Tim Steeves dot com

If you have been tracking conversations around social media for business, you have undoubtedly come across people talking about Social CRM. Companies like Intuit, Procter & Gamble and Citigroup have embraced it in a big way and it seems like the natural next step to Customer Relationship Management information systems.

According to Gartner, social CRM will be a $1 billion sub-sector of the CRM market by the end of this year. The various sites, blogs and communities that comprise this arena represent the fastest growing areas of the Internet. According to Nielsen Online, social networks now reach more people than email.

Salesforce states that as the growth of social media explodes, service departments need to influence customer conversations. Integrating social media into the contact center is a huge opportunity—both to delight your customers and to save money.

SugarCRM has added social features, and is in a simple form that allows users to decide how they leverage social data and channels inside the Sugar system. For example, users can now monitor Twitter streams of their customers, as well as uncover leads and relationship data from networks like LinkedIn and place it into the CRM records.

CRM is still working through the implications of Social Networks.  From my perspective, Social CRM has been defined in a restricted format by those that try to support and practice it, and we are yet to realize its true potential.  No one has dared to define the scope and implement the tools to fully harness this marketing and PR power.  Maybe it’s too soon?

I remember the early times of CRM – way before it became an acronym. Supply management system, accounting systems, sales force automation systems, ticket systems, the list is long.  The madness that often came with these disjunctive systems was boggling. The duplication of effort was clearly prohibitive from a cost perspective, but at the time, the cost of missed opportunities was drastically higher, so the markets pushed it forward.

With new social spheres like Google+ popping up out of the woodworks, social data, marketing, and mining opportunities are growing exponentially and it has become equal madness to it’s predecessors. The market will carry the madness, however, eventually harnessing it into unfathomable opportunities.

What is the situation of your relationship with your client?  If you are keeping up with the times, you have all sorts of digital relationships with them.  Maybe you’re reaching out through advertising to bring them back to a website or micro websites.  You’re probably conversing with them through a multitude of social media channels to invite them into dialogue.  You could be directing them through their mobile devices in order to bring them in and reward their participation in loyalty programs. It’s also likely that some of you reading this are doing all of the above.

With all this interaction being digital, every message, every name, every campaign renders invaluable data that informs you about the nature of your client and your relationship with them; however much of this data is lost in cyberspace.

Figure 1. Twitter Stream Graph where the subject includes "coffee" (Image Provided by Neoformix)

What are the semantics of what people are talking about in your demographic?  What benefits do your service providers appreciate?  What publications do your target market frequent?  Where do they look for help?  What drives them to repeat purchases?  Who are their friends and acquaintances?

In this new world there are no limits to where and how the organization can find, engage and interact with the client. Wherever they are, whatever they are doing, it is possible to present them with a relevant experience, an appropriate call to action, an appealing value proposition. The advertising infrastructure has now become a customer relationship infrastructure, and it opens amazing new opportunities and possibilities.

Cyberspace technology is catching up, and even before the business is ready to take advantage of the benefits, we have a new set of offerings called Data Management Platforms (DMP).  Yes, another acronym – talk to the geeks in charge.  The rules are still being written on what a DMP is, but the essence here is that they are capable of capturing, rationalizing and merging all of these data points, enriching them with third party data and funneling it to where the data is actionable.

DMPs are just beginning, but there will be new tools popping up in the next few years with full comprehensive solutions for marketing.  Regardless of how the channel shakes out, data will always be a key contributing factor to the success of modern campaigns, and, like always, marketing executives will be utilizing it’s potential.

Adobe, Lotame, BlueKai and others are pioneering this space, but on another level, small businesses are beginning to tap into this data and leverage it into leads and opportunities.  It’ll be interesting to see what innovations come out of this in the near future.

Please feel free to comment below on where you think this area is going and/or how your business is currently leveraging this data.

Forget toys – today, whoever has the most data wins.

Recently, I was meeting with a couple of executives from the Canadian Network for International Surgery (CNIS), when a rep from their largest funder, the Canadian International Developing Agency (CIDA) dropped in for a visit. The topic of the conversation was data and how CNIS was collecting it. What I learned from that meeting is that the Canadian Government is collecting serious amounts of data related to their work to ensure that the projects they are funding are competing effectively in today’s markets.

So if the Canadian Government is doing it, it must be a good idea, right?

We’ve all heard the age-old remark, “knowledge is power.” Well data is simply a building block of knowledge. When you can put data together in some kind of context, you get information, and with the right information you can build knowledge.

The World Wide Web started out as a large collection of data and the data was growing at break-neck speeds. At the time, a guy named Larry Page saw this collection of 10 million documents as an opportunity. He partnered with a guy named Sergey Brin, and out of all that mess of data came a system called PageRank and a company called Google. With acquisition of Internet services like Youtube and applications like Gmail, Maps, Street View and now Google+, Google has built itself into a data-collection empire.

Another example of a data-collection empire is Facebook. With more than 700 million active users worldwide, Facebook has been finding new and creative ways to come out with innovative products based on that data. Facebook has the largest database of faces on the planet – about 90 billion photos. With that data, they’ve been able to create a facial recognition technology that “suggests” tags to pictures they upload. In other words, if I upload six photos of my friend Andrew, Facebook may recognize his face (thanks to other tagged photos of him on their website) and “suggest” that I tag him in my photos. The next step for Facebook, in my mind, will be the ability to upload a picture of someone to Facebook and then find all the other pictures of that person on the Internet. Assuming Facebook can find a way to do that without breaking every privacy law in the book.

Facebook was in a similar situation as Google was when it first started. It had access to a ton of data and was able to convert that data into new opportunities.

Facebook Global Connections 2010

Data is now the new frontier for innovation, competition and productivity, and the amount of data in our world has been increasing exponentially. Companies capture trillions of bytes of information about customers, suppliers, and operations and with communication devices doing sales upwards of 5 billion units per year, the amount of information available is growing exponentially. Like other essential factors of production such as hard assets and human capital, data is increasingly becoming a major drive of modern economic activity, innovation and growth.

The explosion of strategies such as algorithmic trading coupled with regulatory compliance and increasingly complex financial engineering tools is leading to massive volumes of data within financial services organizations. In their industry, conducting business at the data level is no longer a practice for the future. In fact, I would argue that every industry is being required to compete at this level in some way.

This article also published in Corporate Recruiters Summer Newsletter 2011

Brain Imaging The first high-resolution map of the human cortical network generated by scientists using a new type of brain imaging known as diffusion imaging.

(Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21042/page1/)

Smartphones This is the year that smartphones took off with the application market – becoming worth over $1 billion. Everyone and his dog began to “tweet” while Google Android snuck into Apple’s Marketplace, leaving Nokia, Samsung and BlackBerry trying to stay in the race with their own app stores.

Social Media Last

year, barely anyone had heard of it (apart from Stephen Fry), today it is in the world’s lexicon and has even been added to the Oxford English dictionary, as well as being named the year’s most popular word: Twitter. Whether you can’t get enough of the service or think its the refuse of people with too much time on their hands, you cannot ignore the rate at which Twtitter has gone mainstream and its effects on global Tech. These are the trends that iTeam is paying close attention to into the next decade.

Real-time Searches With sites like Twitter and FriendFeed rising in popularity and usage, Google and other search engines rapidly began to look out of date when news stations and the like began to pick up stories from users’ tweets. Case in point, the Mumbai terror attacks. As such, both Google and Bing ahve been securing real-time search elements, by signing deals with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others in order to produce results in a much new way.

Biological Machines Its a bird, its a plane…no wait, its a giant flower beetle that is being forced to fly a path controlled by implanted receiver, microcontroller, microbattery, and six carefully placed electrodes.

By remotely delivering jolts of electricity to its brain and wing muscles, an engineer can make the cyborg beetle take off, turn and top midflight. Don’t squash that! Its worth millions of dollars.

Nanopiezoelectronic what? Zhong Lin Wang (not to be confused with our graphic artist Zhimin Wang), a professor of materials science at Georgia Tech, is working on nanoscale devices that convert mechanical energy into power from the nano world. Although the tech has been around for a while, 2009 showed huge strides toward these little devices being able to power themselves…after all, a nano-bot with an extension cord is not very useful.

Despite the economy, the tech industry is still pulling forward in great strides. The web has proven that it cannot be stopped by economic downturns and, in fact, unemployment has strengthened many aspects of the virtual world we call the Internet.

The future is getting more and more tech and if you think the last decade has been amazing, watch the next one. The snowball has only just started to roll down the hill.

Firefox 3.5 has had over a million 2 million downloads (and counting) since it was released this morning.  Click on the image below to see the downloads from across the world in realtime.

For those of you who don’t know, iTeam consists of a highly qualified design and development team made up of graphic designers, programmers, and systems and business analysts. This team combines the skill and creativity required to promote your business online with website design and Search Engine Optimisation, increase online sales through website analytics, and improve productivity and efficiency through custom database software, and office network maintenance.

Check out the new site!

www.iTeamTech.ca

I appreciate any feedback you have.  Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think!