10 Things the FBI Knows...

The following post comes from our Inbound Marketing Channel sponsor HubSpot. The FBI recently posted a Request for Information (RFI) for a “social media application.” But, it was really a request for a social media monitoring application. Why? Because the FBI recognizes what many inbound marketers already know and many others are discovering: There’s gold in them thar social media data. You can use the same social media monitoring attributes the FBI wants to use to catch bad guys to generate and nurture leads, identify hot spots (good and bad), and close more deals. Catch problems early – Social media, the Bureau says, is a “primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events. By monitoring the conversations about your brand and products in social cyberspace, you can discover problems before they mushroom into reputation-damaging situations. That’s what Crave America restaurants did using a tool from newBrandAnalytics . Monitoring the conversation about their new Sweet Heat cocktail, they quickly picked up consumers’ opinions that the drink was too hot and adjusted the recipe by giving bartenders the leeway to mix the drink per consumers’ personal tastes. Geo-location Capabilities -  Social media have geolocation tools baked into the applications or devices delivering the applications. Using social media monitoring tools, such as the one in MarketMe Suite , you can identify geo-target opportunities or nip regional issues in the bud. Be a Fly-on-the-Wall  - Using social media monitoring tools, you can candidly listen in on conversations the way Dell Computers will in its new Social Media Listening Command Center using tools from Radian6, something which the company claims has allowed them to convert one-third of critics into fans. Multiple Touchpoints  - The FBI’s RFI is requesting the application allow users to search across myriad parameters. This will give them—and you—the ability to gain multidimensional views of your customers and prospects, allowing you to develop pinpoint offers based on people’s interests, actions, and opinions. Real-Time Rules  - The dialogue in social media moves so quickly that any social media monitoring tool needs the capability to search, gather, and analyze the conversation in real time. The FBI will use it to detect serious threats to national security. You’ll use it to strike while the iron is hot and reach out to customers and prospects while you are top of mind. Tools like TwitSprout update stats hourly. Curation Counts  - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, foursquare, Tumblr, and on and on. The number of posts, tweets, messages, and more in social media is in the gazillions. Choose a social media monitoring tool that can summarize data the way you need it in order to maximize the time you spend monitoring social media. Nothing Beats Social Media -  The FBI’s research has determined that a “geospatial and analysis mapping application” (that’s Bureaus-speak for a social media monitoring tool) is “the best known solution for attaining and disseminating real time open source intelligence and improving… situational awareness.” And, situational awareness in real time is what every marketer needs to hunt down leads, act intelligently on them, and move them down the sales funnel. You Gotta Speak Tweet  - One of the requirements in the FBI’s RFI includes providing a glossary of “Tweet lingo.” Twitter’s 140-character limit has spawned its own language. Tools like Klout can help marketers learn to speak and translate Tweet-speak to make the most of the conversations captured, maximizing leads found and nurtured. Flex Your Teamwork  - A good social media monitoring tool provides the means for users to define the parameters of their monitoring, to easily create templates, and to quickly and easily share the information across your team. Improved Decision-Making   – Social media monitoring tools, says the FBI, provide enhanced strategic, operational, and tactical information for improved decision-making. And, nothing improves your lead management ROI or your leads-to-sales ratio like improved decision-making. Many of these tools, MarketMeSuite, Klout, Kred , to name a few, help you find the influencers shaping your brand’s reputation in the marketplace. To understand the importance of influencers, consider this: Your best customer, though they may shop with you every week for years on end, can’t hold a candle to the way your registers will ring if Lady Gaga came there once and decided to tweet about your awesome products. That’s what the FBI knows about social media and what you should know too. The views and opinions in this post do not necessarily represent those of Marketing Pilgrim. About the author Jeanne Hopkins, VP of Marketing @ HubSpot and co-author of “Go Mobile”, the best-selling mobile marketing book on Amazon.com.

Salesforce Launches Ass...

Last September, Salesforce bought social customer service SaaS startup Assistly for $50 million-plus to help expand its service cloud offerings to small businesses. Today, Salesforce is debuting a brand new Assistly-inspired social and mobile customer service platform for small businesses, called Desk.com. As you may remember, Assistly helped companies collect and organize all of their customer conversations into a prioritized actionable list and equips support staff with the tools to respond to customers. The application allows businesses to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more. Desk.com includes much of the same help desk functionality as Assistly but with a few changes. As Assistly co-founder and vice president and general manager, Desk.com, Alex Bard and explains, the customer service platform has been completely rebuilt from the ground up, including the infrastructure and back-end. There’s a new user interface, new APIs, a new HTML5 mobile client, and a new reporting service. Additionally, Desk.com is launching with an in-depth integration with Salesforce’s CRM Sales Cloud, so you can see customer service cases in the CRM product and more. Built with social at its core, Desk.com allows small businesses work with and respond to customers over Twitter, Facebook and more. Basically, Desk.com integrates Twitter and Facebook customer service comments with other channels like email, phone and web within the agent desktop. Agents can also see data on how many cases customer service agents have opened, resolved, replied to, reassigned, or reopened—regardless of who was assigned the case. Desk.com includes twelve pre-built reports providing data for average handle time, time to first response, first contact resolution rate, and more. Salesforce is also touting the simple deployment of Desk.com for small businesses. With only four required fields, a company can register for its own social help desk in a matter of seconds. Desk.com also provides a checklist to help companies get started, and each task that a company works through earns the company flex hour credits that anyone in the company can use. Clients can use the Desk.com HTML5 mobile app to respond to customers on the go from a variety of devices, including iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Users respond to support cases using the same filters from their desktop client and access the entire macro library without having to type long replies. Users can also re-assign, change groups, change status, change priority for cases, and modify customer information associated with cases. Pricing starts at $49 per full-time agent, per month, for unlimited usage. Salesforce says there is flexible pricing is also available for $1 per part-time agent, per hour. Desk.com already has a number of well-known web companies using its customer service platform including Yelp, Square, Spotify, Vimeo, Pandora, and One Kings Lane. At the time of the acquisition, Salesforce’s CEO and founder Marc Benioff said of Assistly: Salesforce has spent over a decade democratizing enterprise applications in the cloud…The Assistly acquisition doubles down on that strategy by putting us at the heart of the new trend of customer service help desk applications that have instant sign up and zero-touch onboarding, expanding the potential reach of the Service Cloud to millions of companies around the world. Salesforce already offers the Service Cloud to companies, which helps businesses connect with customers across both traditional and social channels, and counts customers such as Southwest Airlines. For Salesforce, this is a way to aggressively go after the small to medium-sized business community who needs a simple and mobile SaaS for help desk support. Desk.com will face competition from another popular customer service app for small to medium-sized businesses, Zendesk. And unsurprisingly, social and mobile are central to how Salesforce is positioning Desk.com to be the premier (yet cost-effective) customer service alternative for businesses and companies. Next up for Salesforce’s new products— leveraging the Rypple acquisition with the launch of a human talent management SaaS Successforce.

$300 Samsung Galaxy Not...

Samsung isn’t the first company to break into the phablet space, but those of you waiting for a (more than) worthy successor to devices like the Dell Streak 5 won’t have much longer to wait. AT&T has just announced that their pocket-busting Galaxy Note will be hitting their sales channels on February 19, complete with a $300 price tag. Most of the device’s details — 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED display, LTE radio, and handwriting support thanks to the included S-Pen — were revealed or reiterated at this year’s CES , but now the question is whether or not people will take the plunge on a device that’s not quite a phone and not quite a tablet. AT&T hasn’t exactly priced the Galaxy Note to move, but they’re not alone on that front. We’ve seen Verizon adopt the $300 price tag for most of their recent high-end smartphone releases, though AT&T has typically shied away from pricing their smartphones so steeply. They’re probably hoping that the novelty of a device that hovers somewhere between being phone and a tablet will be enticing enough to justify the price, but we’ll soon see how the public at large takes to Samsung’s fabulous phablet. If you’re the type who likes getting things before everyone else (and really, who isn’t?), you may want to wake up bright and early on the February 5th. AT&T is pushing their pre-order process with the promise of a Galaxy Note in your hands a full two days before it makes its way to store shelves, and I can imagine more than few phablet fans using that 48-hour window to rub their new purchase in other people’s faces.

Steve Jobs, Superhero

Editor’s note: Scott Weiss is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. When I was a kid, I read tons of superhero comic books. I fantasized about superpowers, but the storylines about heroes with massive Achilles’ heels really held my attention the most. They saved the world but had screwed up personal lives, made lots of mistakes, and often acted like complete assholes. In retrospect, I related to their flaws. And, probably not coincidentally, my favorite characters exhibited core weaknesses I had experienced: Spider-Man (immaturity), Iron Man (overconfidence/hubris), and Wolverine (rage). Ironically, when the character’s weakness comingled with the superpower, it would often spur them to succeed against impossible odds. It was in this context that I was riveted reading Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson. Given the number of different interviews and unfettered access granted to Isaacson, it felt like an incredibly authentic account of Jobs’ life. His greatest accomplishments, mistakes, superpowers, and flaws were laid out about as raw as I’ve ever read. Steve’s superpowers were many: He was wickedly brilliant, could see around corners, and had unparalleled understanding of how people interact with technology, to name just a few. Did Steve have an Achilles’ heel? From the book, one could conclude that he was an extremely demanding boss. Like a beacon, superstars from every function (e.g. engineering, design, marketing, etc.) were drawn to work for Steve. They described his aura as absolutely overwhelming. And Steve pushed these A+ players to extraordinary, impossible achievements. Steve’s drive for speed and perfection often resulted in harsh, public criticism — usually directed at his very best people. Steve would constantly look over their work and declare, “This is shit!” or “This really sucks!” On my Kindle, I searched the words “shit” and “sucks” and counted 24 instances where he used one of those phrases referring to someone’s work/product. I’ve had a number of entrepreneurs suggest that this persona isn’t unique to Steve Jobs but a common trait among some of the most successful founder/CEOs in the world. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos have all been reported as similarly caustic at times. Is this something to be emulated? As I was reading the book, something struck me like a hammer: Despite Steve Jobs’ choice of words, lack of empathy, and sometimes prickly demeanor, he spent a huge amount of time giving his most talented employees constant, hard, critical feedback. Thinking about how most companies dole out feedback — if they do at all — it’s usually directed at the bottom quartile of performers versus the top. A typical manager at review time spends 80% of their time preparing detailed reviews on the bottom 25%. The top quartile gets lame, short reviews — the equivalent of “You’re doing great, keep up the good work!” So, a manager takes all that time and effort to get someone doing the work of half of a full-time employee (FTE) to do the work of .75 or 1 FTE. In contrast, Steve Jobs — with his feedback energy directed at the top — manages to motivate people already doing the work of 2 or 3 FTEs to do the work of 10, maybe 20 FTEs. Now that’s serious leverage! Could this be a superpower comingling with a weakness? I’ve found that the A players are comparably lazy with regards to their potential. Without serious motivation, they will never reach it—or even try. Despite his delivery, I believe Steve’s critical energy was directionally correct. Here are a few other suggestions for motivating top talent: Flip the feedback equation to 80% of your energy spent on the top quartile. This is really hard in practice as the feedback is usually more nuanced. And the top performers are usually defensive. Infuse some damn passion. The best people don’t just want money, they want to go on a crusade and make a difference. An entrepreneur needs to constantly re-enroll the troops with a compelling, authentic story of how and why we will do the impossible. Set stretch goals and push like hell to meet them. It’s great if these goals have meaning as well — e.g. we need the software release out before a major industry conference. Find a bogeyman competitor to hate. (Preferably a company bigger than yours — Microsoft!) At IronPort, we called out our competitors to the entire company and rallied the team to play catch-up. We also gave bonuses to the sales teams for rip-outs of a competitor’s appliance and then mounted them like trophies on the wall. Work your ass off by example. A leader who is always present, ridiculously responsive and contributes real, hard work sets the right pace and tone. A constant challenge for leaders is to find effective AND positive ways to motivate. The very best companies have inspirational founders who have found a way to coax the superpowers out of their top employees. When the top quartile contributes at 5x to 10x, it makes a serious difference.

Cash-Starved Ambient In...

Nearly two years ago, Ambient Industries raised capital to boost development and marketing of its iPhone app Flook , a location-based social discovery application . Alas, they never got the kind of traction needed to develop a business model solid enough to make enough money from the app. Yesterday, the people behind Flook sent an email to users announcing that the app will be retired “some time in the next 30 days” (after February 25th). From the message: Why? Well, as you can imagine it costs quite a bit of money to run all the machines and robots that make up flook, and unfortunately we have just run out. We built flook as a great experiment, and loved every bit of it. Over 100,000 of you used flook over the years, we got some great press and it gave us so much pride to see the many ingenious ways you all contributed to flook. All good things have to come to an end however, and we just didn’t manage to get flook to where we wanted it to go, but we are so very thankful for your support on our journey. Ambient Industries is offering users a way to export their Flook cards, comments and data. The company was founded by Jane Sales, Tristan Brotherton and Roger Nolan. Sales and Nolan were both previously founders of Symbian Software. What remains unclear is whether Ambient Industries is calling it quits as a whole, or if they’re merely terminating Flook to focus on the development of other smartphone software. Either way, Flook has come tumbling down into the TC Deadpool .