Michael Fauscette

Big Data and the New Face of Commerce

Here's a simple task, let's say you have an antique that you want to sell on eBay and you need to figure out what it's worth, what would you do? I've sold a few things on eBay and to work out at least an idea of value you can searching for similar sold items and develop sort of an average, assuming that there are some recent similar items of course. There are also, depending on the item, online or printed guide books that might help although you would have to make sure the data was reasonably current and that the guide's methodology was acceptable. The more data points and in general the more current the data the greater the chance that you could predict the right price point. In fact if you had enough data you might even be able to determine the best time to sell your specific item. In any case data's the answer and more is definitely better. I read an announcement the other day from WorthPoint, an online resource for the global antiques and collectables community, that explained its new deal to buy eBay antiques data. That data (price, descriptions and images from 150 million transactions) combined with WorthPoint's other data sources including GoAntiques.com, TIAS and leading auction houses forms the most comprehensive research database for antiques. The data is sourced from a company called Advanced eCommerce Resource Systems, the sole authorized re-licenser of eBay market data.

There are mountains of data created every day; in fact the tally for 2010 was around 1.2 zettabytes (or 1.2 trillion gigabytes) according to a study from IDC commissioned by EMC. To put that in some sort of perspective that would be about 19 billion completely full 64 GB iPads or about 800 trillion copies of the famous novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. The report also estimates that about 70% of that data is created by individuals and ranges from transaction data to all manner of socially generated content. Think about the things you do every day, shopping for groceries, bet you swiped your store card for a discount and used a debit or credit card to pay. Maybe you checked in on FourSquare when you got to the store, updated your facebook status, used a groupon coupon and even tweeted about the sale on fresh fish. Let's just say that the digital footprint you generate every day is significant and very telling directly online and offline in a variety of situations.

That's half the equation though, all of that data you generated is collected by some organization. Taken individually each data source provides some useful information but if you could aggregate it somehow, the overlap would tell a very complete story...what you like when, daily activities, interests, where you go, what catches your attention and all manner of behavioral clues.

There are three basic flavors of this data, transaction, behavioral (social) and location or contextual.  The data can be used, once aggregated and analyzed either individualized and generalized. My opening example of WorthPont's new antique database is a great example of the generalized use of this data, mostly transaction data in this use case. Generalizing the data can provide everything from pricing trends to brand sentiment or broad public opinions. Brick and mortar stores can use it for merchandising, pricing, planning ad spend, designing loyalty programs, etc.  

Individualizing the analysis of the available data can support both online and offline programs including online ad targeting, online and offline offer targeting, online dynamic pricing, individualized marketing programming, etc. Ultimately the inclusion of the behavioral and contextual data can lead to predicting future action, one of the ultimate goals for commerce. Predicting what might capture your interest, what and when you might buy, all of these are gold for merchants.

To some the discussion of this level of data collection and analysis may seem creepy or even an invasion of privacy. The key from a business perspective is to only use data that the individual has given permission to use. Some of the permissions are explicit and some is implicit though. The use of credit cards and store cards, for example, come withy implicit permission to collect and use data. On the other hand, social networks have an extensive set of permissions and controls over personal data (read the fine print though). From a business perspective it's pretty obvious why there's some much interest in finding ways to collect, analyze and use all of the data. What's just as important though is gaining an understanding of what's in it for the individual?  The benefits vary by individual and by the specific use of course but in general the use of this data can make your overall experience with a business more individualized and personal. It can also lead to better and more compelling loyalty programs, sales / offers, coupons, etc. In other words there are some very good personal benefits that are exchanged for giving up some privacy.

The use of data in retail isn't a new thing, but the amount of data and the ways it can be used is. The addition of the behavioral and contextual data to the existing transaction data is very promising, although many of these systems are pretty new but evolving quickly. Predictive analysis is particularly interesting and promising. Big data and its use is a key component in the new commerce / commerce 2.0. More innovative use is coming as the lines between online and offline blur through the growth of mobile and social commerce. This year should see some innovative new uses and systems to support that use.

Tags: commerce, big data, commerce 2.0, social, mobile, loyalty, retail

Changing Expectations

I was flying across the US last week and was really annoyed to find that my flight didn't have Wifi. I mean really, 6 hours without an Internet connection, how would I get anything done? Of course when I have an inflight connection I still find myself complaining about the speed. I'm reminded of a comedy routine that I saw on YouTube from Louis C.K. "Everything's amazing and nobody's happy". After all you're strapped to a chair at 35K feet flying at 550 mph surfing the Internet...it's a little slower than the connection in my home, I guess I can live with that.

This morning I decided to run down a little issue with my Verizon Fios account. I set it up last Fall and it works great but I did auto billing so I don't get a bill. Now that's great, it's exactly how I like it, no paper but the problem is that I want to get access to the myVerizon web site. When I try to register it asks for my Verizon Fios home phone number (I get Internet and Cable, not phone, I haven't had a land line in 6 years) or my account number. When you click on "find your account number" it shows you all of the handy places that one might look on their paper bill for that number...uh, well, I'm paperless remember. I tried to run this down months ago but gave up. Now I need access to the site for a couple of things so I thought, time to solve this. I asked for help on the site using the "chat now" feature and after a 30+ minute conversation with the support rep he tells me he can't get the account number because I don't have a phone number (yes, I know, if I had a phone number I wouldn't need the account number but the irony of that seems lost on him). Guess what I can do, call the number he gives me...and on the other end of that call, sigh, an endless IVR. I abandoned this attempt 40 minutes later...that's 70+ minutes to not solve my problem if you're counting. Now I'm happy with the service I get, although it's way over priced and I never get the actual advertised speed, it is fast and the cable is great quality. In the space of a few minutes I've gone from satisfied customer to I'm not happy. They took a simple experience and turned me sour on the whole thing mostly through some poor system design and clearly some CRM issues on the back end.

So what did I want...or what do people expect now? On one hand what I wanted was simple, to be dealt with when, where and how I choose and to have a reasonable outcome in a short amount of time. Even the chat experience was plagued by system design flaws, I filled out a form with all of my information then the chat window opened and the rep had me "verify" each data element one at a time...not a security question but everything I had already typed? As I and many of my colleagues have said over and over, it's about the customer experience today. In fact I would suggest it always was, but expectations have changed and your customers and prospects have learned that they have a voice and alternatives.

From a system design perspective I believe companies often do not try the experience from the user end, or at least not in a end to end process way. I mean if they did would the person who runs Verizon Fios customer service allowed the experience to be so poor to an otherwise happy customer whose monthly recurring investment in Verizon (7 wireless connections and home high speed Fios Internet and Fios cable) is substantial. You had me at I converted from AT&T wireless last year because you have by far the best network and switched from Comcast because your Internet speeds are way better and you even have resolved some wireless billing issues quickly and with a pretty good experience, a happy wireless customer and a happy home customer. Now break this down to the simplest issue, you can't tell me a critical piece of information that you are requiring of me to get access to my own account information online, not acceptable?

From a customer experience perspective companies have to realize that our expectations have changed significantly. Gone are the days where we didn't have choice or voice and channels to express our feelings about your brand. Word of mouth marketing is still the most powerful, remember? All businesses rely on backend systems of some form and large enterprise has gotten very complicated and sophisticated but if the reliance on the systems is screwing up your customer experience maybe it's time to evaluate your choices? Remember I want to interact with your brand (that's the good news) but I now want that interaction to provide a positive experience and be under my terms. A wake up call?

Tags: expectations, CRM, SCRM, social, SocBiz, customer service

Deltek Insight 2011

The Spring 2011 user conference season is finally winding down and for me basically ended last week as I attended my fourth Deltek Insight user conference. Deltek, a company on a multi-year journey of transformation from a sleepy family run culture to a fast growth, innovative international public software company, has always had two strong foundation blocks on which to build, a fiercely loyal customer base and a focus on project based businesses. The Deltek I saw this year looks very different from the one of four years ago, having made several key acquisitions, particularly in the last year, leveraged some key trends in social business, moved some of its portfolio into the cloud, expanded significantly internationally and made some management team adjustments to meet the needs of a company making a run to break through the $500M revenue milestone. Deltek goes to market in two distinct business lines, Government (government agencies and government contractors) and Commercial Project Based Industries (Architectural, Engineering and Construction, Advertising, PR and Marcom, Accounting, Energy and Environmental, Legal Services, IT and Management Consulting, Project Manufacturing, Nonprofit and Aero and Defense), a strategy that has been in place now for some time, but this year saw some interesting enhancements in both lines of business.

With the acquisition of European based Maconomy last year Deltek signaled its intent to make a much more aggressive move in the commercial project based business verticals. As I wrote after the announcement there was little overlap between the two companies as they focused on different micro-verticals and geo's. As expected the addition of a strong presence in Europe has started to offer many new opportunities to the Deltek Vision product and the same has proven true in the US for Maconomy's X1, as they used each product to go after a broader set of micro-verticals. To accelerate the integration of the two companies and provide a coordinated sales strategy Deltek appointed former Maconomy CEO Hugo Dorph as the EVP and GM of Architecture and Engineering and Professional Services. Dorph leads sales and marketing for Deltek Vision, People Planner and Maconomy. In a typical multi-brand portfolio approach the current plan is to continue to invest in both Vision and Maconomy, with the possibility of convergence at some point in the future. From a geographic perspective the team is seeing strong growth and activity in North America and in Europe.

On the Government side of Deltek's business there have also been some interesting changes. With three acquisitions, mySBX (now GovWin), Fed Sources and INPUT, Deltek has formed a new information solutions organization under new hire Catherine Morales, now EVP of Deltek Information Solutions. The solutions are aimed at extending up the government contracting value chain by offering content and community that help facilitate finding new opportunities, finding key partners / sub contractors and winning business in the cloud. This solution compliments another new Deltek offering, a cloud based full busines management solutions portfolio for project management, financial accounting, business development and payroll in small and medium size government contractors called Deltek First. Though not Deltek's first cloud based solution, it is the first end to end business system in the SaaS model. The combination of the content and community from the Information Solutions with full business management of Deltek First is a powerful and complete cloud based offering.

Not to be left out, larger government contracting organizations can enhance their business capabilities with the new roles based project management platform called PM Compass. PM Compass provides an integrated platform for program managers and project leaders that helps monitor, manage and report on multiple, interconnected projects and is a welcome addition to the Deltek Enterprise Project Management portfolio.

Cloud and SaaS, while the fastest growing segment of software in general has proven a difficult model for traditional on premise software companies to embrace. The transition of revenue models, sales models, relationships models and development models can be challenging and disruptive. That said, it is very important for vendors to develop a strategy for dealing with the cloud. In discussing Deltek's emerging cloud strategy with both CEO Kevin Parker and new Cloud Strategy VP Pete Mann, I found a measured and well though out approach. With the launch of Deltek First the company has a full blown end to end business solution in the cloud and can use that to gain better understanding and experience with SaaS. This knowledge will over time, translate to more of the portfolio moving into the cloud, while continuing to support on premise customers and offer customer choice for deployment models. Over the recent past Deltek has offer more of its portfolio in a subscription model, which starts to shift the overall company revenue model slowly to the recurring revenue model of future cloud offerings. With the addition of the Information Solutions, more of the product portfolio is now cloud based as well. Look to the near future to see new offerings in the other solution families, particularly on the Vision / Maconomy side of the business where there is a lot of opportunity for growth in SaaS and little competition.

Overall this year I left Insight feeling like I saw a different face of Deltek, one that builds on its strengths while showing a solid and innovative roadmap for the future. I also had an opportunity to take a glimpse at some double secret product development efforts, code named Kona, that are really dead center of some of the most compelling trends shaping the software industry today. Of course I can't say anything about it yet, but stay tuned for more. I should also mention that in conversations with Deltek's new EVP of Product Strategy and Engineering Namita Dhallen, the team is starting to roll out some new mobile capabilities and has a plan for more on that front in the near future. 

Tags: ERP, Deltek, Insight, project, cloud, govcon, professional services, SaaS

Netsuite SuiteWorld 2011, Making ERP Social

I spent time this week in San Francisco with the Netsuite team and a good cross section of customers and partners at its first annual global user conference. The conference was well managed and very well attended with over 2000 attendees. From my perspective it was also packed with content and provided an interesting view into the emerging strategy that is supposed to continue Netsuite on it current path of fast growth and global expansion. I should also point out that I had quite a bit of fun at a special reception that Netsuite hosted for some key partners, press, media, industry analysts and other special friends at Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison's San Francisco house atop Pacific Heights. As views go that one would be hard to top and the food, created by celebrity chief and restaurateur Michael Mina was fantastic.

To me there were two key themes to the announcements that have the potential to provide substantial benefit to customers and prospects while fueling additional growth for Netsuite. One of these themes is the introduction of a new tier of product offering / packaging for the Netsuite OneWorld product line called Netsuite Unlimited and targeted at the enterprise. The second theme was a host of new partnerships, not least of which are aimed at bringing significant social functionality to OneWorld. 

Netsuite's announcement of moving it's offerings up market is intriguing and perhaps very timely. Partly packaging and strategy shift, the announcement was also tied to some of the partner announcements. The new Unlimited version of OneWorld includes the complete product offering of course and has pricing tiers that scale up by seat bundles. the attack on the enterprise will, for the most part be a direct sales effort although several key partners were announced that should help get Netsuite into the competition. System Integrators (SI) will prove extremely important in the enterprise move and Netsuite added two major partners this week, accenture and McGladrey. The move up market series of announcements also included an appearance by Oracle President Mark Hurd to reinforce Netsuite's use of the Oracle Database and Fusion Middleware and also to announce Netsuite's move to offer Oracle Exadata for extreme scalability of Netsuite apps. Moving up market puts them in direct competition to the only other enterprise cloud based ERP offering from Workday and its CRM partner Salesforce.com. In theory Netsuite should already be competing with SAP;s mid-market cloud ERP offering BusinessByDesign, although Netsuite claims to never actually run across them in deals today. The move up market does not mean that they are forsaking their mid-market roots, clearly continuing aggressive sales efforts there.

I say this move up market is timely for a few reasons. First the enterprise is clearly moving more and more of it's applications to the cloud, especially after the shift in IT and corporate spending strategy caused by the tough economic conditions of the last few years. SaaS based apps also are providing much faster time to value than the on premise alternatives which also equates to faster ROI. As an example of the rapid deployment / fast return model Groupon, a new Netsuite enterprise customer, told the story on stage of deploying Netsuite OneWorld to its rapidly growing operations, 5 international markets live in 6 weeks and in the process of bringing 26 live in only 3 months. The second reason this is timely is the lack of enterprise cloud app offerings and the opportunity to gain share against on premise competitors. As I pointed out above the only other complete cloud ERP suite comes from the partnership of Workday and Salesforce.com. SAP is completely absent from the enterprise cloud ERP discussion and Oracle is only now expanding from its CRM On Demand offering to both CRM and HCM from the new Fusion Applications Suite. I should point out though, that the complete Fusion Applications suite is architected to be offer in a multi-tenant SaaS model, but Oracle has not decided to do that at present. This isn't at all negative for Oracle though, as Netsuite's "arms dealer" of choice they continue to make more money as Netsuite grows (and of course Oracle's founder Larry Ellison is the majority investor in Netsuite).  

The only real product weakness for the enterprise in OneWorld seems to be on the supply chain side of the suite. This weakness was readily admitted by Netsuite, by the way, with a promise of new and richer functionality to come shortly to address many of them. Partnering to gain key functionality is a clear part of Netsuite's strategy, for example announcing this week a new Warehouse Management System built on the SuiteCloud platform by eBizNet, an offering that was key for moving into the distribution vertical. In the mean time Netsuite continues to focus on verticals that don't require heavy duty supply chain functionality. 

The more exciting area for me this week is the move by Netsuite to incorporate social functionality into its portfolio. Netsuite could have started to address the absence of social features in its products by quickly trying to build out a new solution but instead (and perhaps wisely) decided to take the partner route by integrating to well established, more mature and feature rich social products from companies like Yammer and Qontext. Yammer, a new Netsuite partner announced this week, becomes the social glue for the entire OneWorld product by providing the social layer to the ERP system that connecting people, content, data and applications. I'm very happy to see the open approach to solving this problem, with Netsuite opening up access to the ERP suite through an open application called SuiteSocial that connects to social software like Yammer. In Netsuite CEO Zach Nelson's words it's the partnering of the system of record (Netsuite) with the system of engagement (Yammer). Partnering with Yammer also offers another important advantage, the ability to work across the enterprise and out into the ecosystem of partners, suppliers, customers, etc., as social is really about tying more than just the companies employees together. Yammer provides a business with its own internal social network but also adds the capability to create a broader business network. Overall this approach allows companies to socialize all of its enterprise processes with connectivity throughout the full ERP system back into the social activity stream from Yammer. This is an important advantage to just deploying a disconnected social layer that is not tied deeply into a companies core business software. Operationalizing social drives social adoption and the greater the adoption the greater the network effect created in the business. Or said another way, the key to success with this type of social product is in getting as many people as possible to actively use the product, the more people that use it, the more value...and the more people will want to use it. This is a great first effort in adding social into the ERP system, but I'd say now Netsuite should look to adding a community management platform partner, connecting to new social support channels in the CRM module, a feature rich socialytics platform and perhaps offering an embedded social platform for activities like blogging and wiki's.

Congratulations to Netsuite on a very engaging and well run event and on some very interesting content. Time will tell of course but I think the company is on track in many areas and seems to be particularly strong in leveraging both it's platform / ISV partners and in pulling in significant strategic partnerships to add value to its product portfolio quickly.

 Tags: Netsuite, SuiteWorld, OneWorld, Groupon, Yammer, Social ERP, SocBiz, Oracle

Conversations

Businesses operate because of conversations, this is not some great new revelation. We like to talk about how social is about enabling conversations like it's something revolutionary and new but that's just not true. I was preparing to give a talk to a group of sales executives this week on what social business can do for sales people and I actually put on a slide that social is about conversations, when it hit me how silly it sounds to tell sales people they should have conversations with customers. I'm pretty sure that if anybody in a business understands the importance of conversations it would be the sales team. If they don't they don't last long as a sales person or maybe the business itself doesn't survive. So why do we keep talking about conversations if at least part of the business has always been "social"?

Maybe conversation isn't the right word to use here? I think the issue is bringing interactivity to all parts of the business, not just the sales team. You think about it, there are places across the business that should be having conversations or better yet, interacting with customers, suppliers, employees and partners but have we constructed many of those functions so that they can be interactive with each other? Conversation implies two things, talking and listening, but I'm afraid we often forget about the listening part. I had to make a call to a customer support line this past week and of course I was greeted with those dreaded words "please listen carefully as our options have changed". Those systems are called IVR by the way, which stands for interactive voice response, now why does that make me shudder? I have a hard time calling what I was doing with the automated system "interactive"! All I wanted was a conversation but it took me ten minutes to get to a person so I could accomplish my intended purpose. In some old business paradigm I guess that was acceptable but in 2011, it is not. 

If customers (and partners, suppliers and employees for that matter) want to have conversations with you "when, where and how" they choose then I think many businesses are in trouble today. The issue is control, businesses "constructed" the methods for holding these conversations the way it wanted to. Unfortunately the social web has given everyone new, better, real time, loud and uncontrolled communication channels that reach around those systems constructed by companies trying to control the conversations. For product support, for example, I used to accept that I had to go to the product manufacturer and use whatever system they had constructed to get what I needed. That's no longer the case though, as I'm much more likely to search on Google for an answer to my issue, or perhaps ask on Facebook, Twitter or Quora for assistance rather than go to the company sponsored method of interacting. I will also complain loudly and in a public way if I don't get satisfaction from dealing with your brand (think "United Breaks Guitars" if you want to understand the potential for brand damage from the tools available today for airing customer complaints). The same is true for getting product information. In the last decade I shifted from using company sponsored information sources to trusted recommendations from existing customers and from my social graph. It's a lot about simplicity and availability but it also is driven by trust. I trust my social networks because I have some established relationship with them, I may not (or is that probably not) have a trust relationship with the vendor. If I did, the vendor would have the opportunity to engage me in a conversation but if not, that opportunity is much less available.

Conversations need to happen across your business, that you cannot deny. How they happen however is the real issue I think. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that building a better web site will get more people there or using some automated system will suffice as a conversation but that's just not true anymore (if it ever was). I overheard a conversation the other day on the use of Twitter that to me shows how wrong you can be in trying to be right. The "expert" advised the business owner that an automated response on Twitter was perfectly acceptable as an acknowledgement of a customer's support inquiry. An auto responder on email is common practice and I guess we're numb to it, although frankly I don't think it's acceptable on that channel either. On Twitter it is NOT ACCEPTABLE. I engage on Twitter to have conversations with people, not machines and in real time. If you choose to engage on Twitter and set the expectation that you will engage there, then you had better invest in people to manage the channel. Customer expectations have changed and the definition of what is acceptable has changed, you need to learn the new rules.

That all sounds defensive and I guess in some ways it needs to be, but the social web also opens up some great opportunities to change the conversation with customers, employees, suppliers and partners and perhaps build a relationship where none could have existed before. Building ongoing relationships with existing customers and thereby creating a "loyal" customer, at least for most businesses, is far superior to trying to generate business from new customers. Getting new customers is much more expensive than keeping existing customers (at least usually) and an ongoing customer opens up opportunities to gain better insight into what customers want as well as engaging them in ways that can yield much better and more successful products. It goes back to trust, relationships are built on trust so by inference you are gaining greater customer trust if they are willing to continue to interact with your company in a positive way (there's no trust relationship involved in brand bashing, just in case you wondered).

While conversations are not new to business the idea of having many open real time channels through which you can have those conversations is. So that's really what I'm talking about, using new social channels to have more and better quality conversations across the business. Sales can leverage these channels of course, but extending the use to marketing and especially customer service can have a big impact on the relationship with customers. I've talked about using social tools to add both customer communities and new communication channels to support in detail so I won't belabor the point. The idea of changing marketing from broadcast to conversation is a message that sometimes gets lost though. Marketing in many ways is generally broadcast focused and I guess that this new conversation paradigm might be a little uncomfortable at first, but once used, the level of engagement is well worth the change.

Internally the concept of conversation is also no less important. Conversation is one of the tools that can help destroy employee silos, not alone of course, but if supported by the right cultural changes and incentives it's a good place to start. The same principals that apply to conversations with customers and employees will also work on suppliers and partners. I'll save that for another post though. So what do you think, can businesses really open up to conversations across the organization?

Tags: conversation, SCRM, social, customer, e2.0, social business, socbiz, communication, engagement, sales

Let's Make a Deal: Social Offers

Groupon's IPO is potentially valued up to $25 billion and it's subscriber base is doubling once a quarter, LivingSocial raised $400M in venture funding, Scoutmob nails $1.5M in it's first funding round, FourSquare hits 3M daily check ins and Facebook announced it's second "deal" type offering last week. You don't have to look far to find some sort of online "deal" these days, and when I say deal I mean up to 90% discounts! Even AT&T wants to get a piece of this pie (in case you missed it, they launched a daily deals offer today from subsidiary YellowPages.com).

So what's this all about anyway? Well, I've talked about the impending change to commerce (social, mobile, local and the merging of on and off line) before (a couple of other posts here and here), but deal offers, especially if they incorporate some social sharing are taking on an important role in this change. Deals drive traffic (on and off line), or at least they're supposed too; and perhaps they even help build or increase customer loyalty and repeat business.

There are basically two types of deal offerings, the daily offer, which seems to be the fastest growing at this point, and location based deals (instead of locals deals, which fits both categories). In the daily offer approach a coupon is offered online for a deep discount to some business for an item or service. The consumer buys the coupon up front then goes to the business to redeem it. On most of these sites you can also buy the coupon as a gift or refer the offer to a friend. To see the offers the deals company usually only collects your email but to buy they need more data, or in most cases you can sign up with Facebook (thus giving the site more data to help target the deals in the future). The leaders in daily deals are Groupon and LivingSocial, but Facebook new offering is this type and both Google and AT&T are also moving into the daily deals business. While Groupon and LivingSocial have a significant lead in daily deals there are many new competitors and with the likes of Google, Facebook and AT&T jumping in this space will be hotly contested. Facebook in particular has some interesting advantages that could prove to be significant in this race, not counting it's 600M + members. For instance it's healthy mobile presence, the deep personal data for targeting, a newsfeed to display and feed viral expansion of deals through it's significant member base and the potential to use Facebook credits as a form of payment (at launch you can only use Facebook credits for vouchers for things like tickets to events, not for physical goods). AT&T power in wireless could certainly create some buzz around mobile deals, both through its YellowPages app and on a mobile browser. All of these deals vendors charge the company for doing the offer (presumably that's true of AT&T also, but since it launched in test mode today, I'm not positive).

Location based deals are the second type. Now I suppose daily deals are location based as well, but not targeted to your specific location, just your general area / city. Location based deals are tied to your personal context (location and time) and are offered in real time. There are several players in this space including FourSquare (although they've been quite slow to pursue this business IMHO), Facebook Check-in-Deals, Scoutmob and Groupon Now. The idea is to push offers to you based on location and other know factors ranging from time of day to loyalty programs membership and other transaction data. The more relevant the deal, the more likely it would be used. Differing from daily deals, customers don't pay up front for location based deals, only at time of executing the transaction. Personally I think that location (and context) based deals have a more interesting opportunity for local businesses and could even be tied to store loyalty programs. One has to wonder, with its strong ties to local businesses, why Yelp hasn't gone down this path.

Both types of deals have local focus and as such are really targeted at small and medium size businesses.  The concepts work fine for SMB's but could they scale to large enterprise? Frankly I don't think so, they would be very difficult for most large enterprise to coordinate and manage at that scale. There is another player in the deals space though, that is targeted at the large enterprise and has the ability to manage these deals at scale though multiple channels including Facebook. Social marketing automation vendor Crowd Factory includes the functionality to manage enterprise deals offerings and is doing so for some very large and respected brands (marquee customer list here). Enterprise deals management as a part of social marketing automation is a promising offering and Crowd Factory has a good lead with this functionality.

 The final question I think though, is do deals increase loyalty and bring in recurring business? I have no doubt that daily deals bring in more traffic, that seems clear. I wonder though, if traffic equates to recurring customer revenue? The depth of discount from some of the sites (up to 90%) might not really bring in the type of customer that the business expects. Facebook has some advantages here, both because they are focusing on better targeting instead of deeper discounts and because the nature of Facebook interaction could lead to quicker viral sharing and increased uptake of deals through trust-filtering. I guess that remain to be seen, still I'd advise that businesses clearly think through what they want out of the deals offer before they commit to a vendor and an approach.

Tags: deals, groupon, living social, google, facebook, location based, foursquare, marketing, crowd factory

Social Business Solution Vendors

I keep a list of all of the social software vendors I talk to and as I was updating it this morning I realized that it might prove useful to provide it here. Now it's certainly not ranked in any way, nor is it complete. I'm sure there are some companies that I've left off, and if you know of any please put them in the comments. The solutions for social business use are evolving rapidly and there are new offerings popping up all of the time and the more established social vendors are consolidating. I also expect that larger enterprise vendors will do their share of roll ups this year, as evidenced by Salesforce.com's recent acquisition of Radian6. For basic categories I'm using what is a loose interpretation of a social taxonomy that we (IDC) plan to publish later this summer. I won't provide the detail for each, but here's a brief guide:

• Social Software: Broad social enabling technologies including collaboration, social networking, and other enterprise 2.0 software.
• Social CRM: Customer facing social solutions
  • Community Management: Software than enables effective management of a customer community
  • Support Channels: Software that provides a connection between traditional support software and public social channels like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.
  • Sales Intelligence: Software that facilitates the collection and analysis of social data in the context of sales prospecting and sales execution
  • Social Marketing Automation: Software that assist in the execution and optimization of social marketing campaigns across multiple social channels.
• Socialytics: Applications that collect and analyze social data to support decision making.
• Commerce: Software that enables the use of social concepts in some phase of commerce, both on and off line and including BtoB and BtoC.
• Innovation Management: Solutions that enable companies to more effectively manage the product development process to involve a broader set of stakeholders including customers and employees, often employing crowdsourcing / ideasourcing concepts.

Social Business Solutions
Social Software (including e2.0 and collaboration)	Social CRM				Socialytics	Commerce	Innovation Management
	Community Management	Support Channels	Sales Intelligence	Social Marketing Automation
Jive Software	Lithium Technologies	Salesforce.com	Oracle	Hearsay Social	Radian6 / Salesforce.com	Ariba	BrightIdea
Moxie	Jive Software	Attensity	Salesforce.com	Crowd Factory	SAS	ShopIgniter	Spigit
IBM Lotus	Get Satisfaction	Oracle	InsideView	Mzinga	SAP Business Objects	INGage Networks	uservoice
Kick Apps	Sword/Ciboodle	RightNow	LinkedIn	Attensity	Trampoline Systems	Facebook	INGage Networks
Powered	RightNow		Nimble	Awareness	Attensity	Groupon
INgage Networks	Communispace		Visibiz		Lithium	LivingSocial
Mzinga	Telligent				INGage Networks
SocialText	LiveWorld
BlueKiwi	Joomla
Socialcast	INGage Networks
Yammer	Mzinga
Rypple	SocialText
CrowdCast	LiveWorld
Newsgator	IBM Lotus Connections
Salesforce.com	Igloo Software
CoHuman
Mainsoft
Central Desktop
Huddle
Sococo
Vidyo
Cisco
Meetzi
Itensil
Clearvale / Broadvision
Novell Vibe
Nimble

So there's my list, who did I miss?