Articles by Joe

It's a common refrain from both technologists and laypeople alike, but the past two years have reshaped the digital landscape. While many people are probably a bit tired of hearing this phrase -- and other similar phrases -- it is particularly important for companies with e-commerce platforms There are many ways companies can stay relevant as we en...

Now is the time when growth-minded organizations and their sales leaders begin to evaluate this year while looking ahead to the next. It's a time to identify opportunities for improvement, anticipate industry changes, and solidify a sales strategy that will align with the evolving expectations of business-to-business buyers, emerging technologies, and the company's business goals...

Too often, sales teams and successful reps are shrouded in mystery. Many can't tell you exactly how they do what they do. Nowadays, they do it behind a screen, which limits the potential for apprenticeship, immersive learning, and modeling. It offers little data beyond outcomes for managers attempting to dissect what's really working So, what is th...

In 2018, 8.8 percent of all retail sales globally, totaling more than US$2 trillion, were made online, according to the Global Online Retail Spending report. As the total number of online purchases continues to grow, a compelling case can be made that e-commerce customers expect to receive support that is as good as or even better than those who purchase the very same products in a store...

Mushrooming industry and government mandates that govern IT security have led to a highly regulated environment and annual compliance fire drills. Compliance, however, does not necessarily equal better security. We are reminded of this fact nearly every day when breaches make headlines. So what role should compliance and risk management play withi...

With each major public data breach our attention focuses on how to prevent these incidents. A good example is the recent security breach at LinkedIn, in which millions of passwords were stolen. Industry experts and the media immediately started to dissect what LinkedIn had done wrong or what methods or tools should have been used to prevent the incident. Unfortunately, at some point every organization will be faced with a security breach. This raises the question -- are security professionals focusing on prevention at the expense of damage control preparation?...

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. However, real-time is highly complex and costly, and its transactional nature is not directly applicable to many industries, products and services. As a result, it remains an elusive goal...

Access to data has never been easier than it is today. With a few easy steps, it's possible to uncover just about any type of information you can imagine, even data that is supposedly legally protected, such as personal, financial, healthcare and government records However, individuals with nefarious intent have successfully found their way around ...

Marketers are increasingly embracing the need for customer intelligence to provide them with actionable insight to optimize revenue. But how do you get started? Treating what you have today as actionable insight enables marketers to think about using their existing data as customer intelligence, learn from it, and then incrementally improve upon it over time. ...

Last month, e-commerce giant Amazon made a foray into the flash sales marketplace. With European flash sales stalwart Vente Privee entering the North American market, and with the tremendous growth of U.S. flash sales players like Gilt Groupe and Rue La La, it's clear that the flash sales sector is blossoming. Every week, there's a new startup ...

The challenges that all enterprises face today are numerous -- store more data, provide more services, control costs, and now monitor and manage energy costs and carbon impacts. Today there is mounting pressure on CIOs and CFOs to deliver improved services while curtailing costs. To transition IT organizations into service providers for their businesses, CIOs must be empowered with new levels of visibility into the financial and environmental impacts of their IT services and the facilities where they operate.

What if you answered the phone one day to a friendly voice offering tech support for some software that had been troubling you? "Not possible," you'd say. We all know the drill with technical difficulties. We call up the software company during business hours and then sit on hold only to get an agent who barely knows the software better than we do. A knowledgeable tech support specialist certainly isn't going to call us at the moment when we're beating our heads against the computer screen. Or will they?...

Botnets embody the ultimate blended threat. Botnet code carries almost every conceivable form of malware -- from spyware to downloaders, rootkits, spam engines and more. To answer like with like, defenders must employ multiple layers of security. The good news is that time-honored techniques are still surprisingly effective against botnets. Taking...

Network forensics is the capture, storage and analysis of network traffic. You might also hear the term referred to as "packet mining," "packet forensics," or "digital forensics." Regardless of the name, the concept is the same, with the objective to record every packet and the data it contains moving across the network and storing it for some period of time.

Everyone talks about building an online community that drives "viral" marketing -- but how exactly do you accomplish that? Viral marketing is not about setting up a forum and hoping people will come. It's not about launching the 3,009th Facebook application that will sink quickly into obscurity. It's about driving a value chain and meeting a need.

Legend has it that the inventor of chess was so wise that when the king asked him to name his reward, he replied that he only wanted one grain of wheat for the first square, two grains for the second, four grains for the third, eight grains for the fourth and so on up to the sixty-four squares on the board. The king readily agreed, thinking it a ridiculously low reward for such an amazing invention, but then was later advised by his treasurer that he owed the inventor more grain than could be produced by the kingdom in 10,000 years!...

As I watch the world economy spiraling downward, I thank my lucky stars that I happen to work in one of the few industries that is expected to grow despite the downturn. Nonetheless, online retailers are going to face slower growth than we were all predicting even a few weeks ago, and the industry is being forced to completely reevaluate budgets and priorities. Suddenly the five big initiatives you had planned for 2009 are going to get cut down to two or three, and you'll be forced to make some hard and lasting choices about where to invest...

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) are given the unenviable, almost contradictory, task of catching marketing lightning in a bottle on a consistent basis. The problem is that turbulent economic conditions, like the ones we've experience recently, have historically stymied marketing innovation and forced CMOs to focus their budget on "tried-and-true" tactics rather than experimental ones...

We've all done it. The holiday season was crazy, the busiest ever. We missed feature lockdown by a mile, cramming in every last bit just as things began to seriously ramp up. The servers went down on Black Friday. A database crash prevented us from processing returns for four agonizing days. Somehow we managed to survive, adding more chewing gum and baling wire to an e-commerce system than has been stuck to the underside of a third grade desk.

The Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass lives in a very curious world where, as she explains to Alice, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." I think that sentence sums up the world of e-commerce with uncanny accuracy: No matter how hard we work to knock items off the priority list, there are always new ones popping right up to take their place.