AxelS
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The End Of Email

I blogged about it a few weeks ago in a different context. But I’d like to shed more light on the dieing email technology. Yes, yes, yes, It will live on for a long time – but it’s the end of it’s relevance – and therefor eventually die.

My email account receives on average 36,000 emails a month. About 30,000+ are filtered by the server based spam filter. I don’t even notice those 30,000 – other than in a mail server log file saying – deleted 31,074 spam emails.
From the remaining 6,000 email about 5,000 get filtered by my local spam filter. So I end up with about 35 emails per day of which 50% I still care less, 15 – 20 may be informative and 5-10 are real important.
In other words 0.5% of the email volume is important.
Or: 99.5% of emails are a waste of bandwidth, wast of money as I need to buy and maintain spam filters. It’s a sad illusion for customers who trust marketers that they can “deliver the message”.
OK – I get more than 5-10 important messages a day – much more but I get them through different ways. People contact me via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter direct messages, text me, skype me and so forth. Only 20% of what is relevant to me comes through email – and steadily declining. Friends, customers and peers know – if something is REALLY important they skype me.

Now – you may say but if 5-10 are very important you can’t throw it over board. Right ! But it tells me that there will (hopefully soon) somebody come up with a cool new idea to get those 10 important messages to me without all the overhead of spam and filters.

I look forward to the day I can announce that I no longer use email – which I predict will happen within the next 18 month.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS

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All social sites on your blog

It’s been messy to put all your social sites on your blog, your website, your email signature and worst of all – your business card. If you have a twitter account, you have only one URL to tell your friends where else they can connect with you. On your blog the same.

Check out http://xeesm.com you see it here on my blog as an embedded script. You see it on my website as an embedded script, you see it on my email signature and many more places.

Change one – changed all others
The neat thing is: If I add or remove a site, like I recently added imeem, it appears on all sites and anywhere I use my XeeSM automatically. Check the XeeSM fan page, quite some more cool blog posts from other users.

A natural connection booster
The most surprising effect however was that so many of my friends and contacts connect on other places simply because they just didn’t know I have a presence there too. And that drove their friends to connect with me too.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS

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Why most small / medium businesses struggle with social media.

Where is the expected added business?

Social media appears to be a new marketing tool. It looks like a new way to get closer to customers, win some more deals, creating a new communication channel. But where is the new business?

How can I turn it into an $800 Million business?
It was just a little bit too simple. And like anywhere else, there is no free lunch. But social media has a huge potential. It wasn’t just for fun that Zappos, an online shoe retailer was acquired for $800 Million dollar by Amazon. So what is it that makes social media work for some and not for others?

It is actually only one tiny difference:
For some social media is a new marketing channel, get done with it and go on with business as usual. Honestly, how could that work? For others social media is a whole new way of doing business with existing customers, partners and the rest of the market across all departments. Yes, it needs some thinking – but again, there is no free lunch. The latter ones are the winner.

Customers across all industries complain that the vendors, channels and suppliers they deal with provide a mediocre to lousy service, the companies are not approachable and nobody seem to listen. Businesses are so busy with themselves fighting the “business climate” that they seem to oversee that the most important aspect of getting business up are happy customers. Obviously even the coolest social media campaign won’t help at all – if the rest of the company does business as usual. If Customers complain about approachability social media can help to get the team more approachable. If service is a weakness, social relationships between service team and customer would be a great deal of improvement. If products lack functionality requested by users, social media is a great way to connect product management with the market. Interestingly enough, in none of the above scenarios a “cool social media marketing campaign” is the weakness or even required to engage.

How to solve the problem:
1) Understand that social media is a cross functional engagement
2) Don’t hire an external social media team but create a social culture internally
3) Keep sales in charge of customer relationships – but in a more social way
4) Make product development more approachable and listen to the market by being part of the social web
5) Ask marketing to help gather data and reports from the social web and escalate alerts inside the organization
6) Develop a strategy based on a thorough social media assessment
7) Engage in the social web with the goal to increase customer advocacy
8) Have a small team well educated and professionally execute the strategy

The Social Media Academy conducts a complimentary webinar this Friday Aug 14, with further details on the topic.

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Sorry – I unfollowed you

Since I started Twitter in 2007 I followed all kinds of people and over 25,000 followed and unfollowed me over time. I used other tools to get through the noise and a few weeks ago I started to unfollow. I am down at around 1,500 right now. Why 1,500? See further down – let me first say who and how.

Who did I unfollow?
1) People who have “I make you rich” or “follow me I follow you” in their bio.
2) People who still today have no photo up
3) People who have their dog or cat instead of their own photo. I understand you love your dog – but I’m not tweeting with your dog
4) People with over 10,000 followers and still follow more than they have followers. People collect all kinds of things, stamps, photos tinker toys – and today: Connections. Not my cup of tea.
5) If you didn’t tweet in the last 90 days – tell me when you are back – happy to re-follow if it’s interesting
6) People who basically RT all day long to stay in the game, I check carefully – some are actually very nice – others I just don’t care.
7) Random noise & Bandwidth eater. Now if you read so far, please read this carefully: I don’t follow if it is all about walking your dog. I LOVE people talking about there personal life as well – what they had for dinner and so forth but only if that is not ALL I read. I like the complexity of business, family, fun, personal, and what ever constitutes you. We humans are complex anumals and can assemble a social picture in seconds – challenge my ability to do that.

How did I grind through thousands of connections? I used a cool tool called refollow.com. It does it all. You can filter and slice and dice and then mass unfollow.

Who should NOT do this?
If you are follower collector, you shouldn’t do that because your followers will go down right away. Many who auto follow (that’s how you get many followers in the first place) have their tools also do auto un-follow – so you would loose all those who followed you automatically. In other words if Twitter is your follower game platform – it ruins your game ;-)

Now why down to 1,500?.
In accordance to Dunbar, an average human being is limited to about 150 social relationships as a meaningfull number. The limitation is our neocortex. But just a few hundred years ago we couldn’t fly, we couldnet lift much more than our own body weight and had many other limitations. What the industrial revolution did to our physical productivity – the social revolution does to our social productivity – So my “Axel-Factor” is to be able to socialize with 10 times as many as Dunbar’s number is – or about 1,500 people thanks to the social tools we have.

@AxelS
http://xeesm.com/AxelS
(XeeSM is my approachability utility)

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Developing a social media strategy – prevent flops

The best way to prevent social media flops is to create a sound strategy in the first place. It sounds a lot of work and too much for many small businesses but this model has proven to work even in small organizations:

* ASSESSMENT
Social Media Assessment (4 quadrant assessment model) find out where your customers are, where they hang out and what is on their mind. Takes you a week or two to make it right. But you learn more than ever before. If you feel you know already – this is your first red flag to a social media flop. Check your customers presence, research how your brand is seen in the market, research your partners and your competitors.

* SWOT
The assessment leads you to a good ol’ SWOT analysis. You will find out what your (brand, product, service) strengths and weaknesses are from a market point of view – develop your opportunity and threat profile. You do that in a few hours.


* STRATEGY
Now since you know more about your market from a social connection and conversation point of view develop your strategy: Goals objectives, value to the market, major activities to achieve your goals, resources, budgets. Develop a strategy team that includes some of your customers (the X-Team) – that is the most magic difference to old world strategies. May take a few days and online conference calls. But if you do it without your customers – you flop – guaranteed.

* PROGRAMS
Once the strategy is sealed, you construct and execute your programs together with your X-Team. Instead of the old model of blowing something into the market you work with the market. May take a week or two to develop. The key to successful programs is PARTICIPATION and CONTRIBUTION. Each program need to be designed that your eco system contributes and other participates. Otherwise it is just yet another marketing splash – random noise. But your X-Team will prevent you from that type of campaigns anyway.

* REPORTING
The key like in any other business project: Measure, Model and Tune your activities until they are truly successful. Select the right tools and monitor your activities daily – some in real time.

So all in all it may take a few weeks – but you have a wonder weapon – versus yet another boring marketing campaign nobody is listening to.

Make a difference WITH your market!

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Social Media Evolution

ComStar, a Cross Functional Organization Model and Strategy for Social Media engagement

When companies begin to engage in social media they typically start in the marketing department with some rather tactical marketing campaigns. In those early models a large company either hired some social media “experts” to do the campaign or found some engaged people internally. The rest of the organization does “business as usual”. The problem quickly surfaces in sales “What are these guys talking to my customers”, on the service side “what are they promising to our clients”, and the product management team still doesn’t get any feedback how to better launch the next generation products. While it is obvious that social media is a key method to create a better customer experience, a better way to listen to the market, a faster way to react to needs and a less expensive way to become part of the market, the “social media marketing campaigns” alone can’t do the job. An isolated “campaign” is often counter productive and it would be better to just not engage at all.

Learning from the early experiences we developed a holistic approach, a cross functional organization model that is able to carry out a social media strategy. The so called ComStar model integrates all departments that have a touch point with the market into the social engagement strategy. Only a small core of social media trained and experienced people is necessary to help steer even large global enterprises into a new direction. An internal social media strategy and it’s leverage effect makes it possible.

At it’s core, the ComStar Model has one principle:
– Develop a social media service team (SMST) that supports all departments in the organization
The SMST members do not necessarily tweet, blog, comment themselves instead empowers others to do so.
Similar to IT team, finance support or HR that services an entire company, the SMST functions the same way.

With the ComStar Model, the SMST (Social Media Service Team) is the guardian angel of the social media strategy. The main objective is to inspire, motivate and service the strategy relevant departments such as marketing, sales, service, product management, HR and other. The departments in turn engage with the customer base, prospects and the market in a whole. In this model the SMST is the cordial spine for the engagement, while sales keeps the control and the relationship to their customers (even so in a different more social manner), marketing keeps being the creative part in the new engagement model “not pushing the message” but fueling the conversation, product managers get the tools and methods to better listen to needs of the market and service teams get the support to be better integrated in customer issues.

Behavioral changes of “the old guard” in particular on the sales side are as painful as necessary. Change has never been an easy task. But also change has never been more important and has never shown more successful results like today. Creating some fan pages and a few tweets don’t create a better customer experience – nor does it generate the often promised millions of additional revenue. But a great and ongoing trust building relationship with the market does, as we can see in cases like Zappos.

We will present the model in greater detail on
Fri, Aug 14, 2009 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PDT
Leasdership Series Webinar
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/404589362

Agenda:
– Social media impact to our business operations
– ComStar, an organization model for social media strategies
– Comparing structural differences
– Implementation challenges
– Job description, work flow and responsibilities
– Motivation and compensation considerations
– Cross functional reporting models
– A holistic view to corporate social media

Registration:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/404589362

Axel Schultze Axel Schultze MyXeeSM

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Spoken Word

Silicon Valley Offline Social Get Together – July 21

Please join our friend Julie, who runs an awesome restaurant called Neumanalia in a less so obvious place for a great restaurant: Hayward, CA.
Next week Tuesday – July 21, 2009 | 7:30 – 10:00 PM
French / American Cuisine
!!!
Spoken Word
 spotlightNeed a chance to express yourself?
Want to hear what others are doing, seeing, thinking?

What is Spoken Word?

Spoken Word is a form of literary art or artistic performance in which lyrics, poetry or stories are spoken rather than sung. “open mike”

Join us for an evening of fun and companionship in a great setting.
Special Bar Menu !!!
Wine $7.00
Premium Beer $4.00

742 B Street
Hayward, California 94541
510.583.9744

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PayPal Case Study – Social Media Ignorance

Paypal was one of the first online payment services and had a great start but over time lost the edge. The company seems to struggle with their internal administration and adjusting their business processes to meet customer needs.

Company Background
Paypal has 160 million customers
Their support centers work shifts and deal with approximately 60,000 support cases every day.
Over 1,000 support people handle on average 60 calls per day.
You cannot email or use other ways of communication than phone, fax or post.

Support team
To deal all day long with frustrated customers is not a very pleasant job, so fluctuation is rather high and the level of competency very low. It takes on average three calls to find a competent person. Some customers suggest you don’t use a case number as you don’t want to get back to the same person.
Most of the support calls are very low level issues with routine answers, nothing special, simply based on lack of user help and a pretty confusing system administration (a user voice nails it: “This is done by a bunch of engineers and never reviewed by business people”). Many functions are even unclear to the internal teams. Support staff admits it is not very intuitive if it is anything other than pushing the pay now button. Everybody can read that in great detail in thousands on public complains.

Customer Experience
People still really like the product. Some even donated a website like This Link Lots of discussions with thousands of valuable inputs that – as it appears- non of the paypal people ever read. Paypal instituted a feedback form that customers are asked to fill out after each and every support case. Even so many people probably are too angry to even bother, some do, I did. But that source of customer feedback evaporates in the dysfunctional organization.

More Market Research?
Now the latest hit was that I received an invitation to participate in a survey – yet I have to be “elected” to join. However I get $200 if I participate after I am elected. But it looks like I have to drive to Mountain View to do the in person interview. A “market research institute” actually is doing the gigg. I don’t want to know what that cost in total.

So here is a company that has free feedback from millions of users and thousands of cases but just doesn’t bother to care – instead pays a research institute to create yet another source of feedback?

Paypals Social Web Presence
There is a paypal account on twitter, mainly tweeting “please follow us so we can DM you” – 63 updates, following 123 people
There are hundreds of paypal groups on Facebook from paypal fans to paypal frustrated customers
There are 18 groups focusing on paypal on LinkedIn with over 3,000 members
There are paypal customers on MySpace and many other sites, the feedback is priceless.
Yet paypal seem just not to care.

Even internally people know what the issues are: A support person inside paypal (very nice and very professional) “…I know, we asked numerous times to fix those issues but nobody seem to listen”.

How to actually fix the problem
Social Media for Paypal could become a life saver. Not as a marketing gigg but to improve and fix a dysfunctional operation.
1) At first a company team would aggregate and distill the customer feedback using established assessment methods and available reporting tools.
2) Then develop a customer supported advisory board and rigorously execute – fixing the top issues.
3) Tackle more problems and just grind through the list from top to bottom.
4) Ask the folks from “paypal sucks” groups and sites to HELP.
5) Using the, by then established, processes to figure out how new features need to be developed (co-creation)
6) Get feedback in a structured way through groups and networks rather than through useless questionnaires
7) Create forums where customers help customers, supported by maybe even less but better educated paypal support people

Non of the above has anything to do with sales or marketing – just building a better company.

Who Is Responsible?
Is this the responsibility of Dickson Chu Vice President of Global Product and Experience? Or is it Ryan D. Downs Senior Vice President, Worldwide Operations? Or is it Scott Guilfoyle Senior Vice President, Platform Services? Or Barry Herstein Chief Marketing Officer? Philipp Justus Senior Vice President, Global Markets, responsible for growing the company? Everybody has his/her fair share.

But No, Scott Thompson, the President is the one who need to engage his executive team in a cross functional initiative to fix the dysfunctional organization.

Social media is not a cool marketing gigg – it is a strategic engagement to react to the major changes in our society reflected by changing customer behavior and an ever more demanding market.

Axel Schultze Axel Schultze MyXeeSM
Social Media Academy

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How to start in social media?

I get more and more of the very same question: “Axel, I finally decided to get into the social media thing, do you have some advice?”

OK – too long ago I started from scratch, so everybody please chime in and add to it.

1) Give your engagement a purpose (other than just trying it out or selling something). For instance: You may want to learn more about your customers, you may want to help others in an area of your expertise, you may want to know more about your partners, you may want to learn what issues your customers have, you may want to learn from others about an area where you feel you are rather weak… Again don’t sell and don’t be as boring as “expand my network”.

2) Start on two places: let’s say LinkedIn and Facebook. Create your profile by:
– Adding a picture of yours, don’t make it too special amongst the 6 billion you are unique enough as you are
– Add your real name, your real background. No need to hide anything – it is out there anyway.
– Be open, the more information you provide the approachable you appear.

3) Social networking is about connections, conversations, exchanging experience… Invite all your friends from your address book to join you in your engagement. Don’t select only 5 or 10 – don’t be shy, you may be surprised who else is already there for years. So invite them all. If you are not comfortable to invite 1,000 – they only get an invitation from one – YOU. Don’t embarrass any of your friends, contacts or alliances by not connecting with them.

4) In the next few days you may be busy with confirming invitations, thanking them that they connect and asking them for their experience. They may have good tips for you as well. Keep the dialog over the next few weeks – make sure you leverage the connection for conversations – not just as yet another address book.

5) Now look for some groups with interesting topics or interesting people. Don’t forget your purpose by selecting the groups. Sign up with 2 or three, get familiar with the conversations. If you like it chime in, if not you may as well just leave the group. Once in the group: Don’t sell but just develop your skills and help others develop their skills with what ever expertise you may have. You will see others trying to sell something – don’t imitate (we’ll get to that later).

6) You are now a few weeks into it. You may wonder how much time you spend with no results. If that is the case: Your conversations or your network may have not been in line with your purpose. Or you may wonder how many wonderful and helpful people you met in such a short period of time – great – you are right on track.

7) The selling and doing business with those people almost reach the melting point. When can you go out and do business, sell something take orders….? Give it some more time. The social web is like a secret society you don’t get to the secret in the first few levels.

8) By now you may feel good about exploring other places and spaces. You may want to signup with Twitter and follow conversations that are in line with your purpose. Search for specific terms and check the people out. Also here, invite the people who are relevant to you and your purpose and follow them. Forget all the hype around getting thousands of followers. You are here for a reason – people who collected stamps in the past collect followers now – I guess you are not one of them.

9) Other places may be of interest: Create a little clip on your laptop and post it on YouTube, upload your presentations on SlideShare, store your bookmarks on Digg. You may find a few other interesting tools based on recommendations from friends. By now you do a lot of things and use a lot of tools based on recommendations from friends.

10) You are getting into the upper levels of the secret society. You learned a lot based on recommendations. You started tell others about your experience and recommend the tools to others. You retweet, write it to others on their wall… YOU NOTICE BY NOW: You never saw an advertising from LinkedIn or Twitter, you never received a cold call from any of the tools vendors you use. Nobody ever sold you something but you may already pay for some of the extras or reporting tools that help you follow your purpose. You may recognize: All it takes is recommendations. If somebody would have called you at home to use “Friends-or-Follower” you may have dropped it because thats the last thing you want.

11) As you join more groups you recognize the guys who ask hundreds of questions, answer the question right away and put a URL you should visit. Thousands of SEO and outsourcer try to sell you that way – and I’m sure like anybody else you just hate it. You reached an important point of understanding. Selling and advertising in the social web just doesn’t work. But you have this wonderful group of people who helped you and you helped them. And while you still want to do business, introduce your solutions and make a living you learned by now RECOMMENDATION is the currency in the business web. Recommendation = conversation, conducted by others. And maybe you experienced it already – other people recommend you and maybe even your business or products because what you produce or sell is helpful to somebody else.

12) You look back – probably 6 or more month passed by. You are proud that you made it through the maze of valuable and stupid information, through people you met and others you have known for many years. Your initial goals may be achieved and you feel good about the social web. Now you may take it to a whole new level – take your company and help the entire team to make sense out of all this. Make your team and your business partners a helpful hand to your customer base and your industry. Work with your customers and make them so happy that they RECOMMEND you. They can do that much better than you ever will in your life. When all the connections of all your team mates and partners recommend your products and services because they are helpful to others you become one of the top successful business person – without selling a thing.

Axel Schultze Axel Schultze MyXeeSM

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Shocking report – How Teenagers Consume Media

How Teenagers Consume Media
the report that shook the City | Business | guardian.co.uk” ( This Link )

What is shocking to me: What pretty much everybody is talking about finally shook the British Guardian.

More shocking: There is no way to comment on this report. It is electronically “printed” with no way to interact. I have to admit I haven’t been on a news paper site for quite a long time and recognized that this seems still to be the standard.

At the New York Times you have to sign in to “recommend” an article. But also wait until all adds are loaded.

However on SF Chronicle you can provide a comment on pretty much everything. So why spend $200 Million on a new printing press?

Axel

Axel Schultze Axel Schultze MyXeeSM

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Your Twitter Profile Sucks

Too many people wonder why their followership doesn’t work too well, get unfollowed or not followed in the first place. Starting with a good profile seems to be essential:

1) Give your account your real name

2) Have a photo up – any photo as long as it is YOU

3) Point people to your main URL (check http://xeesm.com)

4) Mix your profile well (not your resume, not some funky info – just what is your main concern

5) Custom wallpaper is nice but definitely the last thing I improve

6) Your location is more than a courtesy – people look for others in their vicinity

7) Don’t "protect" your profile – protected means "don’t touch me" and many including me just never even ask to get in touch.

8) Understand that 3 values are part of your profile: Followers, Following, Updates

9) UPDATES is a big influencer of your profile – some people check older tweets as well. Tweet what you think makes sense to your network – mix personal and business aspects in a healthy way.

10) Let pretty much everybody know that you are on Twitter – trust me it helps a lot.. Thought I share this with the group.

Axel

http://xeesm.com/AxelS

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Social Site Manager


We are starting a new service today: XeeSM.com

Share all your social network locations through a single URL. Try it for free: Http://xeesm.com/ Get a low user ID

Did you ever had these issues:
– Like to get more than one URL into Twitter?
– Wonder how many places to list on your email signature?
– Need to decide what to list on your business card?
– Need to make a change and update 25 different places?

You only need one URL: XeeSM.com/yourname

In XeeSM you have all your most current social networks, blog, communities. Such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare, Blog, Website, Wiki… And if you have to change something, you do it one time in XeeSM and don’t need to update all the other places.

Please check it out and let us know what you think

Axel

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Social Media Rock Star or Social Media Business Consultant?

The social web has been explored and rapidly taken over by the business world. What was limited to a social marketing campaign just a year ago to make some cool noise for coffee, skittles or a new blender is today strategically dissected.

The social media rock stars who do a few campaign masterpieces are finding new competition from business process savvy consultants who take social media way beyond the campaign level on the marketing side.

Social Media in product marketing and product design plays a wildly important role. Co-creation is the known buzzword, listening to customers and building the right next-generation product the executable part of it. Social media empowered support organizations leverage engaged users and support the “user support user” paradigm through social media in a whole new way.

Logistics and procurement departments conquer old supply chain problems such as customer buying trends and customer purchase behavior with social media where social web analytics serve as a much more precise early warning systems than anything we had in the past.

While LinkedIn is the prototype for job hunters and recruiters – HR or better said HT (Human Talents) has gone way beyond search techniques and use social media for skill identification beyond the profile, team communication, project qualification and much more.

The social media marketing campaign is only one piece of the cross functional social media puzzle. And today it is actually one of the last pieces to be put in place. Even before developing a social media strategy a comprehensive assessment – assessing customers, brand, partners and competitors – is typically the starting point. Following a traditional SWOT analysis, a social media strategy is developed based on components such as Purpose, Objectives, Benefits Actions, and a sound reporting framework. Resource allocation management and funds allocation including ROI calculations are standard elements in a professional social media tool box.

Now – to do all that – professionally trained business consultants may join the “Social media rock stars” with their 100,000 Twitter followers. In my experience – if all you want to do is a cool social media campaign and get a ton of followers – you are not much further along than the ones who hope to get 100 Million eye balls through sponsored links – no matter what the value of those are. But if you honestly care about your customers and try to develop a profoundly better customer experience – then think beyond the “cool” and start building a holistic cross-functional strategy – so that service, support, product design and sales are a homogeneous force and the customer experience is something your customer recognizes.
Some of the consultants who are working more strategically may be less visible in the social web – but does that mean they are less effective in their work? Are the pros working in the background the ones who really spin the web – way beyond the “cool”?

@AxelS

Social Media Academy

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AxelS

The Oracle – Yahoo Deal

Yahoo is up for sale. Microsoft has a tradition: You mess with them twice they never talk to you a third time. Would Google buy Yahoo? No. Who else? SAP? Not a fit, not happening. Oracle? Hmmmm – let’s think about that one.

Oracle just bought Sun and turning Sun into a cloud computing power house. Probably rearrange the software part, integrating professional services, shutting down MySQL, and decommissioning the hardware box sales over time.

Now – Oracle is thinking Social-CRM, they have a cool online community, they are very much SaaS and Web 2.0 aware (even if they don’t produce yet). While maintaining their existing enterprise business, they will migrate carefully into the networked world – built from ground up on: yes, their own cloud.

The first meaningful application: Search. A search server farm is a cloud on its own. So here is a fit too. Oracle is bold and crazy enough to pull this off.

Oracle could even become the SaaS, Search, Social Web cloud provider for their own acquisitions plus the rest who is out there.

The benefit for the users? Huge. Oracle is the last company that would build an advertising based business model. Hence search may become a whole new user experience.

Search is over 10 years old and there was zero progress for the user – only for the advertiser. We still struggle with 10,000,000,000 search results generated in 0.0007 seconds. We still have no structured search, we still have no geo based search, we still have no social search, we still have no crowed search, we still have no ranking, selection or filter based search, we still have no…. – Simply there is zero evolution in the single most used software application on the planet. Right?

I would even pay 10$ per year for a search that does a good job. With a billion users that is $10 Billion per year.

And that is just the obvious beginning….

Strike – done – we will see.

Axel Schultze

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Partner Empowerment – Social Media Community Network

We are conducting a project to empower partners to participate in social media. The funding is done through MDF. The details are here:

Purpose:
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Social media is a place where customers hang out and converse over products, best practices, service tips and more. The purpose to get partners involved in those conversations is a) to intensify or win back customer relationships and b) connect with new potential customers who are discussing and dealing with the same topics.

Benefit:
======
The benefit to the dealers and reseller to engage is an obvious business benefit in increasing sales and gaining back market share.

Challenges:
=========
A) Channel partners have neither a good plan, nor the resources nor the education to launch such a social media engagement. It is not so much an investment in tools or equipment but in knowledge and time. More so channel partners don’t have the content they want like attractive video clips, white papers, ongoing new blog posts and more.
B) Channel partners are scared to death to expose any customer data. So what we needed to do is build a technology that allows partners to have a private customer community (with no access for vendors, unless wanted) but still provide vendors with relevant meta data to see that the communities are actually active and growing.

Solution:
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Vendors “sponsor” the partners social media engagement including three components:
a) The base education for the partners
b) Some vendor side resource allocation to feed content to the partners
c) An online community system that allows the partner to build their own social community, which in turn is connected to the vendors who feed content straight into all the connected partner communities (in our case 3,500 connected partner communities)

Funding:
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The whole project is funded through MDF – and it cost less than the typical but less effective local marketing events. The initial funds allocation is $800 per partner for training, a few dollars for the online community and more but only if successful for community engagement (see below)

Reporting and justification
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The MDF funds per partner grow with the activities and engagement in the communities. In other words if a partner does not engage with their market – no more money. If the partner engages and their community grows – additional money. If a partner is REALLY active constantly grows the ecosystem and develops a vibrant community – even more MDF cash. The reporting system provides activity level that in turn controls the MDF flow.

So at the end of the day – social media and its transparency provides an even deeper insight into the effectiveness of the partner activities. Probably a bid hard to explain in words but once you see it you will get the idea.

It is a multi million dollar project but simply because the channel is a global channel. Cost is less than 0.5% of the revenue through the channel.

However the concept is scalable and will work with channels as small as 100 partners for around $25,000 to start with.

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AxelS

FriendFeed grows

There is an interesting dynamic at friendfeed. I joined the service about a year ago. And used it as feeds aggregator. That was helpful so I could track less people than I have in my various networks but all together.

Now FriendFeed has grown – big time. I can now use it as Microblog and get the posts back to Twitter. I can aggregate more services and actually consolidate multiple identities such as my uwn and my company’s.

But what is most interesting is the stability and speed. While Twitter engineers have a hard time to keep up with their super simple tool, FriendFeed has a much richer system with way less technical issues.

So all in all I highly recommend checking it out.

Here is what you do:
1) Go to this URL to register: https://friendfeed.com/account/create
2) Get to friend recommendation and add all your friends that may be on Twitter, Facebook etc.
3) Complete your profile (photo, bio, you know the drill)
4) start posting…

This may come in particulart handy when Twitter is slow, down, maintenace one other reasons.

See your feeds….

friendfeed.com/AxelS

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