Jive Talks

Top 5 stupid things I did in 2007

sam_lawrence — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:22:01 GMT

Created Clearspace-branded condoms

True. Amid a lot of controversy at Jive, I created thousands of Clearspace-branded condoms to distribute at San Francisco's Love Parade. In fact, we still have a box of them. I thought it would be a good way to promote a good cause and reach a very techy crowd when they didn't expect it. Although it did get the positive attention of a few customers and some Flickr love, in retrospect, I should have chosen a risk that could have paid off more directly. That said, it's been the joke that keeps on giving. Want one? Ping me: sam@jivesoftware.com.

Fought for a Frankensuite

I argued with Matt and Bill about building Clearspace from the ground up. I wanted to sew together best-of-breed products. They kept telling me that while if we cobbled something together we'd get to market faster, that we'd just end up with a bad product and more work long term. I thought no one would know the difference. Now I make fun of other Frankensuites.

Thought no one would use the blogs in Clearspace

I argued with Aaron Johnson, the killer engineer behind the blogging part of Clearspace (among other things) that no one would blog inside a company. I even made fun of his " meaningful URLs". As you can see from this screenshot from Jive's internal deployment of Clearspace, I sorta ate my words. Turns out 35% of our company blogs and there's an average of 4 comments per blog. I imagine it could be even higher once all our new hires settle in.

Decided to relaunch an entire website in 2 weeks

That's right. A couple of weeks before we launched Clearspace, my small "mini-wesbite" project ended up taking over the entire website. Ten of us worked around the clock for 2 weeks straight and overhauled absolutely everything. It was burnout central. Ironically, we're in-process of overhauling everything again right now but this time we've taken 4 months to do it right.

Didn't hire fast enough

Once we released Clearspace and we were (surprisingly) flooded with interest, I couldn't seem to let go of all the work that needed to be done long enough to focus on hiring. Of course, it could have also been my post about the sort of Marketing people I would never hire.

Unlocking the Extended Enterprise - Part 2 of 3

dawn — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:00:10 GMT

In the first part of this series, Chris elaborated on a number of categories that represent the kind of framework we're using to connect Clearspace and CSX. This helps us visualize how the whole company can become better integrated with not just customers and partners, but also other industry thought leaders. In the short term these connections may be light, but we can see it maturing into something really powerful that speaks to the true value of Social Productivity.

In the second part of this series, I will elaborate on how these six areas can map to several scenarios for connecting people inside and outside of an organization allowing businesses to become more productive. Let me point out that the mapping is not an easy 1:1 between each internal company function and your external community. Would you want to participate in a sales or marketing community for a company so that they could sell you stuff or market to you? Probably not. However, as a satisfied customer, you might talk about a company's products to other community members (sounds like something sales and marketing types might want to see)!

Products and Services

Product management has always been listening to customers and engaging with them to determine product requirements and get feedback that drives product development, but we shouldn't stop with product management. Wouldn't it be great if your engineering or development team could see the feedback directly and ask questions to get clarification to make sure they are satisfying the customer with the technical solution? Social productivity tools, like Clearspace, just make it easier to gather input from your customers in an interactive, collaborative environment. In a community setting, your customers can have an open exchange with your employees about new feature requests, ideas, issues with existing functionality and more. By having this discussion in an open, social setting, we can have honest and ongoing discussions with our customers and use it to more productively set product development roadmaps and drive product decisions. These types of feature discussions have helped Jive engineers and product managers engage productively with our external community.

This is also a perfect place to step in with solutions and services to allow customers to embrace the solution and help them solve the issues that come up when talking about product requirements and feature requests. Some individual customers will always need a particular feature that cannot be provided in the product. By having development, product management, and services all involved in the community, your company can make better decisions about which requests should be in the product and which ones can be more quickly provided by the services group.

According to Jeremiah Owyang:

The opportunity to build better products and services through this real-time live focus group are ripe, in many cases, customer communities have been waiting for a chance to give feedback.

Robert Scoble also touched on the value an external community has to product marketing, development, and services in an interview he did with Search CIO, stating:

>We used blog-search engines to find anyone who wrote the word "Microsoft" on their blog. Even if they had no readers and were just ranting, "I hate Microsoft," I could see that and link to it, or I could participate in their comments, or send them an e-mail saying, "What's going on?" And that told those people that someone was listening to their rants, that this is a different world than the one in which no one listens. It was an invaluable focus group that Microsoft didn't have to pay for.

In the future business landscape, connecting customer feedback within the organization may not be a competitive advantage, it may be a requirement. Claudio Marcus and Kimberly Collins of Gartner quantified the advantage in the B2C market in an interview for Influence 2.0 as such:

>...by 2007, marketers that devote at least 50% of their time to advanced customer-centric marketing processes and capabilities will achieve marketing return on investment that is at least 30 percent greater than that of their peers, who lack such emphasis

Support

Support organizations can also benefit from social productivity software while supporting customers. When customers and support staff can collaborate in an online environment, both groups get value out of the exchange. Not only can customers search the site to get answers before engaging support, but they can also help troubleshoot issues and provide advice to other customers. Since you are also in the community along with the customers you can quickly correct any misinformation while reinforcing accurate information. In some cases, your customers will come up with solutions, workarounds, and ideas that your internal team would never have considered without this external source of collaboration.

The tech industry has known about the value of a support community for some time. Forums have long been the tool of choice for facilitating such a community. However, as Chris pointed out in the first post of this series, "...traditional Communities (like forums) fall short because they are basically dependent on people in the enterprise getting onto the external community to participate." A common platform that extends on both sides of the firewall, such as Clearspace, bridges the chasm between the external and internal, which is what it takes to deliver on the support community value proposition.

Evangelism and Reputation Management

These helpful customers mentioned above who proactively help other customers, can also become evangelists for your products. I've seen these enthusiastic community members step up and speak out on behalf of a company when other community members are being unfairly critical. In fact, John points out an example of a Dell customer that has posted and helped 20,452 times since 1999. A response to criticism that might seem defensive when coming from an employee may be seen as more genuine when coming from a customer. Marketing groups should be courting and talking to these community members and do what it takes to keep them happy. Engaging in this social and open collaboration between internal employees and external users also gives sales and marketing a place to provide information about products and best practices / thought leadership for your industry to keep the customers energized. Managing your reputation also becomes much easier when you can provide information and collaborate in a socially productive environment.

I wanted to start here to lay the foundation for how external communities bring value into the organization. Next week I'll share some strategies for how to grow and shape your external community so that it accomplishes the value I described in this post.

I'll leave you with a quote from Anne Zelenka at GigaOM:

If the promises of social productivity tools prove out, companies deploying them should see improved customer responsiveness, more successful products, more enthusiastic user communities, and better financial results.

What Enterprise 2.0 can learn from the history of CRM

sam_lawrence — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:43:37 GMT

Does this sound familiar?

"The line between departments will disappear"
"There's a lack of established success metrics"
"Too much IT involvement"
"Companies with point solutions have difficulty integrating those to look at the entire solution"

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It should. They could be quotes about our industry but are actually CRM industry quotes from nearly a decade ago. So, if history repeats itself it might be helpful for the “Web 2.0,” “Enterprise 2.0” and “Social Networking” players to take a quick look back at how other industries have evolved as we speculate our future. For example, quite recently, the term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) didn’t exist. That industry evolved over 20 years from “database marketing” to “relationship marketing” and settled on CRM around the year 2000. That’s when the market became energized by intensified competition and easier to use, more cost effective and valuable software solutions.

Houston, we have a framing problem

Similar to our current market, the CRM industry started out very fragmented with lots of players focused on many component parts. These pieces ultimately connected--both in terms of the software solutions and with respect to the concept and value in business people’s minds. Now, CRM is a multi-billion dollar, growing industry with a few big players and innovative challengers. As soon as the CRM market started to frame the problem and solution in a holistic way, and accompanied it with solutions that tied the pieces together and connected them to business value, CRM finally began to make sense for businesses.

Larva, cocoon or butterfly?

I’d argue that our multi-monikered industry is 20 years old. It began with “personal productivity software” and then “groupware,” and “knowledge management.” It now searches for a salient concept and a higher value for connecting the pieces into a networked whole. We refer to this next evolution as “Social Productivity” and frame the opportunity as the next evolution of productivity software. But that concept will take time to grow. As an example of where we are now, today I had a conversation at the Web 2.0 Berlin conference with a multinational company that told me that their executive management resisted their “collaboration project” until they reframed it as simply “an Intranet solution.”

Seeing past the 2.0 hype

CRM had its own hype cycle, too. It was going to “forever change the way businesses connected with their customers.” The reality is that it provided positive, but incremental improvement in efficiency and visibility. CRM is now a required element to be competitive with the top players in a market. Social Productivity is also part of the “2.0” hype cycle. A lot of our industry’s messaging is focused on social technology forever changing cultures and the way people work together. I think that promise is similarly over-inflated but I can understand why presenting this polar extreme is important in the short term. Longer term, Social Productivity Systems, will be a required element and part the set of mission critical systems like CRM, ERP, and PLM.

Navel contemplation vs the windshield

As our industry’s echo-chamber continues to examine the Petri dish of alternative technology tools, potential customers wait for us to start making sense. If we can’t look down the road and make sense of how we’re adding value, how can the rest of the market? They simply want to know, “what can I do with this stuff I couldn’t do before?” and “how can this add enough business value that it becomes a need-to-have?” The CRM market used to suffer the same malady. Those industry discussions were focused on “the power of contact optimizers” or “which campaign-management player was going to win.” Pushing toolboxes at companies gets us nowhere.

Bursting the bubble

Another problem that plagued the CRM industry in the beginning was that all the assets were being stored in lots of solutions all over the company. Newer CRM solutions only added to the problem. Although they may have been easier to use or more powerful, they still became CRM asset bubbles disconnected to the rest of the company and their systems. As long as the customer market sees what we do as “aliens from another planet,” we won’t be able to gain serious traction. Our solutions must connect in smart ways with our customer’s asset and technology investments.

IT needs viable alternatives, not blame

Yes, there is friction between lines of business, executive management and IT. This isn’t new. IT has been living with this type of friction for decades. It was true for the CRM market, too. Sales and Marketing did what they wanted because IT wouldn’t help or IT forced a solution on Sales and Marketing they wouldn’t use. It’s always easy to paint IT as the bad guys. I do agree that IT has the opportunity to reshape their value but they need viable options, first. Right now, there’s not much choice for IT to help beyond solutions that are either too small or ones that lines of business don’t want. This will change soon.

The potential industry impact

It’s interesting to chart the revenue opportunity and market size if you believe there is a relational pattern between the last 20 years of CRM and the last 20 years of productivity software. When you look at the market growth of CRM, you can clearly see the value of connecting the dots. I couldn't find Gartner's database or relationship marketing market size for the 1980s-1990s but did find nearly 10 years of Gartner predictive market sizing starting in the optimistic .com mania in 1999 (hopefully we don't have a similar bubble). CRM is now a $7.4 billion sized market growing at 13% a year. When you think about a value that’s realized across all departments within companies, my sense is that the Social Productivity market can be even bigger.

The sort of Marketing people I would never hire

sam_lawrence — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 17:28:59 GMT

You use the word "brand" a lot

That word is used so broadly, obscurely and recklessly, it's meaningless to me. Not to mention that it's rarely used in a context I agree with. Leave brand to consumer packaged goods and let's focus on delivering meaningful and remarkable value through the company.

Your market is actually other marketers.

Most marketing people don't know their market at all. Their "market" is what they read in articles, analyst reports and in talking with their agencies. Rarely do I find someone who actually gets out there and has continual conversations with people to truly understand them.

You're guilty of being invisible

Paint by numbers doesn't cut it. Granted, most people haven't had the chance to do brilliant Marketing, but at least be able to tell me how you took a risk and how it paid off.

You think in terms of advertisements

Real ideas come way before you ever communicate them. People focused on advertisements never let the idea bloom. If marketers can't articulate how to notify someone in a compelling way, I don't want to hire them. Advertisements are horrible and all of us have become experts at avoiding them.

You don't have your own ideas

We're a creative company with creative products addressing a creative market. Triple the reason to be amazingly relevant with powerful ideas that you know how to pull off.

You're not a student

If marketing people aren't voraciously consuming, internalizing and changing their skills they've already given up.

You're used to other people doing it

Everyone and no one is doing the work in huge companies. If you haven't owned it, you can't know how to do it or be smart about it.

You have no influence

If they can't influence me in their resume or interview, how can I expect them to influence the market?

You can't write

Writing is making ideas clear for everyone. Good writers are good marketers.

You're scared of change

Marketers' jobs are to change the market. You can't be a good marketer if you can't stand change.

You can't say no

Have an opinion. Stand up for yourself. Don't just accept what I say.

You can't see what needs to happen

Take a step back. Are you spending your time on things that will make (the right) impact? What is required down the road? Don't drive while contemplating the inside of the car.

You don't believe

We have a fantastic product. It changes the way people work with each other. If you can't fall in love with that and market from the heart, we don't need you on our team.

You're a good multi-tasker

That's right, I don't want someone that's awesome at keeping 300 things going. People who chase everything get nothing done. I want someone that kicks ass on one thing and then moves on.