In all the hand wringing and advice giving that surrounds the hot topic of social media, one thing often overlooked is that networks of connected people have a certain type of structure, and this network structure provides some clues for how to extract benefits from your own social network. Essentially, every person's network of contacts, colleagues, friends and associates (online or offline) is actually a small cluster within a much bigger network, which in turn is just a cluster within an even bigger network, and so forth. Because of this structure, the most useful positions aren't those with the most connections to other people, but those with the most connections to other clusters of people. Rather than the "strong ties" you have with your closest friends or your immediate co-workers, in other words, the robustness and usefulness of your own social network will be based more on the number of "weak ties" you also maintain - that is, ties to the people you don't know quite as well, or don't interact with quite as often. These are the people most likely to be connected to clusters you aren't familiar with and don't have access to yourself.

Continue reading "Harnessing the Power of Your "Weak Ties"" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (0)

Many companies today are trying to understand Social CRM and integrate it into their marketing activities. The way they do this is by optimizing their existing campaigns for social media, or sometimes by creating wholly new campaigns revolving around the viral character of social media. These companies are present on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and MySpace; they send their marketing messages nicely wrapped through all channels, they reach a large audience of fans and followers. Just like they did before Web 2.0.

What is common to most of these companies is that they understand social media as another channel for campaigns. They fail to grasp the totally new character of social media, the one that justifies calling it Social CRM. By including social media in their channel mix, enterprises are giving up traditional outbound one-to-many communication to their customers. Instead, they are inexorably entering into a continuous multidirectional conversation between not just one but many customers and the enterprise that occurs permanently, that is driven by customers, and that takes place irrespective of the enterprise. The enterprise can opt to participate, but the conversation will continue regardless.

Continue reading "Customer Strategist Martin Förster:
Social CRM Requires a New Marketing Skill:
Having a Conversation" »

| Permalink | Comments (6)

What if we could change the income tax so that it taxes low incomes instead of high incomes? Suppose, for instance, that everyone had to pay 100% of their first $15,000 of income to the IRS, and only after this could they keep any money they earned. Of course, this would provide a terrible disincentive for people to work - it might even make it impossible to find people willing to take minimum wage jobs, which pay about $15,000 a year. No one would want to impose such a tax.

Continue reading "The Most Regressive Income Tax Imaginable" »

Posted by Don Peppers | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the U.S. House and Senate make last-minute changes to the final wording of the financial-overhaul bill, one thing seems fairly certain: U.S. banks and brokerages stand to lose billions of dollars in revenues as a result of the new rules aimed at providing additional safeguards for consumers on investments and other products.

Continue reading "Customer Strategist Orkun Oguz:
Leveraging Customer Segmentation in Wealth Management" »

| Permalink | Comments (0)

Which customer groups offer the most potential? How do you bundle your services to get the greatest return? And how can you balance maximizing customer value (attract, grow, and retain the potential) with acting in the best interest of your customers (customer experience)? These are questions that vex most every company today.

Continue reading "Customer Strategist Poyraz Ozkan:
Move Beyond Segments to Manage Customer Portfolios" »

| Permalink | Comments (0)

Amazon.com's goal , as they say in the tagline of their correspondence, is to be "Earth's most customer-centric company." Don Peppers and I love hearing this, and hugely admire what Jeff Bezos and his colleagues have built in the relatively few years since amazon.com first appeared as an online source for books, CDs, and DVDs.

I've been a frequent user of amazon.com ever since, gradually expanding into more and more categories of merchandise. Of course, I depend on amazon.com to tell me which business books I need to read next; even if I don't hear about a particular one, I can count on amazon.com's community-search engine to find the next highly relevant recommendation for me. (Don and I are amused and not a little reassured by the fact that each time we publish a new book, that new book we write heads the list of books we'll want to read next! So we know the relevance is spot on.)

More than once, when we've gone to order a book, amazon.com has reminded us: You've already bought that book; are you sure you want to buy it again? (Haven't we all accidentally bought something we forgot we already have?) Risking the immediate lost sale to save a customer the hassle (and themselves the expense) of returning an unwanted book just makes sense. Couple all this 1to1 with amazon.com's free shipping, low prices, and huge selection and we can see why Jeff & Co. have done so well.

So what suggestion do I have?

Continue reading "Even Amazon.com Needs to Take the Customer's Point of View" »

Posted by Martha Rogers | Permalink | Comments (1)