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- Gilda Radner used to say, "It's always something." That's true in life and in business - with the realm of CRM being no exception.Companies typically implement CRM systems with the highest of hopes for bringing new efficiencies to their organizations and gaining competitive advantages. But, despite best intentions, those systems may fail to live up to their expectations. What follows are the top five pitfalls - and what to do to avoid the CRM pits. |
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- While at SES in Chicago, I got to hear Rick Klau of Feedburner talk a few times. While listening to him, I realized that Feedburner's services are well worth the free account; not to mention the paid account.Feedburner is a feed management service. It takes your blog generated feed and works with it to ensure maximum compatibility with all feed readers. |
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- Jim AllchinWindows Vista Team Blog : Setting The Record Straight. Jim Allchin responds over on his blog regarding a recent news report quoting him as saying that he would have bought a Mac if he weren't working for Microsoft in an email to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.The email surfaced as part of an ongoing trial between the State of Iowa and Microsoft, one of the last remaining state anti-trust trials that Microsoft is defending. Allchin says that the email was taken out of context and that he was being purposely dramatic in order to drive home a point. |
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- Why do people buy your products? Why do they purchase any product or service? One thing's for certain, it's not about the price.It's a common fallacy that people buy based on price. Well some do, but most people buy based on value or rather their perception of value. |
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- If you have yet to buy gifts for everyone on your holiday list, look no further than a personalized DVD from Yahoo! Photo.You don't have to spend a fortune on holiday gifts to show that you care. Yahoo! Photo and PhotoShow offer a range of products that can be made from your very own photos and make spectacular gifts. |
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- Watching videos online is popular for sure. The online video market has exploded in the last year with sites like YouTube leading the way. It may come as a surprise that there is one area of online video that has not seen rapid growth. According to the "Broadband Video and Web Television End-User Perceptions" report from ABI Research only a small number of North Americans have either rented or purchased a digital movie download. Those that have make up only 5 percent of video online viewers. |
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- Shopping in India can be a bewildering experience.Aside from the completely westernized shopping megamalls that are popping up all over large cities here, there are still thousands of stalls, streetside vendors, underground markets and bazaars selling just about everything imaginable. Lajpat Nagar in Delhi is one of these types of places, full of stores stocking brilliantly colorful clothes, textiles and other materials stacked from floor to ceiling using every centimeter of space in each narrowly designed retail cubicle. Upon first entering the main road here, you are struck by two things ... the colorfulness of every store, and the sameness of each store, seeming to sell the exact same materials side by side. |
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- Never let it be said that Google doesn't embrace the holiday season. From various logo designs to free Google Checkout use, Google has always been very festive during the month of December.This year, not only are they allowing us free use of Google Checkout, they are also including Google Earth in the celebration as well. According to the Google Blog, there are toys hidden around Google Earth and clues about the toys will appear at the North Pole everyday until Christmas Eve. The location of the previous day's toy, which is hidden in a Google Earth satellite image, will also be included in the daily North Pole message. |
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- In Jaipur at the Alsisar Haveli, I met a young puppetmaster and his ten year old brother. Together they performed puppet shows outside the main restaurant at the Haveli, with the older brother expertly controlling the puppets with every finger of both hands behind a curtained backdrop, and the younger brother playing the dholak in accompaniment. Afterwards, I spoke with them about their craft and bought two puppets. Despite having a great location and relative monopoly on all visitors to the Haveli, he shared a common plight of the puppetmaster in India ... no one buys puppets anymore. |
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- I agree with Chuq Von Rospach. Sites shouldn't be forced to take advertising, even to give that money to a charity.I don't take advertising here, well, except if you count my Amazon link and my occassional mentioning of Seagate, which sponsors my video show. Anyway, there's a cost to advertising in clutter, in extra bits that the infrastructure needs to push out, and in reduced quality of experiences for users. And, it's a smart piece of business on the part of Craig's List to try to be different. |
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- Ahh, lots of bloggers got invited to an all-expenses-paid shindig of some kind up at Microsoft. How do I know that? Cause Evan Williams posted such on his Twitter account.Rael Dornfest, Mike Arrington, Molly Holtzschlag, are there, among others. Can we get a complete list? |
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- Wow, I gotta come back to this later, but when I just walked into PodTech's offices after a day of interviewing and being mostly off of the Net several people came up to me and said "did you hear what happened at Le Web conference?"I have one more interview to do today, but looks like Loic has a full meltdown of attendee feelings (people are VERY angry, on first look at posts from the conference, because Loic had a couple of politicians who spoke in French, didn't take questions, and gave a political speech where attendees expected talk of blogging and technology). I have no idea what I'd do if I were in his position. One thing it tells me: don't give your audience something they didn't expect. |
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- Netgear makes a lot of the WiFi routers found in homes around the world so it was a great privilege to interview Netgear's CEO, Patrick Lo.He's ultra approachable. Works in a cube surrounded by customer service people. I like that. Unfortunately I had left my tripod at home by accident, so you get ScobleShow handheld. |
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- I gotta remember to keep trips to Google down to under two hours. Why? My head starts hurting.It's like being in an intellectual candy store. Everyone I meet shows me something else cool and gives me another 10 ways to make my blog better (hey, Mike Cassidy, if you think your blog sucks, you should hang out at Google for a while - they'll show you 50 ways to make your blog better). |
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- The Register writes that, according to numbers from Forrester, Apple's iTunes Music Store is seeing abysmal sales, with revenues down 65% since January.Now, while Microsoft fans may love the idea of Apple losing money, that isn't what this is about: It is about the failure of the digital music store. While iPods continue to sell in huge numbers, songs aren't selling, for the simple reason that, after consumers have sampled the DRM experience, they go right back to stealing music or buying CDs. The value of a song from the iTunes Music Store, or any PlaysForSure store, is just barely higher than zero. |
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- An extraordinary event took place in Paris this week, one that I was due to be part of as a presenter but could not make it. Le Web 3, the third in a series of Web 2.0-ish events organized by Loic Le Meur, attracted nearly 1,000 people from over 35 countries, all of whom showed up expecting to be part of two days and nights of stimulating discussion, learning and socializing. While it looks as though the socializing was a success, it seems that you can't say the same for the conference itself. Some quite astonishing accounts of how the event was hijacked by French politicians. |
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- There have long been rumors of Yahoo! acquiring Facebook. Michael Arrington at Techcrunch , reported the acquisition documents, named "Project Fraternity" have been leaked."Leaked documents in our possession state that an early offer was $37.5 million for 5% of the company (a $750 million valuation) back in Q1 2006. |
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- Matt McGee at Search Engine Guide provides some simple steps to make a page more local. The tips would be useful if you're a small business that relies on local search traffic, as then you must make sure 'search engine crawlers have a good sense of where you're located.'The first step is to put your physical location on every page of your site. It is also important to place local phone number along with physical address. Giving address an extra prominence on Contact Page is a good idea. |
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- The concept of linkbait exploded during the Las Vegas PubCon, thanks in large part to the drinkbait game. While it's true there were a number of sessions devoted to concept, seeing it in action in the form of game based on getting your picture taken hammered the whole idea home.However, how would you react if someone else debuted a similar game at the next big conference, essentially stealing the buzz you created and perhaps cheapening the idea? What if this person is someone you may have worked with in the past? If you are like most people, the idea is not very becoming, especially if your idea was original enough to become a point of reference for the very concept you were exploring. |
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- Human Resource Management as a profession is in danger of becoming not just an irrelevance to day-to-day line managers but a break on the productivity and profitability of organisations.The element that appears to be increasingly missing from HR management is the human element. The increasing importance placed on reducing the costs of employee recruitment and administration, benchmarking remuneration and implementing "systems" to control HR activities has slowly, but surely eroded the human purpose of HR. The reduced emphasis on people starts with recruitment. Advertisements which appear in newspapers or on the internet fall largely into two categories. |
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- Get the best education money can buy from the University of California-Berkeley, for free on Google Video.8 a.m.- the alarm blares, you swat at it and roll out of bed. That shirt looks clean, so you put it on, head for the coffee pot, and shuffle out the door. |
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- Yahoo News and ABC News have agreed to expand their relationship. ABC will be providing Yahoo News with additional video content. The new agreement will add several new features. ABC will offer Yahoo breaking news, features, interviews and video clips from Good Morning America. The agreement is an extension of the current partnership, which started in September of 2005. |
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- Countless authors, speakers, bloggers, podcasters and other advocates of social media have pointed out that companies should focus on their biggest fans and that social media like blogs-along with other Internet tools-are ideal channels for such outreach.Yahoo! and comScore Networks have released research today that validates that point of view. "Engaging Advocates through Search and Social Media" makes the connection between effective use of the Net as a marketing channel and influence of brand advocates. Specifically, the study found (according to the press release): |
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- Skype, an Internet communications company, is now offering U.S. and Canadian customers a paid annual subscription service that will allow registered users to make unlimited to any phones located within the U.S. or Canada. |
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- The Washington Post reports that Skype will introduce a plan that lets customers pay $30 per year for unlimited SkypeOut dialing to US and Canadian phone numbers.The rate has been 2.1 cents per minute, but for most of 2006, the calls have been free as part of a promotion to entice more customers to try SkypeOut. For anybody who expects to make SkypeOut calls within the US and Canada exceeding about 30 hours (which would be just about anybody using Skype as their business phone, as I do), this is a good deal. The free dialing deal has been available in other countries, but no flat fee is planned outside the US and Canada when those promotions end with the new year. |
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- The Good Shepherd is all THE movie this week ... & on the occasion of the movie's premier, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro & Matt Damon will be on Larry King Live next Monday. Jolie & Damon will talk... |
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- Open Blue Lab is a RAD framework (MDA based) that transforms UML models in Web 2.0 portal applications without writing code. It is currently being used to develop a full Web ERP from scratch. Portal layout may be configured through the UI, and Ajax and HTML-based forms are automatically built from XML widget definitions, which may be generated on the fly from a UML model that describes your information system. Widgets are dynamically populated, making them data-aware automatically at run time with no need to code any database interaction. |
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- SKorea’s Daum to tie up with Google in online advertising (Sharewatch) South Korea’s second-largest portal operator said it will operate cost-per-click (CPC) search ads through Google’s system AdSense, starting from January when its contract with another US search-ad company, Overture, expires. Network Solutions Launches Pay-Per-Click Online Marketing Services (PR Web) Pay-per-click services made [... |
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- Oggify is a Perl program for converting a directory tree of FLAC files into a similar tree of MP3 or Ogg files. It allows you to adjust the settings for encoding, and can retag files, among other things. Goggify is a Gtk2 based GUI version of Oggify. License: GNU General Public License (GPL) Changes: |
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- Helpful Reviews and Research on All Things Travel ¦ MyTravelGuide.com Plan your next trip at MyTravelGuide. Find reviews and research on all hotels, restaurants and attractions, plan and explore destinations worldwide for your trips. Hotels Etc. |
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- US $5.69 End Date: Saturday Dec-16-2006 14:57:44 PSTBuy It Now for only: |
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- A Time Warner researcher lays out the case for his company's cable networks. |
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- Buy.com - Creative Labs 1GB Zen Nano Plus MP3 Player FM Tuner $29.99 After Rebate Using Google Checkout. |
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- AP - Feyenoord and Paris Saint-Germain — two clubs whose last UEFA Cup matches were marred by violence — reached the round of 32 in Europe's second-tier competition on Wednesday, and were joined by Ajax, Hapoel Tel Aviv, Celta Vigo and Fenerbahce. |
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