Axel's Blog

This Blog Is Moved

2010-05-15T12:11:00.001-07:00

Thanks for following me here in the past years. However it is time to move on and I moved my blog to my own blog. Please see me on my site: http://axelschultze.com
THANKS !!!

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS
(All my social sites on one page)

In the year 2010

2010-02-07T13:14:00.000-08:00

Some things won't change - but be remembered. "Now it's been 10,000 years..." hope this clip still exists then.

Avatar, took movies to a new level

2009-12-20T13:04:00.000-08:00

Avatar was exciting, compelling, challenging, a new dimension in the movie world. The most well balanced movies I've ever seen. To me it also was one - if not the - most impressive movies I've seen in my live. I loved Star Wars, it was just overwhelming (back in the 70's), but Avatar was the most complete movie of all. A science fiction that had nothing that couldn't be true, nothing too crazy, nothing too silly, nothing too bloody, nothing too brutal, nothing too... To me Avatar had the perfect balance - and it was all about balance.

I will see it again. I believe I only saw "New Hope" twice in the movie theater. I will see Avatar now in an iMax, then with my kids again and.... Screw the box office numbers. This will hopefully be another one billion dollar move - just because I want to see Avatar II. And if not, most of the GREAT movies were less successful then the average shot.

James Cameron, you did an absolutely out standing (literally) job! Nothing more to say.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS

The Channel Never Dies

2009-12-18T15:40:00.000-08:00

Whenever people thinking of eliminating the middleman something magically happens and that middleman takes center stage.

Imagine you want to create a social media initiative and you kind of get frustrated that all you have is about 50 of your 500 employees who would really be helpful. Then you have an epiphany and think "What about my 2,800 partners and their teams"?

Now we are talking
Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS

Why I no longer tweet every day

2009-12-09T13:06:00.000-08:00

I started Twitter early 2007 see my first tweets. Like many I had no clue - stopped using it for a few weeks, came back, liked it a lot and people laughed at me "Axel, are you out of your mind".
In the coming two years I followed probably 20,000 people on and off and got to 53,000 something follower over all - now down to about 5,000 after I did some twitter hygiene.

I used Twitter to converse, get news, chat, inform, provoke...

Twitter is evolving. It is going to be the world's most important NEWS platform. Twitter already became the leading publishing company - without being a publishing company.
And as such I will continue to tweet, but not about how my sailing trip was or that I have lunch with another CEO (well maybe once in a while) - but rather changes that may be of interest to more people just than my inner circle.

Like many things in our social media industry is evolving. People who hate change, don;t want change, will be disappointed - others will sour with the evolution. "Fly with the eagles or scratch with the chickens."

That's why in 2010 you will no longer see me tweeting every day.
Axel
XeeSM.com/AxelS

SRM Best Practices with XeeSM

2009-12-02T13:00:00.001-08:00

XeeSM/SRM Best Practices Dec/09

View more presentations from XeeSM.

My Bio Cloud

2009-10-28T16:16:00.000-07:00

Andrew Baker, a fellow XeeSM user inspired me to do that. I thought it's interesting enough to share it:

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS

The End Of Email

2009-09-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

I blogged about it a few weeks ago in a different context. But I'd like to shed more light on the dieing email technology. Yes, yes, yes, It will live on for a long time - but it's the end of it's relevance - and therefor eventually die.

My email account receives on average 36,000 emails a month. About 30,000+ are filtered by the server based spam filter. I don't even notice those 30,000 - other than in a mail server log file saying - deleted 31,074 spam emails.
From the remaining 6,000 email about 5,000 get filtered by my local spam filter. So I end up with about 35 emails per day of which 50% I still care less, 15 - 20 may be informative and 5-10 are real important.
In other words 0.5% of the email volume is important.
Or: 99.5% of emails are a waste of bandwidth, wast of money as I need to buy and maintain spam filters. It's a sad illusion for customers who trust marketers that they can "deliver the message".
OK - I get more than 5-10 important messages a day - much more but I get them through different ways. People contact me via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter direct messages, text me, skype me and so forth. Only 20% of what is relevant to me comes through email - and steadily declining. Friends, customers and peers know - if something is REALLY important they skype me.

Now - you may say but if 5-10 are very important you can't throw it over board. Right ! But it tells me that there will (hopefully soon) somebody come up with a cool new idea to get those 10 important messages to me without all the overhead of spam and filters.

I look forward to the day I can announce that I no longer use email - which I predict will happen within the next 18 month.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS

All social sites on your blog

2009-09-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

It's been messy to put all your social sites on your blog, your website, your email signature and worst of all - your business card. If you have a twitter account, you have only one URL to tell your friends where else they can connect with you. On your blog the same.

Check out http://xeesm.com you see it here on my blog as an embedded script. You see it on my website as an embedded script, you see it on my email signature and many more places.

Change one - changed all others
The neat thing is: If I add or remove a site, like I recently added imeem, it appears on all sites and anywhere I use my XeeSM automatically. Check the XeeSM fan page, quite some more cool blog posts from other users.

A natural connection booster
The most surprising effect however was that so many of my friends and contacts connect on other places simply because they just didn't know I have a presence there too. And that drove their friends to connect with me too.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS

Last release before XeeSM's public Beta

2009-08-13T16:39:00.001-07:00

Last night the team updated XeeSM one more time prior to public Beta next week. Here is what's new:
- Blogger, Wordpress, Website ... gadget
- Allow XeeSM owner to tweet about himself
- Provide URL suggestions (ajax suggest)
- Let your friends know where you are
- Make it a #FollowFriday feature

- Blogger, Wordpress, Website ... gadget
You can embed XeeSM in your blog or website. Go to "My Profile" and click on "Show XeeSM embed code". The code is based on your profile and you can cut and paste and add to your site. Let us know if you need any help. Like you see it here.

- Allow XeeSM owner to tweet about himself
Once you have your XeeSM or update your profile, you can Tweet about it right from the profile manager page.

- Provide URL suggestions (ajax suggest)
The most asked for request was to add a way to suggest the URL format when you add a site. At your command. Here it is.

- Let your friends know where you are
Share your social site directory with friends, customers and other contacts. Click on "Share it" and upload your email list from Outlook or similar address books. We will send your XeeSM to everybody you put into the list. This may help you to become more approachable.

- Make it a #FollowFriday feature
Each XeeSM has a new Tweet text to introduce the person to others on Twitter. But on Friday it automatically has a #FollowFriday hash tag included.

Please do us a favor and comment on our Facebook FAN Page.

Axel Schultze MyXeeSM

Why most small / medium businesses struggle with social media.

2009-08-13T03:30:00.000-07:00

Where is the expected added business?

Social media appears to be a new marketing tool. It looks like a new way to get closer to customers, win some more deals, creating a new communication channel. But where is the new business?

How can I turn it into an $800 Million business?
It was just a little bit too simple. And like anywhere else, there is no free lunch. But social media has a huge potential. It wasn't just for fun that Zappos, an online shoe retailer was acquired for $800 Million dollar by Amazon. So what is it that makes social media work for some and not for others?

It is actually only one tiny difference:
For some social media is a new marketing channel, get done with it and go on with business as usual. Honestly, how could that work? For others social media is a whole new way of doing business with existing customers, partners and the rest of the market across all departments. Yes, it needs some thinking - but again, there is no free lunch. The latter ones are the winner.

Customers across all industries complain that the vendors, channels and suppliers they deal with provide a mediocre to lousy service, the companies are not approachable and nobody seem to listen. Businesses are so busy with themselves fighting the "business climate" that they seem to oversee that the most important aspect of getting business up are happy customers. Obviously even the coolest social media campaign won't help at all - if the rest of the company does business as usual. If Customers complain about approachability social media can help to get the team more approachable. If service is a weakness, social relationships between service team and customer would be a great deal of improvement. If products lack functionality requested by users, social media is a great way to connect product management with the market. Interestingly enough, in none of the above scenarios a "cool social media marketing campaign" is the weakness or even required to engage.

How to solve the problem:
1) Understand that social media is a cross functional engagement
2) Don't hire an external social media team but create a social culture internally
3) Keep sales in charge of customer relationships - but in a more social way
4) Make product development more approachable and listen to the market by being part of the social web
5) Ask marketing to help gather data and reports from the social web and escalate alerts inside the organization
6) Develop a strategy based on a thorough social media assessment
7) Engage in the social web with the goal to increase customer advocacy
8) Have a small team well educated and professionally execute the strategy

The Social Media Academy conducts a complimentary webinar this Friday Aug 14, with further details on the topic.

Sorry - I unfollowed you

2009-08-07T16:38:00.000-07:00

Since I started Twitter in 2007 I followed all kinds of people and over 25,000 followed and unfollowed me over time. I used other tools to get through the noise and a few weeks ago I started to unfollow. I am down at around 1,500 right now. Why 1,500? See further down - let me first say who and how.

Who did I unfollow?
1) People who have "I make you rich" or "follow me I follow you" in their bio.
2) People who still today have no photo up
3) People who have their dog or cat instead of their own photo. I understand you love your dog - but I'm not tweeting with your dog
4) People with over 10,000 followers and still follow more than they have followers. People collect all kinds of things, stamps, photos tinker toys - and today: Connections. Not my cup of tea.
5) If you didn't tweet in the last 90 days - tell me when you are back - happy to re-follow if it's interesting
6) People who basically RT all day long to stay in the game, I check carefully - some are actually very nice - others I just don't care.
7) Random noise & Bandwidth eater. Now if you read so far, please read this carefully: I don't follow if it is all about walking your dog. I LOVE people talking about there personal life as well - what they had for dinner and so forth but only if that is not ALL I read. I like the complexity of business, family, fun, personal, and what ever constitutes you. We humans are complex anumals and can assemble a social picture in seconds - challenge my ability to do that.

How did I grind through thousands of connections? I used a cool tool called refollow.com. It does it all. You can filter and slice and dice and then mass unfollow.

Who should NOT do this?
If you are follower collector, you shouldn't do that because your followers will go down right away. Many who auto follow (that's how you get many followers in the first place) have their tools also do auto un-follow - so you would loose all those who followed you automatically. In other words if Twitter is your follower game platform - it ruins your game ;-)

Now why down to 1,500?.
In accordance to Dunbar, an average human being is limited to about 150 social relationships as a meaningfull number. The limitation is our neocortex. But just a few hundred years ago we couldn't fly, we couldnet lift much more than our own body weight and had many other limitations. What the industrial revolution did to our physical productivity - the social revolution does to our social productivity - So my "Axel-Factor" is to be able to socialize with 10 times as many as Dunbar's number is - or about 1,500 people thanks to the social tools we have.

@AxelS
http://xeesm.com/AxelS
(XeeSM is my approachability utility)

Developing a social media strategy - prevent flops

2009-07-29T13:21:00.000-07:00

The best way to prevent social media flops is to create a sound strategy in the first place. It sounds a lot of work and too much for many small businesses but this model has proven to work even in small organizations:

* ASSESSMENT
Social Media Assessment (4 quadrant assessment model) find out where your customers are, where they hang out and what is on their mind. Takes you a week or two to make it right. But you learn more than ever before. If you feel you know already - this is your first red flag to a social media flop. Check your customers presence, research how your brand is seen in the market, research your partners and your competitors.

* SWOT
The assessment leads you to a good ol' SWOT analysis. You will find out what your (brand, product, service) strengths and weaknesses are from a market point of view - develop your opportunity and threat profile. You do that in a few hours.

* STRATEGY
Now since you know more about your market from a social connection and conversation point of view develop your strategy: Goals objectives, value to the market, major activities to achieve your goals, resources, budgets. Develop a strategy team that includes some of your customers (the X-Team) - that is the most magic difference to old world strategies. May take a few days and online conference calls. But if you do it without your customers - you flop - guaranteed.

* PROGRAMS
Once the strategy is sealed, you construct and execute your programs together with your X-Team. Instead of the old model of blowing something into the market you work with the market. May take a week or two to develop. The key to successful programs is PARTICIPATION and CONTRIBUTION. Each program need to be designed that your eco system contributes and other participates. Otherwise it is just yet another marketing splash - random noise. But your X-Team will prevent you from that type of campaigns anyway.

* REPORTING
The key like in any other business project: Measure, Model and Tune your activities until they are truly successful. Select the right tools and monitor your activities daily - some in real time.

So all in all it may take a few weeks - but you have a wonder weapon - versus yet another boring marketing campaign nobody is listening to.

Make a difference WITH your market!

Social Media 2.0 - The Next Generation

2009-07-24T16:46:00.000-07:00

Organizing Social Media Across Departments

Where most businesses start:
When companies begin to engage in social media they typically start in the marketing department with some rather tactical marketing campaigns. In those early models a large company either hired some social media "experts" to do the campaign or found some engaged people internally. The rest of the organization does "business as usual". The problem quickly surfaces in sales "What are these guys talking to my customers", on the service side "what are they promising to our clients", and the product management team still doesn't get any feedback how to better launch the next generation products. While it is obvious that social media is a key method to create a better customer experience, a better way to listen to the market, a faster way to react to needs and a less expensive way to become part of the market, the "social media marketing campaigns" alone can't do the job. An isolated "campaign" is often counter productive and it would be better to just not engage at all.

What did we learn:
Learning from the early experiences we developed a holistic approach, a cross functional organization model that is able to carry out a social media strategy. The so called ComStar model integrates all departments that have a touch point with the market into the social engagement strategy. Only a small core of social media trained and experienced people is necessary to help steer even large global enterprises into a new direction. An internal social media strategy and it's leverage effect makes it possible.

The Principle:
At it's core, the ComStar Model has one principle:
- Develop a social media service team (SMST) that supports all departments in the organization
The SMST members do not necessarily tweet, blog, comment themselves instead empowers others to do so.
Similar to IT team, finance support or HR that services an entire company, the SMST functions the same way.

How it works:
With the ComStar Model, the SMST (Social Media Service Team) is the guardian angel of the social media strategy. The main objective is to inspire, motivate and service the strategy relevant departments such as marketing, sales, service, product management, HR and other. The departments in turn engage with the customer base, prospects and the market in a whole. In this model the SMST is the cordial spine for the engagement, while sales keeps the control and the relationship to their customers (even so in a different more social manner), marketing keeps being the creative part in the new engagement model “not pushing the message” but fueling the conversation, product managers get the tools and methods to better listen to needs of the market and service teams get the support to be better integrated in customer issues.

Change
Behavioral changes, in particular with "the old guard" on the sales side, are as painful as necessary. Change has never been an easy task. But also change has never been more important and has never shown more successful results like today. Creating some fan pages and a few tweets don't create a better customer experience - nor does it generate the often promised millions of additional revenue. But a great and ongoing trust building relationship with the market does, as we can see in cases like Zappos.

Presentation:
We will present the model in greater detail on
Fri, Aug 14, 2009 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT
Leasdership Series Webinar

Agenda:
- Social media impact to our business operations
- ComStar, an organization model for social media strategies
- Comparing structural differences
- Implementation challenges
- Job description, work flow and responsibilities
- Motivation and compensation considerations
- Cross functional reporting models
- A holistic view to corporate social media

Registration

Social Media Evolution

2009-07-24T15:42:00.001-07:00

ComStar, a Cross Functional Organization Model and Strategy for Social Media engagement

When companies begin to engage in social media they typically start in the marketing department with some rather tactical marketing campaigns. In those early models a large company either hired some social media "experts" to do the campaign or found some engaged people internally. The rest of the organization does "business as usual". The problem quickly surfaces in sales "What are these guys talking to my customers", on the service side "what are they promising to our clients", and the product management team still doesn't get any feedback how to better launch the next generation products. While it is obvious that social media is a key method to create a better customer experience, a better way to listen to the market, a faster way to react to needs and a less expensive way to become part of the market, the "social media marketing campaigns" alone can't do the job. An isolated "campaign" is often counter productive and it would be better to just not engage at all.

Learning from the early experiences we developed a holistic approach, a cross functional organization model that is able to carry out a social media strategy. The so called ComStar model integrates all departments that have a touch point with the market into the social engagement strategy. Only a small core of social media trained and experienced people is necessary to help steer even large global enterprises into a new direction. An internal social media strategy and it's leverage effect makes it possible.

At it's core, the ComStar Model has one principle:
- Develop a social media service team (SMST) that supports all departments in the organization
The SMST members do not necessarily tweet, blog, comment themselves instead empowers others to do so.
Similar to IT team, finance support or HR that services an entire company, the SMST functions the same way.

With the ComStar Model, the SMST (Social Media Service Team) is the guardian angel of the social media strategy. The main objective is to inspire, motivate and service the strategy relevant departments such as marketing, sales, service, product management, HR and other. The departments in turn engage with the customer base, prospects and the market in a whole. In this model the SMST is the cordial spine for the engagement, while sales keeps the control and the relationship to their customers (even so in a different more social manner), marketing keeps being the creative part in the new engagement model “not pushing the message” but fueling the conversation, product managers get the tools and methods to better listen to needs of the market and service teams get the support to be better integrated in customer issues.

Behavioral changes of "the old guard" in particular on the sales side are as painful as necessary. Change has never been an easy task. But also change has never been more important and has never shown more successful results like today. Creating some fan pages and a few tweets don't create a better customer experience - nor does it generate the often promised millions of additional revenue. But a great and ongoing trust building relationship with the market does, as we can see in cases like Zappos.

We will present the model in greater detail on
Fri, Aug 14, 2009 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT
Leasdership Series Webinar
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/404589362

Agenda:
- Social media impact to our business operations
- ComStar, an organization model for social media strategies
- Comparing structural differences
- Implementation challenges
- Job description, work flow and responsibilities
- Motivation and compensation considerations
- Cross functional reporting models
- A holistic view to corporate social media

Registration:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/404589362

Axel Schultze MyXeeSM

Webinar Q+A Assessment Case Study July/22

2009-07-23T14:30:00.001-07:00

Q: I recently put my business on Twitter. I work for a hotel and the Brand in general does not have a page but individual properties do. Yesterday I received tons of messages and tweets about how angry this customer was at a different property but because we have the same brand name we were guilty by association. How do we address this?
A: I suggest you introduce that customer to the respective manager of the hotel and at the same time explain how the business is structured. You help the customer get to a person and the rest of the community to understand the connection. Offer your help if the customer needs it regardless of the responsibilities - like you said "Guilty by association".

Q: How did you select the tools, did you conduct any thorough testing? Are there any other tools you suggest?
A: To be honest, we selected the tools based on how easy and well the companies responded. The market is in a very early stage. It was more important that the vendors are "social" as well not just a bunch of hackers with no connection to the outside world. Please check our Tools Week page on our website for more tool.

Q: How much of the assessment effort happened via the tools and how much was an additional manual effort?
A: Tools always run in a short period of time and the "brain work" is the lion share of the work. If you'd ask how much time was the ratio without tools, I'd say 80% data research and 20% intelligent analytics work. Now it is 2% system and 98% brain work.

Q: Can you make some rough price indications?
A: It may range from $2,500 to over $100,000 is that enough indication? The cost is pretty linear to the size of your eco system - mainly equates to company size as well. You may find people doing it for $295 - and as always you get what you pay for.

Q: Do you offer a class specifically for conducting assessments?
A: Interesting question. Not really. After thinking a bit more about your question: Even so the assessment is only the first step in a series, you need to see the whole picture. In the class the assessment sessions actually start rather late as we need to make sure students get the full picture rather than just a facet.

Q: We are a marketing focused consultant but don't do those types of assessment, do you think we can work with your consultants or is there a potential conflict?
A: I'd definitely get in touch with them. The risk that you two compete is rather limited. The opportunity to do more successful joint project much more attractive.

Q: We sell exclusively through distribution channels and don't have access to customer data. Any suggestion?
A: You still have end customers - even so you don't know them. So there are a few strategic questions to explore like: Is there a conflict if you try to get in touch with your market? Will partners helpful or not? Is the market potentially interested in a dialog with you? What would the purpose of an engagement be (get market data or actually having a conversation)? So0 more questions - no answer, sorry. But contact any of us for a deeper discussion.

Q: All I hear about social media is "free". Who invests in those expensive assessments?
A: For instance if you allocate 10 people from a 500 people organization, you most likely invest $1-2 Million in salary, overhead and other cost. Not much to create a better customer experience - still enough to make sure you invest it right. The assessment cost is a tiny fraction of the cost you are going to spend - so you better make sure you start in the right direction - the assessment is giving you this assurance.

Q: Can we get the link to the presentation?
A: This Link

We had a few very company specific questions, and suggest you get in touch with any of the presenter or academy and explore ways to answer them.

Thanks again for participating. Let us know how we did, by tweeting about it.

Axel Schultze MyXeeSM

Spoken Word

2009-07-16T13:29:00.000-07:00

Silicon Valley Offline Social Get Together - July 21

Please join our friend Julie, who runs an awesome restaurant called Neumanalia in a less so obvious place for a great restaurant: Hayward, CA.
Next week Tuesday - July 21, 2009 | 7:30 - 10:00 PM
French / American Cuisine
!!!
Spoken Word
Need a chance to express yourself?
Want to hear what others are doing, seeing, thinking?

What is Spoken Word?

Spoken Word is a form of literary art or artistic performance in which lyrics, poetry or stories are spoken rather than sung. "open mike"

Join us for an evening of fun and companionship in a great setting.
Special Bar Menu !!!
Wine $7.00
Premium Beer $4.00

742 B Street
Hayward, California 94541
510.583.9744

Tell a friend

PayPal Case Study - Social Media Ignorance

2009-07-15T15:38:00.001-07:00

Paypal was one of the first online payment services and had a great start but over time lost the edge. The company seems to struggle with their internal administration and adjusting their business processes to meet customer needs.

Company Background
Paypal has 160 million customers
Their support centers work shifts and deal with approximately 60,000 support cases every day.
Over 1,000 support people handle on average 60 calls per day.
You cannot email or use other ways of communication than phone, fax or post.

Support team
To deal all day long with frustrated customers is not a very pleasant job, so fluctuation is rather high and the level of competency very low. It takes on average three calls to find a competent person. Some customers suggest you don't use a case number as you don't want to get back to the same person.
Most of the support calls are very low level issues with routine answers, nothing special, simply based on lack of user help and a pretty confusing system administration (a user voice nails it: "This is done by a bunch of engineers and never reviewed by business people"). Many functions are even unclear to the internal teams. Support staff admits it is not very intuitive if it is anything other than pushing the pay now button. Everybody can read that in great detail in thousands on public complains.

Customer Experience
People still really like the product. Some even donated a website like This Link Lots of discussions with thousands of valuable inputs that - as it appears- non of the paypal people ever read. Paypal instituted a feedback form that customers are asked to fill out after each and every support case. Even so many people probably are too angry to even bother, some do, I did. But that source of customer feedback evaporates in the dysfunctional organization.

More Market Research?
Now the latest hit was that I received an invitation to participate in a survey - yet I have to be "elected" to join. However I get $200 if I participate after I am elected. But it looks like I have to drive to Mountain View to do the in person interview. A "market research institute" actually is doing the gigg. I don't want to know what that cost in total.

So here is a company that has free feedback from millions of users and thousands of cases but just doesn't bother to care - instead pays a research institute to create yet another source of feedback?

Paypals Social Web Presence
There is a paypal account on twitter, mainly tweeting "please follow us so we can DM you" - 63 updates, following 123 people
There are hundreds of paypal groups on Facebook from paypal fans to paypal frustrated customers
There are 18 groups focusing on paypal on LinkedIn with over 3,000 members
There are paypal customers on MySpace and many other sites, the feedback is priceless.
Yet paypal seem just not to care.

Even internally people know what the issues are: A support person inside paypal (very nice and very professional) "...I know, we asked numerous times to fix those issues but nobody seem to listen".

How to actually fix the problem
Social Media for Paypal could become a life saver. Not as a marketing gigg but to improve and fix a dysfunctional operation.
1) At first a company team would aggregate and distill the customer feedback using established assessment methods and available reporting tools.
2) Then develop a customer supported advisory board and rigorously execute - fixing the top issues.
3) Tackle more problems and just grind through the list from top to bottom.
4) Ask the folks from "paypal sucks" groups and sites to HELP.
5) Using the, by then established, processes to figure out how new features need to be developed (co-creation)
6) Get feedback in a structured way through groups and networks rather than through useless questionnaires
7) Create forums where customers help customers, supported by maybe even less but better educated paypal support people

Non of the above has anything to do with sales or marketing - just building a better company.

Who Is Responsible?
Is this the responsibility of Dickson Chu Vice President of Global Product and Experience? Or is it Ryan D. Downs Senior Vice President, Worldwide Operations? Or is it Scott Guilfoyle Senior Vice President, Platform Services? Or Barry Herstein Chief Marketing Officer? Philipp Justus Senior Vice President, Global Markets, responsible for growing the company? Everybody has his/her fair share.

But No, Scott Thompson, the President is the one who need to engage his executive team in a cross functional initiative to fix the dysfunctional organization.

Social media is not a cool marketing gigg - it is a strategic engagement to react to the major changes in our society reflected by changing customer behavior and an ever more demanding market.

Axel Schultze MyXeeSM
Social Media Academy

How to start in social media?

2009-07-14T20:45:00.001-07:00

I get more and more of the very same question: "Axel, I finally decided to get into the social media thing, do you have some advice?"

OK - too long ago I started from scratch, so everybody please chime in and add to it.

1) Give your engagement a purpose (other than just trying it out or selling something). For instance: You may want to learn more about your customers, you may want to help others in an area of your expertise, you may want to know more about your partners, you may want to learn what issues your customers have, you may want to learn from others about an area where you feel you are rather weak... Again don't sell and don't be as boring as "expand my network".

2) Start on two places: let's say LinkedIn and Facebook. Create your profile by:
- Adding a picture of yours, don't make it too special amongst the 6 billion you are unique enough as you are
- Add your real name, your real background. No need to hide anything - it is out there anyway.
- Be open, the more information you provide the approachable you appear.

3) Social networking is about connections, conversations, exchanging experience... Invite all your friends from your address book to join you in your engagement. Don't select only 5 or 10 - don't be shy, you may be surprised who else is already there for years. So invite them all. If you are not comfortable to invite 1,000 - they only get an invitation from one - YOU. Don't embarrass any of your friends, contacts or alliances by not connecting with them.

4) In the next few days you may be busy with confirming invitations, thanking them that they connect and asking them for their experience. They may have good tips for you as well. Keep the dialog over the next few weeks - make sure you leverage the connection for conversations - not just as yet another address book.

5) Now look for some groups with interesting topics or interesting people. Don't forget your purpose by selecting the groups. Sign up with 2 or three, get familiar with the conversations. If you like it chime in, if not you may as well just leave the group. Once in the group: Don't sell but just develop your skills and help others develop their skills with what ever expertise you may have. You will see others trying to sell something - don't imitate (we'll get to that later).

6) You are now a few weeks into it. You may wonder how much time you spend with no results. If that is the case: Your conversations or your network may have not been in line with your purpose. Or you may wonder how many wonderful and helpful people you met in such a short period of time - great - you are right on track.

7) The selling and doing business with those people almost reach the melting point. When can you go out and do business, sell something take orders....? Give it some more time. The social web is like a secret society you don't get to the secret in the first few levels.

8) By now you may feel good about exploring other places and spaces. You may want to signup with Twitter and follow conversations that are in line with your purpose. Search for specific terms and check the people out. Also here, invite the people who are relevant to you and your purpose and follow them. Forget all the hype around getting thousands of followers. You are here for a reason - people who collected stamps in the past collect followers now - I guess you are not one of them.

9) Other places may be of interest: Create a little clip on your laptop and post it on YouTube, upload your presentations on SlideShare, store your bookmarks on Digg. You may find a few other interesting tools based on recommendations from friends. By now you do a lot of things and use a lot of tools based on recommendations from friends.

10) You are getting into the upper levels of the secret society. You learned a lot based on recommendations. You started tell others about your experience and recommend the tools to others. You retweet, write it to others on their wall... YOU NOTICE BY NOW: You never saw an advertising from LinkedIn or Twitter, you never received a cold call from any of the tools vendors you use. Nobody ever sold you something but you may already pay for some of the extras or reporting tools that help you follow your purpose. You may recognize: All it takes is recommendations. If somebody would have called you at home to use "Friends-or-Follower" you may have dropped it because thats the last thing you want.

11) As you join more groups you recognize the guys who ask hundreds of questions, answer the question right away and put a URL you should visit. Thousands of SEO and outsourcer try to sell you that way - and I'm sure like anybody else you just hate it. You reached an important point of understanding. Selling and advertising in the social web just doesn't work. But you have this wonderful group of people who helped you and you helped them. And while you still want to do business, introduce your solutions and make a living you learned by now RECOMMENDATION is the currency in the business web. Recommendation = conversation, conducted by others. And maybe you experienced it already - other people recommend you and maybe even your business or products because what you produce or sell is helpful to somebody else.

12) You look back - probably 6 or more month passed by. You are proud that you made it through the maze of valuable and stupid information, through people you met and others you have known for many years. Your initial goals may be achieved and you feel good about the social web. Now you may take it to a whole new level - take your company and help the entire team to make sense out of all this. Make your team and your business partners a helpful hand to your customer base and your industry. Work with your customers and make them so happy that they RECOMMEND you. They can do that much better than you ever will in your life. When all the connections of all your team mates and partners recommend your products and services because they are helpful to others you become one of the top successful business person - without selling a thing.

Axel Schultze MyXeeSM

Shocking report - How Teenagers Consume Media

2009-07-14T13:42:00.001-07:00

How Teenagers Consume Media
the report that shook the City | Business | guardian.co.uk" ( This Link )

What is shocking to me: What pretty much everybody is talking about finally shook the British Guardian.

More shocking: There is no way to comment on this report. It is electronically "printed" with no way to interact. I have to admit I haven't been on a news paper site for quite a long time and recognized that this seems still to be the standard.

At the New York Times you have to sign in to "recommend" an article. But also wait until all adds are loaded.

However on SF Chronicle you can provide a comment on pretty much everything. So why spend $200 Million on a new printing press?

Axel

Axel Schultze MyXeeSM

Your Twitter Profile Sucks

2009-07-13T09:53:00.001-07:00

Too many people wonder why their followership doesn't work too well, get unfollowed or not followed in the first place. Starting with a good profile seems to be essential:

1) Give your account your real name

2) Have a photo up - any photo as long as it is YOU

3) Point people to your main URL (check http://xeesm.com)

4) Mix your profile well (not your resume, not some funky info - just what is your main concern

5) Custom wallpaper is nice but definitely the last thing I improve

6) Your location is more than a courtesy - people look for others in their vicinity

7) Don't "protect" your profile - protected means "don't touch me" and many including me just never even ask to get in touch.

8) Understand that 3 values are part of your profile: Followers, Following, Updates

9) UPDATES is a big influencer of your profile - some people check older tweets as well. Tweet what you think makes sense to your network - mix personal and business aspects in a healthy way.

10) Let pretty much everybody know that you are on Twitter - trust me it helps a lot.. Thought I share this with the group.

Axel

http://xeesm.com/AxelS

Webinar Q+A "Customer Experience Development"

2009-07-10T13:30:00.001-07:00

Thanks again for the great participation in today's webinar "Social Media - A new Customer Experience Model".
Here are the answers to the questions from all participants:

Q: It's important to be able to respond quickly, honestly and openly in SM environments. Is this affected by the SM team acting as a service entity? Does this slow down the process and make you appear less transparent?
A: It may slow down the process by only a few minutes. The processes you institute are similar to support escalation processes. The ST will escalate findings to the respective people. The advantage for the customer is to get to the right person right away. But don't think too much in complicated service escalation. The trick is to create a social escalation process.

Q: Do you offer special classes for sales teams or marketing teams, or only leadership classes?
A: We plan functional specific classes in fall - but recommend those only for businesses that have already a strategy.

Q: What are the social media maturity levels in the various geographies around the world?
A: There are several studies in the Internet. The net of it is that developed countries are almost equal in maturity. There is no big difference between the US, Brazil, UK, Germany, Australia, Argentina, Spain, Poland... The much bigger concern is the cultural differences that lead to different behaviors and even different use of tools. India for instance uses Orkut much more than facebook, Germany still uses nick names more than real names, Sweden is way more adoptive than the US...

Q: Are you planning an East Coast location for the Academy?
All classes are Online. But we are going local for various reasons. We started in Australia and currently run the first leadership class there. We start in the UK in September and plan other countries. But all classes remain to be online.

Q: How many students are typically in a class?
A: The first classes grew from 7 to 15 and we accept 25 as max. There is a lot of interaction and collaboration so we have to cap it.

Q: The Consulting services you offer, who are the consultants?
A: The Academy Certified Consultants are the ones we involve and recommend. The number is growing every quarter. Very large projects I lead myself and work with the graduates or other members of the faculty.

Q: Do you have a case study where the business is very confidential - like medical doctors?
A: Let me say this: We should not get slaves of an attractive development and try to squeeze every business into the social web. Think about it this way: If there are people out there discussing a certain product, service or technology, you should be part of that conversation. If not - than just don't. Computers are in every household but we still cook great dinner without it ;-)

Q: Should SMM strategy be different for Small Office or Home Office than what you presented today - which is more adapted for biggest companies - having their brand known on the market ?
A: Social Media strategies are no different for smaller than for bigger companies. Our focus on bigger companies is because they are typically leading a market and the smaller companies are followers. But there is ZERO difference. The scope is different but everything we teach, from assessment through strategy to execution can be applied to a 5 people startup and to a multi billion $ global enterprise. Why? Because the customer may be the same person in either case.

Q: Very interesting, do you offer a class specifically to customer experience management?
A: I believe a successful customer experience strategy can only work in concert with an over all strategy. So the Leadership Class at the end does that.

Q: Can we hire you to work with our management team?
A: Yes, but not before 2010

Q: Do you plan to do off line / classroom classes?
A: There are no plans to do that. Social media is all about online engagement and we practice that from the second session on. Our curriculum is build in a way that it wouldn't even work off line because of all the information to digest and exercises to perform.

Q: Do you offer company discounts?
A: Yes we will for more than 5 attendees

Q: Is there any deadline for registration?
A: Not really. But we have over 500 prospects and only 25 seats each class. So the morning class will be booked pretty soon. The next class will start January 2010.

Q: Do you provide some guidance what to check when hiring a consultant?
A: We have an open wiki where both, consultants and customers helped building a catalog of questions:
This Link

Q: Can I become a trainer at the SMA?
A: Generally speaking yes. We offer all graduates to teach either their own or part of the core classes. Laureen Earnest and John Todor will offer their own classes in fall this year.

Q: Can we switch between evening and morning classes?
A: We ask you not to. We are doing a lot of group exercises and that would not work if you switch. Only if you have to miss a session, then you can.

Q: Do you offer company specific classes?
A: Yes we do.

Q: Do you hire?
A: No we don't. All instructors and faculty are active practitioners of the social web with their own business and every day experience in the real world.

Q: Not sure I trust any certification. What do you certify?
A: I fully understand the concern. Here is what we certify and why we believe it is important: This Link

Q: Do you provide your consultants with leads and business opportunities?
A: Don't put this into considerations. View the education as a foundation for your business and don't rely on others, neither the Academy nor anybody else promising you business. I suggest you chat with former students about that.

Q: (Summarized) several questions about registration, entrance exam requirements...
A: Please visit the website for more details:
Leadership Class details: This Link
Requirements and entrance exam: This Link
Class registration: This Link
European classes: This Link

Q: Can we get the presentation?
A: Yes. you will find it here on the blog.

Axel Schultze MyXeeSM

Xeequa Version 2.4 Released

2009-07-10T02:28:00.001-07:00

Navigation and Feature selection
Communities that do not plan to use any of the main features such as Events, Discussions, Videos or Blogs can turn the feature of by checking the box in the community settings. Only admins (Board) will still see buttons.

The Blogger API is expanded so that a community can syndicate content with a Blogger based blog. This feature is only available to Gold programs and up. Each post on the community blog will be posted on the connected blog and include the authors photo and name. If the author has a XeeSM, it will also post the XeeSM. (see Social Media Academy Blog) This Link or on our revitalized Xeequa blog at This Link

XeeSM Integration
XeeSM is fully integrated with Xeequa now. So if you have a SeeSM setup the social sites will be visible in the Xeequa settings and vice versa. Also the connection in Xeequa are synchronized with the "favorites" in XeeSM. CHeck it out if you don't have already This Link

Axel Schultze MyXeeSM

Last Call - July 10 Event

2009-07-10T01:27:00.001-07:00

Social Media based customer experience model
This Link

Social Media based Customer Experience Strategy

2009-07-06T16:51:00.001-07:00

The real underlying power in Social Media is a new customer experience model. Too many hip "social media campaigns" failed because it was just old ideas blasted into a new world. Too much money was invested in fan pages or online community that became dormant after just 3 or 6 month - or worst - was never adopted.

"Anybody experience with..."
Social media is about the most often asked question: "Anybody experience with...". Customers asking for help from real users, real customers - names they would never get from the respective business. Over 160,000 Toyota driver, 65,000 John Deere customers, 50,000 IBM customer, 25,000 SAP customers, 10,000 Dow Chemical customers... customers in all industries for all types of products asked those questions and most found answers. You are right - this is not 100% of their respective customer base - but these are the most vocal and therefor most influential people. Neither business processes automation, nor the next generation CRM, or a marketing campaign or yet another survey can help. If you and your team are not part of the conversation - your influence is ZERO.

"The new customer experience model"
Social Media in a business world is NOT having a LinkedIn profile, is NOT listening to tweets of somebody walking their dog and is NOT browsing through facebook pages. Social media in business is first and foremost "The New Customer Experience Model". Based on a thorough social media assessment of your ecosystem you create a good old SWOT analysis and create a strategy that leverages your team, your partners, your customers, vendors and others to become part of the conversation - not the old "message blasting one way street" - no - a meaningful and mutually beneficial conversation with your customers, your prospects and the rest of the market.

The Social Media Academy is running a complementary webinar this week July 10th. This Link which is all about the new customer experience model, case studies, methods, frameworks, reporting tools and ways to make it happen.

Citrix / Webex - A social media case study

2009-07-03T16:23:00.000-07:00

The Social Media Academy students of the Leadership Class conducted an exciting exercise where they performed a full social media assessment reviewing Citric' Online business by applying the four quadrant assessment methodology. The Assessment is done to better understand a corporations social presence in the market. The four elements concern Customers, Brand, Partners and Competitors.

Process, tools and results will be presented July 22 in an online presentation. Please check details and register here: Social Media Case Study

Social Site Manager

2009-06-29T01:13:00.000-07:00

We are starting a new service today: XeeSM.com

Share all your social network locations through a single URL. Try it for free: Http://xeesm.com/ Get a low user ID

Did you ever had these issues:
- Like to get more than one URL into Twitter?
- Wonder how many places to list on your email signature?
- Need to decide what to list on your business card?
- Need to make a change and update 25 different places?

You only need one URL: XeeSM.com/yourname

In XeeSM you have all your most current social networks, blog, communities. Such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, SlideShare, Blog, Website, Wiki... And if you have to change something, you do it one time in XeeSM and don't need to update all the other places.

Please check it out and let us know what you think

Axel

Social Media Rock Star or Social Media Business Consultant?

2009-06-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

The social web has been explored and rapidly taken over by the business world. What was limited to a social marketing campaign just a year ago to make some cool noise for coffee, skittles or a new blender is today strategically dissected.

The social media rock stars who do a few campaign masterpieces are finding new competition from business process savvy consultants who take social media way beyond the campaign level on the marketing side.

Social Media in product marketing and product design plays a wildly important role. Co-creation is the known buzzword, listening to customers and building the right next-generation product the executable part of it. Social media empowered support organizations leverage engaged users and support the "user support user" paradigm through social media in a whole new way.

Logistics and procurement departments conquer old supply chain problems such as customer buying trends and customer purchase behavior with social media where social web analytics serve as a much more precise early warning systems than anything we had in the past.

While LinkedIn is the prototype for job hunters and recruiters - HR or better said HT (Human Talents) has gone way beyond search techniques and use social media for skill identification beyond the profile, team communication, project qualification and much more.

The social media marketing campaign is only one piece of the cross functional social media puzzle. And today it is actually one of the last pieces to be put in place. Even before developing a social media strategy a comprehensive assessment - assessing customers, brand, partners and competitors - is typically the starting point. Following a traditional SWOT analysis, a social media strategy is developed based on components such as Purpose, Objectives, Benefits Actions, and a sound reporting framework. Resource allocation management and funds allocation including ROI calculations are standard elements in a professional social media tool box.

Now - to do all that - professionally trained business consultants may join the "Social media rock stars" with their 100,000 Twitter followers. In my experience - if all you want to do is a cool social media campaign and get a ton of followers - you are not much further along than the ones who hope to get 100 Million eye balls through sponsored links - no matter what the value of those are. But if you honestly care about your customers and try to develop a profoundly better customer experience – then think beyond the "cool" and start building a holistic cross-functional strategy - so that service, support, product design and sales are a homogeneous force and the customer experience is something your customer recognizes.
Some of the consultants who are working more strategically may be less visible in the social web - but does that mean they are less effective in their work? Are the pros working in the background the ones who really spin the web - way beyond the "cool"?

@AxelS

Social Media Academy

The Oracle - Yahoo Deal

2009-06-20T15:28:00.001-07:00

Yahoo is up for sale. Microsoft has a tradition: You mess with them twice they never talk to you a third time. Would Google buy Yahoo? No. Who else? SAP? Not a fit, not happening. Oracle? Hmmmm - let's think about that one.

Oracle just bought Sun and turning Sun into a cloud computing power house. Probably rearrange the software part, integrating professional services, shutting down MySQL, and decommissioning the hardware box sales over time.

Now - Oracle is thinking Social-CRM, they have a cool online community, they are very much SaaS and Web 2.0 aware (even if they don't produce yet). While maintaining their existing enterprise business, they will migrate carefully into the networked world - built from ground up on: yes, their own cloud.

The first meaningful application: Search. A search server farm is a cloud on its own. So here is a fit too. Oracle is bold and crazy enough to pull this off.

Oracle could even become the SaaS, Search, Social Web cloud provider for their own acquisitions plus the rest who is out there.

The benefit for the users? Huge. Oracle is the last company that would build an advertising based business model. Hence search may become a whole new user experience.

Search is over 10 years old and there was zero progress for the user - only for the advertiser. We still struggle with 10,000,000,000 search results generated in 0.0007 seconds. We still have no structured search, we still have no geo based search, we still have no social search, we still have no crowed search, we still have no ranking, selection or filter based search, we still have no.... - Simply there is zero evolution in the single most used software application on the planet. Right?

I would even pay 10$ per year for a search that does a good job. With a billion users that is $10 Billion per year.

And that is just the obvious beginning....

Strike - done - we will see.

Axel Schultze

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

2009-06-16T20:58:00.000-07:00

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

Partner Empowerment - Social Media Community Network

2009-06-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

We are conducting a project to empower partners to participate in social media. The funding is done through MDF. The details are here:

Purpose:
=======
Social media is a place where customers hang out and converse over products, best practices, service tips and more. The purpose to get partners involved in those conversations is a) to intensify or win back customer relationships and b) connect with new potential customers who are discussing and dealing with the same topics.

Benefit:
======
The benefit to the dealers and reseller to engage is an obvious business benefit in increasing sales and gaining back market share.

Challenges:
=========
A) Channel partners have neither a good plan, nor the resources nor the education to launch such a social media engagement. It is not so much an investment in tools or equipment but in knowledge and time. More so channel partners don't have the content they want like attractive video clips, white papers, ongoing new blog posts and more.
B) Channel partners are scared to death to expose any customer data. So what we needed to do is build a technology that allows partners to have a private customer community (with no access for vendors, unless wanted) but still provide vendors with relevant meta data to see that the communities are actually active and growing.

Solution:
=======
Vendors "sponsor" the partners social media engagement including three components:
a) The base education for the partners
b) Some vendor side resource allocation to feed content to the partners
c) An online community system that allows the partner to build their own social community, which in turn is connected to the vendors who feed content straight into all the connected partner communities (in our case 3,500 connected partner communities)

Funding:
========
The whole project is funded through MDF - and it cost less than the typical but less effective local marketing events. The initial funds allocation is $800 per partner for training, a few dollars for the online community and more but only if successful for community engagement (see below)

Reporting and justification
===================
The MDF funds per partner grow with the activities and engagement in the communities. In other words if a partner does not engage with their market - no more money. If the partner engages and their community grows - additional money. If a partner is REALLY active constantly grows the ecosystem and develops a vibrant community - even more MDF cash. The reporting system provides activity level that in turn controls the MDF flow.

So at the end of the day - social media and its transparency provides an even deeper insight into the effectiveness of the partner activities. Probably a bid hard to explain in words but once you see it you will get the idea.

It is a multi million dollar project but simply because the channel is a global channel. Cost is less than 0.5% of the revenue through the channel.

However the concept is scalable and will work with channels as small as 100 partners for around $25,000 to start with.

Who wants to kill Twitter?

2009-06-10T20:27:00.000-07:00

March 09: A faked Harward professor Martin Schmeldon accused Twitter to be responsible for our economic down turn. OK it was so stupid that an average educated human being was just smiling. It created still some noise but also some negative impact.

June 09: Harward again. A few uninformed students publish a "research" with a similar stupid title: "Men follow men and nobody tweets".

June 09: Just recently the rumor went around that Twitter user number is declining.

Is somebody trying to slotter the bird?

An interesting case of Social Competition. If indeed some competitor tries to damage the image of Twitter, "that somebody" got quite agressive and professional. Interesting also as it demonstrates the vulnerabilty of any business wether it is part of the social web or not. Social media pros obviously know how to defend themselfes - or at least believe they can but how about the rest of the business world that has no clue what is going on.

In case of Twitter - I'm sure they have a good defense strategy - like just let the community figure it out and defend their brand, that would be smart. But in any case it is a situation we can all learn from and so I'd like to ask you "How would you defend your brand"?

Please comment and let us know - at this stage of the game - no idea is stupid enough to laugh about. Share it.

@AxelS

Social Media Education for Managers

2009-06-10T15:12:00.001-07:00

Why is this important?
===================
You probably heard so much about social media and maybe still confused.
- Fact is that close to 400 Million people are part of this phenomenon in some way.
- Fact is that winning the attention of your customers and prospects is easier, less costly and more effective through social media than doing mail shots, cold calls, or advertising. If you want to grow your business, you need to catch your customers in the social web, not with a boring promotion.

But you need to KNOW what to do there, what to expect and you need to KNOW the limitations. You also need to KNOW the places and tools that are out there.

You can figure this out yourself. It may take a few month and some try and error. Or you may take a professional class and actually explore the space from a professional point of view together with others.

What do you actually learn?
========================
You probably already have an account on LinkedIn and/or Facebook. You probably have a some connections and check it out once in a while. Now lets get down to business.

1) You learn to understand that probably none of your customers is using social media yet - most of your customers are "in it" since years. So what do you make out of this?
Understand how customers - in particular economic buyers, decision makers and buying consumers use the social web. Learn how strategic you may want to get and leverage the media for you AND your customers.

2) You learn to look beyond your own profile but how to get active with your customers through group engagements and how to build your own groups to get closer with your market. How to deal with groups to not only use it for customers but as a lead generating
tools where you catch two birds with one stone get new contacts and be so helpful that they actually find you new members.

3) Learn to look at the "professional networks" versus "personal networks" not from your point of view but from a business point of view. There is much to learn from professional networker and how Facebook may become your most important source of information.
Learn to create a buzz around your groups and fan pages that will create more contacts than a spam filer can filter your mail shots.

4) Learn to understand Twitter from a business perspective. If you think Twitter is stupid and you have no time to follow conversations about somebodies lunch or walking the dog - it only indicates that you follow the wrong conversations. Learn how some leading companies like Comcast, IBM or Ford use Twitter for all kinds of customer interaction.

What our Social Media Certificate includes
====================================
You learned to:
- create a holistic point of view when it comes to social media for business
- take social media as a cross functional solution for a better customer experience
- understand the key aspects of a social media strategy
- create a consistent profile across social media platforms as a person as well as a company
- leverage groups in LinkedIn to use it for business conversation
- how to create successful business conversations in LiunkedIn groups
- how to create your own group and make it successful
- how to bridge to confusion between busines and personal networks
- how to leverage facebook to learn more about your customers
- leverage facebook groups and fan pages for business interactions
- how to establish your own groups and fan pages and making them attractive
- when and why to use twitter for your business conversations
- how to select the right people and conversations
- what leverage twitter has to offer beyond just tweeting around
- how to use reporting tools report progress and success

Check it out at Social Media Academy

Social Media Academy goes international

2009-05-09T14:31:00.001-07:00

Social media is a global phenomenon. Approximately 1 Million new people joining every month. The demand for education how to leverage social media professionally in business or for a person's skill and career development is accordingly growing fast. The instant success of the Academy in the US is now replicated in Australia and the UK. The Academy is currently exploring other countries and locations to expand.

In order to be able to scale with the growing demand new locations will be opened in a franchise type model. As such the models, methods and frameworks developed by the Social Media Academy will be available on a worldwide basis.

The first Leadership Class in Australia is scheduled for June 3rd. The first Leadership Class in UK is scheduled for September 09. For both regions complementary introductory webinars are help from mid of May on. This Link

Major Blog Enhancement

2009-05-08T11:41:00.001-07:00

The latest update on the Xeequa communities include an interesting and very important Blog Syndication system. If you are blogging from within any of the Xeequa communities that have a public portal and allow content to go public, you can syndicate those posts with your own blog. The first blog we support is Google's blogger.

Here is how it works:
1) You go to your profile and add your blog to your "Social Networks"
2) You go into any community and create a new post
3) You will see a check box that says "public". check it if you want this blog also appear on your own blog
4) The post will be posted in the community but also on your own blog.
5) Now you will get comments possibly on either blog, inside the community or on your own blog. This is where the real power comes in: The comments will be aggregated no matter where they come from and visible on both blogs. Comments from Xeequa to blogger will be transmitted instantly - comments from Blogger to Xeequa will be retrieved in a 30 minute interval.
6) Posting a post on Blogger however will not go back to any of the communities you are subscribed to. So please post from the community - to feed your blog too.

Give it a try.

FriendFeed grows

2009-05-08T11:05:00.001-07:00

There is an interesting dynamic at friendfeed. I joined the service about a year ago. And used it as feeds aggregator. That was helpful so I could track less people than I have in my various networks but all together.

Now FriendFeed has grown - big time. I can now use it as Microblog and get the posts back to Twitter. I can aggregate more services and actually consolidate multiple identities such as my uwn and my company's.

But what is most interesting is the stability and speed. While Twitter engineers have a hard time to keep up with their super simple tool, FriendFeed has a much richer system with way less technical issues.

So all in all I highly recommend checking it out.

Here is what you do:
1) Go to this URL to register: https://friendfeed.com/account/create
2) Get to friend recommendation and add all your friends that may be on Twitter, Facebook etc.
3) Complete your profile (photo, bio, you know the drill)
4) start posting...

This may come in particulart handy when Twitter is slow, down, maintenace one other reasons.

See your feeds....

friendfeed.com/AxelS

Social Media Academy goes Australia

2009-05-04T22:44:00.001-07:00

The Social Media Academy is going to open an office in Melbourn Australia to serve the Australian market. The first introductory webinar will be Friday May 15, 10am Sydney time. The first leadership class will start June 3rd. More information and webinar registration is at : This Link

Working on new blog feater

2009-04-28T13:46:00.001-07:00

This is the first test blogging from Xeequa to blogger

Social Media - moving from playful to strategic

2009-04-23T02:03:00.001-07:00

Cisco, IBM, Walmart, Wholefoods, Starbucks and others invest millions in their social web presence. The investment is more on the human resource side than on systems. They don't advertise what they are doing but they are moving fast.

The Social Media Academy provides some insight in this week's complimentary webinar http://www.socialmedia-academy.com/html/introwebinar.cfm

- The impact of social media on businesses across all industries

- Identifying the largest pool of business opportunities

- Assessment of a company's social ecosystem http://xeeurl.com/A0848

- Developing a comprehensive social media strategy

- Creating a social media plan

- Reporting and analytics in social media - over 100 reporting tools

- ROI, resources and budget considerations

- Social media as a cross functional business accelerator

- Competing for mind, - and market share

- Building a successful social media practice

This Friday 4/24 - 9:00AM (PDT) Online conference (no charge)

http://www.socialmedia-academy.com/html/introwebinar.cfm

Enabling XeeURL Community

2009-04-21T20:34:00.001-07:00

XeeURL community is now having a public portal page and blogs can be posted to a blogger blog. In order to get a post to a blog on blogspot, the post must be made "public" and the respective blog need to be entered into the "social networks page under setting and my profile.

Technology, Not War, Is the Solution to Publishing

2009-04-15T11:14:00.001-07:00

As sad as it is, industrial media killed itself. It is NOT the Internet or technology for that matter that killed publishers it is the change of their business model from independent content circulation to advertising distribution.

A publisher used to make money by providing a given audience latest news, well researched and easy to consume. Readers paid for the news and publishers made a profit by balancing cost of news gathering and distribution with newspaper revenue. Rather simple model.

I explaind the shift in process here a few weeks ago:

http://www.customerthink.com/blog/what_publishers_killed_may_kill_blogger_too

@AxelS
About Newspapers
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Facebook Pages

2009-03-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

We started a new Facebook page for Social Media Academy. Introducing webinars and educational events. Please join the groups and become fan.

Quo Vadis Facebook?

2009-03-27T15:01:00.000-07:00

The social networking company is looking for money – lots of money. How many do they really need and what then?

2007 estimated headcount 450

2008 estimated headcount 800
2008 estimated cash flow negative $150MM
Above numbers reported by TechCrunch

2009 estimated headcount 1,200
That translates to a cost structure of roughly $200,000,000 (200MM)
With revenues (I don’t see more than 100MM) this is $100MM under.
Now add the enormous cost of data centers that need to stream the videos, the photos and the rest of the application.

The clock is ticking. So what options has Facebook?
1) Cut Cost / Layoff
Either cut staff in half to get to break even
That’s possible but hard to do. But better saving 50% than losing all.
It would also mean the company is getting profitable and may do an IPO in a year or two.
2) Double revenue
But with advertising? That’s so much harder when even advertising machine Google admits that ad revenue is flat – meaning it’s probably going down. After all, the world is beginning to realize that the advertising model is not a business model after all.
3) Additional Funding
Get $500 Million to survive 5 more years, freeze hiring and use the time to develop a product/service value based business model – probably the hardest but still possible. In MHO the only way to keep current investors happy. Remember Jack Walsh: "Shareholder value is the dumbest thing in the world:"
4) Sell
OK then there is the option to sell the whole package - better now than never. Maybe for a billion or two - again remember Jack Welsh.

Then there is competition (possible acquirer):
1) Google with $16B cash in the bank has some nice little wiggle room
2) Less aggressive but more stable LinkedIn could weak up (I know hard to believe) and with just a few smart tactical moves get really dangerous.
3) MySpace – don’t underestimate those guys. They are less strategic more like a news paper driven network – but they have 3 things: a) Huge momentum, b) Financial backing c) the option to break into business (they are just a bid sleepy in that regard)
4) Microsoft? Not really. No vision, totally a-social DNA, no momentum… just money and then we could list any other company with money.
5) The SAP / Oracle world. Hmm interesting. Unlike Microsoft, they haven’t burned their name in social media yet. Just two massive companies but may become an interesting contender in the game in the next two years.

Disclosure: The above numbers are just rough estimates.
But you get the idea

@AxelS

The king is dead - long live the king

2009-03-27T14:42:00.000-07:00

After focusing my blogging on Xeequa and lately on Social Media Academy I decided to to do some personal blogging one in a while. And as such I revitalize this blog here at Blogger.

Generation Y

2008-07-17T14:55:00.000-07:00

Y is after X - it's that simple. But Y is very different!!!!

97% own a Personal Computer
94% own a cell phone
75% of the college students have a social network account

About 76 Million are entering the job space right now.
Businesses better get ready to know about the power and connectivity of that generation. If you are not connected you are out.

Social Media - where do you go

2008-07-17T14:51:00.000-07:00

Social media has been an interesting ride. Unlike technology that was pushed into the market and a lot of ad dollars made it well known - it was the opposite. The market picked it up and then many asked - what happened?

Every once in a while things change at speed of light and many still didn't even know. Why? Because 1 billion of the 6 billion people on earth communicate amongst each other (like the 15 - 25 year old) without letting the rest participate in the conversation. Then once we all know it we lokk back and just wonder ;-)

Alternative Financing

2007-12-18T14:19:00.000-08:00

I came across an interesting white paper put together by SaaS-Capital and ThinkStrategies: “Understanding the Financial Implications of the SaaS Business Model.” It doesn't need to be always Venture Capital.

Also I set down with a fellow CEO this morning discussing the implications of his highly engaged and emotional investors. Three investors own 52% of the company and have 3 different opinion what the strategy of the company should be. What's left for the CEO and management team? Leaving the company.

Fortunately the market is shifting rapidly... alternatives grow equally fast.

The decadence of Venture Capital

2007-11-28T22:36:00.001-08:00

Venture capital is out. The financial world is evolving and so are investment strategies. In a recent post Guy Kawasaki pledged for focusing on inexperienced entrepreneurs. About a week ago I was on a panel with Henry Wong from Garage Ventures inviting everybody who want to start a company to grab his business card. His pitch: "Don't worry about valuation - think what you can do with all the money".

An experienced entrepreneur would just roll his eyes and walk away. The ROI on Sandhill Road is no better than Wall Street. So why take the risk? VCs are in trouble and the latest post "In search of inexperience shows it".

The 7 reasons why entrepreneurs avoid Venture Capital today:

1) Ownership
Creating a company and following the entrepreneurial instinct is more than just fulfilling a dream to be one’s own boss. It is creating something that is better than what we have today, a journey to find people who help shape the idea, will buy it because it is better and a journey of evolution, improvement success and failure. Entrepreneurs need partners and not a financial owner that takes 50% of a company for a hand full of dollars and make it their own.

2) Passion
Entrepreneurs are extremely passionate about their idea and need to go their way with no interruption and constant "help" from an investor. Passion is not a guarantee for success but a key ingredient that once broken, breaks the business

3) Founding Leadership
A recent report from Morgan Stanly compared the world leading innovators such as Microsoft, Google, Cisco and others. One of the metrics was passionate founders in the executive bench. 9 out of ten got a check. VCs typically replace the leadership team within 3-5 years and bring "experienced" executives to the team, making the founder a second degree player.

4) Business Objectives
VCs are in the business’ business. Making money from shoving around companies. Butting less and less money in the first place to invest in more and degrade to 1:10 ration of a winning deal to a 1:20 ration. It's also called risk management. Entrepreneurs aren't players who like to play in that category. Business objectives of both groups have departed to far from each other.

5) Disruption
True entrepreneurs come up with disruptive ideas and try to make a difference. VCs are not really looking for such ideas - even so they say so. When Google was founded, it was Andreas Bechtolsheimer, one of the founding members of Sun Microsystems who gave Google money not a VC - Jee who would invest in this where we have Yahoo. Since Google went public VCs invested in over 50 search engines. Very disrupting. VCs didn't invest in MySpace or YouTube in the first place but now invest in 100ds of social networks or video sites - very disrupting.

6) Investment Profile
True Entrepreneurs ceased building their business plan to match a best practices list of people like Guy Kawasaki hoping that it matches the trend. The opposite is the case, true entrepreneurs have counterintuitive ideas, don't follow mean stream and create businesses in very different ways. entrepreneurship is no longer matching the idea of a VC to invest in.

7) Venture Capital Success
Entrepreneurs became very critical when it comes to the success of a VC. While some entrepreneurs don't really care as long as they get the money - true entrepreneurs do care. Today’s ROI of an average VC firm is lousy. They are under huge pressure to deliver results to their investors in order to maintain their management fees of several hundred thousand dollars per head and keep their Aston Martins and Ferraries. That pressure makes them irrational. And the downfall continues.

At the same time very attractive alternatives raised from that downfall. Healthy individual investors are much more likely to invest in disruptive technologies and true entrepreneurs. Large successful companies all have investment arms and seek people with new ideas and the ability to make the idea a successful reality. Even banks, which kind of evaporated from the entrepreneur’s scene, are back with very creative offers. And as Garage Ventures strategy is just a representation of what other VCs doing, seeking inexperienced entrepreneurs at all cost - the success rate will further decline until Venture Capital may completely reinvent itself sometimes in the very distant future.

Clearly people like me know that they are "unfundable" after stating their opinion. But that's the point, we don't care. Venture capital is just no longer of any interest - we are going after true investors who have only one goal: using their money to make more money - instead of expressing their opinions on tactical measures at board meetings.

Yahoo blocks Xeequa and others

2007-04-12T16:54:00.000-07:00

It looks like Yahoo has a new spam filter. All emails from Xeequa, Tanooma and ChannelExcellence are blocked by Yahoo. We are working on the issue but it is extremely difficult to deal with Yahoo - so in the meantime GMAIL accounts work just fine.

To call Yahoo for support is another interesting exercise: pay $29

Oh well - another item in the comparison list Google vs. Yahoo

Internet Monopoly

2007-01-12T13:07:00.000-08:00

Today I tried to get the new Fiber to the home from Verizon (FiOS). Unfortunately our area is not served by Verizon. O-ton Verizon sales rep :"You know it is a monopoly we can't serve your area, AT&T is". Hmm - I tries AT&T but they don't have any high speed Internet in our area. So I checked back with my current provider Comcast Cable - yes, I have Internet via cable but when I check bandwidth with my little tool I see upload speed of some 70 Kb.

Wow - and that all happens in Silicon Valley. Some times I hope I would be somewhere in Eastern Europe, 5MB fiber to the home.

So was that what we had in mind when we went from a government owned telecom to the "free market"?

Can you hear me - can you hear me now?

Happy New Year 2007

2007-01-01T21:52:00.000-08:00

With the beginning of the new year and changes in the blog software I'm experimenting with a new Blog for Xeequa and updating this blog. The new software for Blogger is pretty cool - B U T as I converted it to the new format I guess I lost a lot of the old customizations such as the Technorati Links, Feedburner Links etc. Oh well...

Please visit also my new blog which is http://Xeequa.blogspot.com

Web 2.007 (Web two dot oo seven)

2006-12-28T16:30:00.000-08:00

And of course – in the typical spirit of Silicon Valley – here are some more predictions:

- YouTube will have much more users then MySpace
- Web 2.0 will enter the business world
- LinkedIn will go public
- Investments in traditional software will be next to nothing end of 07
- The number of Internet users: 1 Billion
will become the "number of the year" for all marketers
- World of Warcraft may be another IPO candidate
but may be purchased by Sony and runs on the “cell”
- Xeequa will have more customers by end of 2007 than SFDC
(just kidding – but you get the ambition)
- Second Life will become the leading virtual business party spot
- TV and print adds will further plunge to total none importance
- Relevance as measured by Technorati, Alexa and others
will become the market cap index for private companies

Let me know what you predict :-)

Xeequa receives first award

2006-12-21T00:31:00.000-08:00

What an honor - the company is not even launched yet and we get our first award. On Zolis block you can read:
And the Winner of the Weirdest Company Name Award is: Xeequa
I couldn't help to get some explanation. But hear the whole story on the 15th when we launch the company.
In any case, thanks Zoli.

Xeequa Company Launch

2006-12-18T23:44:00.000-08:00

For many this this will come as a surprise. Only a hand full of people and a team of engineers knew about it. Today we declare end of stealth.

January 15th 2007 I will launch an new force in the collaboration space and particular Indirect Business. Xeequa, the new company is in business to help companies instantly create and manage profitable partner alliances. Unlike today’s channel management solutions, which are owned by one vendor for “their” channel, Xeequa allows instant Cross-Company Collaboration for all companies with all partners simultaneously. All based on Web 2.0 technology.

Tanooma, the SaaS directory, will also early next year come out of Beta. We already changed the advertising mechanism to Adsense by Google which allows us to simply interact with Google to leverage our ad space. SaaS companies can self register; self service their profile so that Tanooma is pretty much a fully automated - self supporting entity. Registering a company or searching through the SaaS industry on Tanooma is completely free of charge and we have no intention to charge for being represented there. That allows us to have the most complete directory in the SaaS space.

SIIA OnDemand Conference

2006-11-09T21:12:00.000-08:00

An interesting conference – somewhat competing with Saascon in San Francisco. While Saascon was directed to SaaS End Consumer and bringing SaaS closer to the broader public, "OnDemand" was a conference for industry leaders discussing the future of SaaS.

The first few presentations reflected the clear trends and expectations that SaaS is going mainstream and many speakers and panelists predicted that SaaS will replace many on premise applications in the next few years. However some on premise applications like global large scale ERP implementations will remain behind the firewall for quite some years. An analogy was drawn to the 80's when PCs replaced terminals - yet today - 25 years later - mainframes and even terminals are still in business. The SaaS future seems to be in the hands of the new generation software companies who are built for SaaS from ground up. Discussions made obvious that companies who need to change from a license product business to an on-demand model will have a very hard time. While some predict that most license software companies will fail to make the move, others put the example of Concur up, who successfully made that transition in a two year effort.

An interestingly large portion of the conversation on the podium and on the floor was around indirect channels. While sales organizations are not large enough and marketing budgets are limited, SaaS vendors need to find ways to attract partners to spread the word and help implement their solutions. Some companies present their successes with channels.

2 month Sabbatical

2006-11-06T11:33:00.000-08:00

Wow - 2 month through the US from coast to coast. Yes, this was a very educational, interesting and relaxing tour. Never in my live I had 2 month off - and yes it is hard to get back into business mode. On the other hand this was so helpful to better understand the country, the diverse cultures, peoples, challenges and opportunities. We came back thinking "California is an island".

Software as a Service is big - in California. But in the rest of the US? We talked probably to more than 100 different folks in Bed & Breakfasts, Hotels, Motels, Restaurants, Gas Stations, Supermarkets, in Parks or elsewhere - not a single person had an idea what Software as a Service is. Hmmm - so how are we doing in terms of SaaS marketing?

We visited computer stores: "What is hot these days?" "Multimedia in any way or shape." Videos, photos, MP3... Any business around Internet? Cable Modems, better screens, faster machines, a laptop for grandpa. On software? Antivirus programs. Microsoft? Hmm don't know nothing hot.

Now we are back and totally recharged

Interviewing Channel Thought Leaders

2006-08-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

I interviewed several channel thought leaders from within the SaaS industry and share the details in my other blog "Channel-Excellence".

The essence so far:
The SaaS Channel is finally coming into existence. It is not so much the traditional VAR and Reseller now moving to SaaS, but much more completely new companies that form a business specifically to fill the gaps of the SaaS industry. These catalysts do basically 3 things right - that truly enhances the value of the SaaS vendors:

1) They connect (integrate) multiple SaaS applications to a complete information infrastructure (Implementation Services).
2) They provide additional ongoing services including content creation, modification or improvement in very many shapes (Recurring Services Model) .
3) They help smaller local businesses to overhaul and improve their very individual business processes and leverage the fast to implement SaaS application to provide tools to actually service those improved processes (Consultative Services).

The SaaS channels are true catalysts to the SaaS industry. They work in a very different way than traditional VARs and resellers did - and exactly that is the value they provide. SaaS Catalysts accelerate the SaaS industry and will become a true cornerstone to our future.

1,000 podcasts

2006-08-03T22:22:00.000-07:00

Podcast has been in interesting topic for many people in the last few years. One person how ever took it to a new extreme: Eric Mattson. His own goal: Conducting 1,000 podcasts, interviewing marketers, innovators, entrepreneurs and other interesting people. I was number 68. Check it out.

Channel Excellence - the book

2006-07-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

After 25 years in indirect business - growing channels for Rockwell International, building my own global distribution organization (Computer 2000), today part of Tech Data, successfully growing yet a new channel during the DotCom boom (Infinigate) - while the saying went "The internet eliminates the middleman", then building a new category of Channel CRM Software as founder and CEO of BlueRoads and lately helping the SaaS industry to create a whole new channel structure, I decided to write a book about "Channel Excellence".

I'm pretty far and plan to publish it in about 12 weeks. In the meantime I will interview channel chiefs, channel workers and people who helped shape the indirect channels in the high tech industry. Any inputs are very welcome!

To support that project I created a separate blog ay http://www.channelexcellence.com

Channel Sales & SaaS

2006-06-20T17:14:00.000-07:00

Much is written about how Software as a Service will kill the indirect channel. SaaS vendors flip a switch and the application is live. It seams that the 250,000+ US based VARs and resellers go out of business any soon. But wasn’t that the story when the Internet came into existence? Or earlier when CDW opened their doors? Or… 1850 when the industrial revolution started?

N O – the channel isn’t going to die!
I recently talked to a few executives in medium and larger size organizations. And there was 1 single question that makes it so obvious what role a channel needs to play in SaaS: “Who has the capability to help us put it all together” – “Who can help me composing my new IT world which may consist of multiple vendors for different jobs i.e. Sales, HR, Expense Management and so forth”. The channel business simply hasn’t really started yet. But here are already several cases with great success stories.

B U T – the new industry needs a new type of channel.
There is no need for a warehouse, for technicians to install and configure software. The new world needs business savvy and business process aware people. There is no margin to be made from reselling but money from consulting, implementation, integration and ongoing maintenance. Feel free to download my whitepaper at Tanooma.

SaaS is not only no danger for the channel – it may actually be the biggest business opportunity in IT history. About 1 Million early adopter started with SaaS so far. About 750 Million will join the party in the next 10 years or so. That requires 1 – 5 Million Channel partners to act as catalysts for that new industry; it may turn out an even bigger channel than in the traditional IT industry.

TCO for SaaS Applications

2006-06-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

SaaS is all different and so is their TCO discussion!
The discussion about the total cost of ownership for SaaS solutions is on the rise. In my last 5 years of selling SaaS solutions into corporate America – customers range from multi billion dollar global enterprises where we installed truly global solutions spanning multiple continents and even multiple external legally independent but connected organizations – the question of TCO was present, yet the conclusion may come as a surprise.

Let me start with the “good old days of IT”. Total cost of ownership was the “sum of all fears”. And they came in various flavors and shapes. The calculation typically started with server systems, backup capacity, network infrastructure, routers, hubs, cables, then of course the respective software, the operating system, the database, the applications itself, the tools, update cost, migration cost, maintenance contracts for software and hardware. Then we got more sophisticated and included air-conditioning, the floor space, energy, related facility cost and of course the personnel to run the whole show. Lately there is even more cost involved such as rising security cost, disaster recovery management related cost and also all the management overhead. As we try to customize the solution more and more – sometimes we customize us to death – we have cost that is even harder to calculate. With all that, financing the whole structure became another none negligible cost item.

To get even more sophisticated we added opportunity cost, downtime cost, resources that needed to be available in case something goes wrong. In the 90s we learned that the actual software for instance is actually just some 15% of the total cost (depending which calculation you use and which consultant you ask). And at the end we even had to purchase software that helped us to calculate the TCO which came on top of the TCO.

After about 20 years of TCO discussions it is interesting to note that there is still no generally accepted method or formula to calculate TCO in a way that we can compare values, benchmark ourselves and our vendors. Even worse – TCO became a ever more fuzzy marketing weapon with no real value associated that either financial analysts can build a judgment on, executives can base decisions on or purchases can be measured by.

Now let us look into the TCO calculation for a modern software as a service based information system: Let me take the same buckets: Server, backup, software, operating system, database, updates, migration, aircon, space, infrastructure, support, services, teams, financing and all the rest of it. Isn’t it interesting that we get all that for $20-$200 per user per month from a SaaS provider depending what we are using? What do we do at BlueRoads, Salesforce.com, Tanooma or who ever in the SaaS space for customers large or small, regardless whether it is a multi billion dollar Avaya or a 10 Million Dollar medical device startup. We, the SaaS providers, own and run the data center. We do OS upgrades; we manage the database servers and build the application around the database we choose. We do not need to worry about compatibility with 3 database vendors and their 50 different versions. We deployed the application, we provided the update, we manage the data migration at major updates, we support the user because we ARE the technical back end, we pay for energy, the server space. We do the system financing, the depreciation, the planning, the disaster recovery. The monthly software fee BECOMES the TCO unless we do something that is simply yesterday IT – we force the vendor to deploy it behind the firewall, customize it, put it on the customer’s server, and ensure compatibility to their database…
But that is NOT Software as a Service – this is an in-house web based application server, no different from any client server application.

Now the magic question: How on earth can a SaaS provider do that all for 60 bucks a month? Well if you think of it, Salesforce.com spreads their IT cost over 20,000 companies – not 1. But also for smaller SaaS companies – IT cost is may be still 1/1,000 of the cost of an internal IT organization simply by spreading it over 1,000 customers.

My conclusion – put the TCO discussion to rest (Sorry Gartner) – and may be worth mentioning there is no OWNERSHIP of the application, it is a service.

Tanooma Beta Phase 1

2006-05-18T14:24:00.000-07:00

This is a little bid like my first child was born. Even so it is still closed Beta, we are out! Already fixed first bugs and collected first feedback.

After a presentation yesterday at the SIIA conference and the SaaS Workgroup - we feel pretty confident that we hit the right buttons. The SaaS industry needs a place to go. And while the larger vendors will build their user communities we are building a hub where all the users and communities will find each other. We will soon provide ways to not only expose applications, solutions, companies, people and expertise but also local and vendor bound communities.

One of the amazing things in Tanooma is our Genetically Networked Architecture (GNA) which went also live today. Rather than having endless attribute fields and complex related tables for those attributes we invented a whole new method of dealing with the DNA of people, products, companies, skills, possessions and other objects. We literally took the biological DNA concept and implemented it into software. Every attribute is a BASE, every serious of attributes becomes a GENE and all those attributes together become a Chromosome. Nothing a user or anybody other than us has to worry about. It is deep in the inner architecture of Tanooma but it does what we couldn't do in traditional methodologies: Manage an enormous amount of attributes for all sorts of people, companies and products and expose them in any variety quickly over the Internet. For those of you who are interested in that particular topic: I run a special blog for "Genetic Computing".

First semi public presentation of Tanooma

2006-05-13T17:51:00.000-07:00

I posted a lot about the change the SaaS Methodology will have to the software industry. Also I discussed with may of you the challenges every SaaS provider has and how we could make a quantum leap at times where budgets are small and global trade is increasingly complex.

In times where marketing budgets are extremely tight, sales cost need to be reduced to the max – yet – a global market with over 750 Million PC users (our current installed base) need to be addressed in order to successfully compete. We all need to find new ways to market. The old idea of a market place didn’t really work, we need to think differently. Let us show you next Wednesday what we mean.

Tanooma is already the world largest SaaS directory even before we go live in a closed Beta May 18th. Today we have over 350 SaaS vendors, over 150 SaaS focused consultants and solution providers, about 100 SaaS focused investors, SaaS enablers, SaaS analysts, SaaS Experts and other industry contributors listed. The company is founded with the mission to help grow the SaaS industry to about 100 Million Internet Software Service users in the next 5 years.

We are going to collapse a complicated global industry business network into one fast accessible “Virtual Economy”. Users will find more vendors, more partners and more expertise in one place than in any other industry. Customers will be able to make educated decision in a fraction of the time compared to traditional solution evaluation. SaaS users will find a rich set of services such as Single Sign On, License Tracking, User-Supports-User Networks and more – all for FREE! Consulting partners will be able to rapidly build their vendor portfolio like in no other industry before and vendors will have almost instant access to hundreds of potential partners and daily growing. And this is only the beginning.

With Tanooma’s new “Human Interaction Model” (HIM) we rewrite the book of collaboration. As Denis Pombriant (Beagle Research) said after a briefing: “This is SO NEW, I really wonder where this can lead us”.

We will present Tanooma for about 20 Minutes at the SaaS Workgroup meeting on Wednesday May 17th. You need to register with SIIA for the workgroup meeting at http://www.siia.com/events/prereg.asp?eventid=576

First Tanooma Progress Report

2006-04-26T13:08:00.000-07:00

We are having great traction in our development effort. The application is shaping up and we are still on plan to launch "Closed BETA" on May 18th. It is amazing to watch how fast development can be done these days by using smart tools. Creating a virtual economy isn’t easy. No place to look and see how others do it. No technology to read about and no processes to learn from other than abstracting how the physical economies were built – like in the US 250 years ago or Germany after complete distraction post WWII. But creating a whole new thing is such a rare challenge - it is a blessing.

The biggest challenge we were facing was the fact that users in Tanooma have by default multiple “lives”. There is the desire to manage personal applications like online bank accounts, access to financial services, online tax and other services. But there is also a need to mix that with the business applications such as CRM, accounting, marketing, research, HR applications and so forth. So for the first time the personal world and the business world has no longer clear boundaries. We needed to develop an architecture that ensures a single point of view but at the same time administrative separation for business and personal data. Even more difficult: if a user leaves a company. Business assets need to be cut while personal assets shall remain – and soon new business assets (applications and services) will be acquired. That new degree of complexity how ever should be completely transparent to the user – we promised simplicity! By looking into nature we began to copy genetic and motoric mechanisms and learned how to keep all that in the background. Like we don’t “think” we have to breathe and contract our heart mussels, a Tanooma user will not worry about the complexity of a virtually connected world.

The key focus of the Tanooma development is on its "Human Interaction Model" (HIM). Making it easy to search, find, identify, decide, relate, contact, connect, disconnect, communicate, learn, build and grow. The Tanooma world tries to eliminate boring tabulated data and get more interactive than any business application today. Even so we are far away from our vision – we will be able to show the path.

May 18th companies such as SaaS vendors, consultants, investors, enablers and other industry contributors will get access to the system and start configuring their outlet – so that June 20th when we allow users to beta test the new world, will find not only company names but details about their products and services.

We aggregated about 360 SaaS vendors, 85 SaaS focused VCs, 40+ Industry Analysts who track the SaaS space, a few new SaaS Enablers (companies like OpSource) and over 100 SaaS experienced consulting forms. All in all close to 700 companies dealing within the SaaS industry. The industry is not only slowly maturing – it is becoming VERY big – already.

SaaS and Rapid Development Technology

2006-04-15T17:36:00.000-07:00

As we progress with our prototyping effort it was time for us to decide what kind of technology we will use for our final application. So I had several conversations with executives from Macromedia trying to understand their strategy around ColdFusion, I explored Ruby on Rails, considered an Ajax/JavaScript pure play and obviously the traditional Java world. I learned a few interesting things: the most prominent community and also one of the top 10 sites in the Internet: Myspace.com is built on ColdFusion. I noticed that my Bank of America online banking application is a vast ColdFusion site. I was reminded that Java and JavaScript are two very different things and Ajax is a JavaScript based environment/methodology. Yet the richest and most widely used user interface outside HTML is Flash. The world is not as homogeneous as it was. It is no longer Java versus .net like it was C++ versus Basic.

Clearly Java is a very powerful development environment and a developer can pretty much do anything - but also make any possible mistake and take for ever to debug their code. It very much reminded me at the assembler days. Assembler was this powerful, development environment which produced lighting fast code. How ever development took for ever, mistakes were difficult to debug and changes to difficult to implement.

In the fast moving SaaS and Web 2.0 world we are at a similar crossroad. Do we go with the traditional Java code or do we rethink even that. In Tanooma we came to the conclusion that we choose speed over secure tradition.

The soon to be ready for Beta of Tanooma is a multi tenant multi organization cross communication application. Meaning multiple accounts such as SaaS vendors will use it, unlimited users will look at the respective offerings, consultants will be able to connect with vendors but also with users and investors will be connected with any company they are invested in or interested in. A technology which I call "Account Bridge" supports that cross organization cross communication. The development environment needed to allow that kind of complexity, support clustering to support a large amount of users to be simultaneously logged in and perform their activities. While Java seamed to be the logical choice - we decided to go with ColdFusion, AJAX, JavaScript, ActionScript and Flash. It took only 3 month to develop a functional prototype. The application is richer than pretty much anything on the market today - but at one price: There is no longer this one "language" we use. It is a collection of best of breed tools which all promised to interact - and we are very lucky: they do. But Tanooma is not the only company that questions Java as a development platform. Many of the new apps whether they come from Google, AjaxLaunch or many others avoid the long and rather complicated development cycles and leverage the rather new and much more user attracting Flash and Ajax world.

Single Sign On for SaaS

2006-04-08T19:37:00.000-07:00

Single Sign On seems to be one of the hot items when it comes to SaaS application usage. While traditional software resides on your PC and you just load it - Internet Software Services need to be securely accessed over the Internet. The need for SSO (Single Sign On) becomes pretty obvious. As users have more and more SaaS applications in conjunction with other online services, the user-ID/Password handling becomes kind of ugly. Yes you can store them on your PC, but that doesn't feel too save either. In particular when you think of all the applications you access outside salesforce.com, BlueRoads, Recruitmax, RightNow and you name it such as etrade, schwab, bankofamerica, ebay, amazon...

Now - SSO is not that easy. There is either integration work to be done so that each and every software vendor is good with the service or there has to be whole new ways to be developed. We are working on various options within Tanooma and will provide some alternatives when we come out. But there is not only a technical challenges to overcome but also legal issues in regards to contract definitions. Some vendors for instance - such as LinkedIn, have very specific definitions in their contract regarding how you access the application.

So the SaaS industry has to overcome 2 battles when it comes to SSO - a technical acceptable solution and a legally respected way of doing it. We will work on both and welcome any input or concerns.

Yet another rapid change in the browser world

2006-03-31T10:46:00.000-08:00

I remember the days where Internet Explorer was 97% of the used browsers. Right – that was after the time where Netscape was 90% and IE was 5%. But if I look at my stats today IE is down to 62%, Firefox is 23% and – check this out Opera is 10%; others 5%.

Now a related dynamic: new Web 2.0 products like AjaxSketch or AjaxWrite are only available for Firefox. Isn’t it a bold move to develop something and ignore the dominate technology? Well there is stuff out there that is simply not possible in IE.

Talking about Web 2.0. I found a great chart at oreilly's site, explaining Web 2.0 versus Web 1.0:

Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

Also checkout TechCrunch.com it's a great site to be up-to-date with Web 2.0

Patent on Lead Management

2006-03-27T21:54:00.000-08:00

One of the innovations I was working on the last few years was a better way of getting sales leads to resellers. Rather than pushing them out and hoping somebody will follow up, I developed a pull methodology where Partners can pull them from a pool to make sure that the lead will have a follow up. Several rules, a well thought out process flow and an automatic tracking made it work. I applied for a patent which was awarded patent number 09,514,997 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office last week.

OpenSource 2.0 -- Monetizing success

2006-03-23T15:46:00.000-08:00

Many people think about OpenSource and where it goes and so do I. One comment stroke me in particular at one of the recent conferences where somebody stated that OpenSource is good for lot of things but there is no TRUE innovation. “OpenSource projects today are pretty much improving what others did before – but there is neither a new technology, no new methodology and no truly new functionality”.

Past 10 years OpenSource
In the past 10 years OpenSource has come a loooooong way. But still people are not sure about the relevance for the business and how opensource engagements can fuel the industry other than how it does today. The fundamental issue - it seams - is the reward system. Clearly it is rewarding to see how software evolves. There is a reward for contributing by using code others contributed and there is a reward by recognizing increase in quality through the respective contribution of all kinds of expertise. But like one developer stated "I love it but it doesn't feed my kids".

OpenSource and SaaS
With Software as a Service a new question pops: How do you deal with OpenSource distribution license when there is nothing to distribute - other than the service over the net? Will OpenSource dry out when no code is distributed any more?

Rewarding Contribution
Let me contract the above issues all together and think:
-- How about bringing opensource developer together to contribute to innovative and new projects that will be delivered over the net, regardless of the fact that there is only one instance of the code?
-- How about a reward system that includes some monetary opportunity by incorporating the contributors into the success?
-- How about creating an OpenSource Contributor Option Plan that gives out shares of the respective company for those contributors who truly contributed to the success of that company?
This is not a cash reward like with an employee but rewarding contribution to innovation. Would’nt that be one further step towards individuality where at some point in time a company is really a “company of people” with their respective contributors participation in the success – still maintaining the fundamental concept of capitalism? I will work on that idea further and I am really interested to know what you and others think. Feel free to comment and let me know.

Next Level of Technology

2006-03-10T12:37:00.000-08:00

Lot's of discussions around the technology model (single tenant, multi tenant, hybrid model). Some say only a multi tenant architecture is a real SaaS play. I'd like to challenge all of us (at least the technologists) with some thoughts:

Let's look at today’s multi tenant architecture. The easiest way to do that is to check out the Salesforce.com literature which exposes the architecture for developers. What we find is a data model with the traditional hierarchy of an account, organizational structure and users. We find objects such as leads, opportunities, cases, documents etc. and we find some basic processes to manage those objects based on certain criteria or events. Every new tenant is bound to this architecture (which is well thought out) and is therefore able to use the application very quickly. All it takes is an underlying or overarching model that allows every tenant to use the model in some variations, add custom data fields etc. without interfering with other tenants. Salesforce.com demonstrated that it works, is pretty secure and flexible enough to have many companies using the application and still have some freedom for customization. So far so good. As long as we continue to think in our boxed world (our companies’ 4 walls) that is all fine.

Now - outside this box: It's no longer just the company but there are partners who deal with us, and also with other companies. There are suppliers who provide us with additional material, resources and other services. And oh - there is this thing called "customer", in case you forgot - it is the entity that pays the bills (mostly). Customers deal with us, with our partners and of course also with other companies and competitors. And here is the challanging question: What role is the customer playing in this new multi tenant architecture based SaaS model? Today: None!

How will we integrate partners, customers and other constituencies into a meaningful information and process flow? It's not a question of whether we will do it or not - but how and when. Multi tenancy still works inside the box - for one corporate entity. But as soon as multiple legally independent entities need to collaborate, we’ll hit the wall. Yes, we can use SOA, WDDX, XML and what have you, but we are back to square one – like in the previous stage of software we relay on interfaces, APIs and the big hope that it’ll work together. Of course it is much easier but still time consuming and risky. Architecturally Multi Tenant Architecture is a very economic model to drive efficiency and I don’t want to belittle it in any way – it is a major step forward yet we need a new model.

Rather than thinking from the inside out we have to begin thinking outside in. We will need to make it MUCH easier for customers to interact with companies and for partners to do business with their vendors and their customers. Suppliers need to be able to collaborate with all sort of customers without the need to interface all those applications with each other. CommerceOne failed by trying and others didn't even get there. People asked me whether Tanooma will build interfaces to connect all the SaaS players. The answer is “no”. 400 vendors today – 2,000 in may be 2 years from now. And even if we would, it would still be an "internal vendor play" - it would still only represent the old way of thinking in integrations. So to build interfaces with all those companies would be the wrong approach. We all need to elevate ourselves and our respective technology to a higher model where we think and more importantly ACT outside our 4 walls. The challenge is to move from or skip a multi tenant architecture and develop a truly networked interaction model where tenants are no more an encapsulated entity but an organism like cell that is able to seamlessly interact with others: customers, partners, suppliers and must importantly: we need to begin thinking of the "user" not the "account".

Creating this new model - or architecture may go beyond what a single company can do. It may be an "open mind project" (like opensource). It may even require cross technological expertise that goes beyond the knowledge of our own industry. I decided to start this in the next few days.

The Enterprise Software Chasm

2006-03-05T12:16:00.000-08:00

The SaaS Summit in Napa Valley this past week was a very interesting and well organized event by OpSource. I'm sure Amy Wohl and others will cover it and you may also want to read http://boassobusiness.blogspot.com/. Rather than providing redundant viewpoints, I'd like to comment on 1 particular topic: I call it

"The Enterprise Software Chasm"

Tien Tzou from Salesforce.com made a very clear statement about the On Demand world and the death of the enterprise software sales model. He said, and pretty much everybody nodded their head agreeing that this new world is a "Google World" - an inbound world where inside sales people are the heroes and the traditional and very expensive direct sales model is vanishing away. VCs in a later podiums discussion at the same conference agreed and pointed to the successes in the SaaS world with short sales cycles and large number of users. The traditional enterprise sales model with their traditional long sales cycles is something investors would no longer accept.

Future software investments go into those companies who build a product, bring it to the market and if people pick up on it - this is considered success. No more outgoing sales and definitely no long sales cycles. If you need to mess around with a customer for several weeks - stop it and find customers who buy it because they like it. Well, a very logical and from an investors point of view very economical strategy.

This, and previous discussions with various investors lead me to believe that there are only 2 companies on the planet that will continue to invest in the enterprise software model: SAP and Oracle. That also tells me that with no other engagements and investments, SaaS for the enterprise market is at least 5 years out - enough time for both SAP and ORACLE to reengineer their respective companies and make them ready for a SaaS oriented enterprise business. New innovations for enterprise software will therefore not be seen on the market before 2012. Since 2003 almost nobody invested in enterprise software anymore - despite the fact that enterprises still exist (and I'm sure we do not expect enterprises to go away any soon - but read on). This development will create a big chasm between enterprises and smaller more agile companies who will be able to use latest Information Management tools (on demand and omnipresent). The SMB part of the world may actually catch up more than normal simply because of tools, systems and methodologies which are not available for a complex enterprise.

The point I'd like to make is that this interesting development may change the face of our business society in a rather unexpected way. It is not because the technology couldn't be available - it is because there is no investor who is interested in an enterprise play, dealing with the fact that enterprises have different needs to modernize their business and need people who have the patience to work with 10 different departments at the same time and analyze business impact of a software that may be run within a 20 Billion $ company and be used by 20,000 people in very different capacities. This has nothing to do with "stubborn and old sales guys who can not adopt", it also has nothing to do with “IT old timers” who are unable to take on new technology. It is about the complexity of an enterprise and in order to reduce complexity for the users and increase simplicity of processes - the tools to make it happen will most likely become even more complex - and at least right now nobody want to invest in it.

SaaS is becoming a demarcation of a growing chasm between enterprise software and any other software.

Regardless of the reasoning - the SMB market has an unparalleled opportunity to grow and compete with the dinosaurs. I use the word dinosaur not as an often used term for something old – but to draw a parallel to evolution where larger and more complex beings were replaced by smaller, highly agile and flexible ones. If a company spends $20 Million every year on IT in order to run it and customizes those solutions so far that it is no more economical to update, did that company reach a point that sheer size made it less competitive? Is it a point even so operations and production is highly optimized, the brain of that entity is no longer capable to evolve any further? Is the Enterprise Software Chasm an early warning indicator that super complex global enterprises after decades of mass consolidation by acquisition are in great danger? Did the gigantic acquisitions in the Automobile Industry here in the USA that ended by having only 2 massive and barely profitable companies left over, proven to be a mistake? The reason for the car industry consolidation was the believe that so many car manufacturers have no chance to survive because they don’t have the critical mass. Today we have more car manufacturers on the planet than 1950 – and today there are percentage wise way less US cars in the country than 1950. Porsche is one of the smallest car manufacturers on earth – yet one of the most profitable.

The Enterprise Software Chasm can not be crossed for quite some time. I wonder what dynamics and evolutionary effects it will have on the SMB space – and the "Porsches" of the other industries.

Technology Free IT

2006-02-26T17:03:00.000-08:00

Information Technology without Technology?

I wrote quite a bid about the disruption, the growth and the strategic values of Software as a Service. I shared with many of you my vision about this industry and where it can go. In an earlier post I stated that we may run a business with nothing but SaaS. Today I'd like to take you out into a near future office environment (a few calendar quarters from now).

OK - So our new office needs some basic communication with internal and external people. We need something for our bookkeeping and write invoices. We need to do some HR work, payroll and expense management. Our sales team need to manage customer contacts, our marketing team needs to manage campaigns and initiatives as well as partners and alliances. We also want something to manage our service teams' requests and cases. And finally will need to manage our products, projects and entire logistics and warehouse.
So let's put up our sleeves and start:

Communication: We may start with Yahoo email and calendar. It is free and allows us to work in a team and see each others calendar. We may then select Webex to communicate with our customers and partners in a more communicative way.
Office: While checking out Webex we find their office products and actually find the necessary office software to run our day to day documents, lists and data tables. And in the future we may consider Office Live from Microsoft.
Customers & Marketing: The obvious first name is Salesforce.com. But there are others like RightNow and Sugar CRM and already many more. Let's pick SFDC for the fun of it and take RightNow to mange service requests. To write optimal proposals, we may consider Offermatica. If we now want to better plan out marketing campaigns we may come across Eloqua and take them to do the campaigns - may be we also choose ResultsMail to do the sending and tracking of email blasts and manage the ones who want to opt out. And if we want to integrate our partners we go with BlueRoads for channels and Loyalty Lab for retail customer loyalty management. Our call center may be entirely distributed across the nation using Five9.
People: To mange HR related activities we may see EmployEase and may be Expenseit to do the expense reports. To better manage personnel development we may use Successfactors. Additional hiring may be supported by LinkedIn.
Bookkeeping, Orders & Logistics: Now when we get orders we want to choose a complete ERP solution and may stumble over Intacct or NetSuite. We may track all our contracts with Encover. We may also choose one of the project management systems, SCM tools and other products out there for our specific needs.

As you can see we pretty quickly are able to replace every single software today with SaaS solutions. And guess what, all of the above can be done already today. I found over 300 vendors in some 30 categories who all can make this a reality. There is not a piece of software that I need to put on my computer other than a Browser and an OS of course.

But walking through this new office environment I discovered some totally new challenges: My SaaS applications are sometimes so cheap that I may need to connect with other users to find out the best usage - hard to call the Yahoo hotline and ask for somebody to come in and help us optimize the use of yahoo mail in a team environment. Another issue I'm facing in that office is that I don't just start the software - I need to login and provide a password and do so for 20 different applications. Also I may need some tool - at least an online spread sheet - to track all the licenses and keep up with expiration dates. And when I begin to put this all together I would welcome some knowledgeable person to help me find the best solutions for me TODAY (since I don't worry about tomorrow - because I simply switch if I need to).

The advantage how ever are big enough to go forward: We don't need to mess with servers, with backup, with software upgrade and updates. We don't need an engineer who puts this all together for us. We don't need to allocate $250,000 capital expense for software and hardware. We don't need to worry about service and maintenance contracts and we don't need to plan amortization and think about what software is right for us today and how this decision may affect us in a year or two from now.

Tanooma will soon be a showcase for a completely SaaS based business - we have no software that runs on our servers (hence no servers). Tanooma is running a completely "Technology Free IT" environment. Simply because it is less expensive, requires no investment, requires no staff and allows us to pick and choose what is best for us TODAY and end of the year we may switch to what ever makes sense then.

Competitive advantage: We have the most flexible office IT infrastructure and can afford to pick the best possible solutions that fit our most current needs. While others may be limited by the investments they already made - we will have the best solutions for us when ever they are available.

P.S. Ismael Ghalimi, another fellow blogger said it this way: http://itredux.com/blog/office-20/

The beginning of a new software economy

2006-02-18T15:49:00.000-08:00

From 1 Million to 100 Million SaaS users in 5 years

I guess we all pretty much agree: The SaaS Industry will grow fast. How fast - we will see in 5 years from now. But a few interesting indicators show where this all goes:

1) Investors
On conferences publicly and in individual conversations privately we hear it over and over again: "We will invest in SaaS but we will probably do no more investments in traditional license software". For investors it is the recurring revenue model but also more and more the underlying technology. I may be totally off - but I can see more investments into SaaS in the next few years than into Internet in the crazy days. Why? When the railroad boom slowed down with it's crazyness in the old days - the real investment started in building the transportation infrastructure.

2) Technology
When it comes to Rapid Software Development, SaaS certainly outperforms any other software model. Deploy it now - get feedback - fix it on the fly - mature to a product that is not build for an audience but actually with an audience. SOA, Web Services, open source are just a few key ingredients to build a software so fast that no other technology can compete on a time to market scale. With the speed comes more variety and more diversity.

3) Economy
SaaS is cheap - period. Even so we all hear from the legacy software maker that SaaS is more expensive in the long run - I just hope that who ever says that has a calculator handy. We all agree that the actual software and hardware cost is less than 40% of the overall IT spend. And we also agree that a SaaS vendor is able to split their operations cost amongst 1,000 and more companies versus only one IT organization. Enough said.

4) Popularity
SaaS is simple in the first place and vendors have an unparalleled interest to keep it that way. This will motivate less computer savvy users or industries to investigate software and IT solutions. SaaS will go way beyond application software. Any kind of Tools, Games, Hobby and Entertainment Solutions will get into the market. Manage your wine cellar online, keep your library online and get additional information about the author, play games online and develp your identity and earn points in a new gaming world, begin not only filing your TAX online but actually interact and communicate with your insurance and everybody else in an online home office infrastructure where you find all your documents even if your home burned down.

500 Million PCs (our todays installed base) will use SaaS partly or entirely one way or the other. It may be 100 Million already within the next 5 years.

SaaS – Mega Disruption

2006-02-11T02:08:00.000-08:00

The least significant feature of SaaS is that it is a new software delivery mechanism. That is only a side effect. Unlike the Time Share system in the 70’s or Mainframe based application delivery in the 80’s, SaaS has several disruptive elements that will change the face of the software industry like no other development before.

10 Strategic Aspects of Software as a Service

1) Time to value
With average implementation times of 1 day to 6 weeks, SaaS software is an order of magnitude faster productive than any traditional business application. While traditional business software needed to be installed, configured, embedded in existing IT infrastructure, adjusted to fit with other software and mostly customized not only to fit the customers needs but simply to put to work – SaaS applications in contrast go live immediately and can be used from day one. An ROI can be expected in a matter of months – not years. Even so customization capabilities may be limited – updates and usability will immediately increase.

2) Perpetual service model
SaaS vendors have no other chance than provide excellent service to their respective customers on an ongoing base in order to stay in business and ensure the renewal of the service. Support is typically provided on a 24x7x365 basis – at no extra cost. There is no “product delivered – thank you very much”. SaaS is based on a perpetual service model, versus a perpetual license model.

3) Major transformation in usability and support structure
Since SaaS companies are build on the premise of a perpetual service model, a large amount of creativity goes into usability and serviceability of their products to ensure a profitable operation. Substantial investments go into user interface design, intuitive process design and more or less bug free applications. Since support contracts are no more separate line items – there is a big interest on the vendor side to drive support down; next to zero.

4) Financial predictability
Traditional IT cost was a collection of cost items such as software license, software maintenance, software support, hardware cost, hardware maintenance, up to date hardware to support the software, adjustments in server infrastructure, other operational expense including space and air-conditioning. While this was very hard to plan and predict, SaaS licenses include all of the above – including personnel and support. This is a rather simple to plan per user, per org, per what ever unit over time expense.

5) Leveraged Administration, reduced cost
In the traditional IT environment every update, every upgrade, every data migration is done one by one for every single company individually. SaaS providers by contrast do the same job for hundreds or even thousands of companies over night. Also here the motive to make this error free and as cost effective as possible SaaS providers invest strategically in operations efficiency and leverage the critical mass of customers to always outperform an individual IT center infrastructure in cost, availability and scalability.

6) Data security and reliability
As we learned from various studies, between 70% and 90% of security fraud happens within a company by internal personnel. Data access to not only mission critical but also personnel and other sensitive data need to be granted to a variety of people internally. SaaS providers in contrast invest in security mechanisms and typically operate their systems by people who have no interest in the individual data of the respective clients. By risking the integrity of an entire company SaaS providers have a much higher motivation to ensure data protection than many IT organizations.

7) Meta Data - Business Benchmarks
As our business world is more and more focusing on efficiency, process optimization and improving operational infrastructure we are in the need for benchmarks and data points to actually measure effectiveness in relation to our respective industries and to other industries. A currently very underestimated side effect of SaaS is the ability to collect “Meta Data”, information from all sorts of businesses about sales process times, average lead closure rates, average marketing campaign response data, personnel churn and hundreds of other data points. Even so the business ethic of a SaaS provider would suggest to keep that information highly confidential on a per customer bases, it is of enormous value to our business society to understand the aggregated results and averages. While this is extremely difficult to aggregate with customized and behind the firewall application software, it is a huge treasure of the SaaS methodology. It will take quite some time for some companies to appreciate the benefit of benchmark data vis-à-vis contributing with their critical and sensitive information but as the old saying goes “what you can measure, you can manage and what you can manage gets done”.

8) Technology Free Information Management
Companies, primarily flexible organizations or start-ups may go with Technology Free Information Management and entirely word with SaaS providers. No capital expenditure for the back office, no IT service team, no backup, no update, no data migration, no software installation, no security management. Not only will those companies have a competitive advantage in their operational flexibility and reduced cost but more importantly in their ability to switch to most current technology and most appropriate applications for their respective business.

9) User Integration
In the 60’s computer users where primarily programmers and operators. In the 70’s some educated and trained business administrators joined. In the 80’s and 90’s more and more all employees of a company were integrated in the internal Information Architecture of a corporation. The “last mile” is the integration of legally independent business partners and customers. In a traditional software model this goal is limited to EDI and some dedicated and individual system integrations. The SaaS model how ever also here opens a new world. The combination of Internet Technology, Webservices and the SaaS model allow applications and connectivity that partners and customers can be integrated in a homogeneous business process while maintaining their independence. From dedicated host software to standardized PC software to SaaS reflects the evolution of user integration and user centricity.

10) Explosive Growth.
In the next 10 years, over 500 Million PC users will use SaaS one way or the other, partly or exclusively. If a main stream application cost $50 per year and reaches 30% market share, the respective vendor would make $7.5 Billion annual recurring revenue. He may lower the price to 50Cent per year and still make $75Million. Software will become so cheap – we almost wonder whether it is even possible. Unlike predictions that the industry will consolidate after a few years like the current IT industry, SaaS will grow in variety like any other consumer industry.

Plus the obvious tactical advantages such as omnipresence of the respective application on a global scale, ever faster technology improvements with less hassle of update processes, lower cost if implementation and experimenting with new solutions, new application and other reasons. It is not the software delivery model that makes a SaaS application it is the disruptive service structure, meta data and explosive growth potential.

Tanooma - building a new world

2006-02-06T22:06:00.000-08:00

Tanooma - A new world a new engagement
As you know I'm working with a partner on a next generation Software as a Service engagement.

Dr. Timothy Chou (former president of Oracle on Demand) and I decided to continue pioneering the SaaS industry and contribute to its growth. We are currently developing the underlying infrastructure and software architecture for our new solution and also work on definitions, business model and go to market strategy. Please stay tuned for a few more weeks. If you are interested, you may register at the Tanooma site at http://www.tanooma.com/ and we will automatically inform you prior to the launch.

Both, Tim and I are working within this SaaS industry from day one. And we both share our view with many others - this industry will be more disruptive to Information Technology then any other innovation before. The interesting part about Software as a Service is, that it is more then just a new technology - it is actually more a new methodology and more importantly a new business life style.

Selling Software comes to its end. We are at the beginning of providing software based services. A SaaS company can not leave once a deal is signed - the engagement actually just begins at that point. SaaS is a new world with new aspects, new thoughts and new behaviors. SaaS provides new benefits, more simplicity but as markets grow there are more and more questions - I am currently tracking over 300 SaaS companies - end of last year I encountered about 200.

This is going to be one of the most exciting times in our industry!

2006 Enterprise Software Summit

2006-01-30T00:57:00.000-08:00

Enterprise Software will experience dramatic changes ahead. SaaS is the primary driver for those change. It is not the new delivery model, but three key elements: Benchmarking, User Experience and Reach and Cost & Efficiency advantages.

The 2006 Enterprise Software Summit http://www.enterprisesoftwaresummit.com/agenda.htm circles around those themes. I look forward to it.

The Service Economy

2006-01-08T16:39:00.000-08:00

2006 may become the most important year for the Software as a Service industry. I recently heard people talk about "Hardware as a Service". Wouldn't it be cool to get a washing mashine in a HaaS (Hardware as a Service) model? We enter an annual contract and pay $25 per month. If it breaks, it will be replaced, if a new model comes out we'll get it. And how about our $20,000 home theater for $690 per month? If we wan't a bigger and better one - no problem! And may be our....

Seriously - our economy will change. Leasing and full service leasing will morph to Hardware as a Service as Software as a Service makes further progress. It will be an exciting yet very challanging development for most of us.

Pioneering Software as a Service

2005-12-12T11:58:00.000-08:00

When I initiated the development for a first "software service" based application in 1997 using ColdFusion 1.5, I had no idea of the development of this industry. It was just ment to interact with our 4,000 resellers in 20 countries and client/server software was obviously not the right way to go.

In 2001 I founded BlueRoads, one of the early Software as a Service companies and the first with an enterprise class architecture in mind. The company experienced great success, grew in market awareness, customerbase and usage. Many other Software as a Service companies where founded in the meantime. I watch over 200 today.

Now - I'm working with some very interesting people (also SaaS pioneers) on a next generation Software as a Service solution and will continue to help this new business to grow fast.

Development requires change

2005-12-08T10:04:00.000-08:00

Change is probably the only constant in our universe. I truly enjoyed my 4 years at BR and especially the personal relationships I developed. Now I decided this is a good time for me to transition to the next phase of my life. I look forward to seeing BR achieve great success!

With Software as a Service gaining great momentum, our industry is changing radically. As Microsoft is joining the market with Dynamics CRM 3.0, the SaaS World will not only develop further but that development will accelerate. The top 6 SaaS CRM Players today in accordance to Forrester Research: Salesforce.com, Siebel CRM OnDemand, RightNow, BlueRoads, NetSuite and Salesnet are leading the trend.

As one of the pioneers of the SaaS industry I see the biggest change not because of the new technology or delivery model, but the explosive usage. While CRM was an elite software for the Fortune 5,000 now 10 Million US or 65 Million world wide business can afford to better manage their customers. ERP is no longer a solution for the Fortune 500 but 10 Million world wide producers of any goods. Software as a Service will bring more change to our industry than PC software did when IBM and Microsoft introduced their solutions in 1982 and disrupted the Mini and Mainframe world. Roughly a billion PCs will use Software as a Service in the next 10 years one way or the other, partly or solely. This development requires massive change in the way we think about software.

Enterprise Software is dead - long live the enterprise

2005-11-20T12:47:00.000-08:00

We hear it all over the place - the enterprise software market is dead. With two players left: Oracle and SAP, nobody will want to compete with them. So, bad times for enterprises, if you don't want to choose between those two. Well - there is a new world how ever: OnDemand Software Service (OSS) or "Software as a Service" (SaaS). Is it like the 70's where IBM, Bull, DEC, Amdahl... ruled the world until the PC came out?

SaaS for the enterprise is on it's way - simply because enterprise users like anybody else want the simplicity, the fresh way of how developers look at software, the ease of update, functionality selection and also the omni presence of such software. And as the enterprise doesn't go away Enterprise Software will be redefined.

SaaS for the Enterprise means that application structures, security requirements, integration aspects and interaction model need to be taken care of. BlueRoads for instance was the first company working on those questions. "APN" the Active Participation Network Architecture was the first step to answer questions around structure and architecture. The VSI Technology (Virtual Single Instance) was a first step to answer the security requirements. APN enabled APIs was the first step to think of large scale integration technologies. And the "Zero Training UI" was answering the user interaction model questions. At least there is a beginning.

Leading by innovation

2005-11-11T19:38:00.000-08:00

BlueRoads achievements so far:
- Attracted a top executive team who in turn hired an exceptional team under them
- Successfully raised 3 rounds of funding, in rather tough times.
- Delivered a robust and very highly regarded product suite
- Received a lot of respect from customers, analysts including Gartner, partners and other players in the market
- Grew one of the most attractive venture backed SaaS companies
- Introduced a company culture of engagement, openness, team spirit and respect
- Delivered quarter over quarter growth in bookings and about 100% growth year over year with a shoe string budget
- Grew subscriber base (number of partner companies) from about 120 in 2003 to 1,000 in 2004 to 12,000 in 2005.
- Won blue chip customers including Avaya, CheckPoint, Hitachi, HP, Juniper, Nortel and others
- Engaged in technology partnerships with companies like Salesforce.com and Webex
- Maintained consistent vision and strategy
- Introduced disrupting innovations for lead management, deal registration and contract renewal management
- Managed to compete successfully against Siebel and other enterprise class software players
- Managed to win 65% of all channel management deals in the high tech industry in the last 2 years
- Lead the company against major competition to the #1 position in Channel CRM

Anmd the year is not over!

Executive Blogging

2005-11-10T15:20:00.000-08:00

Currently about 100,000 blogs are created every day in accordance to a recent article in Forbes. Yet it still feels like something for freaky insiders. But that may change soon.

Executive Blogging (as I call it) may soon be a preferred way for executives to stay in touch with their community of customers, prospects, investors, partners, opinion leaders and the rest of the industry. Rather then sending out mass e-mails, hoping it hits the right people, the people who are interested to find out about the respective company or their leaders and people may watch the corresponding blogs.

That is how I want to use it. I will try to post updates and latest development. Even so people may fear openness as a competitive disadvantage – I believe openness is a sign of strength and maturity. BlueRoads is a fast growing and very innovative company, way ahead of any competition. I’m fine letting the industry know what and how we are doing.

Executive Blogging may become a new discipline in investor relationship and market communication. There will be a lot to learn and to experiment. In particular public company leaders will need to be very careful to stay within the legal and ethic boundaries of public statements – so let’s see how we can leverage Executive Blogging to the benefit of people who want to be informed and those who are ready to keep an instant open dialog. I’m happy to be one of the pioneers.

Innovation: Software as a Service

2005-11-09T11:39:00.000-08:00

Software as a Service is one of those innovations (see my post below). It wasn't meant to be a better way of delivering software. The SaaS movement is about a whole new information technology experience. Some other interesting insight can be read at Sam's blog, one of the Microsoft people who are driving SaaS. I met Sam at a recent SaaS meeting, hosted by Microsoft with other executives from BeVocal, Blue Roads, Echopass, Ellie Mae, Five9, Intacct, Newsgator and OpSource. Clearly all of us, the early pioneers of the SaaS World, will help shape this new industry segment to a whole new dimension of software innovation.

Innovation

2005-11-04T10:15:00.000-08:00

Innovation is my passion - something that keeps me going. There is one thing in particular about "innovating" that I feel is very different from more classic "improvement" (making great things better). Innovators don’t ask a user or customer what kind of solution he or she wants based on an known problem. Innovation is about understanding a problem from a high level and diving deep into all necessary details, then creating a holistic view of the situation and ignoring all existing solutions. From that point on innovation is creating a whole new and disruptive solution, methodology or process which wouldn’t be created otherwise. If I would have simply built what our customers told me in regards to lead management – the superior PULL methodology would have never been developed. If I would have designed business processes around MDF&Coop program management based on customer requirements, a closed loop ROI management system would probably still today not exist. If I would have listed to friends and industry leaders how to build a successful whole sale distribution company, Computer 2000, which was the largest European computer distributor would have never made it. Innovation is more than out of the box thinking. Innovation requires a deep understanding of a problem, ignorance in regards to existing solutions, abstract thinking and dealing with complexity and patience to create an end-to-end solution.