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Social media and OSS/BSS pack a powerful one-two punch for business

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Heard about a conversation recently that I just had to share with you. A group had gathered at an industry event and a client asked whether a supplier participated in social media: “Are you on Twitter, do you have a blog, things like that,” to which the vendor replied, “Um, we don’t do any of that, we only spend time on real business.” Rarely do I hear of something as proudly, defiantly and arrogantly wrongheaded as that, especially when, as it turns out, all of the company’s clients and top prospects have at least one Twitter persona, and some as many as 10-20. Yet when I learned that same speaker later described the rest of the company’s business model as, “Doing the impossible for less money than the competition”—I understood. The speaker and company are riding a business model rooted in thinking small that is destined to hit the wall. Continue reading

The problem is a LOT bigger than Facebook

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Facebook is the first or at least the most high-profile flash point where the notion that everything on the Internet is (or ought to be) free runs smack into the reality that, without being compensated for what they do, organizations have no reason to exist.

Read more on New Media Edge…

When you add it all up, this is one hot browser

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Email clients and web browsers are now essentials of business and personal life for most of us. Your choices of browser and email client impact pretty much every move you make online including your active participation in new media. As such, while my quest for the perfect browser is hardly a life and death matter, I hope it makes for a decent read and gets you to try some new options, including some I guarantee many of you have never heard of before. Continue reading

The social (selling) event of the XeeSM

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Thirty thousand business users can’t be wrong.

OK, they could be, but in this case they are right on the money.

In Fall 2009 I told you about a new service called XeeSM [pronounced see-sum], launched by Axel Schultze and the team who earlier brought us the Xeequa Social Media Academy, where you can post links to your most important social media links and other sites in one place, in my case http://xeesm.com/JEFF/. Or as I call it at my core site, a one-stop social hub. I love it for that reason alone: Instead of loading up websites, news releases, ads, email signatures and everything else with an ever-growing laundry list of social links (“Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIN, oh my”), you can now cover all your online bases with just one. Continue reading

Is Twitter a waste of time?

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Some people have been asking this question since Day 2 A.T. (After Twitter), but it has come up again recently in several business networking groups—including one founded specifically to interact about all things Twitter—and many still don’t understand why you and your organization should do it. I answer this way:

  • For those who hate the task of having to write a blog, this puts you on the grid (the social media grid) with a microblog—and oh btw, arguably the hottest interactive venue on the planet right now. Low effort; high, potentially massive visibility. Continue reading

…but the light bulb has to really want to change

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A variation on the changing-a-light-bulb joke goes like this:
Q – “How many [psychologists/psychiatrists] does it take to change a light bulb?”
A – “Just one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.”

Let’s just say we recently concluded a contract with a tiny company in a niche market that claimed it wanted us to help it take its business to the next level. “We’re tired of trading dollars, winning just enough new business every year to offset the accounts we lose. We want you put us on track to grow from $2 million a year to about $7 million.” Let’s just say the firm’s founder, CEO, grand poobah and big kahuna (all the same person) claimed to want to grow his “baby” from a minuscule unknown to a big or at least bigger hitter. Yet none of it is going to happen because he and the firm didn’t really want to change.

Let’s just say.

SWOT on demand: Company believes it is the “sole source supplier” to its niche. It’s not. It faces 15 competitors including publishing giant Thompson. Continue reading

“Hey, 2.0”: It’s STILL about reaching, connecting with and persuading people.

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My musical tastes flash across the spectrum from heart-rendingly beautiful symphonic movie soundtracks to some of the most deliciously vicious hard rock ever recorded, but somewhere in the median is a sultry, radio-friendly-yet-cult-favorite tune by Steely Dan entitled Hey Nineteen. And that’s as good a starting point as any from which today’s ravings about some of the madness inside the “2.0” methodology may flow.

If you thought I came here to unite us all around a starry-eyed vision of the wonders of search engine optimization/marketing (SEO/SEM), Web2.0, PR2.0 and whichever 2.0 buzzwords we can dream up tomorrow…oh, wait, the categories in our editing pulldown menus here on the staging site now include “Web3.0″…you’re half right. Continue reading