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3 CRM Traits Shared by Good People and Great Companies May 03, 2012 
I just wrote a note to a friend of mine thanking him for his participation at a conference I recently helped organize. It was a thank you note, and he's a CRM industry influencer; I won't divulge names, because it's not important to my point, nor do I want to seen like too much of a suck-up. In any event, I was grateful for his participation in the show -- not just for his session, but for his behavior at this and every other CRM event he goes to.
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Putting a B2B E-Commerce Twist Into the SMB April 28, 2012 
Business-to-business selling on the Internet, or B2B e-commerce, is one of the fastest growing segments of the small-business marketplace. As businesses flock to the Internet to find vendors for essential products and services, B2B e-commerce is rapidly expanding, both in terms of total revenue and the number of small B2B firms operating in the digital space.
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Match the Big Data Job to the Big Data Solution April 27, 2012 
In the rush to play in the Big Data game, it's easy to forget the fundamentals. The fear of being left behind can cause enterprise IT teams to move directly into pilot projects with a choice of products and technologies that may not be best designed to solve the identified business problem.
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The Lighter Side of IT Consumerization April 24, 2012 
You've probably heard the term "consumerization of IT." Some of the network and security pros reading this probably think this is yet another meaningless industry buzzword with little or no value. However, to dismiss it as such is to potentially miss out on what is both a very powerful concept ... and one that information security practitioners ignore at their peril.
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Harnessing Big Data Through Customer Intelligence April 24, 2012 
Driving revenue performance and applying data in order to influence/generate buying behavior throughout the customer life cycle is not new -- it's an ongoing goal. Real-time marketing, which relies on capturing data in real time, improves revenue performance and is the optimal way to drive 1:1 customer interaction throughout the customer life cycle.
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Customization on the Cutting Edge April 20, 2012 
Every day, I meet retailers who are eager to learn how they can add a co-creation, customization, or personalization feature (collectively "Customization" with a capital 'C') to their existing offerings. They often start the conversation off with an overview of their current products and quickly move to a discussion about which of them cater to the "customization" demographic.
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Big Data, Tough Questions April 20, 2012
If you work with SIEM, you've been spending more than a couple of years, dealing with "Big Data" -- more lines of logs than any one person, or even a reasonable-sized team of people, could ever hope to keep up with reading through. Our data is plenty big enough already. So why is everyone so hyped over Big Data now?
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Social, Mobile and Collaboration: 3 Tips for Getting on the Road April 19, 2012 
"You can't get there from here." That's the classic gag about New Englanders giving road directions -- that somehow, the route that needs to be taken is so convoluted and confusing that there's no way to negotiate between two points on the surface of the Earth. Logically, we know that's not true. You can get anywhere from anywhere these days -- especially if you can rely on transportation that doesn't need to stick to the roads.
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Cloud Insecurity: Not Enough Tools, Experience or Transparency April 18, 2012 
It may be that the hype around cloud computing has settled, but security concerns continue to make headlines and are often cited by CIOs as top priorities. CompTIA's latest trends study found that while many U.S. companies trust the cloud enough to use it, only 13 percent trust it enough for heavy lifting.
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Taking Digital Analytics to the Limit April 17, 2012 
Managers must overcome several complex issues to build successful digital analytics teams that can deliver on the high expectations placed on them by upper management. For one, there is currently a significant supply/demand imbalance in the digital analytics talent pool. Also, a wide range of skills are necessary in the end-to-end process of online analytics and optimization.
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Sussing Out Your Customers' Relationship Styles April 12, 2012 
At last year's Dreamforce event, the word "koan" was used quite a bit, thanks to CEO Marc Benioff's Buddhist proclivities. The word means "a paradox that is to be meditated upon," typically used to train novice monks to abandon dependence on reason to achieve enlightenment.
Most of the applications of "koan" at Dreamforce didn't apply to paradoxes, nor is it wise to abandon reason when dealing with any CRM vendor in the hope of finding enlightenment.
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Catching the Mobile Commerce Wave April 07, 2012 
Riding the wave of technology change these days is a bit like surfing. The ocean and waves often change much faster than our ability to stay out in front of the transformation. Now another current is approaching the wireless world as mobile commerce curls to challenge conventional e-commerce.
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Automating Social: The Perils of Trying to Fake Sincerity April 05, 2012 
"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." This quote, often bandied about, is attributed to Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), who was a French diplomat, dramatist and novelist. And, judging by his best-remembered quote, kind of a jerk. I'm not saying this specifically as an attempt at character assassination of a 68-year-dead raconteur -- no, there's a reason that I bring it up, and it has to do with social CRM.
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The Future is Now - The Dark Side and Hacktivism March 31, 2012 
We live in times when technology is exceeding the understanding of educational institutions and corporations. A highly social Web and a bad economy is making the Dark Side -- the Internet underworld where cybercrime and hacking run rampant -- overwhelming. Hacktivism is the new, hip thing; it has become a hobby for people with higher-than-average computer knowledge.
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5 Fast Fixes for Business Knowledge Optimization March 30, 2012 
Can you tell me exactly where your employees are and what they are doing? Do you know what the top 10 most profitable projects were for your company last year? Can you make a bid on a project that has little or no margin of error? If you can't answer these questions, then you should know that someone else can and the business advantage lies with them. Fortunately, gaining this type of insight is not particularly difficult.
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Social CRM vs. the Unimaginative, the Unmotivated and the Skeptical March 29, 2012 
When I go to CRM conferences -- and I go to many -- one of the things I relish is the opportunity to speak to leaders about thinking surrounding social CRM. That group is not limited to the pundits and authors most closely associated with SCRM; it also includes users at these events who have reached the decision to fully embrace it in their businesses. I leave these events filled with excitement.
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10 Tips for Smooth Landings March 28, 2012 
Effective landing pages are an essential component of successful online marketing campaigns and are probably the single biggest factor in determining whether or not you will convert a Web visitor into a prospect who is willing to provide contact information. Landing pages are custom-designed single Web pages a visitor arrives at after clicking on a link or advertisement.
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Sarbanes-Oxley - Not Just for the Big Fish March 24, 2012 
Why should you care about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act? If you are the CEO or another executive within a large public company, the answer is obvious: because you have to. If you don't, your business -- and you -- will face serious repercussions, including possible jail time. Not good.
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12 Steps for Staying 1 Step Ahead of Online Security Threats March 23, 2012 
With the explosion of Web-based communications in the form of applications, blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, new security threats that can cause serious damage to computers are emerging. As they access these Web-based services from both work and personal computers, many users are unaware that they may be exposing themselves and their organizations to risk.
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Customers, Big Data, and the Internet of Things March 22, 2012 
The top 10 trends in CRM was the topic of the lead-off talk by analysts Gene Alvarez and Ed Thompson at Gartner's Customer 360 Summit last week. Most of the items were evergreens that are fixtures when such trend lists are drawn up, but there were two that caught my eye, if only because of their juxtaposition on the list. First was the issue of "big data."
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