberg that SCRM is really about having a conversation with your customers when, where and how the customer chooses. I've said repeatedly that social business is about changing culture NOT about new technology and that goes for SCRM as well. Now don't get me wrong, I love new technology, and certainly there are lot's of new SW products that do or could help facilitate social business and SCRM. The problem though, is that I'm starting to see SCRM talked about like it's some new module of the CRM system, you know, an add on module that magically makes your company's customer strategy social. I had a request from a client last week for a market sizing and forecast for SCRM, huh?

CRM is a customer strategy and many companies have chosen to use SW and technology as a part of that strategy. SCRM just extends that customer strategy in a few ways. Let's look at that idea a little:

What: The social web created multiple new ways for people to connect, communicate and build relationships.

How: Social tools like blogs, photo and video sharing, etc. that create social media; social platforms and apps that facilitate building social networks; social apps that open up new communication channels like micro-blogging, social platforms that facilitate the creation of communities that can use all of the previously listed methods of social interaction and the ability to carry the conversation anywhere on line that the customer chooses.

Why: Customer behavior has changed because of the social web. The availability of information has increased dramatically and the places customers look for information, support and advice have moved away from the company and it's own web presence. The social customer is just as likely to ask for help from their trusted network on Twitter or Facebook as at the company support portal. This means you, as a social company have to open up to these new communication channels and connect them to your older CRM systems and processes. Simply put, join the conversation.

None of his replaces the need for a CRM solution and customer strategy, it's an extension of strategy to change the way you engage with the social customer. Engaging your customers and building an "experience" for those customers will increase loyalty and involvement with your brand. It also open up new ways to increase customer satisfaction by delivering products that the customer wants, marketing in ways that meet customer expectations and preferences, and delivering support when, where and how they choose. By doing this you acknowledge that the customer owns their relationship with you and that you are willing to work to be relevant.