Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

What is Social CRM (SCRM)?

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

People have always talked about their customer experiences.   But the speed of the Web and the reach of social media tools have exponentially changed the timing and impact of this sharing.  Traditional CRM strategies and tools have not kept pace with business’ need to respond to the customer’s control of the conversation.  It was this need - to engage with and respond to customers within the context of this real-time dialogue - that gave birth to the concept and practice of Social CRM (or SCRM).  Which means what, exactly?

As with any emerging term, SCRM has been defined in a number of ways by a number of “experts”.  I personally like the definition provided by author and blogger, Paul Greenberg.  I’ll post his short definition here, but I encourage you to check out his full definition and description here.

To quote Mr. Greenberg:

“SCRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

As for how this relates to Reside and our clients, allow me to reference another quote by Mr. Greenberg, from the same post, as he summarizes what the “Big Idea” is behind SCRM:

[Through SCRM] the customer is afforded the ability to co-create by the company. What that means is not all that pat. It can mean anything from customers and the company collaborating on product development, to customer suggestions on how to improve a company process, to customers helping other customers solve customer service issues… . Co-creation is the ability of the company and customer to create additional value for each other - what form it takes is not always THE BIG THING.  But co-creation, mutually derived value, is at the core of SCRM (emphasis mine).

Reside is helping our clients apply the principles and tools of SCRM every day as we work with them to implement Idea Portals, Customer Service Portals and Online Communities.  These solutions give the customer a voice and a “spot at the table” in terms of influencing the business brand.  And smart businesses know that happy customers share those experiences.  And that’s how you grow a business - at the speed of the Social Web.

Reside - Force.com Forty Innovation Showcase Finalist

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Reside received great news from Salesforce last week; we were announced as one of the Force.com Forty Innovation Showcase finalists. In October, Mario Fantauzzi and I traveled to San Francisco to present Reside’s work on FICO’s first-of-its-kind B2B online community in front of a panel of Force.com experts. Reside’s ability to think of innovative cloud solutions to meet FICO’s needs won not only FICO’s business, but the judges respect as well. With the help of the expert team at Reside, we integrated five different cloud services (SaaS applications) into one website, while keeping the look and feel of the brand consistent, making FICO’s Decision Management Community one of the most innovative cloud solutions of the time. This solution enables clients and prospects to effectively collaborate, while capturing and managing the ideas of members. The community also acts as a discussion forum and research center for the users. We are thrilled to be among this elite group of innovators, and are excited to be at Dreamforce this year when the winner is announced! Visit www.reside.biz/dreamforce09 to learn more about the event and where to find us.

Learn more about the innovative solution – Read the FICO Case Study or view a screencast of FICO’s Decision Management Community.

Reside Rocks the TEKNE Awards

Monday, November 9th, 2009

 Reside’s support of the high tech industry included being a Platinum Sponsor at the 2009 Tekne Awards held in late October. The event was inspiring, a great chance to see some of Minnesota’s most cutting-edge companies and products. I was also impressed by the talented students who were chosen as scholarship finalists. I wanted to share this video clip of Reside’s Matt Johnson (MJ) being interviewed on site at Tekne.

 http://www.vimeo.com/7420498

Reside looks forward to continuing to support the Minnesota High Tech Association and the Tekne Awards

2009 Tekne Awards

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Congratulations to the 2009 Tekne Award recipients and scholarship winners! Last Thursday, Reside was a proud platinum sponsor of the Minnesota High Tech Association’s (MHTA) Tekne Awards. Don Mink, Reside’s Practice Director of Technical Services, did a great job presenting an award category, while the ceremony’s MC, John Sweeney of Brave New Workshop, provided comic relief throughout the night. The awards show brought Minnesota’s business, technology and political leaders together on this special evening to celebrate technology innovation in Minnesota. It was amazing to see the innovative solutions these deserving finalists have established within their companies. Among the companies at the ceremony, a few of the winners include:

 

VAST Enterprises, based in Minneapolis, won the cleantech award, Ecolab won the green category award, and Starkey Laboratories Inc. won a medical technology award for their new S2 line of hearing aids.

 

For more Tekne Award winners, read the article from Minneapolis-St.Paul Business Journal. Thanks to everyone at MHTA that made this night possible. Stay tuned for more information regarding the 2010 Tekne Awards.

 

 

Yo T-Bird Kanicki – do you Google Sidewiki?

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Today customers and general Web users are having more to say about websites. People are being enabled to contribute to any Web page and help others by posting comments about that Web page, with some of the best comments being shown in the sidebar for all users to view. The feature is integrated with Google Profiles, so you can find more information about the author and read other Sidewiki comments. This feature has gotten both sides talking, some love it, some hate it…you be the judge… check out the Sidewiki for Google.                                                                                                   

Tweet and They Will Give

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Just read an interesting article from Fast Company on how non-profits are using Twitter to raise funds. Most notably the organizations that are Tweeting didn’t intend it to be a fund raising activity but rather a chance to interact and communicate with their audiences. However; it comes at no surprise that this type of real-time communication drives contributions and giving.

Let’s look at the traditional model of fund raising for a non-profit. The yearly drives, the direct mail detailing desperate financial woes, give now or we go under. As a contributor to several non-profits it always irks me when I have no clue what is being done with the green backs. Especially the smaller non-profits. This might sound judgmental, rude, or selfish but the point I’m driving at is we all give to movements and causes that we are passionate about. But if I don’t know what’s going on, how do we keep the passion.

Non-profits are quickly learning that the best way to raise funds is to make it personal and timely. Let us know what’s going on. What is happening. Where do you need help today. It’s that personal timely connection that brings us into the field. We can see, taste and smell the village of an impoverished child, the cold of the homeless family, the despair of refugees. Give us that and we will be engaged. You’ll barely have to ask and our checkbooks will open. Just point us in the right direction.

For profits should take note. Make it real, timely and informative. Empathize with us or get us involved. Its all about relationships and trust. You’ll barely need to ask for the sale.

On an unimaginable scale…

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Monopoly City Streets was released last week, with the tag line of “Property Empire Building on an Unimaginable Scale”.  Unimaginable was probably more accurate than they wanted it to be…

The first three days after launch were incredible rocky: outages, sluggishness and bug reports coming in from blog comments, twitter posts and more.  The first response from the developers was their cryptic, “It is working… but” blog post.

I can’t help but wonder if following in Google’s footsteps of beta releases and invites would’ve uncovered some of these issues before they got out of hand.  And since they partnered with Google Maps for the application itself, makes me question even more why they didn’t??

  1. Release in BETA. User expectations are lower when they see something in BETA.  They see an issue, and don’t get near as upset as they would if they expected the application to be perfect and fully released.
  2. Release with invites. Google did this with their gmail release: only users who are invited by other users can register and use the application.  With this model, your user base grows somewhat steadily - instead of everyone accessing on the 1st day.

Game restart is set for tomorrow: Thursday, September 17th.  Follow the progress of the game at http://blog.monopolycitystreets.com

Programming and Hierarchical Learning

Friday, September 11th, 2009

I did have another blog topic in mind for today, but when I stumbled across this article I decided to switch things up.

Quality Oriented Teaching of Programming

Although the author talks specifically about teaching programming, I believe his points apply to any subject with a hierarchical learning pattern.  Mathematics is the first subject that comes to mind: If you fail to understand how variables work in equations, you will continue to struggle as you progress through the subject.

Having initially started my college education with the intent of becoming a mathematics teacher, this idea of hierarchical learning was like a huge light bulb going off! (I moved to programming when 2 students I was tutoring in algebra, still failed…)

As a parent, these are the quick things I pulled out for when my kids start struggling with math, etc.

  1. Spend time on the “easy”/”early” things before moving on.  Make sure they “get” the basics!
  2. The methods pointed out do create more work for teachers, so take an active part in your child’s education.
  3. Know the testing schedule, help your child to not be caught off-guard or unprepared when their test day comes.

Along the same lines, check this out if your child IS ready to be a programmer!  :)

Collaboration Means Drop the Ego

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

When a great idea is uncovered does it really matter who came up with it? As a Marketing and IT professional for more than twenty years I’m often amazed how much IT and marketing consultants are afraid of not having all the answers. How we cringe when asked the uncomfortable and unanswerable questions. Yet we boast about partnering and collaborating with our customers. Isn’t being openness, honesty and transparency elements of partnership? I challenge all consultants to step out of their comfort zones and declare, “We don’t always have all the answers!”

A great example of this is a client we recently worked with. We were developing a new application that was revolutionizing the client provided their product to their constituents. As we wire framed out the new concepts we found that many questions still remained unanswered. As much as we wanted to define and design it all for them our client still needed to do some of their own wire framing and discovery to reach the desired outcome. After a few days our client came back with a workable solution. One of our consultants said, “Gee what are they paying us for.” I replied that we provided the tools and framework that led them through the process and activities that enabled this discovery to occur. We could have spent endless hours (and billings) trying to come up with the idea on our own but we needed our client to answer some basic questions they were still wrestling with. It didn’t matter who came up with the solution. What mattered was we (as a team) came up with the right solution.

Too often experts are relied on to have all the answers. The danger in this is setting the stage for ignoring valid solutions. A close friend of mine has a sister who is battling brain cancer. She recently started having some new symptoms and problems. Several specialists were called in. The timing of these new symptoms coincided with a recent prescription for insomnia. When this was brought up by his sister after lengthy deliberations with the doctors, one of the specialists quickly rejected it. As my friend related the story, it was denied by this doctor on the grounds that it wasn’t his discovery. He had overlooked a simple and obvious cause. How often do experts put their egos first and dismiss ideas for all the wrong reasons – even in a case of life and death. I believe we call this politics. Needless to say his sister was correct and a more empathetic (and less ego-driven) doctor recognized the conflict and subsequent treatment.

As professionals and consultants we bring years of experiences, tools and frameworks that enable us to tackle new problems. Our ability to rely on our past efforts, learnings, and experiences help us uncover new and innovative solutions. But in order for this to occur we must create an open environment with our clients. Our clients must also nurture this relationship with realistic expectations and shared responsibility. Together we need to develop a collaborative environment that manifests the best ideas. When you are en route to discovery you don’t always have an explicitly detailed map. But you want a leader who can guide you through the jungle and won’t let his or her ego get in the way. That’s real partnership and collaboration that generates the best ideas – no matter who comes up with them.

Reside one of first value-added resellers of the Force.com platform

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Salesforce.com unveiled today its new Force.com value-added reseller (VAR) program – an expansion of the enterprise cloud computing leader’s business model that will serve to grow sales of its cloud platform (Force.com) via a select portion of its existing partner network. 

Reside is pleased to announce our participation as one of the fist VARs in the program.  To learn more, view our press release.